Focus Newsletter

A Word From the Dean

​Del Doughty, PhD
Dean, College of Liberal Arts

This month’s column is about two random days in March that caught me by surprise and led to some reflection on my personal and professional lives. 

One Wednesday evening, near the end of the month, I had the privilege of leading the conversation at a dinner party hosted by Indiana Humanities. It was a gathering of about eight or nine people, varying in background by age, ethnicity, occupation and geographic origin. We gathered to discuss the question, “Are we being good ancestors?” It was part of a program run by Indiana Humanities to spark a conversation on what some might call “effective altruism.” While we were meeting here in Evansville, seven other dinner table conversations were happening at venues across the state. It was great fun. First, I love the format. Most of the time when we academic types try to organize a conversation, we think of doing so in terms of conferences, seminars, lectures or panels, and we tend to measure our success by the number of people who attend. This was not that. This was people sitting down to a meal together to explore a big philosophical question. Anthony Bourdain would have loved it.  

Among my takeaways from the evening:   

When it comes to ancestors, we first think of genetics; that is, we tend to think of ancestors as those who pass on DNA to us—great-grandparents, for instance, and great-great grandparents and beyond. But for many of us, ancestry is tied to place as well—the place where your family or “your people” come from. When someone says, for example, “We’re Midwesterners” or “My family comes from the Mississippi delta,” they are signaling that wherever they are now, they bear a legacy of those places as part of their identity.  

Our favorite ways to connect with our ancestors is through food, music and rituals, most of the latter around holidays. Food is an obvious one, perhaps, but very powerful. Those family recipes that are handwritten on faded, softening index cards? You are going to want to be careful with those if you want to be a good ancestor. Generations to come will cherish them. 

And, as for our own goodness as ancestors, we agreed that it is mostly about preservation. If we want future generations to remember us well, we need to preserve the environment so that they have access to clean water, healthy soil and fresh air, but we also need to be vigilant about keeping and passing on memories.  

The next day, a Thursday, marked Opening Day for Major League Baseball. I have been a baseball fan, off-and-on, my whole life, but mostly “off” lately. Baseball has gotten too boring and slow. I just have not had the patience to sit down and watch a game in years. But this year, something was different, and it made me curious enough to clear a little time after dinner to watch the last few innings of a game between Houston and Chicago. Recognizing that the game had stagnated, and that it was losing fans, leaders in MLB have made some innovations to the game:  There is a pitch clock now to keep things moving, and pitchers can only throw to first base twice to keep runners from stealing without a penalty. It is hard to tell after watching a game or two if these and other changes will attract more fans, but the pace feels crisper. More to the point, good for baseball for making some changes that will adapt the game to contemporary culture. Baseball has long had an obsession with policing what it thinks of as the integrity of its game. Change comes slowly and begrudgingly. Lower the pitcher’s mound a few inches? Play games at night, under lights? Allow a designated hitter to bat for the pitcher? Every potential change, no matter how small, seems to be met with charges of a conspiracy to blemish the Platonic ideal of the game. 

I think the reason that these two things—the dinner party one night, the baseball game the next—hit me the way they did is that, as an academic, I am invested in preserving the past and handing it on to future generations. I owe a debt to the members of my academic guild who have come before me, and I want to honor the memory of my professors by doing for others what they did for me. If I do not keep tradition, I feel like I am violating the integrity of something sacred. However, if I get too focused on maintaining the integrity of my discipline and do not let it evolve, I will begin alienating those very people of the next generation that I purport to care about. It is a hard balance to strike, but it is important to get it right.