Office of the President

New Student Convocation — August 31, 1997

The Wanderer

Members of the Class of 2001! New students in the classes of 1998, 1999, and 2000! Today, you are joining your lives with a community celebrating its 150th anniversary. Most of you will remain members of the Carthage community beyond the middle of the twenty-first century, and you will help the College celebrate its bicentennial in the year 2047. Long before then, as alumni, you will guide its destiny and determine the kind of education Carthage offers your children and grandchildren.

There is no other institution of higher education in the world that bears this name, yet we enjoy one of the most famous names from classical antiquity. For centuries, the ancient Carthaginians were the dominant seafarers and traders of the central Mediterranean. In their small, wooden ships, they extended their reach throughout the Mediterranean and up and down the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa. One theory even suggests they traveled as far as South America.

According to legend, the city dated from the year 814 B.C. when a small band of refugees from the city of Tyre lighted on the north African shore. Tyre was one of the rich and powerful cities of Biblical times. Scriptures tell us that King Solomon, in building the temple, had imported both cedars of Lebanon and construction experts from the city of Tyre. The Phoenician inhabitants of Tyre and its neighboring cities passed along to our own civilization one of our most precious possessions — the phonetic alphabet. The Greek alphabet, and hence all Western alphabets, including our own, came from the Phoenician.

The people who founded Carthage were no longer rich and powerful, however. Losers in Tyre's political struggles, they were led by a courageous and strong-willed woman named Elishat. She had set sail with her followers after her husband was killed by her brother, the king of Tyre, in a palace revolution.

The legend continues that, for many years, enduring countless dangers, Elishat and her band wandered the Mediterranean searching for a new home. In her odyssey, Elishat became known as "the wanderer." Finally, on the north African coast, not too far from Sicily, they happened upon one of the greatest natural harbors of the ancient world. There, they stayed, calling their settlement "Carthage," which meant "new town." Their town, their home.

Young Carthage grew rapidly and prospered in its strategic location. Elishat became Queen of Carthage, but her troubles were not yet over. A neighboring ruler, coveting the wealth of the new town, tried to take over the city by marrying Elishat. The legend tells us that Elishat was determined to preserve the independence of Carthage. Spurning her suitor in order to save the freedom of her new town, she ended her life by throwing herself into a sacrificial fire.

In the Aeneid, Virgil took up the legend of Elishat, named her Dido, and gave the story a Roman twist. But that was the Carthage story as told by the enemy, for the Romans and the Carthaginians had fought for centuries. Remarkably enough, the Romans have left us eyewitness historical accounts of another strong-willed Queen of Carthage.

It was the year 146 B.C. Phoenician Carthage was in its death throes at the end of the third, and last, Punic War with Rome. The Romans had devastated the city, and only the citadel with its temple remained to be conquered. Finally, the courage of the commanding general of Carthage faltered. He crossed the lines, fell on his knees before the Roman general, and begged vainly for his life. Just then, above them on the wall, surrounded by fires from the burning temple, appeared the wife of the Carthaginian general, their two small children in her arms. She screamed curses on her husband for his cowardice and curses on the Romans for their destruction of her city. Then, pressing her children to herself, she jumped into the fires, choosing death for them all rather than lives of slavery.

Needless to say, she won the respect of the Romans and of all those who have heard her story since. It is said that the conquering Roman general wept as Carthage burned. Laid out before him, he perceived the transience of all human constructs, and foresaw the day when his own city, Rome, would suffer a similar fate.

The tradition of Carthage, however, has continued for more than two millennia since that fateful day. Within a century, Julius Caesar, who understood the strategic location of the harbor, had the city rebuilt. For centuries, Roman Carthage flourished over the foundations of the Phoenician city. The greatest of the early church fathers, St. Augustine, studied and taught at Carthage for years in the late fourth century. Finally, around the year 700, the Islamic conquest destroyed the city, but its stones then became the building blocks for the new city of Tunis, which survives to this day.

