Commencement 2004

Professor Yvonne Dixon's Address to Phi Beta Kappa Initiates
May 22, 2004

Good afternoon, and greetings to the new members of the Society, to President McGuire, to fellow Phi Beta Kappa members, and friends. One is never at a loss what to talk about in the annual Phi Beta Kappa address to new initiates because the topic is foreordained. Your speaker is always asked to focus on the same theme: The Liberal Arts. Let's take a moment to look closely at the meaning of those two words: I could bore you with strict dictionary definitions, but let me turn instead to another source, by quoting the words of the highly respected columnist for the Washington Post, Mary McCrory, who died last month. Much was written about McCrory at the time of her death. In one of the articles, I was particularly struck by these lines from one of her columns: "I don't mind if you call me a liberal . . .I. . .think it's a respectable word. Its root is 'liber,' the Latin word for 'free,' and isn't that what we are all about?" In this statement, Mary McCrory was not thinking of the type of freedom alluded to by Secretary Rumsfeld last year after the looting of Baghdad's National Museum and Archives. "Stuff happens," Rumsfeld said inelegantly at the time, and he further elaborated by dismissing the looting as, "an exercise in freedom." McCrory's idea of freedom was not the kind that leads to wanton destruction. Rather, as a former student of the classics at Boston Girls' Latin High School, she was thinking of freedom of thought. Free thinkers, that is liberal thinkers, approach learning without prejudice--with open minds. A liberal education frees our minds. It makes us tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; it makes us broadminded.

Now, what about the meaning of the word "Arts?" This word automatically makes us think of the visual arts and music. But in a larger context, "Arts" refers to all the various branches of academic learning embraced by the humanities. You new initiates have studied many topics here at Trinity: Music and Art History (to appreciate great works of the creative imagination); English (to experience our rich heritage of literature); and Spanish and French (because a knowledge of foreign languages is essential in our global society). You have also studied History and Political Science; Economics and Sociology. The list could go on and on. The breadth of your learning and the excellence of your achievements in the Liberal Arts lie at the heart of your election to Phi Beta Kappa.

Tomorrow you will graduate from Trinity and enter a new phase in your life. I, too, will be entering a new phase in my own life as I will be retiring from Trinity after many years of teaching Art History. What comes next? What course can we set for ourselves as we continue to learn in the future?

I began this talk by discussing the meaning of words central to the pursuit of humanistic learning. Let me add another word for you to consider as you chart your future course. The word is "Serendipity." A relatively new word in the English dictionary, it has only had wide currency since the mid 20 th Century. Certainly it is very popular today. In the year 2000 the British public voted it their favorite word. "Serendipity" is a pleasant sounding word, but what does it actually mean? It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 in a letter to his friend Horace Mann. As a child, Walpole had read an old Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes from Serendip, Serendip, incidentally, comes from the Sanskrit word for Sri Lanka. In this tale the three young princes go off on a long journey and, as Walpole wrote to his friend: "They were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." Such discoveries, Walpole continued, are "of that kind which I call serendipity." Thus in this letter did Walpole invent the word "serendipity" to describe the process through which one finds "something wonderful while searching for something else." Inquisitive humans, it seems, often turn accident into discovery. Of course, it's certainly true, as the old adage says, that "fortune favors the prepared mind," so in order to operate "serendipitously," one must have the necessary knowledge base that will allow her to be receptive to new discoveries. She must be open-minded, and ready to make sense of the unexpected.

Two books published in recent years, by Larry Verstraete and Royston M. Roberts, give numerous examples of how a serendipitous approach has operated in science. One of the most important of these accidental discoveries is that of penicillin. In the summer of 1928 Dr. Alexander Fleming was researching the flu. One day he observed that some type of mold had contaminated the flu culture in one of his petri dishes. At first he was tempted to discard the specimen, but he decided instead to closely examine the mold since the area surrounding it was clear. This meant that the mold had killed nearby staphylococcus bacteria in the petri dish. Fleming's prior experience had prepared him for this discovery since some years earlier he had accidentally shed a tear in a bacteria sample and discovered that an enzyme in the tear had killed surrounding bacteria. Now, in examining this new sample, Fleming determined that the mold belonged to the genus penicillium. By performing additional tests, Fleming confirmed that he had discovered a non-toxic antibiotic capable of killing many of the bacteria that cause infection in humans and other animals. His work won him a Nobel Prize in 1945, and we are all well aware of the impact penicillin has had on disease control.

In addition to Fleming's discovery of penicillin, many other scientific and technical discoveries have been made quite by accident while the discoverer was pursuing something else. These include: X-rays, Smallpox vaccination, Pap smears, sugar substitutes, Teflon, Velcro, and even Silly Putty.

Let me tell you about one of the most interesting and surprising recent cases of a person's coming up with a highly unorthodox solution to a pressing problem. This involved oil spills and hair clippings. In 1989, hairdresser Phillip McCrory (no relation to Mary ) was watching a TV report on the oil spill caused by the Exxon Valdez. As he watched the helpless otters being rescued from the ocean, their fur soaked with oil, McCrory had an idea: He wondered if human hair might be employed to soak up oil. The next day he brought home a bag of hair clippings from his beauty salon. He stuffed an old pair of his wife's panty hose with the hair and then tied the ankles together. Next, he filled his son's wading pool with water and then dumped in a gallon of used motor oil. Finally, he placed the hair-filled panty hose in the pool. In two minutes, the water was clear. Human hair does not actually absorb oil; rather, minute scales on the strands of hair pick up and hold the oil through a process called adsorption. The US government has now done extensive further testing on McCrory's concept and is poised to use his discovery on a large scale to clean up oil spills. All of this occurred because a "prepared mind" was able to make connections between two highly unlikely sources.

