The definition of truth itself was put on trial during Winter Term in a series of lectures held in the Science Center’s Craig Auditorium.
“The Truth,” a January mini-institute, explored this ominous and often slippery topic and drew about 100 Oberlin students and professors to daily speeches and debates.
The event featured a broad array of voices, from mathematicians to Marxists to creative writers. The keynote speaker, Stephen Melville, an art history professor at Ohio State University, said he did not feel at all qualified to deliver a concrete definition of truth.
He joked it made him uneasy to “stand up in front of an audience and pontificate for 45 minutes to an hour on truth and do so not only with a straight face but presumably with something like authority.”
The majority of the lecturers shared Melville’s apprehension of competence, though this uncertainty actually shaped the series in a way that no one expected.
It turned out a significant number in the audience were future speakers in the series. “Many changed their presentations to respond to what others before them had talked about,” college sophomore Steve Kwan said. “It was a weird sort of interaction.” He said after alluding to comments made in the previous lectures, the speaker went on to give the meaning of truth for their discipline.
In the first lecture on Jan. 6, English professor and Winter Term director, T.S. McMillin, laid out what he said was the overarching importance of the course.
“Truth lies beneath everything we do at Oberlin,” he said. “The pursuit of truth is the basis for what we teach and study, for scholarly and artistic works and for measuring success,” he said.
Speakers in the three-week course included College and Conservatory faculty, a campus librarian and Mellville.
Several of the lecturers creatively meshed the ambiguous question of “truth” with their own field expertise.
Dance faculty Ann Cooper Albright improvised dance routines during her lecture, titled “The Body Never Lies: Truth, Agency and the Corporeal,” which was held in Warner Main Space. Near the end of the lecture, Albright built a tower with cushy blocks which she called “truth,” and then hurled herself into it.
Creative Writing professor Dan Chaon, in “The Truth About Fiction,” recounted his experience after one of his short story collections was crudely translated in Arabic. He began receiving e-mail messages from Iran asking about his supposed friendships with “midgets, hyper-active children and crazy people.”
McMillin said he spent considerable time searching for the ideal mix of personalities, but a number of the speakers he requested ultimately turned him down.
“I wanted people who would take on what is at once a disciplinary, philosophical and self-reflective question,” he said, but added, “There were, however, some people who would have made important contributions who were unable to participate.”
Other presentations ranged from slides of mathematical proofs to speeches replete with Heidegger philosophy. Every speaker had a different way to tackle the truth.
College librarian Jessica Grimm lectured on the poetry sect of “language writers,” which employ a sort of stream of consciousness that focus on non-sequential descriptions of a single subject. During her lecture, Grimm passed a poem out titled “Truth Notes; or Has that ladder really been there this whole time?” a lyrical compilation of words and phrases from the preceding lectures in the series.
In the end, there were only two things that every lecturer seemingly had in common: first, that each of them believed that their field was in some way in the pursuit of the truth, and second, that it was too anomalous to be adequately defined through one line of work.
There were 12 Oberlin students who attended the lectures for credit, though the audience was primarily faculty, staff and non-students from the Oberlin community.