True to the tradition of Elishat, your college also has been a wanderer. Carthage stands virtually alone among America's 3,600 colleges and universities in that the College has had no fewer than four separate locations and four different names. Back in 1847 in Hillsboro, Illinois, we began as "The Literary and Theological Institute of the Lutheran Church in the Far West." This autumn at Homecoming, we shall dedicate a sculpture depicting two of the greatest men in Carthage history — Abraham Lincoln and John Hay. In the 1850s in Springfield, Illinois, our second location, they knew the College as "Illinois State University." It was the pioneers on the prairie who gave us the name "Carthage." They had wandered halfway across the North American continent, most of them on foot. Like Elishat's followers, they were neither rich nor powerful, and, like Elishat, they founded their own "new town." Calling their settlement "Carthage" was truly remarkable. People who leave home and wander into the wilderness usually do not have much to leave behind. The pioneers had had little opportunity for formal education. Many were semi-literate at best. Yet someone had heard of an ancient city, one that had ceased to exist more than one thousand years earlier. The pioneers knew, or had learned enough, about ancient Carthage to adopt that name for their own new town.

No matter that it was only a small farming community. The College adopted the name of Carthage when we opened our doors there in 1870. By the 1960s, when it was time to find another new home, this time in Wisconsin, we honored our traditions by retaining our name. Yes, there are still small towns called "Carthage," with distinctive traditions of their own. Yet, this College has grown, prospered, and gained national respect. We are now America's most visible perpetuator of Elishat's "new town."

For this 150th anniversary, I have said a good deal about Carthage, both the ancient city and the modern college. But what does any of that have to do with you?

Perhaps you already have drawn the inference that, at this moment, you do share similarities with both Elishat and the prairie pioneers. You are leaving home, and you cannot predict with confidence what your final destination will be. Years, even decades of wandering lie before you. On average, you will change jobs six or seven times during your life. Many of you will work in professions far removed from your major fields of study in college. The details of your personal lives — spouses, children, friendships — still remain to be discovered. In the years ahead, you will experience defeats and triumphs, sadness and joy, the full range of human emotions — but, at this point, all that remains clouded in obscurity. You are wanderers.

Of course, we should not exaggerate or overly dramatize the significance of this day. Within a few hours, many of you will wave goodbye to parents and family members. Others of you already have done that. There may well be some lumps in throats or even tears at that point. Stories do circulate, however, about parents clicking their heels in the parking lots as they race to their cars — although that is a sight I never have witnessed personally. For that matter, probably most of you have reached a point where you are ready to be more on your own.

But to what purpose? The wanderings of Elishat and the prairie pioneers were anything but aimless drifting. They were searching for a place to found their Carthage, their new town. They had a goal. They knew what they sought.

Is it fair to ask you what your goal is? Where will you establish your Carthage? What will be the nature of your own new town?

Well, these are heavy questions to shoot at you when you are not even fully unpacked. Moreover, there is no good reason why you should be able to give precise answers. Among you, the most common major field of study is known as "Undecided," and that is as things should be. My favorite definition of education is that it is "a movement into a larger world." As long as thinking human beings are alive, they are being educated, they are expanding their universe. A period of formal education, particularly in one's younger years, can provide an invaluable opportunity to assimilate the experiences of others. College is all about moving much more quickly into a much larger world than one could possibly accomplish on one's own.

The more we as human beings expand our horizons, the more we need to know where home is. In the Heritage seminars this term, you will soon read the story of the most famous wanderer in Western literature. The young Odysseus left his wife and infant son for twenty years, fighting for ten years before the walls of Troy, then having adventure after adventure for another ten years on his way back to Ithaca. When people think of the Odyssey, their minds usually wander to those amazing adventures, to the Lotus-Eaters and the Cyclops, to Circe, the Sirens, and Calypso. The resourceful Odysseus was seeing the world and having a good time.

Yet the poem is not so much about wandering as it is about coming home. It is about Odysseus' reestablishing his relationships with son, with wife, with father. It is about him reclaiming his own house from his wife's suitors. It is about him reassuming his duties in his own land and to his own family. In short, the epic is about Odysseus' finding his own new town. Ithaca becomes his home when he returns, in a way it had never been before he left.

