Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 4, 2005

Make No Little Plans

It is bold. It is quintessentially American. It is: "Make no little plans."

Each year at this convocation, the College inaugurates a theme for the academic year. New banners lining the streets proclaim it. Our program today announces it, and Carthage literature throughout this year will repeat the advice to "make no little plans."

Today marks a fresh start for a college now 158 years old. We have a new group of students-you, the Class of 2009 and transfers into other classes. We have prepared this welcome just for you. As a teaching college, Carthage has just one mission, and it is you. There is no other reason why this campus exists. Your education, your growth and development are our reasons for being.

So it is with great curiosity, pleasure, and anticipation that we help you as you go about settling in today. Now, and across the weeks and months ahead, we shall be urging you to "make no little plans" for your time at Carthage, and beyond.

Those words capture the spirit of an age and the soul of a city. They resound with optimism; they vibrate with energy. They sprang out of a young city of Chicago back in the 1890s. Many of you, growing up in or near the city, have family members a few generations back who were caught up in that dream of making no little plans. Your lives are better because of them.

Chicago was burgeoning. Immigrants were arriving by the trainload. The railways had transformed a small village into the most dynamic metropolis in the country. The stockyards displayed the blood, the grime, the drama of the country's slaughterhouse. Wealth was mushrooming. The skyline was leaping up. The Cubs were playing baseball, sort of. (Actually, that is not fair. They won several championships in the 1880s. Someday, those good old days will return.)

Chicagoans possessed business, industry, and commerce, but they needed respect. They wanted those people on the east coast, and even the Europeans, to acknowledge that Chicago was more than just some wild frontier town. Chicagoans set about founding the Art Institute, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the University of Chicago. But they wanted more.

The 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America was fast approaching. There had to be a grand celebration. This was the great era of the world fairs. People journeyed by rail across continents and by steamer across oceans to attend them. In 1889, the French had upstaged everyone with the Paris World's Fair marking the hundredth anniversary of their great revolution. Looming over everything stood the Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure humans ever had built. Chicagoans resolved to do better.

Pulling out all the stops, they won an intense battle in Congress to be the site for the world's Columbian Exposition. In three years' time, they produced the Great White City in what is still Jackson Park by the Museum of Science and Industry. Beautiful in its architecture of buildings and landscapes, the fair showcased the newest of the new-the first all-electric kitchen, the first automatic dishwasher, the first zipper, the first moving pictures. Fair-goers discovered Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Cracker Jack, and shredded wheat, and Pabst beer won the blue ribbon. Buffalo Bill set up his wild west show nearby. And, yes, Chicago produced a spectacle eclipsing the Eiffel Tower. In Paris, you only could ride up to an observation deck. In Chicago, you could peer across urban vistas as you rotated in circles reaching 264 feet high in thirty-six gondola cars holding sixty people each. A marvel of engineering, it was the world's first Ferris wheel.

The man responsible for putting it all together was Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham. A visionary with the drive and the organizational skills to turn dreams into reality, Mr. Burnham insisted on recruiting America's best talent to produce the greatest exposition in the country's history. Promoting that grand enterprise, he proclaimed, "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized." In other words, if an ambition enlivens our imaginations, we are more likely to accomplish the magnificent than we are the humdrum that leaves us uninspired.

When Mr. Burnham uttered those words, this college already was approaching its fiftieth year and had educated two generations of students. A century later, we still find ourselves making no little plans. The students now here, and those who recently graduated, have witnessed significant changes here on campus. You will also.

This is your first day in your new home. You have chosen it, and you accept things as you find them. You have no way of knowing the detail of how all this got here, nor is there any compelling reason why you should devote much effort to finding out. But you start from here, and Carthage will be part of you the rest of your lives. Until you die, you will carry responsibility for this college.

The strategic goals for Carthage across the next ten years focus on two assignments: faculty development and campus development. I trust you will see progress in each. Compared with this day last year, the faculty you see before you has grown by fully ten percent. Among the newcomers this year are a young composer whose work has been performed by major symphony orchestras, a former Motorola software engineer specializing in information systems, an expert in Japanese politics and Asian studies, and an education professor whose research has included the development of personalized grading plans for middle school students with disabilities. I could describe many more, but you get the idea. These are people, carefully selected from among hundreds of candidates, who have been preparing most of their lives to teach you in your classes.

