Community learning day asks, "does integrity matter?"

The College hosted its seventh annual Community Learning Day on October 4, themed “Does Integrity Matter?”.

The event’s keynote speaker, Ethan Canin, author of this year’s summer reading book, The Palace Thief, spoke about what it means to have integrity and how it applies to writers of fiction.

The Palace Thief is a collection of stories about a classics professor at a prep school who comes across a student who is a powerful senator’s son. Throughout the story, both characters struggle with maintaining integrity.

Canin defined integrity in his lecture by explaining that, “Integrity, as it applies to the individual, has something to do with trying to achieve a union between your public and your private self.”  

Canin told the story of his brother, whose homosexuality was discovered by his father. He realized, afterward, that his brother did not change due to these events, like many characters in other stories he has read. Instead, his brother moved closer to integrity.

“Duplicity is easy,” Canin said. “Integrity is difficult. People do change early on, but we call that, not coincidentally, growing into one’s self. What I take from this is that if you do succeed in changing in real life, it seems to me that the only lasting change you can make is a change in the direction of integrity.”

He then went on to say that change involves confession.

"Change is revealing the truth, in this case, about yourself and to yourself. And each truth that is revealed about me – that’s one more piece in the building of integrity."

Finally, Canin shared his experience as a medical student, when he learned the language of medicine – a language he said often disconnected doctors from empathizing with the patient.

He said, “All of us should strive to use real words all the time, the words that still have an instant and visceral meaning, not the politically correct words, not the politified words, not the advertising words, not the business major words, just the real words – the words that still make pictures in our brains. This is the language of integrity, a language in which our ideas and real feelings are visible, hearable and identifiable in our public speech.”

Canin’s lecture was followed by breakout sessions with both faculty and professionals who discussed the theme “Does Integrity Matter?”. Canin and other prominent writers discussed “Writing with Integrity” in a breakout session, which was coordinated by Jess Row, English professor at the College. Among the panelists were Nicholas Montemarano, fiction writer and author of If the Sky Falls and A Fine Place; Lorraine Adams, fiction writer and author of Harbor; Kazim Ali, poet and author of The Far Mosque; and Tracy K. Smith, poet and author of The Body’s Question. Each panelist read excerpts from various books and poems, and discussed how integrity factored in their own writing.

Other breakout sessions included “Integrity and Public Policy” and “Medical Ethics in a Time of War.” “Integrity and Public Policy” was coordinated by Robert Anderson, director of general education, and Rosa Zagari-Marinzoli, assistant dean of the School of Culture and Society. Moderated by Diane Bates, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, panelists included Martin Bierbaum, director of the Municipal Land Use Center; Kevin Michels, assistant professor of business; Donna Shaw, assistant professor of English; and Morton Winston, professor of philosophy and religion. “Medical Ethics in a Time of War” was coordinated and moderated by Amanda Norvell, associate professor of biology, and featured panelists Leslie Rice, assistant professor of nursing, and Richard Kamber, professor of philosophy and religion.