Another famous wanderer was the Prodigal Son. Most of us can readily recall the story told by Jesus about the younger son of a wealthy father, the boy who asked for his inheritance and then wandered off to have a good time. After spending all he had, and falling into abject poverty, he came to see himself more clearly than ever before. Swallowing his pride, he decided to return home and ask not to be restored as a son, but to be given shelter as a hired servant.

The father must have been waiting and looking for his son every day, for he spied the boy when he was still far off. Rejoicing at having his son back again, the father would not let the boy even finish his confession, and the boy never got to the hired servant part of his speech. The father ordered a celebration of the son's homecoming. Finally in a poignant scene, the father explained to a resentful older brother what absolute love is all about. As we read Jesus' story, we quickly realize it is about wandering, but even more about coming home.

In recent months, another wanderer has experienced a whole new wave of popularity thirty years after his death. With his beret, beard, and messianic visage, Ernesto "Che" Guevara symbolizes 1960s revolutionary Marxist zeal. Now, in supreme irony, his name and picture are valuable commercial images, selling Austrian skis, Finnish coffee, and Swiss watches among many other products. Here in the United States, his recently published Motorcycle Diaries has sold more than 30,000 copies.

The diaries are an account of a 23-year-old Che, who set off with a friend on a dilapidated motorcycle for a tour around South America in the early 1950s. Their adventures included hunger, illness, surprise after surprise — and repeated exposure to the poverty of people across the continent The son of a liberal, middle-class Argentine family, and a very bright medical student at the time, Che in his wandering became increasingly consumed with the social injustice he saw around him. His diaries detail a progressive defining of values. They depict Che, morally and intellectually, building his own new town.

Individuals with pure and uncompromising values command deep respect. Yet the Che who sought out remote leper colonies and seriously considered a medical specialty in leprosy was the same Che who, ten years later, urged the Soviet Union to launch a nuclear strike against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. To what home had his wandering led him? Always remember, that as morally conscious human beings, we do carry responsibility for the kind of home we build.

Odysseus, the Prodigal Son, and Che Guevara are a strange and eclectic group. Yet, they represent only a varied vocabulary expressing a common theme: humans are wanderers searching for home. We wander throughout life, as we progressively define and refine who we are and where we stand.

This college is your place to wander in many directions. Here on campus, you may discover your own new town, your own Carthage, in a library, a laboratory, a music room, a weight room, a chapel, or in a host of other places. Wherever — it will be your home because it will symbolize your values and your commitments.

The faculty will play a role similar to Odysseus in one of his exploits. In order to appease Poseidon, the God of the Sea, Odysseus was ordered to wander until he found people who knew nothing of the sea, who had never seen ships, who did not recognize oars. There, before them, he was to plant his oar in the ground and make sacrifices to Poseidon. In other words, Odysseus was to educate those people to the glories of Poseidon; Odysseus was to help them move into a larger world.

In your years here, your professors will plant many oars before you. They will open door after door through which you may wander into larger worlds. Ultimately, only you can decide where, in all those worlds, your own new town, your own Carthage, will be.

If all of this seems daunting, there is a metaphor that may be helpful. A famous Scottish-American minister named Peter Marshall recalled the Second World War practice of crews taking ships to sea without knowing where they were going. For security reasons, they sailed under sealed orders, and the captain opened those orders only when out to sea. Marshall observed that life is like that. We also set sail under sealed orders. There is purpose in our wandering, but only gradually and progressively do we understand what it is.

In this 150th anniversary year, the College perpetuates not only the memory of an ancient city. We also are America's fourth oldest Lutheran college, and the Judeo-Christian tradition receives honor and respect here. In that tradition, across the centuries, millions of humans have found inspiration from a creator with a purpose for them. They have known where their ultimate home is.

Today, your first day here on campus, on behalf of thousands of Carthaginians, let me welcome you to your own new town. Have a marvelous time as you wander among the many adventures ahead. Always remember that defining where home is for you, and returning there, are the ultimate goals.

Welcome to Carthage!