Colorado College: A Beginning, a Means, or an End?
Remarks by Margaret Liu ’77, consultant in vaccinology at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The academic year at Colorado College officially began on Monday, September 2, with the opening convocation held in Shove Chapel. Read a news release.President Celeste, Dean Storey, Professor Davis, Professor Lindeman, Alumni Association President Friedman, CCCA Co-Presidents Shea and Kisabeth, Members of the Faculty, Students, and Friends, thank you very much for the great honor of speaking. I owe much to Colorado College, the faculty, staff and students, and to those visionaries and donors throughout the years who have made this such a tremendous and unique institution.
In her invitation letter, President Mohrman, suggested that I speak on the topic of the value of a liberal arts education, with the theme of, "It all started here." So of course I thought of things like the superb education I had received. My husband, Robert, had a different idea. He's an East Coast Ivy League type, who has earned so many degrees that he has more initials after his name than there are letters in his first name. He thought that the high quality of a CC education was obvious, and therefore, was more intrigued by the effect of the block plan. He teases me often about my "just in time delivery" in accomplishing projects, such as putting together a lecture during the plane ride to a meeting, something I didn't do for this talk! My children utilize a more direct word calling it procrastination, and they worry aloud that they have inherited a double dose of the gene for procrastination by getting one from each parent. I had always thought that I was just "multi-tasking." My husband had been amazed, just as some of you incoming freshman may be, to learn that Colorado College expects its students learn an entire semester of organic chemistry or "Great novels of the 19th century" or any other course in 17 1/2 class days. Yet it was obvious to him just how successful CC professors and students are in conveying and mastering such huge quantities of information in such compressed amounts of time. He therefore thinks that the CC block plan taught me to accomplish projects in less time than most people require, and that all CC alumni must all be tremendous at time management. That is certainly one additional benefit of the CC experience.
In this talk however, I want to reflect upon what a Colorado College education is, and what role it should play in a person's life. I've entitled my talk, "Colorado College: A Beginning, a Means, or an End?" in order to make several points about the value and impact of your time here. Firstly, this is the beginning of a great opportunity. Likewise, obtaining your degree is a wonderful end, or goal. But most importantly, your Colorado College experience is an invaluable means, a means to prepare yourself for life, not just a job. CC will prepare you to do well in your career; it will prepare you for challenging and difficult times. It will prepare you to live, not just for yourself, but to be a force for good, to better the world around you.
Each life, though, is personal. So I hope you don't mind if I explain what I mean by first sharing with you parts of my life story that are integral to the wonderful honor that the college has bestowed on me today. I'd like to tell you about several pivotal Septembers that serve as sort of bookends for my life.
Twenty-nine years ago, I attended my first Convocation at Colorado College. I don't remember it, just as years from now you probably won't remember my talk, except possibly for how long it goes on. Don't worry, I'm just kidding. But I do remember being here in Shove for a more private convocation, when my mother brought me here and prayed with me, committing me and the years ahead to God's mercy and direction. Flash forward to this year, when our family is on the eve of celebrating my mother's 83rd birthday tomorrow. This September's joy is tangible and not at all taken for granted, because of last September.
Last year, on September 10, I made my daily phone call to my mother, a woman of incredible strength, determination, and vision. After my father's death when I was 4, she had been both mother and father to my then 6 year-old sister, my 7-week-old brother, and me. Mom managed to enable all three of us become physicians, and to have all 3 get degrees from Harvard; the only blemish on her record is that only 2 out of 3 of us have degrees from Colorado College. We also were inspired by seeing Mom achieve herself, earning her doctorate in English literature after our father's death, with English being her second language, on top of the 2 masters degrees she already had. At age 82, she had twice conquered cancer and was living alone in an active retirement community.
But that night, she never answered my multiple phone calls. We called security guards who found her nearly comatose on the floor and rushed her to the hospital. A few hours later, in the early morning of September 11, I took the earliest flight to Orange Country airport in southern California. I never made it, because partway there, the pilot announced that a national emergency had been declared and that all planes in the entire nation were being forced to land at the nearest airport. No one, not even the pilots, knew what was happening. After we finally landed, I managed to rent a car to drive the rest of the way. It was an unusually gray gloomy day in Los Angeles. The usually frenetic pace of LA traffic seemed slower, with everyone listening to their radios, sharing the sense of horror and helplessness. My sense of helplessness and sorrow increased when I arrived at the hospital to find my mother now comatose with blood pressure falling. Then my sister and I, both physicians, were kicked out of Mom's intensive care unit room, because she needed to be resuscitated. It was surreal to be sitting in the little waiting room with images of the World Trade Center attack on the TV while overhead I heard again and again, the announcement "Code Blue, Room 243, Code Blue, Room 243," my mother's room. All of this was made harder, not easier, because of having personally resuscitated many people. This was my mother.
So last September, with this strong loving mother now being resuscitated and hooked up to machines, and with our nation and families all over suffering devastating losses, the world seemed all upside down. I'm sure you all shared this feeling, and some of you may have had great personal tragedies. When Mom was being taken to the hospital, my sister and I had decided to not awaken our brother since it was 2 a.m. in Boston. We thought it best to see how mom was after her initial evaluation and treatment at the hospital before having him start to worry. Only later did we realize that had we awakened him, he would have been on one of the 2 planes out of Boston bound for LA on Sept. 11 that were hijacked by the terrorists. We were awed at God's hand in our decision.
