Issue of
November 4, 1998
 
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Roberts: Changing the
world a generation at a time
BY LISA TREI
A life of the mind, a
sense of community and a search for justice are the three
core values that guide Professor Eric Roberts.
"It has been critical
to me that the ideas I have and the communities I'm part
of are somehow focused on making the world a better
place," the computer science professor told an
audience in Memorial Church on Oct. 14. "Studying
the world is fine, but the point is to change it because
there's a lot of things that need to be changed."
Roberts, a popular teacher
on campus, talked about his interests and principles as
part of the ongoing lunchtime speaker series called
"What Matters to Me and Why."
Roberts pointed to several
influences -- his Quaker family, his academic upbringing
and the turbulent 1960s -- as the factors that helped
mold his values.
The son of a college
professor, Roberts said he was pushed toward an
intellectual life from his childhood. "I was
challenged from a very early age to think," he said.
"Thinking about things mattered; reason would change
the world."
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But Roberts said he also
was encouraged to integrate "a life of the
mind" with living in the real world.
"Unfortunately, that term has a certain connotation
in some people's minds with the idea of a disconnected
scholarship or intellectualism that is somehow divorced
from the process of living in the world," he said.
"That's not at all what I mean." Roberts said
that it is "the capacity of the human mind and all
the things it is capable of doing" that can
"make this world a more exciting, more interesting,
more fascinating place."
Part of this process,
Roberts said, also means sharing intellectual pursuits
with like-minded people. "If you [live] a life of
the mind in isolation, you can't get nearly as far than
if you're engaged in some community in which people are
sharing that pursuit," he said. "It's certainly
one thing that draws me to a university -- the best place
to live in that kind of community."
Roberts said that his
spiritual and political beliefs were largely influenced
by his grandmother, Ruth Roberts, a Quaker. After raising
three sons, one of whom was Roberts' father, she
"started living her life in a very deliberate way to
make things better," he said. For example, after
World War II, she joined a Quaker relief service to help
rebuild Germany.
A belief that a community
of like-minded people could make the world a better place
was passed on to Roberts, who entered Harvard University
as an undergraduate in 1969. In the 1960s, he said,
"there was a political spirit abroad in the land,
and a spirit of change and hopefulness that was
manifested most strongly in the spirit of community. We
knew the world was changing."
Roberts explained that it
was largely young people who were making those changes
happen. "The students who sat down at the lunch
counter in North Carolina and started the civil rights
movement were students in college, no older than anyone
here," he told the audience. "I'm proud of that
time, and I've tried to carry those values with me."
Roberts said that he tries
to integrate his core values in his teaching. "It's
a way of doing good work because I can be part of the
creation of the next generation that can take on the
challenges we leave to it," he said.
While Roberts talked about
how much he likes teaching, he also expressed concern
about the values that dominate campus culture today and
how they are in conflict with his own principles.
"So many of my
students, unfortunately, seem to be obsessed with making
more money in a shorter amount of time than anyone
else," he said. "[It] seems to be part and
parcel of what goes on in Silicon Valley but, in fact, it
doesn't advance any of those underlying values. It
doesn't, for example, intrinsically contribute to a life
of the mind. As you narrow your focus so [that] you have
a single-minded goal, it doesn't help with that. It
doesn't focus on that sense of a search for justice,
because the inequality of wealth distribution has been
one of the greatest sources of injustice that we face.
And it doesn't foster community."
Despite working in such a
hyper-stimulated environment, Roberts says, as a faculty
member, he tries to promote what he thinks is important
through his own activities. At a time when people are
looking at the expanding possibilities of using computers
as teaching tools, Roberts says his job is not
compromised because he is not merely a conveyor of
information. "You could always just buy the textbook
and, if that were enough, then somehow teachers would
have been made obsolete years ago," he said.
"What I try to do as a teacher is model a sense of
excitement, get people motivated to work harder than they
think they can. That [gives] a sense of empowerment and
that can only come from a human connection."
Although Roberts says that
people today are disempowered by their own cynicism, he
remains hopeful. "There's a lot of good things
happening in the world," he says. "The world is
not in the same kinds of wars that it was [during] many
parts of this century. I actually think that many things
are getting better and we'll survive. There will always
be work to do. My search for justice is a longtime one
and I won't finish it, the next generation won't finish
it, but we all need to work toward it." SR
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