I wonder if it’s true for you, too, that Swarthmore looms larger in your life as more time passes. You can leave this place, but Swarthmore follows you out the door. Even if you were having an existential crisis at the time and couldn’t fully absorb Swarthmore, something important about it becomes part of you anyway. And I’m wondering now just what that important part is.

When I was a student here 40 years ago, I had it backward. I wanted to be loved by Swarthmore and was less clear about what I loved back. I felt enormous respect for its professors and my roommates and friends but a cursory, ill-informed, anonymous warmth for its Quaker tradition. I took for granted one key aspect of that Quaker tradition—the place it held for large dreams.

This message is not the one that I imagined Swarthmore was imparting to us, which was more along the lines of learning for learning’s sake. Although I was imbibing the official message, I’d also been eyeing that portrait of Lucretia Mott on the wall of Parrish Parlors. I regret that I didn’t pause then to have a good conversation with Mott about the importance of dreams. The conversation would have made her smile.

For Mott had many big dreams; one of them was the founding of the College, which she did with a few dozen others in 1864. Born in 1793, Mott was also active in the movement to abolish slavery and win for women the right to vote and be public citizens. She fought for prison and school reform and temperance and opposed war.

In the course of her activism against slavery, she was chosen to be a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London in 1840. There, she sat next to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the segregated women’s section outside the main gallery in which the conference was held, forbidden any formal participation. Later, Stanton credited a conversation with Mott about holding a national women’s right’s convention—a talk sparking the Senecca Falls, N.Y., conference in 1848 and the beginning of the 19th-century women’s movement.

In imaginary conversations with Mott, I’ve asked what issues she would take on today. I imagine her telling me that she’d sit down to talk some Quaker sense into President Vajpayee of India and General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Under the nose of an oil president, she’d work to end American dependence on oil-related military adventurism and call for all universities and colleges to follow Swarthmore’s lead in moving toward sustainable energy [see “Air Power,” p. 11]. She would protest the World Trade Organization’s policies of attaching “structural readjustment” requirements to loans to poor countries. The equity Mott sought between men and women would also be sought between the rich and poor peoples around the globe. And she would ask the question beyond the “equality question”—equal to what? Equal on whose terms? Equally caring or uncaring?

Swarthmore, bless its heart, puts a little bit of Mott in us all. In an age of postmodernism and identity politics, it passes on trace elements of the Enlightenment. It’s not that we all share exactly the same dream. But going through this place, it is difficult not to catch hold of, freshen, reflect on, critique, and enlarge your dream.

What is a dream? It’s a vision of the world as it isn’t yet. It’s a tendency to feel that ideals are as real as anything else. It’s a chronic allergy to the word “inevitable” as in “global warming is inevitable,” “Wal-Mart triumphalism is inevitable,” or “war is inevitable.” It’s a gravitational pull toward optimism, a faith that things can improve. Even in my classroom at the University of California-Berkeley, nondreaming students say, “flexible workweek? Subsidized child care? Sharing ethic at home? Work-life balance? You have to be kidding. Pipe dream.” Then, in the back row, a hand goes up. And bless God, it’s Mott. Or rather it’s her spirit, living on in the form of a young, gay man with green hair and earrings who is saying, “What are you talking about? Norway’s done all that long ago. It’s time we did it too.”

As a teacher, I’ve watched a parade of dreams—large, collective dreams of the 1960s; the fading dreams and then fractionalizing dreams of the 1970s and 1980s; and the more worried, private dreams of the late 1980s and early 1990s. For all of them, any dream worth its salt calls for a capacity to doubt itself. Dreamers need to be willing to criticize their dreams—to know when they’ve gone sour or been just plain wrong.

Clearly, too, a dream needs content. It would be a fatuous statement, indeed, to praise dreams of all sorts. After all, Genghis Khan had a dream. Adolf Hitler had a dream. No, I’m talking more particularly about dreams in a humanistic, progressive and—broadly speaking—Quaker tradition.

For though I am not a Quaker in any formal sense, I feel we need this tradition now more than ever. With the triumph of global capitalism, the rise to power of right-wing governments in many First World countries, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh dominating our airwaves, we need counterpoints. I know of no safer moral ground on which to stand than, broadly speaking, that of the Quaker tradition. And facing that moral ground, we discover a great paradox.

Although Quakerism was part of a religious tradition that led to the rise of capitalism, ironically it now offers solid moral ground on which to plant our feet in the attempt to counter the overreaching and negative aspects of it. In The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalism, Max Weber observed that Protestant religious sects—such as that of the Quakers—upheld the values of thrift, hard work, work as a calling, an orientation to this-worldliness (as opposed to monasticism)—all of which fueled a motivation to work hard, which led to the rise of capitalism. If Weber is right, Quakers were part of this story of the rise of capitalism; many prominent Quakers in the United States and Europe were, indeed, captains of industry and commerce.

With their beliefs and unusual customs, they also stood apart from the society they’d created. They were pacifists. They said, “thee and thou.” They refused to use the days of the week because they were named after Roman or pagan gods. They refused to sign letters, “Your Humble and Obedient Servant” because people should only be humble and obedient servants of God. In short, the Quakers were oddballs, and it was perhaps this quality that helped them establish a tradition antithetical to the negative elements of capitalism.

As my roommate from 40 years ago and lifelong friend, Caroline Hodges Persell ’62, observed, “The Quakers are antimarket. They were one of the inventors of the idea of ‘enough’—as in “We have enough stuff. We don’t need a sixth television or a second van,” especially as a model lifestyle to export to the Third World. The world’s ecosystem can’t survive it.

So we face a paradox. The Quaker tradition may have inadvertently led us into the mess of an overmarketized society. But more than most traditions, it can help get us out of it. Now, 40 years later, after the tests have been handed in, graded, and handed back, I think I’m finally beginning to see the main idea, the hidden curriculum—what Swarthmore has all along been trying to mean.

Lucretia Mott and Swarthmore, I thank you deeply for upholding the importance of dreams. It is what I love about you.

Arlie Hochschild is professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley. This article is adapted from her talk at Alumni Collection during Alumni Weekend 2002.