GCAS Keynote Address, Prof. Jane Anna Gordon

August 23rd, 2020

by Professor Dr. Jane Anna Gordon

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Vice-President’s Address

President’s Address

Susannah Elizabeth Livingstone, Stephen Bujno, Cory James Johnson, Mark Andrew Stimson, Keith Clougherty, Christoph Solstreif-Pirker, and Walter N. South II, I am delighted to join in today’s celebration of your many achievements!

What is so precious and rare about this moment is how clear it is that your individual achievements are both very much yours and those of your immediate loved ones and also, most definitely, ours. 

After all, in developing the learning and growing wisdom represented by your Master and PhD degrees, you are also developing the learning and growing wisdom of the institution and the educational project that is GCAS.  

GCAS has been—and is—a remarkable idea; a dazzling aspiration. 

But absent people like you, who sought it out as the community and structure through which to pursue your dreams, it would have remained only that. Through your seizing it as the institution through which to realize your aims, it has become material. It has become real. 

It is so rare that there is such a direct and graspable connection between individual and collective growth and thriving. 

As you earned your degree, you were quite literally bringing GCAS into being, building an alternative model of generating and keeping human knowledge alive.

Among some 5th-century Athenian thinkers—whose ideas were heavily indebted to intellectual predecessors in what we now call Egypt—today would be an example of Maat or of justice: your pursuit of what you love and need and have talent for is one and the same as what a larger polity or community or institution also loves and needs and has talent for; what constitutes you, is constituting GCAS; your pursuit of self-realization and that of GCAS as a project and institution are identical. 

You are in the rare position of not only earning an advanced degree today, your doing so is also enacting the achievement of one of the most coherent ideas of justice.

***

Like many of you, I am profoundly moved by the aim of GCAS to create a model of debt-free education. 

As I was preparing for today, I was thinking about what it is to free the pursuit of the vital human need for ongoing, rigorous education from the very real prospect of fiscal danger or long-term economic indebtedness; what it is to disentangle the ensnared relationship between seeking freedom, on the hand, and incurring its opposite, on the other. 

This made me think of the final section of a chapter by one of Lewis and my students, Gregory Doukas, who is writing a dissertation about political responsibility. Building part of the discussion from the work of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, Greg was reflecting on how social reality, which is constituted by and constitutive of intersubjectivity, takes place in and through time. 

As he reflects, we become and act as political members of societies and communities as we take on “political responsibility from our ancestors and assume it in an orientation toward our posterity.” Or as Arendt writes when explaining the nature of political responsibility, 

“It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed by the deeds of the ancestors.” 

At first I was thinking about how, in assuring that you did not accrue economic debts in the continuation of your education, you were freed to take on other, more meaningful forms of indebtedness. Rather than saddled with unavoidable economic obligations, you could seek out, even pursue, other forms of debt. Rather than spending years settling accounts with Sallie Mae, you could work out how to live your sense of gratitude to those whose courageous deeds further opened our horizons; to those who, through words, unclasped conceptual avenues once shut.

But then I realized that I was in error: 

The profundity of GCAS’s approach exceeds the formulation of replacing one form of indebtedness with another. This is because what it offers to the project of education is the loosening of the grip that capitalist monopolies have had on everything. 

In other words, my own thinking, that you could exchange one kind of debt—financial ones—for another humanistic or political kind actually reflects the problem GCAS seeks to address.

We need not think of obligations we have to others—whether dead, still unborn, or among the living—or the commitments that we make and may choose to rekindle through the language of debt and indebtedness at all. There are other, far richer possibilities that do not reduce everything to the language of fiscal exchange or the settling of economic accounts.

We can affirm, with the separation of learning from the strictures of financing, languages that are not so shackled. 

In thinking of what today marks, then, it is not only a moment of realizing a most coherent understanding of justice (whereby your pursuit of self-realization is one and the same as the realization of a larger, liberatory project), it is also an expression of genuine freedom; one so genuine that our tired and foreclosed eyes might almost miss it!

***

It is beautiful to celebrate the prioritizing of projects that are utterly urgent AND that are not oriented by the immediate or by the exigency of the right now. In a moment when we speak about the unfolding losses of the present in terms of seconds and minutes, here and now we affirm the seeking of understanding that we can and will never exhaust. 

Part of why education is so freeing is that it connects us, even if only in fleeting periods, to the beautiful and to the eternal; to what we may know more intimately than anything that surrounds us, even if we could never have physically encountered it. 

I would like to close with some words of and to Walter N. South II, with whom we were so fortunate to share actual, historical time. Specifically, I want to speak of the spirit of Walter South in words of another elder, Hannah Senesh, who, like Walter, cared ferociously for human dignity. She said and we can say of Walter: 

“There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.”

Congratulations on your affirmation of the value of such light!  

Today and tomorrow, we celebrate you!