So 21-year-old valedictorian Niall Slater charged his Wooster classmates at graduation 1976, invoking the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Thirty years later, the professor of classical studies continues to challenge others to “follow the gleam” of learning and inquiry.

His lifelong passion to promote liberal arts education stems from his student experience at Wooster, says Slater, who chaired the Classics Department at Emory University and serves as president of Phi Beta Kappa, the national honors society for undergraduates in the liberal arts.

“What is a liberal education? It is education that teaches people to teach themselves through their own process of discovery,” says Slater. “ It’s the ideal that Wooster’s Independent Study represents — that every learner is capable of asking new questions and discovering new knowledge.”

In fact, if he could have chosen anywhere to practice his profession, Slater says it would have been at a college like Wooster. While he is quick to praise the large research institution where he has spent the past 16 years, he admits that teaching the classics has been compared to enrolling in the Roman Army. “A Roman Army recruit would enlist in Italy and serve in Northern Africa or on the Danube River. Academic life is like that. You go where they send you.”

And “where they send you” might also include the tributaries of a changing field of study. For example, there was a time when the classics were taught only in Greek or Latin. Today they are taught in translation, in order to attract and serve more students. Slater also reaches more students by teaching areas that he dubs “on the edge of the classical canon,” including Roman comedy and art.

Why is learning the classics important? “So many students don’t think beyond the horizon of now,” he says. “You need distance from our culture to examine our culture. As Archimedes said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.’ If you want to move the modern world, you need another place to stand — another perspective.”

Slater has stayed connected to Wooster through his service on the Alumni Board, the Atlanta Leadership Group, the Scots Career Network, and as an Alumni Admissions Representative.