Worth it?

These days we are very careful to count. Especially with regard to our money, which we are anxious to see well spent. We want our movies to be worth our ten dollars. And, on this great day of Commencement, we want to know that our $140,000 was worth it.

I think that such a cold calculation is a bit unwise. It might be healthier to think, not in terms of dollars and cents, but in months and years. We should measure the quality of our experience by the time invested - it is our lifetime, after all. We only get so much.

Has Tufts been worth the last four years of my life? That should be the question on one's mind. How does one answer it? Not by looking at a GPA. While the GPA may be a good measure for merit and hard work, it is a terrible barometer for value. It is not certain that a 3.6 student has gotten more out of Tufts than a 3.4.

Better to ask, what do I know from being at Tufts? What knowledge have I gained from my four years here? I do not mean simply knowing how to "do things." Though that's important, even robots know how to "do things." People must know why we do these things and how we figured out how to do them. The future will only bring new things to be done and our minds need to be free and powerful enough to discover how to do them. That is the purpose and the meaning of a "liberal" (free) education. It is to change and cultivate the mind.

Students, administrators, even teachers have been heard to solemnly declare, "The greatest education occurs outside the classroom." This sentiment seems to echo with great profundity - until someone asks the logical question, "then why go to school?" Shouldn't one maximize his education by cutting class? Perhaps we could cut that old "tuition" figure from our bursar's bill. If the sentiment is true, our post-grads should be sent to Club Med, not med school.

This is not what they mean, of course. They mean that those things about which we care most deeply occur outside the classroom: Finding friends and keeping them while sailing through betrayals and jealousies. Looking for love and intimacy, finding it, and then nursing the pains from ripping it apart. Fighting for fairness in the face of bigotry and favoritism. Talking until 2 a.m. about the meaning of life and forgiveness with your weirdly religious friend. Mourning the tragic losses of friends and family.

These are the ideas, questions, and problems that make us human: Love. Friendship. Justice. God. Death. And they are precisely the issues that should be central to our classrooms. Our education, guided by our professors, should not only confront us with these issues but also expose us to the smartest thinking about them in our human history - whether our concentration is as engineers or philosophers.

After four years of your life at Tufts, are you a different person than when you arrived? If you've learned anything about those major issues, then you probably are. The knowledge gained by a liberal education ought not be merely passive, nor merely technical. Coming to wrestle with the truth of things ought to change someone, hopefully for the better. Education should affect all areas of one's life, one's outlook on the world around one, and one's relationship to it. Questions to ask at the end of that education include, how should I decide between what is right and wrong? How do I treat my neighbors, particularly the ones I don't like? How do I relate to my parents? In short, has Tufts helped make me a better person? Am I wiser?

If in retrospect your time at Tufts has not been as fruitful as you hoped, there is no reason to despair. You do still have the rest of your life ahead, after all. It is not all downhill from here. For, while much of your time will be spent working to provide for life, life also will provide time for leisure. In that leisure you are free, free to choose with what your mind will be occupied and what you will feed to your inner self. Simply make the next four years, and the next forty, very worthwhile.