老头儿又发飙了

以前我有在博客上贴过Greenberg老头儿给学生发的“慰问信”。今天上课回来一看，又一封杰作躺在邮箱里。这小老头怎么就这么可爱咧……

Living with Conflict

Folks,

I was born two blocks from Yankee Stadium. On hot days during summer weekends, I still recall sitting on my father's lap, watching a Yankee game on a tiny television screen, and hearing the cheers of the crowd through our apartment window when someone hit a home run. The Yankees were my team as I grew: Mantle, Maris, Whitey Ford, the wit, wisdom, and superb catching of Yogi Berra. The best ballgame I ever saw was when the Yankees defeated the Red Sox in a deciding league playoff game; Bucky Dent, a most unlikely batter, hit a home run to win the game. I watched from a hospital room where my mother was recovering from surgery. These are times and images one remembers.

I lived in New York from birth to age 22. But as I aged in other places, I always considered myself a New Yorker. No longer a resident, I still visit regularly to explore the museums and shops, walk the streets, and eat the great food. When the twin towers were destroyed and my city left in ruins, I felt a personal sense of loss and anger. I had just celebrated my 50th birthday with my family at Windows on the World-the restaurant perched on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower. Obsessively, I watched the news reports and repeated images of destruction around the clock during those first few days. Like an addict, I knew the constant watching only made me more upset, yet I could not stop. My connection to the city of my birth was just too strong.

For 30 years, my family and I have lived in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. My wife completed her medical training here; my two daughters were born and raised here; our best friends are here; and this is the place where I have lived longest. For all these years, I've also been part of Drexel, and its students, faculty, staff, and unique culture have become part of me. I've grown to love Philly, with its rich history and rough edges, and its spirit. I like working in this city, and my family and I are most often found in the city on weekends, enjoying great music or theater or museums, and some of the best food available anywhere. I consider myself now a Philadelphian.

Hence my current conflict-and why I am taking your time with this personal reflection. I'm not an avid sports fan, yet this World Series presents a challenge, which by now you have probably anticipated. I write because that challenge opens a small window on the nature of life and how education can help us live it.

The great American poet Robert Frost writes, "Nothing in life runs unmixed." The challenge of living comes from its complexity, its multiple perspectives and possibilities for interpretation, its uncertainties. Solving an equation correctly is satisfying; it provides closure. A really good movie or novel or poem-or a complex scientific or engineering problem--prompts more questions than it answers, poses challenges that are not resolved easily or perhaps at all. Friendships and relationships do not run unmixed. Major life decisions do not run unmixed. The great art of living well involves learning to live with uncertainty, becoming comfortable with conflict, even becoming able to balance two competing theories or perspectives at once-or affiliations to two sports teams locked in fierce competition. That's why it's an art and not an exact science. And that's what a good university education offers: a challenge to linear, often narrow thinking. It does so by cultivating discussion of competing, often equally valid ideas, modes of interpretation, and analysis. It prompts thoughtful reflection on life's great ironies. It helps us learn to live with uncertainties, conflicts, doubts, and fears. It helps us become human.

At Drexel, we are opening the curricula of our majors to encourage students to learn more broadly and to engage learning in different ways; and each College and School at Drexel will be developing courses aimed at presenting to a general audience of students the riches of its disciplines and the complexities of its approaches to thinking. Each discipline and major has much to offer in this regard, for thoughtful practitioners of what appear to be exact sciences understand that once you begin questioning deeply, more questions than answers arise.

I have studied arts and sciences and dedicated a large portion of my life to trying to interpret and teach great works of art. I've grown more comfortable with doubts and uncertainties, with not knowing, and with un-resolvable conflicts. Part of this stems from education and part just from living. The important question, then, is how is a New Yorker, now a Philadelphian and educated in irony, handling the competition between the Yankees and the Phillies? I stand with most of my colleagues, friends, and our students: I'm rooting for the Phillies. I want the Phillies to win. But I'll hate seeing the Yankees lose.

Mark Greenberg