Release date: Oct. 31, 2002

President Reflects on Ireland, Emory And Education

Of Ireland, Emory and Education
Bill Chace, president of Emory University

Late last spring, I had the unexpected pleasure of being offered the opportunity to teach a freshman seminar, and to do so on a topic for which I have a passion: the history and literature of Ireland.

These seminars (every first-year student has to enroll in one) are meant to introduce participants both to a scholarly topic and to Emory itself—the culture of a university. This particular seminar was also to be the first to include an "overseas component"; I was told I would be taking the students to Ireland for a week during the fall semester break. Of course, I relished with anticipation the seminar and what we (15 students, a teaching assistant and I) would be able to do with such an unusual opportunity.

I thought immediately of how I would close the gap between what we could read about Ireland and what we could actually feel, hear and breathe when we arrived on its soil. Every teacher can feel, at times, the weightlessness and abstractness of certain academic topics.

It is one thing (and a very wonderful thing) to read the words of Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, Liam O’Flaherty, James Joyce, Medbh McGuckian and Seamus Heaney. It is quite another to traverse the land where they lived and wrote, to gain a sense of the space they occupied and the history that enclosed them. In the case of at least one of these writers, Medbh McGuckian, the class would be able to meet her and to talk with her about her poems.

And yet another advantage loomed large in my mind: students at Emory, if they are from the United States, come from a country, numbering some 280 million people, that occupies an immense land mass. Ireland is a small country, slightly larger than West Virginia; its population is about one-seventy-fifth that of the United States. Would it not be good for 15 American students to dwell, even for a week, in a more constrained space, and yet one with an extraordinarily complex and tangled history? Would it not be good for those students to imagine, if only for a week, how they would live amid a different set of cultural, religious and political reminders and markers?

And behind all my thinking about this course was my interest in introducing the freshmen to an Emory that is an international and cosmopolitan institution, one in which the peculiar idiosyncrasies of American life are constantly exposed to the buffetings and challenges of the otherness of life elsewhere in the world. We live as a superpower, but such economic and military superiority hardly protects us from naïveté and ignorance about all the things of the world that are not American.

How good it would be, then, for 15 students, a teaching assistant and an instructor to go forth from the campus, armed with the knowledge afforded to us by our reading, to encounter a people, a land, a history and a culture somewhat knowable, somewhat foreign, and everywhere remarkable. I look forward to sharing some of the fruits of this educational innovation at Emory.

Oct. 15, 2002
DUBLIN -- After having arrived safely, we found ourselves quickly thrust into the life of this bustling, cool, somewhat rainy and somewhat sunny city. Whatever jet lag might otherwise have blighted our first few hours on the ground was overcome by the steady flow of meetings, walks (some quite long), encounters with learned and witty Dubliners, opportunities for further understanding of James Joyce, and two excellent guided (and private) tours, one of them through the National Library and the other through the two houses of the Irish Parliament.

As the world (and during this week, our class) has come to learn, the Irish have proved extraordinary exporters of two most generative entities: themselves and their literature. We have been told while here (in a country of 4.5 million) that some 75 million people around the globe can—and do, often fervently—claim some degree of Irish ancestry. What we have come to study is not this diaspora, however, but what now has become of these people and their culture.

With one eye, then, on Swift, Yeats, Joyce and contemporary poets like Peter Fallon and McGuckian, and the other eye on the people to whom we talk and from whom we learn outside of classroom sessions, we have looked back to the cultural past and looked forward into the cultural and national present.

And, thus far, we have learned that while Ireland remains an island, it is, at the same time, a part of the European Union. On the day we leave, Oct. 19, it will cast a decisive vote, under the terms of the Nice Treaty, about the expansion of that Union. Everywhere we go we see placards urging either a yes or no vote on that expansion, and thus we witness the rich variety of political expression alive in the land.

Moreover, we see that Ireland, once a somewhat isolated and beleaguered country, has become a crucial part of a new Europe. It has benefited thereby in economic growth but now is studying the costs of that growth and its consequences. A culture that once, because of poverty and political turmoil, drove its people to distant shores, is today reflecting on what it means to be a secure country from which few people emigrate. As we consider the past flowing all around us, we see that Ireland has its hands full of modernity.

I write this on our last full day in Dublin, for tomorrow we take the train up to Belfast. In that city, we will see a troubled and anxious part of the island, for the six counties constituting Northern Ireland have just been "returned" to rule from London. Their recent semi-autonomy, won after decades of sectarian warfare, has been suspended in the wake of a new political scandal. We will leave the prosperity and security of the Republic of Ireland and will be, for two days, in the midst of a part of the country that cannot seem to escape the depressing burden of old suspicions and old hatreds.

Coming home to the States, we will have a great deal to ponder—as students and as citizens of the world.

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