After fifteen years as Denison's President, you'd think I'd have had my say. Just the major ceremonies of the academic year--First Year Induction, Academic Awards Convocation, and Commencement--have given me the opportunity to make 45 formal addresses to Denison classes. Add to that the occasional Phi Beta Kappa address and periodic appearances before academic honor societies or other student recognition ceremonies, and I've certainly had many chances to share my thoughts or try to offer a little inspiration to Denison men and women. As I considered what I might say today — as a sendoff for you, and, this year, for me--I wondered at one point whether I should just draw highlights from those talks and make this a "Dale Knobel's greatest hits" album of ideas. But then I thought, nah, I've still got an unshared thought or two dying to get out. Once a professor, always a professor; you can't pass up an opportunity to teach!

Moreover, I confess that I'm always thinking of new things to say — new to me, anyway. A wonderful thing about being in academic life is that you never stop reading, never stop listening, and never stop encountering new ideas. And there always seem to be new opportunities to share what you've learned. But hold it! That's what all of us of the faculty hope will be true for all of you, and not just those who choose academic careers--that you'll never stop reading, listening, encountering new ideas, and sharing them with others. This, we have confidence, will be an outcome of your liberal education. May you also discover new ideas that you want to share throughout your lives.

One of the concepts we especially talk about in the world of the liberal arts and sciences is "critical thinking." It's almost a buzz word. The American Association of Colleges and Universities, which promotes liberal arts education nationwide, has a public advocacy campaign called LEAP, Liberal Education and America's Promise, and, yupp, sure enough, one of what it calls "essential learning outcomes" for college educated men and women is "critical thinking." AAC&U has just completed an employer survey, too, and what has it turned up among employers' greatest needs in new college-educated employees? Critical thinkers. Colleges include critical thinking as an educational goal in their mission statements all the time. And while Denison doesn't use the exact expression in the body of our mission statement, it is prominently featured in a couple of appendices that go along with it. Actually, our mission statement uses a related expression that is meant to get at some of the same things as "critical thinkers" and that is "autonomous thinkers"-- as in, we seek to educate "autonomous thinkers." Throughout higher education, critical thinking is described as one of things that sets the liberal arts apart from more narrow and vocationally-specific forms of undergraduate education. At Denison, we organize our curriculum around it. We intentionally limit the major to about one-third of all courses a student takes and then say that it doesn't matter much what discipline you choose as a major so long as the major holds your interest and provides you with challenge. That's because, we would argue, each of our majors provides an essential element of a liberal education: critical thinking.

We all kind of know what we're talking about when we reference critical thinking. Of course, we mean thinking for yourself (that's the "autonomous" part that we mention in the Denison mission statement). That is, not taking received wisdom at face value without examination. It means being able to distinguish between unsupported opinion and well-considered points of view based upon evidence. It means--if ideas were automobiles--lifting up the hood and exploring the engine beneath. We even extend the notion of critical thinking to writing. As liberal educators on a campus like this, we take the view of English novelist E.M Forster, who once asked "How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?" There's wisdom in that. It's sometimes in the telling that we come to understand what we really know and how well we know it. We also understand critical thinking to be introspective and intensely personal. The ancient sage's words may sound a little harsh, but we do implicitly hold with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. Critical thinking, we believe, is at the heart of making the best art and music and is the very soul of science, serving as the basis for the rigorous assumption-testing of the scientific method. So, this is all really good stuff. What's not to like about critical thinking? What's not to like that you have all been educated to be critical thinkers?

Here is where I hesitate just a little. Because my own life experience--in academe and out--has suggested to me that there are some challenges connected with critical thinking. This is because critical thinking is necessary but not sufficient in an educated life. The insufficiency is hinted at in the etymology--the history--of the word itself. The word "critical" has descended, through intermediaries, from the classical Greek Krites (Kreetace), which means, as I understand it, to judge--not so much in the legal sense but in the personal intellectual sense of assuming for oneself the privilege of evaluating, assessing, distinguishing, and deciding. There's a hint of arrogance in that. I get to decide. We start a little at that as we did when a former president of the United States announced "I'm the decider"—even, if in a Constitutional sense, the assertion had some merit. Perhaps what I'm thinking is that critical thinking, unalloyed with anything else --humility, empathy, care, perspective, perhaps—can become, well, just critique or, to put it more baldly, criticism.

The self-promoting aspects of what we sometime take to be critical thinking simply gives me pause. And I'm not just talking about other people's critical thinking here but my own. I discovered something with a little embarrassment in the last few weeks. As I've begun to pack up my office, I'm taking another look at tthirty-seven years of published or delivered output as a historian and educator. There are two single-authored books and one co-authored one, twenty-seven articles or book chapters, fifty-nine conference presentations, dozens of book reviews for fifteen different scholarly journals, a fair number of manuscript or grant proposal reviews for institutions ranging from Yale University Press to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a dozen successful grant proposals of my own. When I saw them all together, I was a little shocked by the formula that characterizes my professional writing, displayed usually in the first few paragraphs or pages of a piece: "Professor so and so says this about that, but I'm telling you that she/he has got it wrong and I have got it right. So here it is—the right way." Now, I know this is a scholarly convention. I'm not the only one using it. Yet it gave me concern, not that I was being a critical thinker, digging deep, but that the rhetorical formula I've been using for sharing that thinking seems calculated to puff me up while deflating others—by being, frankly, critical.

