You Are Ready for This Moment: Talking Bonner Talk
July 11, 2020
Related: Schools Like Guilford Matter to This Area published in the News-Record Letters to the Editor, July 1, 2020, following various announcements by the Guilford College including the stepping down of its president during Covid, Black Lives Matter, and an uncertain future.
July 11, 2020
Related: Schools Like Guilford Matter to This Area published in the News-Record Letters to the Editor, July 1, 2020, following various announcements by the Guilford College including the stepping down of its president during Covid, Black Lives Matter, and an uncertain future.
My guess is that there are about 250-300 of you out there — Bonner Scholars who graduated from Guilford College. And there are probably twice that number who caught the community engagement bug as Community Scholars, Center Fellows, project and site coordinators and others. My time at the Bonner Center for Community Service and Learning was only for a brief part of its existence, so I worked with perhaps 100 of you. Some of you I got to know well, but my role concentrated on community partnerships and on site work in neighborhoods which later included community-based research projects that sought to increase the direct involvement of your professors. James knew all of you. Without him, you probably could not have afforded Guilford. Without his guidance, many of you would have given up. You didn’t.
More than thirty years ago I taught at Guilford through the Art Department and the Interdisciplinary Studies Program which developed a common course for entering freshmen and which featured a stellar line up of visiting speakers. I taught the Honors student section. Many faculty were Quakers and though it was lamented at the time for its decline, the student body was “only” about 15% Quaker, if I recall. My first wife, now deceased, was a Quaker. We met at Guilford. I used to take our son Nick to the school’s daycare which was located in New Garden Friends, a nice walk from the Hege art studios. When Nick died in 2018, I received condolences from some of my former art students who used to play with him as a baby.
When I returned to the campus in 2012, the head of the student services area overseeing the Center was eager to tell me about Guilford’s “peculiar culture”, but I already knew many of the faculty who I sat with at faculty meetings years ago and who were now on the verge of retirement. Long ago they were the “Young Turks” eager to modernize the campus, eager to make changes. How time flies. During the library’s big evening dinner celebration a few years back (I forget the purpose) I got seated with Ted Benfey, emeritus professor of chemistry, whose wife was sister to Annie Albers, who, along with her husband, Josef Albers, were members of the influential Bauhaus art and design movement. The Albers escaped Nazi Germany, Josef Albers taught at Yale School of of Art and a student named Bernie Chaet, who himself would go on to become an artist of renown, a Yale professor, and under whom I would become his teaching assistant when I went there for grad school. We traded these stories with the Benfeys at their retirement home many years ago when my first wife and I were their guests. Of course, sitting in the old library at our table (which also included Claire Morse, another amazing retired professor), Ted Benfey didn’t remember that occasion, and for the current student services person sitting way yonder across the room at another table, it was beyond his scope to understand.
In 2012, I knew little about James Shields except that I received the cautious assessment that he was an artist, actor and something of a troublemaker, which as I consider it now, seems to be exactly what all creative people are supposed to be. I mean troublemakers. And critics, upsetters of the status quo, or as I once taught in art classes quoting Ezra Pound, “artists are the antennae of the race”. Marshall McLuhan thought of artists as a type of radar for society, an early warning system about dangers ahead.
Dangers ahead.
Police shooting. Chieu Di Thi Vo. Mike Brown. Ferguson. Freddie Gray. Ebola outbreak. HIV. Homelessness. Chronic disease. Substance abuse. Dangerous housing. Deportation. Dreamers. DACA. Poverty. Mental health. LGBTQ rights. Gender equality. Food insecurity. Earthquakes. Racism. Racism. Persistent racism. Trump.
These were some of the issues that marked the short time I was at the Bonner Center. These were the issues you took on because they were part of who you are. These were the issues in students’ lives that cut to the bone and for which academic theory, history and criticism alone could not heal. Since then you’ve borne the brunt of Trump’s governmental fury. And yet you walked out with the mental tools and know-how to reshape your future and the futures of those around you. Practically all Bonners remain socially engaged and plugged in to the critical issues of our times, executing the kind of persistent caring, demanding, worrying and working that brings us to the here and now, a struggle for democracy, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter, and the repair of deeply frayed institutions and communities whose faults and weaknesses Covid has exposed for all to see. They have been, to paraphrase various Quakerisms, brought into the light. A very harsh light.
“If something cannot go on forever it will stop”.
Things stop. Programs, even ones like Bonner that celebrated over two decades of success, come to an end. I regard the program, James’ leadership brilliance and you and your work as Bonner Scholars, Bonner Fellows, Community Scholars and Bonner allies as exactly the sort of revolutionary change America needs to repair its education system, to re-educate itself, re-engage in the democratic process and rebuild community.
In 1984, when I first stepped onto the Guilford campus for an interview after arriving at the airport, there was no Bonner program. Guilford College was a different place. Between then when I was a faculty member and 2012 when I returned as a staff member, I did many other things in my work and life. But I consider my work with you at the Bonner Center to be the high point of my career as an educator and artist.
In the coming days, weeks, and months as more Americans die of Covid, of being homeless, of being unemployed, of being poor, of being Black, of being caged, of being undocumented, of counting on failed institutions and failed systems, we all have our work cut out for ourselves. Let’s get on it. Let’s get busy. And let’s know that the work that matters is the work we do together out in the real world, out there in the community, beyond the green fringes of a pretty campus. These are precisely the challenges Bonner prepared you for. The Center as we have known it has ended but the work continues through you.
