After a long career in television news on CBS and NBC, Harry Smith is spending his first year in retirement at Central College in Pella.
Coming from a blue-collar Illinois family, college football opened Smith's prospects of attending college. While playing for the Dutch, he said he had the classic liberal arts college experience. The 1973 graduate is currently teaching a course called “Commencement: the Beginning," as an executive in residence, where he hopes his students will experience the same curiosity about the broader world that was sparked for him.
“I have witnessed over the decades as a board member there, this narrowing of focus that, ‘I've got to study this to get this job, because that's the paycheck I want when I graduate,’” said Smith, who is a member of Central’s Board of Trustees. “Well, chances are that job may not even exist two years after you graduate, or five or ten, because the world is changing so, so quickly. So, my whole thing was, let's reembrace this liberal arts education, because you want your fingers in as many different places as possible, because that way the world becomes a lot more familiar than one that you are so, so narrowly focused on.”
Smith, an Emmy award-winner, said his students had “no clue” who he was at the start of the semester, but many signed up for his class at the insistence of their older relatives.
“They said, ‘Well, our parents said, if you were teaching a class, we had to take it, or should take it.’"
His course includes exercises such as asking students to bring in a stanza from a Walt Whitman poem and telling the class why it’s important to them, or lessons with titles like, “Your Brain on Art.”
“Whether anybody accepts that for the moment or not is immaterial. My sense is years from now, it might actually become valuable or a sort of a touchstone — ‘I remember when that guy talked about blank’ — so that's my hope.”
To hear this conversation, listen to Talk of Iowa, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Sam McIntosh produced this episode.
