Right Brain, Right Time, Right Place
Maurine Slaughter
September 3, 2011
Good evening and welcome, students, parents, faculty and staff, administration
and trustees. Vice President for Education Programs Edward C. “Ted” Farraday conducted an exhaustive search for a faculty convocation speaker for the 50th anniversary year. Clearly the faculty member would need to be just the right person: someone of a certain credible antiquity. A student of all things Interlochen, Mr. Farraday did some research and devised a brief quiz in order to decide among a number of qualified applicants. Here are a few sample questions: What was Ann Hanson’s last name when she lived in the residence hall and she and Byron were dating? Decades ago, what was the first thing students did when they received purple and white handouts that had been run off on a mimeograph machine only moments earlier? Who said, “I feel healthy. I feel happy. I feel terrific!”? After the IBM System 36, what was a VT 420? How many Liberal Arts instructors shared one telephone in 1990? Which former Interlochen president and which former Admissions director appeared at Street Beat in drag on a motorcycle? How much fun was it for faculty and students to share Thanksgiving turkey as a sponsor group when we had a one-day Thanksgiving break? You get the idea. Actually there were a few perfect scores on the quiz, but I was the only person who recorded my name, and so here I am.
Tonight’s program is actually nicely balanced, though, with performances by young mostly faculty musicians and the student dancers, greetings from student government leader Sarah Deaver, other introductions, welcomes, remarks, comments from our president about Interlochen past and present, and a speech by a, well, veteran academic instructor. You might not be able to tell how much we all have in common, but I would suggest that the strength of Interlochen has much to do with a unity that transcends our apparent differences.
Our statement of philosophy might cause you to wonder about our unity, since it mentions that the Academy “manifests uncompromising expectations.” Think about a whole campus full of people with uncompromising expectations. You can imagine the potential for conflict and perhaps discomfort for students when both arts and academic teachers manifest uncompromising expectations. We have sometimes referred to this manifesting process as the “healthy tension” between arts and academics. Our negotiations can be spirited as we discuss the allocation of time, but from its inception, Interlochen Arts Academy has combined a superior academic program with the excellent pre-professional fine arts curricula. This is Interlochen’s uniqueness, and despite the seeming polarities, we are all on the same team. and we share in our mission, as stated, to provide students “pre-professional arts instruction, college preparatory education, and life skills development.”
Just in case I seem to be speaking only of arts and academic instructors, let me clarify now that I am also cognizant of the tremendous contributions of all of the staff, and especially the highly competent and caring residence hall counselors, who, in addition to their devotion to our students, also make it possible for some faculty members (like me) to stay here for 35 or 40 years. Many of us would not have been able to do that if we had lived in the residence halls for all of that time.
The division that I represent is Liberal Arts, and the term "liberal arts" suggests our unity with the other academic division and with the arts at Interlochen. In medieval times, the liberal arts encompassed the seven subjects of the trivium and quadrivium, and thus included subjects such as geometry, astronomy, and music, in addition to logic, grammar and rhetoric. The liberal arts were originally, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, the arts and sciences that were appropriate for study by free men; they are still subjects of intellectual breadth and depth and are not limited to narrow technical training. Most serious artists find that the development of intellectual depth and academic interests enriches their art, and we academic teachers are exactly where we want to be. We love working with young artists, just as our esteemed arts colleagues do, we love making connections between our disciplines and the students’ arts interests, and we love the artistic sensibility that our students bring into the classroom. We welcome opportunities to collaborate formally and informally with our colleagues in other portions of the school.
The theme of solidarity between Interlochen arts and academics was impressed upon me again just this past summer, when, at the suggestion of my new colleague Mary Ellen Newport, I read Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary.” The title is a Nietzschean allusion, and Dr. McGilchrist is a physician, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist with a liberal arts background; he first studied theology and philosophy, and his earlier career was as a literary scholar. In “The Master and His Emissary,” McGilchrist relates the right and left hemispheres of the brain to nothing less than all of Western history and philosophy. His thesis, expressed emphatically and with staggering imagination and detail, is that the master is the right hemisphere, while the left hemisphere is merely the emissary who thinks it is infallible; the direction of modern and contemporary Western culture has been away from a valuing of the right hemisphere and toward a usurping by the left hemisphere, he says—all to our detriment. I have expressed the idea simply and naively, but let me assure you that McGilchrist’s concept goes way beyond the pop psychology understanding of right brain and left brain, and it certainly doesn’t suggest that we are one or the other. Forget it if you’re thinking "you’re an artist and therefore a right-brain person, or you’re good with math and language and organization and therefore you’re a left-brain person." We now understand that both hemispheres of the brain are involved in just about everything we do; it’s simplistic to suppose that the left hemisphere is the language hemisphere, for example. The right side of the brain is actually more critically involved not only in creating poetry, but in understanding connotative language, meaning as a whole, metaphor, and humor. Any great human endeavor, whether that of a mathematician, a poet, a musician, a historian, or a dancer—requires tremendous sophistication of and communication between both sides of the brain; but McGilchrist argues that the master, the right hemisphere, is more associated with context, the big picture, living things, theory of mind and therefore empathy, uniqueness, responsibility, emotions other than anger, sense of self and other, the Romantic movement, and the most profound insights and highest abilities, whether in the arts, language, or mathematics.
