To me the question about "education and social responsibility" comes down to this: Is there a special responsibility about social issues for people who are situated, for the time being, in a learning community like St. Olaf?  If so, what is it like?  For me, the distinctive obligation of people in a learning community is to think a bit longer than others have time to do.  We live in luxurious circumstances, surrounded by friends and books, and cradled by time.  Society grants people in schools this luxury in the hope that we will indeed think a bit longer about pressing issues.  Our job is to be more critical, more reflective, more attentive to details of history, context, and ambiguity, than we could afford to be if we were situated elsewhere.

In one way I have no major, because I spend my time counseling students who are planning their own majors, and I identify with each one, so I have 20 or 30 majors.  And in another way, I don't have a major because what I really have is a set of guiding questions that I have been trying to figure out using any tools I could get my hands on--hence I have studied bits and pieces of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and in women's studies programs, religious studies, etc.  But I have consistently been interested in a certain kind of questioning.  It's a rude kind of questioning, when you think about it.  I always want to know if what people think and say they are doing is what they are really doing.  For example, if American leaders say they are defending freedom and justice, I want to know, Is that what they are really doing?  I also continually ask questions about the influence of language on thought: I'm convinced that the language we have to use literally pre-determines what we are able to think about.  Thus, to cite an example we talked about a few weeks ago, if the only language held out for discussing the 911 attacks is a language of war, that language obstructs our capacity to think about the world in any other ways.  Finally, I continually ask questions about the way constructions and patterns of gender influence our lives as women and men.  Obviously, all these questions interact.  So, I'd like to know if there are patterns in our language about 911, bin Laden, Islam, American, etc. that are pre-determining what we can think about these things.  And I'd like to know if there are gender patterns--that is, regular uses of language that is associated with masculinity or femininity--that play an unusual role in the available language for talking about 911, etc.