Congratulations to our special class of 2024!

You were our first ever class to begin your Ashesi experience online in a highly volatile and disruptive COVID era. And despite the odds you made it. In 2020 you were distant faces and voices unable to fully connect with the Ashesi ethos and today you are leaving us as engineers, business analysts, computer scientists, and managers of information systems different and yet connected because of the liberal arts education you had at Ashesi. So, I would like to read you a page and a half of William Cronon’s work entitled “Only Connect…” The Goals of a Liberal Education. It reads:

Let’s remind ourselves of the ten qualities I most admire in the people I know who seem to embody the values of a liberal education. How does one recognize liberally educated people? How do you respond to the person who says, I hear you had a liberal arts education, what does that mean?

1. They listen and they hear.
This is so simple that it may not seem worth saying, but in our distracted and over-busy age, I think it’s worth declaring that educated people know how to pay attention—to others and to the world around them. They work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions.

2. They read and they understand.
This too is ridiculously simple to say but very difficult to achieve, since there are so many ways of reading in our world. Liberally Educated people can appreciate not only the front page of the New York Times but also the arts section, the sports section, the business section, the science section, and the editorials. They can gain insight from not only THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR and the New York Review of Books but also from Scientific American, the Economist , the National Enquirer, Vogue , and Reader ’s Digest .

They can enjoy [Chinua Achebe] John Milton and John Grisham. But skilled readers know how to read far more than just words. They are moved by what they see in a great art museum and what they hear in a concert hall.
They recognize extraordinary athletic achievements; they are engaged by classic and contemporary works of theater and cinema; they find in television a valuable window on popular culture. When they wander through a forest or a wetland or a desert, they can identify the wildlife and interpret the lay of the land.

They can glance at a farmer’s field and tell the difference between soybeans and groundnuts alfalfa. They recognize fine craftsmanship, whether by a cabinetmaker carpenter or an auto mechanic. And they can surf the World Wide Web. All of these are ways in which the eyes and the ears are attuned to the wonders that make up the human and the natural worlds. None of us can possibly master all these forms of “reading,” but liberally educated people should be competent in many of them and curious about all of them.

3. They can talk with anyone.
Educated people know how to talk. They can give a speech, ask thoughtful questions, and make people laugh. They can hold a conversation with a high school dropout or a Nobel laureate, a child or a nursing- home resident, an elderly grandma, a factory worker or a corporate president.

Moreover, they participate in such conversations not because they like to talk about themselves but because they are genuinely interested in others. A friend of mine says one of the most important things his father ever told him was that whenever he had a conversation, his job was “to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does.” I cannot imagine a more succinct description of this critically important quality.

4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly.
What goes for talking goes for writing as well: liberally educated people know the craft of putting words on paper. I’m not talking about parsing a sentence or composing a paragraph, but about expressing what is in their minds and hearts so as to teach, persuade, and move the person who reads their words. I am talking about writing as a form of touching, akin to the touching that happens in an exhilarating conversation.

5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
The ability to solve puzzles requires many skills, including a basic comfort with numbers, a familiarity with computers, and the recognition that many problems that appear to turn on questions of quality can in fact be reinterpreted as subtle problems of quantity. These are the skills of the analyst, the manager, the engineer, the critic: the ability to look at a complicated reality, break it into pieces, and figure out how it works in order to do practical things in the real world. Part of the challenge in this, of course, is the ability to put reality back together again after having broken it into pieces—for only by so doing can we accomplish practical goals without violating the integrity of the world we are trying to change.

6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.
Truly educated people love learning, but they love wisdom more. They can appreciate a closely reasoned argument without being unduly impressed by mere logic. They understand that knowledge serves values, and they strive to put these two—knowledge and values—into constant dialogue with each other. The ability to recognize true rigor is one of the most important achievements in any education, but it is worthless, even dangerous, if it is not placed in the service of some larger vision that also renders it humane.

7. They practice humility, tolerance, civility and self-criticism.
This is another way of saying that they can understand the power of other people’s dreams
and nightmares as well as their own. They have the intellectual range and emotional generosity
to step outside their own experiences and prejudices, thereby opening themselves to
perspectives different from their own. From this commitment to tolerance flow all those
aspects of a liberal education that oppose parochialism and celebrate the wider world: studying foreign languages, learning about the cultures of distant peoples, exploring the history of long ago times, discovering the many ways in which men and women have known the sacred and given names to their gods. Without such encounters, we cannot learn how much people differ—and how much they have in common.

8. They understand how to get things done in the world.
In describing the goal of his Rhodes Scholarships, Cecil Rhodes spoke of trying to identify young people who would spend their lives engaged in what he called “the world’s fight,” by which he meant the struggle to leave the world a better place than they had found it. Learning how to get things done in the world in order to leave it a better place is surely one of the most practical and important lessons we can take from our education. It is fraught with peril because the power to act in the world can so easily be abused—but we fool ourselves if we think we can avoid acting, avoid exercising power, avoid joining the world’s fight. And so we study power and struggle to use it wisely and well.

9. They nurture and empower the people around them.
Nothing is more important in tempering the exercise of power and shaping right action
than the recognition that no one ever acts alone. Liberally educated people understand that they belong to a community whose prosperity and well-being are crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by making the success of others possible. If we speak of education for freedom, then one of the crucial insights of a liberal education must be that the freedom of the individual is possible only in a free community, and vice versa. It is the community that empowers the free individual, just as it is free individuals who lead and empower the community. The fulfillment of high talent, the just exercise of power, the celebration of human diversity: nothing so redeems these things as the recognition that what seem like personal triumphs are in fact the achievements of our common humanity.

10. They follow E. M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End: “Only connect . . .”
More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here—listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people’s eyes, leading, working in a community—is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect.

All this is fair enough, and yet it too is deeply misleading in one crucial way. Education for human freedom is also education for human community. The two cannot exist without each other. Each of the qualities I have described is a craft or a skill or a way of being in the world that frees us to act with greater knowledge or power. But each of these qualities also makes us ever more aware of the connections we have with other people and the rest of creation, and so they remind us of the obligations we have to use our knowledge and power responsibly. If I am right that all these qualities are finally about connecting, then we need to confront one further the paradox about liberal education_In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place; it makes us responsible to those communities in ways that limit our freedom. In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves.

And so I keep returning to those two words of E. M. Forster’s:

So, Class of 2024, that’s who you are as an Ashesi liberally educated professional! and if you don’t remember any of the 10, I just shared remember two words, “Only connect.” Congratulations Class of 2024 wishing you success and happiness!