Tonight, is the annual Bailey Oratorical contest here at Juniata. The event is celebrating its 118th year which puts it up there with other long-standing and cherished Juniata traditions like Madrigal and Storming of the Arch. Unlike those events, the Bailey is a true testament to the liberal arts values that we as a college try to espouse daily. The Bailey gives Juniata students the chance to express their own unique opinions about the specific prompts put forth each year. The finalists this year will be asked to describe their dream for the future, and why they have that specific dream. It’s a prompt that I think is particularly apt given the current state of global affairs. Regardless of your political ideology or what country you live in, I think one thing that we can all agree on is that there is no small amount of uncertainty about the future of our world, and that future is in the hands of my generation.
That is one of the most beautiful things about Juniata and the faculty and staff that strive to make it a haven for academic achievement and interdisciplinary appreciation. I think the endurance and success of the Bailey speaks for itself, no pun intended. The Bailey challenges students to think about the world and tis issues and to offer up their own perspectives on the world and ways that we could maybe make it better.
Last year, contestants were challenged to think about how civic engagement and the other values that are inherent in a liberal arts education could help to heal the divides present not only in our nation, but the world over. We heard speeches from sociologists and mathematicians, historians and biologists and I think that is the testament to the true liberal arts nature of the Bailey, and of Juniata. The mathematicians aren’t just taught to see the world through numbers and equations just as the politics POEs aren’t taught to see the world through power dynamics. The Bailey and similar events like the Liberal Arts Symposium later this Spring, challenge the students at Juniata to think outside of the box of their perspective on the world and to see the world and its issues through someone else’s eyes.
I don’t know what tonight’s speeches hold, but if they are anything like past speeches I have heard, they’ll be thoughtful and insightful and will challenge the audience to think, just as much as the contestants had to think about the prompts. And maybe we might just gain a new perspective on a brighter future.
