'Emancipators of the Human Mind'

 As he got go older, J. Frank Dobie talked more and more about the importance of having a free mind.

It was a departure. He’d spent decades trying to convince students — and ordinary Texans — that they should aspire to having a well stocked mind.

Dobie said he’d like to make — I like that word — a book on Emancipators of the Human Mind. He had in mind Emerson, Jefferson, Thoreau, Paine, Newton, Arnold, Voltaire, Goethe and the gang.

I suppose the political climate of the country is weighing on me, but I wish he’d gotten around to that book.

Dobie wrote a friend:

 

If I were teaching any course now I’d never let my auditors forget the joy of having a liberated mind. Yet, during the period when I was preaching the gospel of the right of a people to its ‘cultural inheritance,’ I must have neglected considerably the liberation of minds … I am aware (now) of a great deal of tawdriness and paltriness and meaninglessness in this alleged ‘cultural inheritance.’”

 

Dobie was an old man then, and I’m an old man now. More and more, I think each generation has a responsibility to get rid of bad ideas. That is, each person has a responsibility to free his or her mind.

• Source: Lon Tinkle, J. Frank Dobie: The Makings of an Ample Mind; Austin: The Encino Press, 1968, p. 7. These words are on Dobie’s grave: “I have come to value liberated minds as the supreme good of life on earth.”