I had long been scheduled to give a lecture about my research on vaccines towards the end of September, in Stockholm at the invitation of the Nobel committee. I figured this was probably the most important lecture I would ever be asked to give. Suddenly my world was topsy-turvy: in between working with the graphic artists making slides and rehearsing my talk in front of colleagues, I was driving 800 miles roundtrip between LA and San Francisco to be with Mom since planes either weren't feasible or practical. And of course there were still other work and family life. I went to Stockholm not sure if Mom would still be alive when I returned, but knowing that she would want me to go. It was a physically and emotionally exhausting time. So seeing my mother here today, weakened but able to travel, is cause for joy and gratitude for God's mercy to our family. It is nothing short of miraculous.
I am telling you all this in a talk about Colorado College to illustrate the importance of everything you learn and experience here, not just the academic knowledge or degree. My college education and experience needed to prepare me not just for my work, or for speaking at the Nobel Forum in Stockholm, but for life in all its complexities, with all its joys and sorrows. The various filaments of work, family, friends, avocations, and religion that make up life, don't happen discretely, but are all intertwined. And we participate and respond as integrated humans, as the composite of our intellects, emotions, wills, and spirit.
Yes, CC is a great place to learn, to gain the credentials for further education or jobs. After graduation from CC, when I entered Harvard Medical School, I was intimidated, having been informed that I was the first person in 25 years to be accepted from CC. Some of my Harvard classmates thought of CC as a hockey or party school. One of the first people I met was Howard H. Hermann, who informed me that his initials, "HHH" stood for "Harvard cubed," that is, Harvard College for undergraduate studies, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard hospitals, as he intended to finish his medical training at Massachusetts General Hospital, or MGH, otherwise known as Man's Greatest Hospital, a premier Harvard hospital. I bravely enrolled in advanced biochemistry, armed with both the knowledge and the love of chemistry imparted to me by Professors Taber, Champion, Hitchcock, Michaels, Jones, and Kester. I found that their superb teaching helped me be at the top of a class filled with graduates of Harvard, MIT, Princeton and the likes. I won a spot at Mass. General Hospital for my post-graduate training, along with "H-cubed," and more importantly with my future husband, Robert. Most importantly, in the years following my matriculation, Harvard Medical School accepted a number of CC grads including my brother, Paul, so at least I knew I hadn't ruined the opportunity for others.
But of course book learning is only one part of a good education. We need to be taught how to reason and to continue to educate ourselves after our formal schooling has ended. In his book, "Surprised by Joy," C.S. Lewis, in speaking about reading newspapers said, "Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is 20 to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn." While factual knowledge gained at CC will be more permanent than the information C.S. Lewis was referring to, it certainly is true that as discoveries are made, we not only have to expand our knowledge base, but we often need to edit it. This has been very true for me in medicine and research where whole fields of knowledge developed after I graduated. But it is also true even for daily living, particularly in a technological society. At Colorado College, I had been blessed to be taught by professors directly, not by graduate student teaching assistants, and in small classes, not huge auditoriums full of hundreds of students. CC professors made, and continue to make, teaching a priority, and hence they not only imparted information, but also nurtured my interests and love of learning. So for all these reasons, CC trained me well to continue to learn.
A CC education is a liberal arts education. Rachel Carson, in her book, "The Sense of Wonder," says that facts, which she calls, "the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom," are insufficient unto themselves. I'd always thought that the value of a liberal arts education was to provide a broader, historical, humanistic view of life, to make one a "Renaissance Man" insofar as that was possible having 2 X chromosomes. But in the 21st century, we actually need to be more than Renaissance men or women. I've come to appreciate that Colorado College also provided a community, a means and place to develop all aspects of being human: intellectual, spiritual, physical, and social. In other words, a CC education is not simply a ticket for a successful career, but the Colorado College community and experience are a wonderful preparation for life.
For example, the vision of the faculty to invent and optimally teach in the block plan taught me much about creativity, and about doing things in new and different ways. My career of leaving a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School to go into research in industry at a time when that was not mainstream, then into biotechnology, and now to split my time between a company in France, a philanthropic foundation in Seattle, and soon also a university in Sweden, while living in California has struck many colleagues as being very nontraditional yet a path that they envy. They have told me they wished they had been brave enough to do something so different and fulfilling, something that brings a unique combination of skills and experience to address critical medical and social needs. Spending my formative college years in a place where the faculty had a vision and were creative and brave enough to defy the traditions of higher education contributed to this. CC is unique place for enabling its students to learn to literally take Robert Frost's "road less-traveled."
