Page 67 - fall2011

FALL 2011 . ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE 65
The Adirondacks draw all sorts
of people to their waters, peaks
and valleys. People with paddles,
skis, fshing waders and hiking boots are
the typical visitors. People traveling with
books and ideas have also taken to these
woods, even Freud and Einstein.
In the 1890s, a small group of phi-
losophers used to gather in the majestic
Keene Valley on the western slope of
Hurricane Mountain at a camp called the
“Glenmore School.” William James, Josiah
Royce, John Dewey and Charles Peirce
all “lectured” around the campfre to test
their ideas against the refner’s fre of other
minds.
Josiah Royce was clearly diferent from
the others, in both his intellectual sources
and his personal roots. He was a Califor-
nian who “pioneered” by coming East. His
Cambridge house was later owned and in-
habited by Paul and Julia Child. He flled
it with Hegel, the Childs with French wine
and nouveau cuisine.
For Royce, the highest human ideal,
one he surely defended in his Adirondack
interlude, was loyalty. He defned loyalty
many times and many ways as “the will of
some fascinating social power.” Its afect is
to invite a perspective outside ourselves to
a “unifed cause” that will also bring inside
ourselves a deeper strength, dignity, value,
opportunity and fulfllment.
From this long-ago mountainside scene
and from books philosophers seldom read
anymore, there is an insight about the
St. Lawrence experience that I am ofen
asked to explain. It is the phenomenon of
the alumnus and the alumna; perhaps it
should be called the Laurentian genome.
It is noticed by others, ofen with their
own tight college afliations, and jealously
described by them as distinguishable, as if
our graduates are joined by the rarest con-
nective tissue, binding each to a place, and
to each other, with something physicists
have not yet discovered.
Why do St. Lawrence graduates, by their
of loyalty is tied also to a sense of debt and
the problem of repaying it. No one, even
the most fnancially self-sufcient student,
ever pays the total cost of a St. Lawrence
education. We didn’t pay for the education
of our teachers; tuition did not build our
classrooms and playing felds. We perhaps
go to college wondering in the exuberant
confdence of youth if it is good enough
for us; we look back on it all and must
wonder if we were good enough for it.
Very few of us, especially if endowed with
a sensitive conscience, can go through the
years afer college without trying to repay
at least some portion of the balance in the
account still marked “outstanding.”
When Owen D. Young, Class of 1894,
was interviewed by the famous muckraker
reporter and biographer Ida Tarbell, he
told her that when he hired people, “One
of the things I like to know about a man
is whether he is loyal to his college, or
whether he forgets.” Laurentians are typi-
cally marked by the virtue of remember-
ing; it is a deep stamp upon them, upon
us, that is more vivid than almost anything
outside the personal traditions of family.
We may have ample pride in our St. Law-
rence acclaim, particularly in the public
achievements of an alumnus or an alumna.
But we all know the St. Lawrence truth
and its fdelity…to be loyal is enough.
—WLF
very nature, contribute so readily to annual
funds, special memorials, campus projects
or scholarship endowments? Why do they
drive hours to reunions, hockey games, or
the weddings of children whose parents
they have not seen in decades? Why do
they put decals on the rear window, build
a wardrobe of “logo gear,” and give up
weekends to reconnect with fraternity
brothers and sorority sisters? Why do so
many secretly dream that a son, daughter
or grandchild might, in their own inde-
pendent exploration, someday become a
St. Lawrence student and walk the familiar
brick paths of the old campus? Royce
still answers for us. Loyalty is the reason;
loyalty is the best human expression of a
willing, practical, trustworthy belonging
to something greater than any single indi-
vidual could ever develop alone.
Many are loyal because their truest self
was frst revealed to them in some large
way by the whole experience at St. Law-
rence in a friend’s admonition, a coach’s
hug, or a professor’s life-changing question
that begins, “Have you ever considered
being... a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, an
entrepreneur?” Staying connected to that
anchor point of life is perhaps tied to
the riddle, “Have I been over the years a
consecutive and consistent self under the
terms of those formative, long-ago yester-
days?” Introspection, so far from giving
us reassurance, usually tends to frighten
us. And yet, you have to take the self that
is you back to some point in time that has
an enduring objectivity, a moment when
you have defned yourself, a place known
well and loved. You have to go back once
in a while to check on this mental second
nature that shaped you as a student, the
way Wordsworth returned to Grasmere in
1799. He was loyal to that place because
when he came away from it he could say,
“So was it when my life began;/So is it
now I am a man;/So be it when I shall
grow old.”
For some Laurentian alumni the feeling
Laurentian Virtue