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| Wendy Lynne Lee, 3 yr.s old, 1963 |
Well more
than a hundred years ago, the great philosopher John Locke argued that the
unique identities of persons—of individuals like you and I—were woven out of our
memories, sewn out of the stories we tell about ourselves.
And while those
stories may become, like tattered jeans, worn over time, or re-embroidered with
a bit more sparkle and shine than their originals, what matters about them is
that they’re ours—that no one else can tell them quite like I can tell mine—or
you can tell yours.
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| Wendy Lynne Lee and her Mother, Gloria Frances Lee, 1959 |
Here’s just
a little bit of mine:
Crazy but
true, I was actually trained for some years to follow my Aunt Evelyn into the
ballet. This was not because my
family was especially affluent—we were the middle of the middle class. It
wasn’t because I was good at toe-shoes; I wasn’t.
It was because my
parents—like many of yours—aspired to give their kids more than they had had.
While I’m sure I didn’t recognize it at the time, I see now that that aspiration
is elemental to my own identity.
Indeed, the lesson I absorbed at my father’s
knee was that we must justify our existence through the contributions we make
to others. So, by the time I was 10, I had decided to be a writer. Not dancing. Not music. Words.
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| Wendy Lynne Lee Christmas, 1961 |
Good, bad,
or ugly, that thread of identity—that narrative about my own narrative—is the
very air and water of my existence. It is the road for my own contribution,
sketched out in words, paved in pencil.
Nonetheless,
for whatever my high-fallutin’ aspirations, reality is not a patient place. By
the time I finished high school in 1977, I was already working. My dad had died
at just 49 from brain cancer, and my mom—to whom I remain close—could not
support me.
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| My dad, Jack Everett Lee |
So I married at 17 and promptly went to work as an assembly line laboror—a
job that anyone smarter than a gopher would quickly discover was mind-numbing
and body-destroying.
The minimum
wage was $2.56 an hour, and the only thing that spared me from being fired for
union organizing to improve wages and working conditions was pregnancy and an
early labor that, as an unforgettable 20th birthday surprise,
produced identical twin sons.
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| Wendy Lynne Lee 18 yrs. old, 1978 |
Truth is, I was ill-prepared for so much responsibility, and
like just too many women, I found myself imprisoned in a marriage where that
lethal combination of tradition and ignorance made me one more domestic battery
statistic.
By the Spring of 1980, I had fled—suitcase and diaper bag—from Utah to
Colorado. I’m sure I didn’t realize it at the time, but I am one of the
luckiest women in the world. I had somewhere to go—a mother who could offer me
council and safety, compassion and security.
 |
| My mom, Gloria Frances Lee, 2014 |
Fast
forward to August, 1982. I have just given birth to my third son, am
surviving—but just barely—on welfare, food stamps, and a grant to go to
college, and I live in an old Summer vacation cabin at the base of Pike’s Peak.
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| Lindsay Lee-Lampshire, 1983 |
I have miraculously managed a quarter at Pike's Peak Community College in order to enter
University of Colorado, and I’m terrified that factory labor has atrophied by
brains, that I’ll be exposed as a fraud, and that I’ll never
raise my kids out of poverty.
But what was also becoming as clear to me as this
very moment is that education offers an opportunity like no other.
My family counseled
me to the practical—cosmetology or hairdressing, or secretarial work—all the
province of women, and way beyond my motor skills. My mother worried aloud that
too much education might render me unmarriageable.
But I saw something else, and while I know this might sound
ridiculous or just clichéd, what I saw in the sheer beauty, bigness, and
riotous variety that is the humanities—philosophy, English, anthropology,
theater, poetry—was a world I could not only embrace, but to which I could
contribute in some way that my kids could be proud of me.
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| Lindsay Lee-Lampshire, 1984 |
Life in that
cabin, ah—life in that cabin. Four rooms, including a walled-in cement deck
passing for a bedroom, a bathroom with no sink, a finicky space heater, a
camper stove, and a mini-frig.
Every school day I had to hike up and down the
hillside steppes with a baby, a backpack, and sometimes the groceries, often in
the snow, and always with hefty books.
It would be an understatement to say
that I had no social life—but what substituted for that was a sense of purpose,
the intoxicating ideas with which I was becoming acquainted, and that I lived
somewhere always beautiful and ever-changing.
