When Chace returned to Oxford on May 6 to deliver the college's 150th commencement address, where more than 200 Oxford sophomores received their associate of arts degrees, he took the opportunity to reflect on the four themes prompted by his earlier journey: healing and health, service, learning and teaching.
*Healing and health: "One does not immediately think of college as a place of healing," Chace said. "This place, Oxford, is not a place of illness; what, then, needs to be cured? The answer resides in the truth that even the young... are always in danger of having their minds dulled by the commonplace and the routine. All of us... have a disease called habit. In its low-grade infecting way, it prevents us from seeing all that is around us and it makes us turn the truly wondrous into the only conventional.
"Education," Chace continued, "is one of the ways we humans have created to thwart the deadening power of habit, to cure us of the illnesses of suffocating routine and mindless convention. Education reminds us of just how strong our pulse can be if only we are genuinely alert. . . This, then, is the healing power of education; it is the power of revivification. These Oxford students today have been given the power to heal the ordinary and make it the extraordinary."
*Service: "Service is one of those human activities we all know is noble but whose nobility we would rather have others be responsible for," Chace said. "Despite that human vice of ours, many Oxford students have been engaged, one way or another, in acts of service during their time here. They have helped each other; they have helped others less fortunate than themselves; they have seen to it that this small community is constructed out of the endless little acts of forbearance and support. But I suspect that they have also learned the truth of service, which is a truth about every generous deed."
Chace said that truth is summed up by the character of Richard Rowan in James Joyce's only play, Exiles. Rowan says: "While you have a thing, it can be taken from you . . . but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give."
*Learning: While acknow-ledging the crucial role of research in higher education, particularly since the end of World War II, Chace pointed to another kind of learning "that has nothing to do with the impact of modernity or with funded research or with the new. That kind of learning is simple yet imponderably difficult." Chace illustrated his point with a passage from Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon: "There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to give."
"This kind of learning is as old and as new as life itself," Chace said, "and is taught best, I believe, in schools with the patience and the surroundings that ask us to look inward. This kind of learning has to do with wisdom, the highest form of learning. Oxford College pursues that learning and, in so doing, superbly exemplifies the highest mission of education."
*Teaching: "Education has to do with the laying down of a legacy of understanding upon which those coming after us can stand," said Chace. "It has to do with giving to the present so that the future can be strong. It is, in a supreme form, an act of generosity. In The Education of Henry Adams, a book that rightly can be called this country's best autobiography, Adams declares that, `A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.' The teachers on this campus and their colleagues represent that generosity and that influence."
"Let us rejoice," Chace said in closing, "that there is an Oxford in our culture and in our land, let us rejoice that it is blessed with a faculty so strong and so dedicated, and let us rejoice in the marvelous fact that on this day we see before us a class of graduates, and they are to be praised."
Following Chace's address, Associate Dean for Campus Life Joe Moon presented the Eady Sopho-more Service Award to Emily Tripp, whom Moon described as a "behind-the-scenes, thoughtful caregiver." In presenting the award, Oxford's highest student honor, Moon cited Tripp's work in Oxford admissions, the planning of the college's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday observance, the Freshman Seminar program, teaching tennis to at-risk children, visiting area nursing homes, and helping to build outdoor toilets in rural Honduras. This summer, Tripp will be part of a group of students traveling to Sitka, Alaska, to help repair homes for Native American residents.
As last year's recipient of the Fleming Award, Neil Penn, professor of history, presented the 1995 award to Lucas Carpenter, associate professor of English. Penn cited Carpenter's work in chairing faculty committees, advising student organizations and leading a curriculum review committee. In preparing his remarks, Penn went to several of Carpenter's former students, one of whom said, "He taught me how to teach myself." Another former student, who is preparing to be a teacher, said of Carpenter: "I will model my teaching after Lucas Carpenter's because he is the best there is."
--Dan Treadaway