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Butterfly Dreaming

Remarks for groundbreaking, Catherine Cater Hall

NDSU, 12 September 2017 | Tom Isern, NDSU DIstinguished Professor of History

Twenty-four-hundred-odd years ago the Chinese philosopher, Chuang Tzu, awoke from a vivid dream. He had dreamt he was a butterfly. It had seemed so real, so carefree. “Now I do not know,” Chuang wrote, “whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

This is a butterfly year in the Red River Valley of the North. More specifically, we are graced this year with fluttering clouds of painted ladies, butterflies spangled with dots and colors suited to the autumnal scheme. There is a logic to this. Painted ladies, it seems, are capable of reproducing on the foliage of corn and beans, and our landscape today is almost wholly garbed in those crops. In a Roundup-Ready countryside we have no more bobolinks, but we have the painted ladies; something is lost, something is gained.

In 1982 the Faculty Lecture at North Dakota State University was delivered by Catherine Cater, who began her talk, on the power and pervasiveness of myth, by quoting Chuang Tzu. Catherine’s was a life that diverged from her original plan. Perhaps something was lost. Certainly something was gained. In just a few minutes I would like to reflect with you on loss, gain, and the life of Catherine Cater. And then, as we break ground, I hope we can resolve to build, here, upon the legacy she left us.

Yesterday, in an elevator, I mentioned to one of our department heads that I was putting together some remarks about Catherine’s life, and he allowed that he had never heard of her. I might just refer you to the program for biographical basics, but let me supplement those with my own remarks.

Catherine Cater was born a century and a few months ago in New Orleans. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the institution where her father was professor and dean, Talladega College, a historically black, liberal arts college undergoing integration. She experienced both the historical trauma and the literary richness that resulted from competing myths about the lineage and fate of Southern society.

This experience led to her 1945 doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, which explores the social attitudes of five Southern novelists — Faulkner and four others — as revealed in their fiction. Therein Catherine writes,

“Like Chekhov’s cherry orchard, the South is a composite of myth and memory, of beauty and of sordidness, and if the beauty lies in the warmth of courtesies and of hospitalities, much of its sordidness lies in the widespread economic poverty ... of the people gathered about the courthouse square on a Saturday morning, or peering out of the mill windows late of a Saturday evening.”

The Southern novelists, Catherine argued, although enmeshed in a past that still bound the region, were aware that things were stirring, and that the transitions of the postwar era would pose possibilities as well as dangers.

Catherine wanted to be a part of that, possibly through a career in social work, possibly through some sort of activism. She wrote a poem entitled “Here and Now,” which was picked up by Langston Hughes and included in his landmark anthology of 1951, The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949. From that work I now read.

I am not accustomed to lingering over images of butterflies in my speeches, except when, in my History classes, my adherence to chaos theory moves me to invoke the butterfly analogy.

That reference, however, might now be appropriate. For I cannot tell you just what turned Catherine Cater from overtly social and political preoccupations into a literary and philosophical path. I know there were some rocks along the way, having to do with anti-communist hysteria and with the generally restive character of the academy in the 1950s and 1960s, turmoil extending from her early teaching years in Michigan and New York through her thirteen years at Moorhead State College. So in 1962 she crossed the river to NDSU, where she remained even after her official retirement in 1982; she had a hard time quitting, thank God.

It is possible I have overstated the turn in Catherine’s life. Here at NDSU, she still sought, every day, to change the world. She sought to change the world by quickening and influencing the minds of young men and women. I do not have to reiterate the testimonials of Catherine’s students who benefited from her instruction and guidance in her classes and in the Scholars Program; those declared sentiments are the reason we are naming a building for her, and talking about her today. Her pride, if ever she were guilty of such a sin, derived from seeing all those young people take wing and leave her.

A dedicated teacher and conscientious scholar, surely, but I would be remiss if I were to leave the matter at that. We should remember, today, what Catherine Cater stands for.

First — the liberal arts — the liberal arts as the intellectual heart of the land-grant university and as the basis of a good life. The mandate for the liberal arts in the land-grant university has been unequivocal since 1862. A century later, when Catherine came to NDSU, the university was in growth mode, but neither then, nor in the several decades that followed, were the liberal arts accorded respect and resources commensurate to the mandate. I would say that even today, with the general efflorescence of our research university, and with a president who voices unprecedented understanding of the liberal arts mission in the twenty-first century, it is still a struggle — but I say this, of course, as an unabashed proponent of the liberal arts. Catherine carried the torch. I declare today my sincere homage to her faith.

Second — dignity — the demonstrated capacity to steer herself with grace and aplomb through difficult straits. Catherine carried several bundles that others might have categorized as burdens or disadvantages. She had none of that. She expected to be taken on her own terms, as a scholar, a teacher, and a person. She got on with it.

Third — an unwavering faith in the potential and humanity of our young people. Be a good teacher — model the scholarly life, place your moral compass on exhibit, give your heart to the students who ask for it, and some who do not — and their flight will be your reward.

Today we make a place for another generation of students, scholars, and citizens. God help us to provide them not only with bricks and mortar but also with the elevating wind on their wings.

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