The 50th anniversary of the founding of Southwest Minnesota State University is a cause for celebration, one that can manifest itself in a variety of expressions–intellectual, academic, literary, athletic….and musical, as well.

Sunday afternoon we are celebrating this important anniversary with an all-American orchestral concert that features not only the luminous names of American composers such as Aaron Copland and George Gershwin — notable eminences certainly — but also members of our own luminaries, such as Peter Lothringer and Robert Butler Whitcomb, who will be hearing his music well into his 96th year.

The program begins with our beleaguered national anthem and ends with the music of arguably the most financially successful composer of all time — John Williams, whose music has adorned American films too many to number. It will be a sumptuous feast of American music, to be sure!

It should give one pause that our university on the prairie exists at all, as it comes out of a time in our political and cultural life, very different from our own, where universities in rural towns were built not because they made good economic sense, but that access to education and culture and the life of the mind was deemed important for ALL citizens of a state to enjoy, not just those in the big cities.

There was a commitment to art, literature, and the general living, breathing American culture at large that compelled frugal legislators to have imagination and a sense of adventure and establish a university in a rural town in southwestern Minnesota, against all odds.

From that one almost impetuous gesture, many great things came forth — literature, poetry and writing that had few equals in other quarters of the state, an experimental learning environment that stressed intercollegiality and intellectual cooperation across disciplines, and notable examples of excellence in theater, art and music.

The Southwest Minnesota Orchestra came to be shortly after the inception of classes at SMSU and has been going strong for almost all of those 50 years, with a very well-stocked music library and its own resident string quartet–the Meadowlark Quartet.

None of this would have been possible if those legislators in the 60s had been “prudent”…..no Ed Evans, no Bill Holm, no Howard Mohr, no Bart Sutter (who was a graduate) and ….no Southwest Minnesota Orchestra.

As SMSU gears up for its next 50 years, it would be good to ponder how and why we need to keep the whole enterprise going. “Isn’t online education good enough? Aren’t brick and mortar classrooms a thing of the past? Do we really need to hear all of that Mozart?” are questions that do not make the spirit soar, nor do they unfortunately, really get to the heart of the matter.

For if we want a country that can “compete,” it must not only do so with its powerful dollar or more powerful guns. It must do so with its heart and mind….and this is the true domain of university life. Yes, equipping students to find good jobs — a laudable goal. But equipping those students’ minds with critical thinking, a knowledge of when someone is conning them, the ability to smell fake news when it really is fake and yet more importantly, why listening to Mozart makes you smarter and reading Homer and Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens is time much better spent then surfing the Internet — that is our ultimate goal.

For if we can instill a sense of the exquisite pain of a Mozart modulation, the layered joys of a Stevens’ quatrain, the ocular wonder of a painting by Ed Evans, Bob Dorlac or Nick Schleif, then we will have citizens of our great country worthy not only of our flag and anthem, but the high moral purpose and commitment to freedom with which our nation began.

Dr. Daniel Rieppel serves as Associate Professor of Piano at Southwest Minnesota State University and Music Director of the Southwest Minnesota Orchestra.