The Phi Beta Kappa Magee Address:
6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30


TACOMA, Wash. – University of Puget Sound President Ronald R. Thomas has chosen the title “No Subject” for the Phi Beta Kappa Magee Address that he will present on Oct. 30.

The title sounds cryptic—but it has a serious intention. By reflecting on his own time as a college president, and drawing from his previous career as a Victorian scholar, Thomas plans to examine one of higher education’s most serious questions of today: What is the real value of a college education?

The lecture will consider some of the answers entertained by policymakers and the media, and offer Thomas’s own thoughts, from the perspective of a college president and a scholar of the Victorian novel’s relationship to such nineteenth-century cultural inventions as psychoanalysis, forensic science, and the cinema.

The annual address, presented under the banner of America’s oldest and most selective undergraduate honor society, will be held at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Tahoma Room of Commencement Hall. The event is free and open to the public, however tickets are required. See below for ticket information.

Thomas writes in a preview of his address that the central theme of the 19th-century novel was “the making of the human subject” through the transformational effects that experience has upon a character. The Victorian Age, the period when the novel is considered to have reached its apex as a literary form, was itself a time of dramatic social transformation—from a largely rural, agrarian society to a more urban, industrial state with an emerging and influential middle class, and the prospect of increased social and financial mobility across rigid class lines.

Thomas observes that an analogous storyline—of personal and social transformation and the overcoming of social barriers—could and should define the mission of the university today, during another period of rapid social change. That story traces the modern college student’s realization of his or her full potential through a transformative experience “into the mature and self-knowing human subject he or she can become.”

“But this is not the predominant discourse we hear in the media, in public policy, or in the marketplace about what higher education can or should be doing in the 21st century, or how it should be valued,” Thomas continues.

“My challenge—our challenge—is to tell the story of (and make the case for) the real value of a college education in the making of human subjects—in a world in which that story has been replaced by a data-driven account of material accumulation, where the human subject, as we know it, disappears,” he concludes.

At stake in that story and in the goal we set for the purpose of a liberal education, Thomas implies, is the survival of the notion of the integrated subject, our conception of who we are and of who we can become. A college education, like a good Victorian novel, he concludes, is a life story where “time is charged with meaning.”

Ronald R. Thomas has been president of University of Puget Sound, Western Washington’s only national liberal arts college, for 11 years. In that time the 126-year-old college’s campus, national student recruitment, and community outreach have all been transformed, along with the lives of thousands of young graduates. As a testimony to this, in 2012 Puget Sound was named one of 40 “Colleges That Change Lives,” by the eponymous national organization dedicated to helping students meet their educational goals.

A native of New Jersey, Thomas formerly taught Victorian literature and culture at The University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., where he also served as college vice president and acting president. Thomas is the author of numerous academic articles and chapters in books and has published three books of his own, including Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science and Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious.

The Phi Beta Kappa Magee Address was established in honor of John B. Magee, professor of philosophy and religion, who was a driving force in establishing a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at University of Puget Sound in 1986. The annual address focuses on either a professional scholarly inquiry or an intellectual hobby and includes a reflection about how the honor society’s values have impacted the lecturer's work.

FOR TICKETS: Admission is free, but tickets are required. Order online at tickets.pugetsound.edu , or call Wheelock Information Center at 253.879.3100.

For directions and a map of the University of Puget Sound campus:pugetsound.edu/directions.
For accessibility information please contact accessibility@pugetsound.edu or 253.879.3236, or visit pugetsound.edu/accessibility.

Press photos of President Ronald R. Thomas can be downloaded from: pugetsound.edu/pressphotos.

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