Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 4, 2011

New Horizons

This year, Carthage welcomed nearly 800 new students to campus at the New Student Convocation. This is President Campbell’s address to these students and their families.

Members of the Class of 2015! Incoming transfer members of the classes of 2012, 2013, and 2014! This New Student Convocation honors you. All the formalities are just our cordial welcome to you as the newest members of the Carthage community. For those of us who have been awaiting your arrival, these moments are a celebration. We rejoice you are here.

You are joining a college with a distinguished history. This is the first day of the 165th year of this institution. It has always been a teaching college, and it will continue to be just that. Today also marks the beginning of the fiftieth year for Carthage here in Kenosha. Everything you see on this campus has emerged in that space of time. No other college in this country enjoys a better location. And for Barbara and me, this is our 25th year here at the College. That is quite a while.

This year, among Carthage graduates and friends living around the country, the College is sponsoring a series of gatherings titled Celebrating Carthage. Yes, we are commemorating the past — the 165th, 50th, and 25th anniversaries — but we are using those memories to inspire a vigorous commitment to the future. Celebrating Carthage means pressing on toward new horizons.

Each academic year, the College adopts a new theme celebrating Carthage students. The Carthage calendar for 2011-2012, the printed program for this event, and the street banners that have gone up around campus in recent days proclaim New Horizons — and they do so with you in mind. Today, on your first day as a college student, each of you is taking a big step toward your own new horizons.

Yes, a change like this can seem a little daunting. Yes, there are parents here who are feeling some separation anxiety. But, like thousands who entered Carthage before you, you will soon settle in to life on campus, make friends, and become involved in classes and activities. Most of you have thought long and hard about where you would go to college, and the vast majority of you will find that you made the right choice. This adventure will turn out to be a lot of fun, and your families will be both relieved and proud.

Still, there are a lot of new horizons lying out before you. How will you respond? With enthusiasm or fear? With reason or recklessness? With purpose or without a clue? As you move through the years of your life, will you be just a wanderer, or will you become a searcher? Do you think there could be anything out there worthy of your quest? Are you willing to make the effort to find it?

Yes, you do want to graduate from Carthage with a legitimate claim to some level of expertise in some field of study. Yes, it will be great to get that first real job. Your family certainly is all for that. But what fundamental difference will those new horizons make in your life? The answer lies in the attitudes you bring to them.

• • •

The Carthage mission statement points toward a lifelong quest. Such a quest builds healthy minds, bodies, and spirits. The mission statement seeks to guide both our personal and our communal efforts in that endeavor. In just seven words, it proclaims: Seeking Truth, Building Strength, Inspiring Service — Together.

That mission underlies the scenes on the new Carthage calendar and street banners, depicting recent and current Carthage students. Your fellow students appear literally from around the world as well as right here on campus. And, always, they are engaged in a quest.

In my opinion, the following three photographs are examples of seeking truth. The November page of the calendar shows a group of Carthage students listening to a presentation in Ephesus, one of the leading cities of ancient Greek culture. They are assembled at the site where the city council met to debate and to determine public policy. Many of our contemporary ideas about how to organize government can be traced back to the Greeks. Those Carthage students are learning not just about the Ephesians but about themselves as well.

Next comes a night photo of a student and his Carthage professor engaged in a summer research project on the Pike River right here on campus. In cooperation with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, they were doing a survey of the local bat population, using sophisticated technology that can detect the sounds of bats in flight. Each summer, a considerable number of Carthage students remain on campus in order to undertake special research projects with their professors.

Another street banner depicts three students at the headquarters of the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in Houston. They were invited to NASA in order to conduct an experiment in a weightless environment. Yes, that means boarding the so-called "vomit comet," a NASA aircraft that creates brief intervals of zero gravity as it dives steeply toward the earth. To win that invitation, those Carthage students had to compete with students at much larger universities in devising a research project relevant to NASA’s exploration of space. For the past four years, Carthage students have been winners in the competition and have done scientific research while flying with NASA. Students at no other small college own a record like that.

The Carthage calendar contains an apt observation by American physician, poet, and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” The students we have just seen were seeking truth and exploring new horizons simultaneously. They were stretching their minds, expanding their intellects, and making themselves new people.

• • •

The second part of the Carthage mission statement focuses on building strength. We are at the right place for that. Just behind those seats up there is the varsity weight room, designed for the Red Men and the Lady Reds on Carthage’s twenty-four NCAA Division III teams. The equipment is the best on the market. Long hours up there will help this young man shake off the tacklers or absorb the hits he is bound to get. As for the rest of us, I shall see you over in the Semler Fitness Center. With its strength and aerobic equipment, it is our health club here on campus.