The faculty will continue to expand while you are here. Budget projections include the addition of approximately twenty more professors during your years on campus. You and your fellow students will be asked to participate in the selection decisions. Every faculty candidate teaches a class during his/her interview process, and the College pays close attention to student evaluations of their performance. Carthage will maintain its average class size of just nineteen students. That is a principal reason you choose a place like this.

Here on campus, the Hedberg Library, the N. E. Tarble Athletic and Recreation Center, and the A. W. Clausen Center for World Business have opened in the past five years. The first villa of six in a new student residential village is under construction and will go into service next summer. The others will follow across the next several years. Complete renovations are in store for the new W. A. Seidemann Student Center, the Physical Education Center, and the Carthage theatre. You will witness much of this activity, and the rest should be completed in the early years after you graduate.

It is fair to say that Carthage is making no little plans.

But what about you? The new banners along the streets display images of current or recent Carthage students. The message is clear: you should make no little plans.

What's big? What's little?

The book inspiring my comments about Chicago's Columbian Exposition is a best-seller by Erik Larson entitled The Devil in the White City. Students in one of Professor Thomas Noer's history courses read it, and it is Mr. Noer who deserves credit for this year's theme to make no little plans.

My closing comments take their direction from a chance meeting on campus with Psychology Professor Ingrid Tiegel and Classics Professor Chris Renaud. I commented to them that I was wrestling with how to end this speech to you, and their ensuing conversation gave me the ideas I needed. I say this to illustrate the kind of life you can live here on campus. This is a college community where ideas abound. Your daily interactions with faculty and staff members, and with fellow students, can keep you on your toes and give you great pleasure.

Throughout his book, Mr. Larson interweaves the grisly crimes of a serial murderer with the epic of the world fair. It was all taking place at the same time. It was all part of life in Chicago. Even in our grandest moments, the dark side is with us.

Most of us share an awareness of Anakin Skywalker. With the appearance this spring of the third episode of Star Wars, the cycle is complete. We now know the full story of Anakin's life. Let me ask you: Did he make big plans, or little plans? Why did he become Darth Vader? What would you have done? How do you know?

Why did he ultimately prove to be the "chosen one" who would destroy the Sith and balance out the Force? What would you have done? How do you know? It is important that questions such as these occupy much of your time at Carthage. In answering such questions, you determine who you are.

The young Anakin was a bundle of contradictions. Did he opt for the big or the little?

Let's say that he went for the big. There was no doubt about his talent; he knew the Force was with him. There was no doubt about his courage; he threw himself into danger again and again. There was no doubt about his ambition; he thirsted for recognition as a Jedi master. There was no doubt about his passion or his capacity for love. For his mother, to whom he gave what was, for her, the grandest of gifts, the opportunity to die in his arms. For the girl who became his wife. He would do anything to protect her from his vision of her death. Anakin coveted the power to make the world the way he wanted it.

Or was it all so little? What of his frustration? What of his anger? His blind rage in massacring the women and children of the sand people. His torment when the Jedi thought he was not yet ready to take his place as a master. His murder of the Jedi children once he had given himself over to the emperor. His attack on his wife whom he loved more than anyone else. What frustration, what anger when, as Darth Vader, he could not prevent a ragtag bunch of rebels led by a young boy from blowing up the Empire's mighty Death Star! How little could he get as he hurtled through the debris, alone through space?

Anakin Skywalker was a young man with tremendous potential. Was Darth Vader a man or a robot? What was left of his body? After Anakin's fight with Obi-Wan Kenobi, the emperor essentially gathered up the remains and created a bionic man. When that mask came down over Anakin's face, what was left of his soul?

It seemed Darth Vader was doing big things. For many years, he wielded supreme power in the service of the emperor. The whole universe feared him. But how did the emperor reward his loyalty? How galling, how humiliating it must have been to hear the emperor tell Luke to kill him and to assume his place as the second Sith lord. Then, when that final duel turned and he stared down at his defenseless son, why did Darth turn on the emperor, the source of his power, instead? And, finally, why did Darth insist on having that helmet removed, knowing that he surely would die?

The young Anakin could not have foreseen his life as it turned out. No one really can. We should plan, even though there are surprising twists and turns along the paths of our lives. But throughout that journey, what we believe about the big and the little will define us.

What's big? What's little? You have to discover that for yourself.

Welcome to Carthage.