Others misperceive liberal arts colleges as being academic "ivory towers" separated from the "real world," serene sanctuaries of learning where bright students prepare for graduate or professional school and have little contact with or interest in the larger society.

This mythic image no longer fitsif it ever did. Today, liberal arts colleges prepare students to pursue a variety of careers immediately upon graduation, and their students are heavily involved in the surrounding communities. But liberal arts colleges do much more. Not content simply to confer competence or hone intellectual skills, they are committed to helping students engage in self-discovery. In this sense, liberal learning is as much a moral and spiritual enterprise as it is an academic endeavor. Small classes and close relationships with professors and other students not only facilitate learning; they also help broaden horizons and provoke the kind of self-reflection that prompts students to refine their character and embody their faith.

This is an especially timely subject, for we live in an age bereft of purpose and hungry for meaning. In recent years, Americans have grown justifiably concerned about the unraveling of the nations moral fabric. The evidence is pervasive: violent crime, rampant alcohol and drug abuse, teen pregnancies and illegitimate births, casual divorces, and television talk shows that celebrate vulgarity and deviancy. Perhaps most disheartening is the ethical corruption evident in government, in business, and in schools. Newsweek magazine recently reported that a Chicago teacher provided his high school students with the answers to a national standardized test they were about to take, explaining that "Everybody cheats. Thats the way the world works."

How do we reverse such an erosion of morals and manners amid an irreverent age? One obvious way is to encourage young people to reflect more seriously on the origin and nature of their own values and to reinforce those elusive qualities of character that give young men and women the potential to have a real impact on the world. How to spend a day nobly, Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote in his journal, is the essential problem to be solved.

For many years, Furman and other liberal arts colleges have challenged young people to live nobly within a community of learners where young people can grow and express themselves freely, where people know and care about others and are known and cared for by them, a place where students are encouraged to develop a personal style and design a way of life in the process of gaining knowledge. In short, they are colleges where history, civility, and concerns of the spirit and social justice still matter.

In practice, this commitment to liberal learning means fashioning opportunities for students to assess who they are as well as what they want to be. To help encourage reflection along these lines, we encourage students and faculty and staff members to share with one another the values they most cherish.

One of the most important of these forums at Furman is the L. D. Johnson Lecture series. It is named for the beloved former university chaplain and minister of First Baptist Church who alerted students to the daily relevance of moral principles and spiritual anchors.

Those invited to deliver the L. D. Johnson lecture are asked to speak about "what really matters" to them. It is a daunting assignment. Talking in public about what really matters makes one feel exposed and vulnerable, like a snail without a shell.

Yet such an effort to express our selves as spiritual and moral beings who profess values and seek virtue is ultimately an uplifting enterprise. However imperfect, however clumsily expressed, our presentations about what we most value gives substance and ballast to this community of learners.

Of course, our main difficulty in leading a good life is to strike a balance between contending claims and conflicting values. In this regard, life is a continual negotiation, a perennial compromise between competing desires and demands. Maintaining the right balance requires first knowing ones own center of gravity.

We hope that all Furman students will take with them from this special place a more mature sense of their own moral and spiritual foundations and a more engaged sense of civic and social responsibility. Too many students arrive at college uncertain of their core beliefs and values. Like the poet Denise Levertov, they feel themselves unready for soul-baring:

I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.