After 30 Years: What My Centre Degree Meant to Me

by Mason Smith '76

I graduated from Centre in 1976, so this is my 30th year as an alumnus.

When I left high school, those three decades ago, I wanted to be a journalist—a degree program not offered at Centre. My friends attended other universities, and I imagined that they were learning all sorts of neat journalistic stuff.

Meanwhile, I was sitting in Grace Doherty Library, glumly reading Paradise Lost.           

Luckily, my advisors, Dr. Milton Reigelman and
Dr. Charles Lee, had a better grasp than I did of what
my career might demand. They both told me that a liberal arts degree would be a good foundation for reporting, and for other careers that might follow. The College’s goal, they said, was to turn me into a “Renaissance man.”

I rolled my eyes at this. The very idea of asking a man or woman to be a poet, a warrior, a scholar, a scientist, a person of faith. . . . I wanted the income and responsibility of a job—OK, so mainly the income of a job.

I soldiered on. I left Centre with a double major in English and history, and in possession of three Big Ideas symbolized by a telephone book, a chain-link fence, and a copy of the National Enquirer.

The phone book represents a database, and like any database, it has structure and a physical location. My liberal arts degree gave me an understanding of the concept of database. All human knowledge is stored in these databases—libraries, archives, computer architecture.

The second Big Idea, symbolized by a chain-link fence, represents how knowledge is interconnected. I attended a lecture in the then-new Norton Center for the Arts on how Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica influenced J.S. Bach’s music.

A different lecture at Centre suggested that an outbreak of bubonic plague in the late 1400s may have helped trigger the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s. Knowledge interconnects in countless ways. The key was to look for those connections.

And finally the supermarket newspaper shows that not all databases are equal. Quoting the National Enquirer on economics is not at all the same as quoting the Wall Street Journal. I could make judgment calls on sources—and choose the best ones.

After graduation, I finally got a chance to study journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Then, as I had hoped, I landed a job as a reporter. To my surprise, the degree I used every day as a journalist was the one I’d earned at Centre. My writing was clean. I understood the background of events that some of my colleagues missed. I knew how to research, write, and rewrite.

Even more to my surprise, in 1984 I found myself working in public relations for Eastern Kentucky University. No longer a journalist, I now had to write and edit for a different mission. Once again, Centre’s Big Ideas helped me adapt and communicate—using technologies that didn’t even exist in 1976.

Oddly enough, when I applied for the PR job, the first question my supervisor asked was, “Well, Mason, have you ever read Paradise Lost?” He’d just finished a master’s degree in English specializing in John Milton. He wanted to talk about his favorite poet. As a matter of fact, I could chat about Milton, and I got the job.

After six years in PR, I went back to school to get graduate degrees in English. Again, late in life, I had to do grad-student stuff—reading, writing seminar papers, defending my dissertation. But in my years at Danville, I’d learned how to study. Things went well.

And now I’m an English teacher. This is my third career, and I find myself encouraging my students to become Renaissance people—to diversify their studies, read widely, think deeply. Boy, do I owe my advisors an apology! The three Big Ideas are as important as ever.

So have I made my Centre professors proud and achieved Renaissance-man status?

No way. I’m a long stretch from that ideal.

Yet I found myself leaving a bookstore recently with a copy of Ian MacNair’s Teach Yourself New Testament Greek under my arm. My wife asked, as she often does, “Have you lost your mind? You think you can learn that by yourself?”

Well, sure. After all, I’m a Centre graduate.

There is nothing I cannot learn.

Mason Smith ’76, is a lecturer in Eastern Kentucky University’s Department of English and Theatre. He and his wife, Marie Mitchell, have four children: Mitchell (14), Marlowe (9), Ruby Margaret (8), and Ingrid Marie (3). They spend most of their free time on soccer fields of various sizes.

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