Scholars in many fields have been operating on the principle of serendipity for some time. It lies at the heart of the currently hip "games theory." The science of 'gaming' encourages the development of different scenarios and strategies to respond to a given situation. Guided by these principles, two professors at Yale, Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff, have teamed up to suggest a variety methods for shaking off conventional thinking and going off in new, sometimes counterintuitive directions to solve problems. One of their proposals is "pay-per-mile" auto insurance. Currently, women-- who drive half as much as men and have half as many accidents--pay the same amount for car insurance as men do. If, instead, insurance were sold at the gas pump, with the cost of the insurance built into the price per gallon, a person would pay for insurance according to how much he or she actually drives. As an additional benefit, the problem of uninsured motorists would vanish since everyone who filled up with gas would automatically be insured. Thinking outside the box and being on the lookout for new discoveries can lead to innovative solutions for nagging problems.

The great art historian Erwin Panofsky once observed that the most interesting and important information is often found in the book just next to the one a person pulls from the shelf. In other words, if you go in a different direction from the one you originally started off on, you may stumble upon something interesting. Something of this sort happened to me about a year ago. My husband and I were staying with friends on a plantation on the Eastern shore of Virginia that has been in the same family for over 350 years. In our hosts' library were many first editions dating back into the 17 th and 18 th centuries. I was randomly pulling books from the shelves when I came upon--for me--an important discovery. For a number of years I had been trying to establish the source for a particular drawing by the English artist George Romney. This drawing depicts a figure being lifted up into heaven by angels--a highly unusual subject for an artist of the Enlightenment. Clearly the drawing had to be a copy of a painting by a Baroque artist, but which one? I had tried to put myself in the artist's shoes, searching all over London for Romney's source. Was it Rubens' painting in the Banqueting Room at Whitehall? Was it Thornhill's at Greenwich Hospital? None of the paintings I examined provided a close match. Yet, finally, here, in a private library in rural eastern Virginia, I got lucky. I had stumbled upon an obscure 18 th Century book containing engravings of paintings which were popular in the l8th Century. One of these, The Apotheosis of St. Paul by Domenichino, is a minor work by that artist, not widely known today, yet it had clearly attracted Romney's attention when he visited Paris in 1764, and he had copied it into his sketchbook. My road to the discovery of this drawing's source had been totally different from the one that I had thought would lead me to my destination.

Taking an unexplored path can often lead to satisfying discoveries. Robert Frost alludes to this in the concluding stanza of his poem The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Taking a less traveled road has made all the difference for the daughter of friends of ours who live in Egypt. Jehane Noujaim, who turns 30 this week, is an Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. She decided after graduating from Harvard to be a filmmaker. After working for MTV, she made a well received documentary called Startup.com, and then was trying to decide what to do next. The obvious answer was to continue working in New York, where she knew people and had many opportunities. By chance, however, she met an employee of the Arab news channel, Al Jazeera and conceived the idea of doing a documentary on that network. Camera in hand, she set off for Qatar and imbedded herself for nearly a year filming the day-to-day operations of Al Jazeera as well as interviewing US press officers. Her film, Control Room, opens this very day in New York City and will soon come to Washington. Through an accident of timing, due to the recent prison scandal in Iraq, her film has achieved a relevance she could never have anticipated. Jehane was brave enough to make the leap to do something new and unconventional, and--serendipitously--she has made a film which will help us better understand both the Arab and the US news media.

Like Jehane, you also will soon be making choices as to what comes next in your life. I suggest a dose of serendipity. I suppose that a serendipitous approach particularly appeals to me right now because I, like you, am at a threshold. Retirement will bring with it a whole new world of possibilities. I won't give up Art History, but I look forward to learning about subjects I never had time to study before: Political Science or Anthropology or Economics or Military History or Natural Science. I will now have a chance to read the novels and biographies I've set aside for "later," and I will hope to finish reading the works of Shakespeare.

I hope that you new graduates will use the breathing space you have at this point in your lives to hang loose; to take stock and to go off in new, perhaps surprising, directions. I urge you to range even more widely in the liberal arts. Study the subjects you never had time for before. Be prepared to find creative solutions to old problems.

In conclusion, let me return to Mary McCrory. According to newspaper accounts, this meticulous woman had planned every detail of her funeral. She left written instructions as to who would speak and for how long, where people would sit, etc. However, as one Washington Post writer attending the funeral reported, "There was serendipity, too. [There's that word again!] There were moments that [Mary] couldn't plan, as when the sun broke through during the end of Communion and for ninety seconds illuminated the stained-glass windows above the altar." It was as if, at the appropriate moment, God had given a benediction upon the life of this remarkable woman. In closing, I urge you to welcome serendipity into your own life, and I hope that it will take you in unexpected directions where joyous discoveries await. Then, as if by happy accident, you will see the world anew--through a prism of brightly colored light. Thank you.

Sources

Serendipity: www.simonsingh.net/What_is_Serendipity.html

Alexander Fleming: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cancer/discoveries2.html

McCrory and Oil Spills: www.adn.com/evos/stories/EV150.html; and
www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF14/1401.html

Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff: Richard Conniff, "How a lawyer and an economist set out to change the world by looking at life upside down and sideways," Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June, 2004