Limerick: True faith and allegiance
Original article can be found at The Denver Post
Originally published on March 18, 2016 By Patty Limerick
After a recent visit to our nation’s capital, I came home with restored hope for my nation.
There’s a tribute you don’t hear every day.
In a once-common pairing of actions that have become increasingly rare, I was nominated for a federal appointment by the White House and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. On March 3, I was sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Humanities. William Adams, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), read my oath aloud, phrase by phrase, and I repeated each phrase after he spoke it:
I, Patricia Limerick, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
Having the occasion to follow the lead of William Adams was a moving and memorable experience. A scholar in philosophy, a former college president, and a Vietnam veteran, Adams is the creator of a new NEH initiative: “Standing Together: The Humanities and the Experience of War,” aimed at tapping the “power of the humanities” for the benefit of veterans and their families.
The assumption that the humanities act as a bastion of academic insularity and political rigidity has had a persistent life in popular thinking. Even a brief encounter with William Adams — or, for that matter, with any of my fellow Humanities Council members — provides a lasting corrective for that stereotype.
And, ever since I returned from Washington, Americans have not stopped dazzling me with their goodwill and dedication to the nation’s ideals.
Consider this example.
On March 11, the very day that the ill temper of the Republican presidential campaign crossed into violence at the Trump rally in Chicago, I spent the morning in a dramatically preferable world. My former student Geoff Hunt, a deeply committed history professor at the Community College of Aurora, had arranged for me to deliver the opening address at a conference during which students presented research on topics ranging from constitutional amendments to Aristotle’s theories of virtue.
While bitterness and rage rampaged through that rally in Chicago, I was perfectly positioned to observe the inspirational conduct, demonstrated every day in community colleges, of young Americans who are following their own ambitions while also pursuing the common good.
In this election year, the national levels of vitriol and bitterness, anger and anxiety, opposition and antagonism have been rising steadily. And, just as steadily, my professional life keeps returning me to the company of impressive Americans. While I am grateful for my circumstances, I cannot help wishing that this arrangement could be reconfigured.
If someone can design a way to reverse this situation, dispatching me into the company of the bitter and resentful, while turning the presidential election campaign into an enterprise in goodwill and common cause, I swear I will bear true faith and allegiance to this reconfiguration of fortune, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
So help me God.