A few years ago, my presidential colleague and fellow historian Michael Roth of Wesleyan University in Connecticut shared his own ambivalence about critical thinking, calling the critical thinking that takes place in college classrooms sometimes little more than self-promoting and self-satisfying "debunking." We've all seen what Roth describes, and we may even have carelessly promoted it: "The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship," Roth wrote, "is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to 'trouble' ideas." Roth worries about an academic "culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker [and in which] our students may become too good at showing how things don't make sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning and direction in the books they read and the world in which they live."

It's the latter that, I think, provides a caution. There's enough careless criticism outside of the classroom on college campuses without facile encouragement inside. In college residence halls and army barracks (and maybe around office coffee machines) you can count on one thing—that criticism (some may less charitably call it "carping") is one of the things that a) seems to be a social device that brings people together and b) if you do it well, makes you seem important and cool. Awareness of this—maybe even wounding by this—is probably what led one of my Denison predecessors more than a century ago to have chiseled into the college gateway on the stairs connecting College Street and the lower campus to Barney-Davis Hall on the hilltop a quote from late 18th century English poet George Crabbe: "Feed thyself, To thine own powers appeal, Nor whine out woes, Thine own right hand can heal."

So, wow, am I saying, Class of 2013, we've corrupted you or at least just reinforced over four years the temptation of youth to be, yes, debunkers? No. As I shared at the outset, there's way too much that's good about critical thinking to throw it overboard. So how do I get out of the dilemma I've created for myself? I think it's this way. I read a piece once by a guy who's in the leadership business, that is, a fellow who writes about and conducts workshops on leadership for folks in the not-for-profit, for-profit, and governmental spheres. His name is Ed Ruggero, and he's a graduate of West Point who had a military career before taking up his current line of work. He writes about being overseas as a very young officer under a gruff, no-nonsense more senior commander and being tasked with unraveling a supply mess. Nothing, he reports, was getting as it should to troops in the field: not food or mail or even replacement soldiers. The junior lieutenant applied, well, critical thinking to the situation. In Ruggero's words, "I did some cracker-jack poking around; I was all about root cause analysis and getting the right data. I got the numbers on how old our trucks were and how often they were breaking down; I detailed the over-scheduling and over optimistic time estimates, which led to missed maintenance and tired drivers who got lost on unmarked country roads. I wrote everything down in my spiffy little notebook and reported to the major." I'd say, here's our classic, college educated critical thinker. He's not only used his powers of analysis but also his sixth sense for de-bunking, too, showing how others had made careless mistakes that exacerbated the problem. Ruggero then shares the punch line, his commander's response to his fine critical thinking: "What are you going to do about it?"

What are you going to do about it? That, in the language of the 1950s and '60s era TV game shows is "the $64,000 question." In the educated life, to be completed, critical thinking requires critical doing. "Critical" is a funny word. It's got a meaning associated with criticism and critique. But, beginning in late Renaissance, it also became connected with the most urgent period of an illness (like the Plague) , with the "crisis," when the fever would either break and the person live or the fever consume and the patient die. The word "critical"—or at least the progenitors of our modern word—also took on the meaning at this time of essential, urgent, or timely. I would use it in this way here. After being critical thinkers and getting to the bottom of things, can you become critical doers, taking the appropriate, informed steps to answer the question you uncovered, to solve the unsolved problem, to fix the error you've unmasked? In short, how will you make things better—whether it's a mathematical problem, a social wrong, or a broken relationship?

The first Provost, or chief academic officer, of the College of Philadelphia (the institution that became the University of Pennsylvania), William Smith, got at this when, on the eve of the American Revolution, he wrote, "Thinking, writing, and acting well…is the grand aim of a liberal education." Not just thinking. Not just writing—in E.M. Forster's words, seeing what you think. But acting, acting well.

The thing I like about the question "What are you going to do about it?" is that it forces us to go beyond unmasking and debunking. It forces you to question your own assumptions and interests. It places you in the shoes of others. It is a relevant question whether you are in scholarly pursuits, in a profession or career, in a household or family, in a society or organization, in a community.

Judson Harmon got that about Denison. He got it that you begin the habit of critical doing, of acting well in college—at Denison. Who's Justin Harmon? Harmon enrolled at Denison in 1862, then left college with a number of other young men to join a make-shift, temporary militia, the "Squirrel Hunters," when southern Ohio was threatened by a Confederate cavalry raid. He returned to Granville, unscathed, to graduate in 1866. He studied law at the University of Cincinnati, and after years of successful practice was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President Grover Cleveland. Subsequently, beginning in 1908, he was elected to two terms as Governor of Ohio. In 1912, he was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Woodrow Wilson. In 1900, he was asked by the student editors of the Adytum, the Denison yearbook, to write a brief reminiscence. He wrote this: "A college is the world in miniature, and it well for one who is to deal with all sorts of people to begin early." Governor Harmon, I'm convinced, "got it." He got it that you begin the process of acting on your critical thinking, of engaging in critical doing that affects the lives of all around you while you are still in those formative college years. You set patterns that last a lifetime.

Class of 2013, I hope that Denison has, indeed, taught you to be critical thinkers. But I also hope that you have begun to assume the role of critical doers, not stopping at figuring out what is wrong or unfinished but continuing on to fix or finish the work. By doing so now and in the years ahead you will enrich your lives as well as the lives of others, give pride to the professors who have taught you, and bring credit to yourselves, and to Denison, alma mater.