Living on the side of a mountain is an experience that is
etched into my soul; it informs my commitments to the environment in ways both
deep and enduring. I stayed in school, and I alternately forgave and expelled
my third child’s father for choosing Micky Big Mouth and Southern Comfort over
me, but I would be a liar if I told you that self-reliance wasn’t sometimes
accompanied by loneliness, or that staking a claim to my independence was some
easy thing. It wasn’t.
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| Sunset, Pike's Peak, 2013 |
All the same, the stories you’ve heard or lived about
how necessity is the mother of invention are mostly true, and at least for me
that uniqueness of identity Locke talked about grew more out of the need to
figure out things like food, heat, and more food than out of anything else.
Philosophy
gave me a thousand ways to think about all these things. Among the best,
hardest, bravest things I have ever done was to choose it not merely as a
discipline but as a life worth living. It took a leap of faith to load my kids,
my cats, and my then partner into a 1972 oil guzzling Chevy truck with
everything I had in the world and $1500.00 dollars and drive it to Milwaukee
for graduate school.
There is no guarantee that such big gambles will pay off.
But what there is is the promise that even if they don’t, we won’t get to old
age wondering whether we should have taken that chance, made that leap, taken
that road.
Whatever else you do, don’t let that happen.
Women make up less than
a quarter of academic philosophers in the United States—but we are among its
most vibrant and creative communities. Working my way through to the first
undergraduate degree in my family, and then the first Ph.D. was at some points
so hard I nearly quit in tears. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation less than 10 ft.
from a Super Nintendo. I gave birth to my fourth child less than two days
before I taught my very first class.
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| Carley Aurora Lee-Lampshire, 2 yrs old |
That first teaching day, however, was one
of the most insightful of my life. I was so tired. She’d been the first I had
delivered without a cesarean section, and she was still at the hospital
awaiting a potential transfusion—but 10 minutes into that class I knew two
things: first, that if I could weather that day this “academia thing” would
likely never get any harder, and second, that being up in front of a room full
of fresh faces—just like yours—was a blast. I don’t know that I have ever had a
day better or harder than that.
However
clichéd it may sound, what education has given me are choices I would never
have had, a chance to be a role model to my kids, my students, my nieces and
nephews that might never have come my way, and the opportunity to act for the
public good that we should all have—but of which too few take advantage.
Coming
to Bloomsburg University in 1992—another truck drive—was both a real risk and a
new adventure. But by then, I was up for it, and by the time I had taught and
written and worked my ass off for tenure—and my first tattoo--I knew something
about risk, namely, that failure really just is an opportunity to try something
different, and that success isn’t an event—it’s a state of mind that gets you
up on the good days and the bad ones.
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| Carley and Wendy, 2008 |
Although my administration might be happier were I a little less vocal, a little less demanding, the truth is that the more protected are our jobs, the more responsibility we have to speak out on issues that matter.
Among those closest to my heart are
issues that affect women, children, and nonhuman animals—those most vulnerable
in our society whose voices are the least heard. Taking a stand on some of
these is not necessarily a prescription for popularity, and as I have spoken
out strongly for gay rights, women’s reproductive rights, animal welfare, and
environmental integrity, I am sometimes the target of harassment and hate mail.
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| Jack and Wendy, 1967 |
But the thing is that, once you’re equipped with the critical thinking skills a
humanities education offers—once you can think and you come to see even just a
little of what all there is to think about—you can’t go back.
You won’t want to.
Education is the
most valuable and dangerous thing in the world. It equips you to see through
the Bull Shit and the beautiful, the hype and the reality, the fleeting and the
stuff that’s worth fighting for.
But with that education comes the responsibility to be better, to do
more, to contribute.
No better example prepared me for this than Socrates’ “The
unexamined life is not worth living,” and Marx’ “The purpose of philosophy is
not merely to know the world but to change it for the better.”
These two
ideas—that critical self-reflection is essential to actions we can live with, and
that we have some duty to contribute—inform virtually everything I do. The most
obvious of these, I suppose, is teaching—not a job as much as a privilege—no
matter with what challenges my students present me. Every day, I get to “corrupt
youth.”
I get to introduce dangerous ideas to young folks, and I get to
challenge their assumptions. I also get to write about all the things that
matter to me, a few of which even matter to other people.
If I have any single
message for you as you move forward in your own precious lives, it’s this:
listen to yourselves.
Listen to the very best, foresightful versions of
yourselves. Then read—everything you can. The world is messy, frustrating,
contradictory—but it is never dull.
Then think. Hard. What is
your contribution?
What do you have to say?
Thank you
sincerely for having me today. I have given many speeches—but to date, this is
surely the most important.