CC professors supported a deeply-rooted sense of aiming for whatever was a worthy target without worrying about barriers or ceilings. In addition to the chemistry department faculty and fellow students, others who helped develop this expectation of achievement included Professors Bradley and Hilt in the physics department, and Professor Max Lanner, who never let the fact that I wasn't a music major limit what he expected from me as a pianist. Being a woman in a chemistry department a quarter century ago, or at a medical school that had a very short history of admitting women, or being a daughter of well-educated but relatively poor minority immigrants, never were things I thought about as limitations. Only later, when doing a surgery rotation as a medical student was I told by a male surgeon that it was too bad that I was a woman because I could have made a great surgeon. Later, as one of only a handful of women out of over 100 of the top scientific managers of a company, I was told by the president of the labs that I was one of the smartest women he knew, implying that I was one of the best of a lower species. The Vice-President more blatantly talked about women's smaller brains. In all my time at Colorado College, I had never felt that any one in the CC community held any lowered expectations or tried to block my path due to my gender or ethnic background or beliefs. After being in this world where I was free to become whatever I dreamed of becoming, and where I was fully encouraged and assisted to achieve, it stunned me to encounter glass ceilings and people who tried to close doors in front of me just because of their biases. Fortunately, by the time I encountered these people, the self-knowledge nurtured by my family and by CC had freed me from other peoples' lowered expectations. Indeed, even the title of the CC incoming Freshman yearbook, "More To Come" put us on notice from the first day of college that CC expects its students to contribute and achieve more in the years ahead.
It is not just the professors who teach at CC. Then-Dean of Students Libby Sutherland taught me that busyness was no excuse for not doing more. Her words were, "If you need to have something done, ask the busiest person, because that person is the one who knows how to get things accomplished." Then she exhorted us to be the ones who would get involved where needed.
And my classmates taught me life lessons as well. One classmate and friend, Forrest Cranmer, who, because of an incurable brain tumor, never knew ahead of time that he would fall from a chair lift onto the ski slope below or crash while bicycling on busy Uintah Street because of the onset of grand mal seizures, and who retaught himself to ski with special equipment when he became paralyzed on of one side of his body, taught me about courage.
Another classmate reinforced my mother's lessons about stewardship when in response to someone complimenting me about how much I had achieved, interjected that, "No, Margaret is just doing what she should, given all the opportunities and talents she was given."
The different communities that made up my life at CC included the Ke(y)tones, a woodwind quintet composed entirely of chemistry majors; the Phi Delts who taught me to jitterbug, fellow French house residents whose telephone greetings of, "Allô, oui?" evoked queries of, "Halloween?," and an impromptu marching band garbed in moldy uniforms executing precision marching formations on the football field at half time. Of course since there were only 10 of us, the only pattern we could make was of Tuberculosis bacilli growing and dividing, in commemoration of the role of tuberculosis in settling the Pikes Peak region. All these communities helped me grow in important ways needed for life.
But all of these wonderful ways to develop as a person do not exist to simply better prepare you for your own life. The education and lessons for life that Colorado College provide are not merely to prepare you for a life lived for yourself. The true value of the time here is not its ability to help you achieve the wealth or fame that the world calls success. Ralph Waldo Emerson defined a better kind of success. He said, "To laugh often and much; … to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." Your education at CC should teach you that worldly success is not the ultimate goal, but that rather you should strive to improve the lives of those around you. Your time spent in the various communities that make up Colorado College should both teach you of the needs in our world and motivate and equip you to make a difference. You need spiritual as well as intellectual growth.
My personal beliefs as a Christian are that Jesus came to transform us and that we in turn should help bring more good into the world. It isn't necessary to make an earth-shattering global contribution; what is important is that each of us should work to increase what is good in the lives of those around us and in our world, whether that be by seeking to discover truth and knowledge as a scientist, righting a social injustice as an activist or lawyer, improving others' health and well-being, creating beauty as an artist, writer, or musician, or simply increasing joy.
We should "invest in people" rather than in material goals. The Bible refers to this as love. I Corinthians chapter 13 says, "If I have the gift of understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything...but [am] without love, then I am nothing at all...The time will come when knowledge will fail for our knowledge is imperfect."
In summarizing, let me refer back to the title of my talk, by saying that Colorado College is a wonderful beginning, educationally and personally. The degree you will earn, and the knowledge that it represents are a worthwhile end and achievement. But most of all, Colorado College is a priceless means; a means to develop you into the kind of person with the capabilities and the vision to be someone who professionally and personally will contribute to bringing light and good into our world. You will be well-schooled in thinking "outside the box," free to venture forth into new activities and spheres, dreaming of what can be done rather than worrying about what can't be done. You should be a person who values all that others have done to pave the way for you. You will understand the meaning of stewardship of your talents and opportunities. And you will know that the purpose of all of your composite skills, beliefs, interests, and loves is to make the world more full of joy and goodness, less overwhelmed by suffering and selfishness. As you plunge into the opportunities, decisions, and challenges that lie ahead, there will be times of indecision, doubt, and anxiety. I leave you with the words of Gandalf the good wizard from J.R.R. Tolkien's book, "The Lord of the Rings." In speaking to Frodo, a previously very ordinary individual, who was afraid and uncertain about the overwhelming challenges that lay before him, Gandalf told him that it was not up to him or anyone to decide what lay ahead, but rather, "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."
Enjoy, delight in, and use wisely your time in this amazing community called Colorado College.