CHRIST COLLEGE LIVES: FAITH AND WORK, LOVE AND LIFE FREDRICK BARTON ‘70, EDITOR CHAIR, CHRIST COLLEGE NATIONAL COUNCIL Christ College Lives: Faith and Work, Love and Life Introductory Remarks: CC Homecoming Celebration Saturday, September 30, 2017, 5:30 pm Fredrick Barton ‘70 I find it fitting to be stepping in front of this audience after being introduced by Dean Margaret Franson. It was she, after all, who assigned me the task of standing here at this moment. And that is fitting, too, because, as everyone who graduated from Christ College since 1991 knows first hand, Dean Franson is the engine that pulls the C.C. train. Our esteemed deans may have provided the broad vision, but Margaret Franson supervised the details. And this Golden Anniversary celebration of our founding, like so much about Christ College, has been a Margaret Franson project. I stand here now as one of her details. I frankly don’t recall whose idea it was as part of our anniversary celebration to solicit short biographies from our alumni. But once the idea was agreed to, Margaret volunteered me to edit the submissions into a compendium, which I hope you have had the chance to peruse or will take the chance to read through once the final edition is available. My own reading of these biographies has proven an exquisite pleasure. We C.C. alums have been up to some stuff the last half century, and our compendium is a forthright indication of outstanding individual achievement indicative of amazing programmatic success. I am incredibly pleased to have my own biography nestled among all of these others. I am confident every grad who reads the compendium will come away feeling proud. As my wife Joyce will affirm, over and over again as I made my first read through, I paused to exclaim, “Wow, I went through the same program as this person. And that person. And the next person. And the person after that.” To paraphrase Queen, “We have, we have, rocked it.” Our compendium includes approximately 400 biographies, and though I am not a trained pollster, I think this current number represents a more than adequate representative sample of what Christ College graduates have been doing since they collected their diplomas. Examining the list of entries yields a 1 number of observations. First of all, though we are not everywhere, we are certainly all over the place. In addition to our fellow alums living and working abroad in Albania, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United Kingdom, we are residing in Washington, D.C., and forty of the fifty states. A little fewer than fifty percent of us reside in the Midwest while slightly over half of us settled elsewhere across the U.S. and abroad. Together, about twenty-five percent of our alums live along the east and west coasts. Where we need more settlement is in the South. In my own state of Louisiana I am joined by only two other alums, and I can testify this makes Christ College reading group discussions very short. But whether plentiful or few, we are a force to be reckoned with wherever we land. And that’s because, we are pursuing lives of such distinction. Our presence in the professions is astonishing. Our life-long devotion to education is a salient feature of what we have been up to. Among our respondents, seventy-one of us are college professors and thirty-six of us are secondary or elementary teachers. And while that group ministers to the mind, other groups take care of body and soul: twenty-three of us are doctors, twenty-three more of us are pastors, and eight of us are deaconesses. Handling our legal matters are our forty-six attorneys. Making stuff work are our twenty-one engineers. We are founding our own companies and playing leadership roles in various businesses. We are producing art, making films, writing novels and composing books of poetry. And, man, are we making music. Commandeering our professoriate, we could clearly open our own small university, offering courses in almost every discipline in the Liberal Arts and Sciences and in Business, Engineering and Nursing as well. Our Christ College Alumni University would be especially strong in English with ten professors and Theology with nine. Our medical professors and law professors could offer graduate professional education. We have academic leaders ready to helm our university with experienced higher education administrators in academic counseling, financial aid, fund raising, alumni coordination, human resources, and public relations. We have veteran deans and provosts, too; we even have our own university president. 2 Heck, we could start our own town to house our own university. We’ll need schools, and we’ve got the teachers for them and two headmasters to lead them. We’ll want churches, and we have clergy in abundance. If we build our homes, schools and office buildings from scratch, we have architects to design them and construction engineers to erect them. We have accountants to prepare our tax returns and keep our finances in order, bankers to make sure our money is secure, and curators to plan the exhibitions at our museum, including work by our own artists. Our doctors and nurses will staff our hospital and clinics, and their work will be coordinated by the sizeable cadre of us who hold health care managerial positions. Our newspaper will be staffed by our contingent of journalists and editors and laid out by our graphic designers. Our libraries, which will contain the work of our many, many authors, will be overseen by our half dozen librarians. We have a pharmacist to run our drug store and physical therapists to assist with our aches and pains. We have actors for our theater, game designers for our home entertainment centers and web designers to improve our websites. We’ll have a beautiful park in our town, which will be overseen by our park ranger. Baseball will be played in our park, and for that we will need a licensed umpire. Thank goodness we’ve got one. We’ve got a basketball referee for our community gym, too, and another experienced ref for soccer matches. When one of our churches needs a new pipe organ, we have just the person to build it. We won’t have crime problems, of course, and we have an F.B.I. agent to make sure it stays that way. We will enjoy great agreement about the shared life in our town, but we will need democratically elected officials, and our two campaign managers will handle the mutually respectful candidates for each position. Should we ever need advocacy to nations abroad, our two foreign service officers will represent our interests. With so little or no conflict to resolve, I am not sure what our three judges will do, but I am confident they will preside over their courts with great wisdom and honor. We won’t have mental or social problems, so our several psychologists and social workers will commute to other towns to do their good work in the service of others, something we are quite good at. But with all these accomplished people doing important work in so many areas, I admit to being envious of one particular group of our alums: and that’s those of us who identify themselves as 3 consultants. I have never been able to grasp what exactly it is that consultants do, but I gather they are well paid to do it and infrequently if ever have to live with the consequences of their recommendations. They often travel and stay in very nice hotels which, along with their first-class meals, they put on expense accounts. One can’t help liking that. Emmy-winning actor and Oscar nominee Don Cheadle, who starred as consultant-firm chief executive Marty Kaan on the television comedy House of Lies, defined consulting as “a business that allows you to come into someone else’s company where you requisition the C.E.O.’s watch and then charge him a lot of money to tell him the time.” Good work if you can arrange it, and eight of our number have. Good for them. They won’t be able to spend much time in our town, but their taxes will help support our university, schools, libraries and park. If any of our consultants are in attendance tonight, please see me afterwards; I could use some consulting on how I can get into your line of work. Most of our alums have done and are doing good work, and many of them, very many actually, are doing well, while doing their good work. But I want to quote one of our number I look forward to knowing in our town who describes his post Christ College life with typical and becoming modesty. From what I can tell, this individual is having a career that is no doubt widely envied in his community. But he understates his accomplishments and writes about himself that he “doesn’t view his job as a ticket to fame or fortune but truly loves what he does and looks forward to work every day.” I think he speaks for the lucky many among our number, and I am sure you will agree with me that it doesn’t get any better than that. As a last requirement of our town, we have among our fellow alums, one who provides a particularly valuable service. Is my old friend Fritz Wehrenberg in attendance tonight? (It’s a Saturday night, so he is probably at work.) Fritz graduated from Valpo and Christ College in 1971, attended the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago and spent thirty-eight years as a parish pastor and a campus chaplain before retiring in 2013.