college - more than can be said, alas, of past orientation speakers, who tended to be obscure, patronizing or lazy. I'd told Eddie we wanted something about liberal arts, democracy and diversity and if he could throw in some John Dewey (a New School founder and one of his intellectual heroes), so much the better.So much the better indeed - he did all this and more, in an address entitled "The liberal arts in a time of war." I won't try to summarize his talk (though I'll ask my advisees to try tomorrow when I meet them for the first time), but I'll share with you a line from Dewey which played a central part: every generation has to accomplish democracy all over again. It's a familiar Deweyan (indeed Jeffersonian) idea; in other places Dewey asserts that democratic life has to be enacted anew in every generation, in every year and day, in the living relations of person to person in all social forms and institutions, and that Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.
What a fantastic idea to offer idealistic (though fearful of being betrayed by a certain Kenyan-Kansan, if not by the American electorate) young people, especially in connection with the equally Deweyan idea that American democracy is an incomplete project. And yet one student stumped us all during Q&A (though only Eddie had to answer): If every generation has to accomplish democracy anew, does that mean it's always getting better? I've no idea how I would have answered, but was interested that Eddie's first response was "no."
