Excerpts from the commencement speech of Glen Van Brummelen at commencement dinner, June 2, 2006.

How to Be a Freshman

Isaac Newton was not a congenial man. Let’s be blunt about this: he came across as an arrogant jerk who couldn’t handle social niceties. He was distinctly not a party animal. He rarely divulged his work, preferring to live in almost total isolation. He had few friends and no significant relationships, suffered a mental breakdown and died lonely.

Yet he became the most revered scientist who ever lived, changing the way we see everything. Before Newton, I kid you not, people really believed that cannonballs fly out in a straight diagonal line, stop in mid-air, and then fall vertically straight down to Earth, landing on their victims in the style of Wile E. Coyote quivering under his umbrella. Presumably, those who could have provided first-hand reports of the actual path of the cannonball’s arrival weren’t in a talking mood.

Before Newton, the area of a curved shape wasn’t a clear notion. Before Newton, you couldn’t talk about the speed of an object that was slowing down or speeding up. Before Newton, light traveled from the eye to the object, not the other way around. Before Newton, the world was a very different place. What people saw then, immediately, in their daily lives, is alien to what we see now.

So, what made this recluse, this hermit, this misfit, into the man who peeked behind the veil and saw for the first time what had been staring us all in the face since the beginning?

I think I know part of the answer: he was the ideal freshman.

Freshmen aren’t comfortable. You can tell by the way they scurry through the hallways and cluster in groups, totally at odds with how we cluster in groups. They don’t seem to know much. They’re not as sophisticated and worldly as we are. They don’t yet know that cannonballs travel diagonally in a straight line, then fall vertically down.

Newton didn’t know that either. As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Maybe he was lucky to have been forced to interrupt his Cambridge University education due to an outbreak of the plague. When he was at home waiting out the storm, he invented that powerful new tool now used to torture our beloved freshmen, the calculus….

So, what have we learned in the past four years, and is it going to keep us from being Newtons? I can’t speak for all of you, so please forgive a personal interjection in my little morality play. I’ve discovered that a liberal arts education, unfettered by regulations and restrictions, can be the most powerful force in the world. I’ve also seen that it has an enormous capacity to fall flat on its face, but to pick itself up, wipe the muck off its face, smile grimly and carry on with determination and a glint in its eyes. I’ve seen that mathematics is not the isolated symbolic fortress that I conquered, sort of, as an undergraduate--but is, instead, a rich interchange where ideas travel across and between most fields of inquiry….

Newton’s predecessors knew how the world worked. The stars are set on a sphere, like diamonds, and we’re at the center of it all as it rotates around us, once per day. Objects down here in the natural world, like cannonballs, naturally wish to move in straight lines. Objects up there in the supernatural world, like planets, want to move in perfect circles. Another powerful vision, another one that makes sense of so much. It’s obviously true. And it’s utter rubbish.

But unlike being a senior Aristotelean, being a “senior” at Bennington is (or should be) an uncomfortable paradox. We’ve been taught to chuck convention, to put ourselves into our work, to challenge assumptions. Then we’ve been given the tools to do so. Finally, we’ve completed our major attacks on orthodoxy and conformism. Now we know how it’s done. We are ready to establish the rules for how to break the rules….

The problem with seniors is that they get in their own way. They pick up the pebble and say, “I know what this is. I know how it was formed. I can tell you its chemical composition, and I know how old it is.” Don’t get me wrong; these are good and important things to know. But notice how often “I” gets involved. There’s a sense of self, even selfishness, built into being a senior. And that stops you from being a child, from seeing what’s out there rather than seeing yourself.

Now, far be it from me to accuse Bennington of having an ego problem. Call this instead our second moral: to be a good freshman, to really see the world, don’t think highly, or poorly, or yourself. Don’t think of yourself at all….

We all remember trigonometry, sines and cosines and all that — our teacher drawing pictures of sailboats and pine trees, connecting them up to form triangles, and after a bit of obscure jargon and wizardry finding out that the sailboat is 73.2 feet above the tree, with no easy way to get down.

Well, trigonometry first came about to study the stars, and as is clear to any freshman, the stars live above us on a giant hemisphere, with us at the center. It has probably not escaped your notice that a hemisphere, unlike a blackboard, is not flat. Imagine taking the curved blackboard of the heavens, and connect three stars. To figure out the math of that twisty, bendy space must be incredibly complicated (hundreds of times worse than the flat blackboard stuff), unbelievably tedious, and downright cruel to inflict on anyone.

But no. Just one example: take one of the angles of that triangle, and the side opposite that angle. Divide the sine of one into the sine of the other. Now do the same for the other two pairs of angles and sides. You’ll get the same number, all three times. Doesn’t matter what stars you chose, close together or far apart, sharp-angled triangles or not; it’ll always work, guaranteed. There is no earthly reason to expect such a breathtakingly simple relation to apply to such a complex situation. There’s no reason that something so elegant and beautiful should have the immeasurable gift of also being true--but it is. And it’s just one of many nuggets in spherical trigonometry. We truly live in a world of wonders.

It’s time for true confessions: I missed this pebble the first time I came across it. I said to myself, “this is a dead subject that no one, not even historians, has cared about since 1955. It’ll never do me any good; it can’t serve to advance my career.” I told myself that I knew what it could do, that it wasn’t worth my precious time. So I ignored it and went after the bright lights — well, as bright as the lights get in the history of math. That cost me ten years of delight. Now I’m making up for lost time, forgetting myself and what others will think, chasing this butterfly wherever it leads. And, paradoxically, people seem much more interested in my chase now that I’ve abandoned the bright lights for those intriguing shadows….

The contradiction we are feeling the most, I suspect, is this: our time here is naturally drawing to a close. We can’t wait to get out of this place, and yet we can’t bear it to end. It’s time for us to do as Newton did, to enter another world, with eyes and minds open to the perpetual newness of life. We’re all graduating tomorrow. We’re becoming freshmen again, and I can’t think of a better bunch of people to do that with than all of you. Starting over: it’s one of the greatest gifts that Bennington can give, and it’s ours for the taking.