You and I have minds, we have bodies, and we have spirits. We need to build strength in each dimension. Another banner introduces us to a Carthage student in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The art and the architecture are impressive, but they may be opening him up to something even greater — as the light and his face suggest. Intimations of immortality reach us at unexpected times. Transcendent moments make us stronger and help equip us for this space-time life of ours.

President Theodore Roosevelt knew what it meant to build strength. He overcame a sickly childhood by sheer willpower. He undertook adventures and a career demanding mental, physical, and spiritual strength alike. As president, he oversaw the American entrance onto the world stage a century ago, and at home he established the national park system. This year’s Carthage calendar proclaims his attitude: “Believe you can, and you’re halfway there.”

Accompanying President Roosevelt’s observation is a photograph of Carthage students on a trip to study the geology of Iceland. There, they explored waterfalls, fjords, hot springs, and glaciers. If you look closely, four students are already up on the ridge and others are strung along the face of the hill. The professor who led the trip took this photograph. She then faced a steep and strenuous climb, but she made it to the top.

President Roosevelt would say that if the people down by the river believe they can reach the crest of the hill, they are already halfway there. The Carthage students we have seen — whether on a campus athletic field, in the greatest of European cathedrals, or at an Icelandic waterfall — all of them were exploring new horizons and simultaneously building their own inner strength.

• • •

As we contemplate inspiring service, the Carthage calendar includes an observation by American psychologist and philosopher William James that is to the point. His simple and direct advice was: “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

Putting those words into action are three Carthage students participating in children’s games with orphans in Namibia. Many of those children lost their parents to AIDS, which has ravaged southern Africa in recent years. There are instances where 13- and 14-year-old youngsters are acting as heads of families and attempting to look after younger siblings. In the past three years, Carthage students have made several trips to Namibia simply in order to work with and for those children.

On another page of the Carthage calendar, we encounter a young woman in India, teaching children the English alphabet. Who knows what they can become in a growing economy if they gain a decent education. Our student was doing her communications internship in India, and now is beginning her senior year here on campus.

For more than fifteen years, successive groups of Carthage students have raised money in order to bring medical supplies to Nicaraguan children in their mountain-top village. Our students spend much of January each year, working in a makeshift clinic there. Those trips to Nicaragua have ranked among the most popular January-term opportunities, and there are always students on the waiting list to go.

That group of students in Nicaragua brings us to the final word of the Carthage mission statement: together. The vision is of a common bond uniting the Carthage community to seek truth, build strength, and inspire service — and to do all that together. Such unity can be quite a tall order in the real world, but the shared experiences among students on such trips certainly does bring them together.

On another banner, we encounter an equally enthusiastic group in Kyoto, Japan. They were members of the Carthage Wind Orchestra and had traveled to Japan to give a series of concerts and to make music together with their peers at a Japanese university. Every January, one of the Carthage music ensembles undertakes performances in Europe, Asia, or Africa.

All of these group trips to locations around the world are organized and led voluntarily by Carthage faculty members because they want to share such experiences with you. Only an extraordinary, teaching-oriented faculty would undertake such an effort. The faculty provide leadership for Seeking Truth, Building Strength, Inspiring Service — Together.

• • •

Yes, exploring new horizons can be a lot of fun. For mountaineer George Leigh Mallory, climbing was fun, but it also was a quest. After many triumphs, he died in the 1920s high on the slopes of Mt. Everest. We shall never know for sure whether his climbing partner and he were the first humans to reach the summit. Probably not, but that really does not matter. For Mallory, it was the quest that counted. As he said, “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy.”

That thought brings us to our final photograph of Carthage students abroad. How to deal with a Wisconsin January? One way is to join a Carthage study trip to Australia and head for the Great Barrier Reef. These three do appear to be having a good time, wouldn’t you agree? They, and you, will never swim with more colorful tropical fish anywhere else in the world. But, their experience was not just fun in the sun. Their group studied the geography of much of the coastline of the Australian continent.

So, how will you respond to all these new horizons laid out before you? Clearly, you will have to pick and choose; you cannot explore them all. But each quest you undertake can inspire another and another and another. Ultimately, it is your own mindset that matters. If Carthage helps you become a searcher, not just a wanderer all your life, your time here will be well- spent. Ultimately, whether you are here on campus or ten thousand miles away, your greatest discoveries will lie within yourselves. That is what a quest is all about.

British author and philosopher C. S. Lewis wrote: “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” Believe it now. Believe it fifty years from now.