If McGilchrist is correct and we are dangerously de-emphasizing the right hemisphere in contemporary Western culture, then Interlochen is the right place to address that concern, and both the academics and the arts here are on the same side and ready to work toward restoring the proper balance. It would be a mistake to suppose that Interlochen academics advance left hemisphere abilities while the arts encourage right brain expression. What we care about, as English and history and science teachers, as visual arts, motion picture arts, creative writing and theatre instructors, is combining head and heart, technology or technique or factual detail, with passion and depth of understanding of the human condition.
Not only are arts and academics at Interlochen in much greater agreement than you would suppose, but Interlochen past is one with Interlochen present. People ask me whether Interlochen has changed, whether Interlochen students have changed. Well, sure. The individuals matter, and anyone who has been here a long time feels more than nostalgia, a sense of loss for the individual students and faculty members who have meant so much. We’re proud of the stunning new buildings, and technology is changing more quickly now, as it must. For students, there are new distractions, and it can’t be getting easier to be sixteen. Human nature hasn’t changed, though, and if we teachers liked working with young artists last year or decades ago, then I assure you we still do. We still aim for the best pre-professional arts programs you’ll find anywhere, and despite our understanding and embracing of Interlochen’s arts emphasis, we academic teachers are committed to offering a quality program that prepares students for college, for the responsibilities of citizenship, and for the depth of critical thinking and capacity for communication necessary for accomplishment in almost any field. If some students discover here that the arts will live in them without their becoming professionals artists, then we think that’s an acceptable conclusion to draw from their Interlochen experience, too. It’s often still true that students thrive here after not quite fitting in at their previous schools. Here at Interlochen, they seem to find a community of support that might be represented by but goes far beyond our community meetings.
We look forward to many significant changes during this, our 50th Academy year, and beyond, as the future is built out of our past. Faculty and students will naturally be skeptical about some of the changes, including those that will prove to be positive. We are skeptical, and we prefer to speak our minds. When I was the age of my students, though, I sometimes descended from skepticism to sarcasm. Although in my adult life I have mostly cultivated an image of sweetness and sincerity, when I was an adolescent, I was known, at least in my own family, as “acid tongue.” Sometimes, honestly, my sarcastic self emerges once again, or particular situations or personalities bring out the sarcasm in me. There can be a kind of camaraderie in the sharing of sarcastic remarks, but surely we can strive for a greater unity than that. What I hope for us this year is that we make an effort to transcend the sarcasm that too often employs wit to demean others, or the cynicism that assumes a fundamental selfishness and lack of integrity in other human beings.
This is, after all, a year to celebrate, and we hope you’ll join the celebration. President Kimpton has consistently pointed out that as we celebrate our past and traditions and anticipate future directions, we will not neglect your 2011-2012 experience. Most of us who have been here for a while have had some years that were better than others; that’s to be expected in a long career. You students, however, are here this year, and if we are distracted or dispirited this year, it’s no consolation to you that we were more effective or more dynamic a couple of years ago. The past and the future of Interlochen pivot on the present, so let’s make the most of the present and commit not to cynicism but to engagement.
Let’s celebrate, then. Let’s celebrate this year, not only our anniversary, but our current students, whose talents we are eager to explore and for whom we hope for so much, both artistically and academically. Let’s celebrate these parents, who have sacrificed financially and sacrificed time that they expected to spend with their children before college. Let’s celebrate this fine faculty and staff; I hope you’ll all get to know as many of them as possible.
You’ve shown up here tonight and taken an early step toward the commitment and engagement, the unity and community that we try to achieve at Interlochen. Many years ago, the man who became my husband said that all I had to do was show up. At the time I was moved by the suggestion that I could be precisely myself and that’s all that would be required of me. I should have asked exactly what “showing up” meant, though, because marriage turned out to be rather difficult. I’m not saying that we should be married to Interlochen (and you should not believe my husband if he tells you he wakes up in the morning with ungraded essays plastered to his face), but what I really hope for this year is that we “show up” for each other, in the sense of being fully present in the present in each other’s lives. Let’s talk about what “being fully present” means in terms of our uses of technology, our manners, our body language, our attendance in and preparation for class, our thinking beyond grades to ideas and experience, and our individual contributions to our community. All of that will come soon enough, but meanwhile, best wishes for a very satisfying school year, 2011-2012.