“They brought me into the rooms where it was happening. They also brought me into the rooms where not much was happening, where ordinary people were living their very ordinary lives.”
Elizabeth Drummond is Director of the Marymount Institute and Associate Professor of History.
“Befriend books.” I suspect that few people remember what the university president said at their New Student Orientation, those first days on campus when we’re mostly focused on getting settled in the dorm, meeting friends, and finding our way to the buildings where we’ll have our classes. And let’s be honest: there are so many people talking at you, and the speeches are mostly pretty anodyne, trite, and full of platitudes – so it’s not surprising that the words go in one ear and out the other. But I remember what our president said…or at least I remember part of it.
Father Leo O’Donovan greeted my Georgetown class by encouraging us to “befriend books, befriend the library, befriend books.” I was already an avid reader of all sorts of books. I was one of those kids who checked out the maximum number of books every week of the summer so that I could “win” the reading competition and who as a teenager spent more time shopping for books than for clothes. Vacations were tricky – how to bring just the right number of books so that I didn’t run out but not so many that my suitcase would be too heavy (ebooks have saved me there). I might have even hugged a book or two in my life!
Father O’Donovan was encouraging a love of reading…but not merely that. It was an invitation into an intellectual community – a challenge to engage with ideas, to seek out knowledge, and to pursue a life of inquiry. “Befriending books” meant more than just reading under a tree or with a flashlight in bed; it meant cultivating a sense of curiosity, a desire to learn, a willingness to question our received knowledge. It meant being an academic, whatever that looked like in your chosen major.
For me, even though I was in the School of Foreign Service and thought that I was headed into a career in diplomacy (the joke at Georgetown is that everyone wants to be president, except the SFS kids who all want to be Secretary of State), that meant being a historian. “Books” – shorthand for all sorts of textual sources, primary and secondary – transported me to other times and places. They brought me into the rooms where it was happening. They also brought me into the rooms where not much was happening, where ordinary people were living their very ordinary lives.
“Befriend books” meant not just reading about history but also practicing how to be a historian. My sophomore year, my history professor encouraged us to go and do research in the National Archives. As I sat in the reading room of the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, reading redacted State Department documents about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, I felt that thrill of working with “the actual thing,” the telegrams that had gone back and forth between State and the embassy as events unfolded quickly. And it was for me to make sense of it all, to develop my own historical interpretation. And that’s when I first realized that as historians, we also “befriend archives”!
When we first heard it, “befriend books, befriend the library” seemed a little silly. But as Father O’Donovan welcomed us to Georgetown that day, it was clear that “befriend books” was shorthand for embracing a life of the mind, for exploring the questions and ideas central to the Catholic intellectual tradition and essential for understanding the past and the present, and for creating meaning in our world. Still today, decades later (we don’t need to be specific about how many), “befriend books” is what I first think of when asked to give advice to young scholars. Yes, read, of course. But more important, embrace the journey!