This year, however, I draw from a personally enriching experience that I had in early summer, which I judge is also of value to you. In July, I was one of 12 university presidents invited to a week-long seminar to read and reflect on the classical texts that comprise a liberal education. For me, it was like spending a week with old friends as I reread and revisited texts of Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, de Tocqueville, Newman, and Whitehead, that I had not read since my own undergraduate days some 35 years past. It also provided a rare moment of leisure to reflect on the whole proposition of liberal education, an education that is the essence of the Jesuit philosophy of education and is at the heart of your University of San Francisco experience. A liberal education is about learning to be at home in the world, with all of its diversity and divisiveness.
Liberal education has something to do with the creation of a learning community.
Without the learning community built by teachers and students, nothing in the old and familiar texts will come alive. When combined, they yield a potent intellectual brew. In my summer readings, I discovered that one of America's greatest writers has a metaphor for liberal learning. This metaphor is in the first half of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Now, as someone who was raised on the banks of that great river, anything that has to do with the Mississippi appeals to me.