Each commencement season, I enjoy surveying the landscape of addresses and essays which in one way or another attempt to provide vision and challenge for the year’s graduates. Most are utterly predictable, along the lines of “reach for the stars” or “make the world a better place.” But a few go deeper, some reminding us of misplaced priorities or of the too easily forgotten purposes of genuine education.

Consider the address of Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who undoubtedly was speaking both to graduates and their parents when he repeated the often asked questions, “What’s my son going to do with this literature major?” or “What’s my daughter going to do with her degree in film studies, or in government?” Such questions seem all the more pertinent during tough economic times, when job prospects appear slim in every vocational field.

He went on to cite several examples of Wesleyan alumni who are putting their liberal arts degrees to work in remarkable ways – doing Arabic translation, writing film scripts, starting up businesses of various sorts, and working in transformational ways in government. Roth encouraged the graduates to “imagine opportunities not only for making money in the next six months, but for meaningful professional work and public service that will be rewarding for years to come.”

Of course he wasn’t ignoring the challenge of “paying rent and buying food” in the short run; but he was reminding them – and perhaps more importantly their parents – of the longer and wider horizon for their lives and work, especially at a time when the shorter term prospects appear so dim. With massive convulsions in virtually every sector of society and industry, now is “exactly the right time for planning new initiatives,” with unprecedented opportunities for creative and bold college graduates to design and develop new pathways in uncharted territory.

I’m reminded of a quip from my friend Augie, who had been very successful in the telecommunications industry and was looking for his next challenge: “I want to get into something that I know absolutely nothing about!” Augie understood the possibilities for those whose education and experience had not led them into a narrowing channel but rather had equipped them to learn and absorb, to see what those steeped in particular fields could not see, and then to find ways to do things differently and profitably and beneficially.

This is exactly what enabled another good friend to build one of the most successful financial derivatives trading companies in history: Joe, a philosophy major in college, detected interconnections and misalignments in the derivatives markets and created trading theory and practice that brought order and stability to the marketplace and enabled his company to reap huge financial rewards.

This has been one of the traits of Covenant alumni over the decades. At Covenant they come to delight in what they’re learning in their literature and art and psychology and biology studies, all taught in a broadly interdisciplinary context. And then they put all that to work in a myriad of creative ways, often through odd and unexpected pathways of God’s providence – learning connected to doing, wrapped in the assurance of God’s calling for all of life.

The path is undoubtedly meandering, with one thing leading to another and then another. When parents express their concern about what their daughter or son will “do” with a French or history major, I sometimes respond, just half-jokingly, “There’s never been a Covenant grad who hasn’t done something next!” It’s true – they all find their ways, and the first job, or even the first two or three, won’t make or break a lifetime’s calling. In fact those early halting steps can be the winding road to God’s longer-term blessing, either in that very field or in another that they discover along the way. Before he entered the financial markets, my friend Joe, the philosophy major, spent several years after college driving a bus, working as a deputy sheriff, and selling zip code directories. Now that’s what you do with a philosophy major!

Then consider an essay by John McArthur and Jeffrey Sachs. Referring specifically to a report on the challenges of research and development in the area of sustainable development, the authors articulate broader principles about the kind of education most needed in the years ahead.

The problems are complex and interconnected, spilling across academic disciplines and often across national borders. Solutions will require theoretical knowledge and practical problem-solving skills, including the capacity to build and lead teams drawn from a variety of disciplines. They will require leaders who can cross boundaries of science, policy, geography, theory, and practice. In other words, they will require a new generation of sustainable-development practitioners.

Unfortunately, however, at a time when so many of the world’s most-challenging issues require solutions drawing from across academic and professional disciplines, colleges remain overwhelmingly focused on single-discipline studies. While specialists are still essential, and nobody can master all the relevant interconnected areas of expertise, vastly more professionals should have basic knowledge spanning crucial areas like natural science, health science, engineering, public policy, and management. That basic knowledge is needed to harness and coordinate the insights that are constantly emerging from a relevant range of fields.

Identifying the critical need for “far-sighted, cross-disciplinary decision making as a basic need for a more prosperous future” and “for ‘generalists’ who can bridge the work of specialists,” McArthur and Sachs highlight an important feature of effective education, a feature that has always characterized a Covenant education.

Whether in the core curriculum or in the depths of major fields of study, Covenant professors lead our students to understand how the various academic disciplines relate to and inform one another. We should expect such mutual relation and informing, given our foundational convictions about the beauty and variety of God’s creation. The biologist and the artist gaze with wonder on the same world, and their respective insights provide a fuller understanding than either discipline alone could. Ditto for literature and business, or physics and philosophy, or music and psychology. In this interdisciplinary endeavor, we at Covenant benefit from our smaller size, which enables faculty from across the disciplines to engage with one another regularly, not only team-teaching courses but also occupying offices on shared hallways, so that our theological understanding blossoms into active interaction and mutual delight.

If McArthur and Sachs are right, and I think they are, Covenant students are being prepared exactly as they should be for what lies ahead. We don’t do what we do for purely pragmatic reasons; our belief that college education should be interdisciplinary from beginning to end is convictional and flows from a biblical and Reformed theology of creation. But it’s nice to hear such confirmation that our educational philosophy and practice are in the sweet spot of opportunity and need for the future.

In the various segments of my own professional life, and particularly now at Covenant, I am keenly aware of the benefits of interdisciplinary perspectives. Not a day goes by when I don’t see and draw upon the connections among my formal philosophy studies, my years of teaching college, my experiences in business and management, and my pastoral ministry – not to mention my early training as a pianist and my participation in the college men’s chorus and in intercollegiate athletics.

So, what will my sons do with their liberal arts degrees (literature, French, music, and economics, by the way!) and their interdisciplinary mindsets? Anything that comes along, in God’s providence. Already Kathleen and I are watching with amazement as their pathways unfold, in ways that we couldn’t possibly have predicted. And we already see the powerful impact of their learning to read novels and poetry, their understanding of how language works, their insights into harmony and rhythm, and their grasp of economic models and financial systems, as they pursue vocations that, frankly, aren’t straight-line functions of their academic majors. We can only imagine what that will look like across their lifetimes.

These are great days for Covenant College as we equip our students for work and service to the glory of God. It’s good to hear from folks like Roth, McArthur, and Sachs, who help us understand why no students anywhere are better prepared for the road ahead.