mastership

Uncle Lloyd passed this on to me and I pass it on to you with a smile. How well put. From complexity to simplicity, is this the nature of evolution underneath it all? Keep it simple, sift it down…


Matriculation – 2006 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Simple Gifts
Dean Jon Butler
August 31, 2006

Welcome to New Haven, welcome to Yale, and welcome to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

What a wonderful day for all of us here together in this beautiful, stunning hall, courtesy of the generosity of Yale's fabulous School of Music.

How should we think of the ways you, and we, came to be here and of what Master's and Doctoral students will experience in the next two to six years?

We can learn much, I think, from a peculiar, even quirky source: a song or "dancing tune" of the 1840s entitled "Simple Gifts" that derived from Shakers, heirs of the British celibate religious movement whose founder, Ann Lee, arrived in America on the eve of the Revolution and whose successors are best known in secular culture for their beautiful and spare furniture.

The words of "Simple Gifts" are indeed simple enough—so American and yet universal, but, dare we say it, perhaps also unexpectedly revealing about graduate study, however odd that may seem.

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free;
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Of course, the tune to which the Shaker visionary set these words is equally famous, not only as a song and a hymn in some religious groups, but as the center theme of Aaron Copland's ballet, Appalachian Spring, which has come to be emblematic of America itself.

But what could a Shaker tune, composed so long ago and so far from a university, tell us about graduate study? Our surest guide to the history of the words and tune once was you. He is the historian Stephen Stein, a 1970 Yale Ph.D. and now Chancellor's Professor, Emeritus, at Indiana University, Bloomington. Stein began graduate study at Yale with the same mystery and anticipation as you likely experience today and then became one of the nation's foremost scholars, studying the great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards as well as the fascinating unfolding of religious dissent in America.

Stein's superb standard history, The Shaker Experience in America, published by Yale University Press in 1992, tells us how "Simple Gifts" and many other Shaker "dancing tunes" emerged in a period of revival in the 1840s. Visionaries believed they received the songs through inspiration. They drew words and music from secular culture, then reshaped them in a vortex of religious enthusiasm. Out of complex materials came simple and elegant statements of belief and commitment.

Complexity to simplicity. This is the hallmark of scholarly research and achievement. The unexpectedly subtle text of the Shaker song, "Simple Gifts," offers us interesting metaphors to help understand the graduate study on which you are embarked in both Masters and Doctoral programs alike.

We would not be so presumptuous, of course, to say that we have created here "the valley of love and delight." You will, I hope, discover the joys of New Haven as well as of Connecticut, and we especially hope our international students discover the joys of America. And indeed, no graduate dean, much less this one, could refrain from noticing that more than a few students have found partners and spouses within the temporal or spatial parameters of graduate school.

But here I think of two other wonderfully evocative allusions in this surprisingly rich Shaker dancing song. One is found in the chorus of "Simple Gifts":

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd
To turn, turn will be out delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.

Unlike the broad undergraduate programs from which you come, your graduate programs will be intense and focused. You will take subjects and turn them inside out and outside in. You will shift them and move them and turn them upside down. You will see them for what they are and measure them by their absences as much as in their full, ungainly and even ugly and raw specificity. You will be buried in your research, and yes, on occasion you may feel that your research has buried you.

But in this turning, turning, you will see patterns—in mathematics, in chemistry, economics, in literature—patterns that will tell you that something is wrong with what we were assured was true, and that old orthodoxies have smothered. And within these patterned anomalies, you will both locate critical lacunae and create new and energizing intellectual problems.

Ultimately, creating intellectual problems is what we really do in the serious intellectual work that characterizes graduate education. We find difficulties only dimly perceived and perhaps not even recognized, yet that limit our understanding of our physical and human and conceptual worlds, and then we create informed questions whose solutions open up new problems and, in turn, new solutions and new gains.

In the solutions, we dissolve specificity into elegant theories and new generalizations, and the power of these new creations derives, literally, from their origin in the turmoil of complex observation, as well as from the elegance of new, clarifying insight. The Shaker visionary understood this well, as soon will you. It is only in the turning, turning that we have indeed come round right.

A second verse tells us something about the respect and the obeisance that we rightly and critically pay to the integrity of our means and methods in serious intellectual work and in graduate education. This is a modern meaning we can draw out of the third line in the opening stanza of "Simple Gifts":

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'tis the gift to be free;
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.

Notice here the crucial importance of merely one word among twenty-three, the tiny word "ought."

If the third line in "Simple Gifts" had been written in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, I suspect it might have read slightly differently: "'Tis the gift to come down where we WANT to be."

How intriguing that the Shaker visionary who "received" this text emphasized the idea, the imperative, of "ought." By design and by obligation, the research and scholarship you soon will launch respect method, as much as, and more than they respect results. Our findings in seminars, in research labs, in the solitude of literary or historical research, are not matters of will, of assertion, of pre-existing ideological or theological or emotional claims or of personal idiosyncrasies or whim. Rather, our findings are legitimated by the scrupulousness of our methods, whose care and honesty alone open up the world as it is and human beings as they are.

As scholars and researchers, we—like the Shaker visionary—want and indeed demand that we come down not merely where we want to be, but where we "ought to be." That is because our commitment is to truth. We do not serve ourselves. We do not serve ideologies. We do not serve parties. We do not serve politics. We serve our subjects and the intellectual processes that reveal our subjects. We are rightly humbled by our subjects, and we are rightly awed by the intellectual processes that reveal them. The reasons are simple: in the end, they are all we have.

This is why, in scholarly and research communities, "the gift to be simple"—the opportunity to draw generalization and insight from masses of information in subjects ranging from Shakespeare and economics to physics and microbiology—and "the gift to be free"—the ability to pursue topics as far as our research and inquisitiveness take us, irrespective of the orthodoxies we challenge—can never be anything less than "the gift to come down where we ought to be."

Lux et Veritas. Light and Truth. The Yale motto, like the verse of the Shaker dancing song, is not merely a slogan. For the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as a principal symbol of Yale's overriding commitment to research and scholarship, it expresses the object of our existence. And for Yale as a university, Lux et Veritas expresses the simple gift whose enlargement and protection is our highest passion, our only calling.

For several years now, the Graduate School Matriculation ceremony has closed with fabulous musical performances. Doing so demonstrates Yale's extraordinary breadth of activities and resources, physical and especially human. In the past two years, our musicians have been the superbly talented students of our School of Music. This morning our musicians—like Stephen Stein, our historian of the Shakers, again are you—in this case, graduate students who are studying here today in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology; Computer Science; Theology; Psychology; English; Geology and Geophysics; and French. In a university famous for undergraduate singing groups, they are the Graduate School's distinctive a capella singing group, The Citations. Listen to them. Imagine their journey in music from complexity to simplicity. Think on the transfer from linguistic analysis to musical expression. Contemplate the discipline of individual voices into a harmonic whole. Ask about the usefulness of a sense of humor, to say nothing of its pure pleasure, amidst the vagaries and, indeed, frustrations of scholarly research. Hear in them graduate community, the community we invite you to join, the community we invite you to make, the community to which we welcome you this morning. And, indeed, celebrate them and the gifts they bear, the gifts they have so joyously created.

We congratulate you.
We welcome you as scholars.
We are delighted you are here.

We hope this is the place where each of you will find your own simple gifts, the place that is just right.