State of the University Address:
Drew in the World, The World within Drew
September 26, 2007
"We are not put in the world to sit still and know;
we are put in it to act." Woodrow Wilson
The state of the university is strong. There is a tremendous burst of energy on campus, some stemming from the sounds of new construction, but more from the addition of first-year students, more highly selected, more diverse, and more international than ever before in the university’s history. The library just opened a permanent and very impressive exhibit of faculty scholarship, students are initiating a journal of undergraduate research, and the college just received its highest-ever ranking in academic reputation, much as I find these reputational rankings idiotic. The new Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict is opening this month; Drew will host an unprecedented number of lectures and conferences this year, ranging from 12th Century religious practices to the politics of terrorism to the marketing of popular culture; the College is considering dynamic new ideas for a crucially common first-year undergraduate experience and a new major in Environmental Studies; the Theological School has successfully adopted the PhD in Religion and has established a center on global Christianities; Caspersen is gaining new dynamism as a graduate school and becoming a locus of interdisciplinary and advanced learning for the entire university. And within Caspersen, a Master of Arts in Teaching program will inaugurate a new era of school-university partnerships at Drew. Last Sunday we inaugurated Drew’s membership in the new Landmark Conference, a conference that will be a model for the right and important place of athletics in an academic setting. The new faculty in all three of our schools are simply outstanding individuals, each of them tremendously gifted and ready to add their original ideas to a university always noted for innovation. Our financial results for the fiscal year just ended are positive and we have gained some very distinguished new trustees. I spoke last fall on this occasion about adding some pep to the University’s step, and now I am running hard to keep up with all of you.
Even so, the day comes when the unavoidable, daunting, ultimate question must be posed, by institutions as by individuals: Why do I exist? A university exists, the famed 1930s president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, would say, to convey civilization, its learning, achievements, and values, from one generation to the next. Hutchins’ opponent in educational theory, John Dewey, would say rather that a university exists less to convey the past than to forge the future, to teach students how to grapple with the world.
As I enter my junior year, choosing to major in Drew itself and agreeing with both Hutchins and Dewey, I ask you to spend the next twenty minutes with me in thinking why Drew exists and what it can add to the academic and social ecology of the United States and the world.
History tells us something startling about higher education and about Drew. Most colleges and universities that were established, as ours was, by religious denominations, intended learning as a means for improving the human estate, spiritually, ethically, and practically. Learning was supposed to be good for something. Yet as they developed through the twentieth century, these institutions became increasingly divorced from the surrounding society; in the words of one pundit, country clubs where physics and history replaced golf and tennis. The reasons for this insularity are worth considering.
First, these were campuses on lovely lawns, places that suggested the quiet required for learning, retreats reminding us that the forerunners of universities were monasteries. The hush of a campus, punctuated by the peal of bells, lures us into contemplation, but also may take us away from social urgencies.
Here’s a second reason the campus sometimes seduces us away from the immediate world. We human beings, when we have the luxury of thought, fall in love with it. That is, there is a purely hedonistic aspect to college, and to speak exclusively of learning as a means for social engagement too easily ignores this important pleasure principle. A new book by Stanley Fish criticizes an overly moralistic idea of education in its very title, "Save the World on Your Own Time." Indeed, we acknowledge and celebrate the joy of creative and deep thinking.
But left to itself, learning as pure pleasure is decidedly incomplete and even potentially narcissistic. Pleasure must complete itself in purpose. We inhale learning, but that requires that we exhale as well, that we enact our learning by employing it for the public good , that we create a continuing commerce between the academic grove and the city of urgent history—not only applying our learning but informing our learning by lived experience.
I spoke of this need two years ago in my very first address to the university community and again at my inaugural. Today, I wish to nominate engaged learning—learning and action—as the University ’s defining characteristic. The community itself has led me to this decision, and I want to take a few minutes to tell you about yourselves because, in truth, you have nominated this theme to me.
Here’s one instance: For the last two years, we have been grappling with the future of the sciences at Drew. Our faculty had been longing for much-postponed better facilities, and I asked for a vision first that would guide us in our material choices. The report on the future of the sciences is excellent, and I congratulate the faculty and the provost on it. But my point here is made by the emphatic connection in the report between science and the common good.
"Our dependency on carbon fuels has led to global warming," the report states. Or again, "The success of the human genome project raises concerns regarding access of health care and the use of information about a person’s ‘genetic burden’ in decisions." The authors of the report assert more generally, "not only must we develop the next generation of scientists, but we must also cultivate an American citizenry that will formulate and champion prudent public policies." This linking of science and society creates opportunities for students to bring their scientific training to bear on all the ills that flesh is heir to.
Elsewhere in the College, a faculty curriculum committee has been rethinking our general education requirements. While their recommendations have not yet been finalized, a consensus is forming around the notion of learning and doing, of enacting knowledge as part of the educational experience in the college.
The Theological School, more than any other part of the university, has always maintained a connection between learning and service, but in recent years, it seems to me, this has gone well beyond ministerial service, or perhaps through ministerial service, to a wider range of social concern.
Every second year Master of Divinity student is expected to be involved in a church or other supervised setting. Some choose to work in Newark with HIV-AIDS agencies, others volunteer with United Nations NGOs. The program allows them to hone their ministerial skills in a supervised setting. In helping others, they gain invaluable insight into their own abilities.
This form of engaged learning is also visible in the College. As I speak, students in Andrea Talentino’s "Development in Africa" course are learning about microfinance in the classroom in preparation for a January seminar in Cameroon, where they will take what they’ve learned and apply it hands on. They will travel into a remote part of the country for three weeks to meet people who have developed business proposals, for example women in farming cooperatives who are in need of equipment for their businesses, such as grinders to speed the processing of cassava, a common root vegetable. After they return to the U.S., the students, who will have raised money prior to their departure, will meet to decide which proposals to fund, and the money will be dispatched to the groups, giving tangible meaning to their classroom learning.
We have an impressive current inventory of learning and doing, but we could learn and do still m ore. What if we were not only to step up our Study Abroad opportunities but add to them Study Beyond, which might mean tutoring in Irvington or otherwise engaging in environments that would add to a student’s—or a faculty member’s—previous perspective? And what if we were to add a service aspect to some of our DIS and Study Abroad semesters, as Chris Taylor has done in Egypt, or as Andrea Talentino and Kathleen Madden will be doing in Cameroon? What if we were to ask students not only to learn a language but then to employ it in some way, whether translating at the United Nations or tutoring a Spanish-speaking young person in Morristown or Dover? What if, in the most natural ways, then, we were to make Drew matter beyond Drew? And what if, at the same time, we were to make our learning bear upon everything we do within Drew, becoming at once extensively global and intensively local?
But perhaps even more than our faculty, our students long for engagement. When I am asked what has most surprised me since I arrived at Drew, my response is immediate —the number of students requesting funds from me to engage in voluntary acts of social betterment. Habitat for Humanity relief work in Louisiana, Human Rights Week events, and the Drew Honduras Project to name a few.
Do you see what I am getting at? Across the university, there’s an interest in employing learning to meet social challenges. When we add it all up, we find ourselves sitting upon a consensus.
This was borne out when we hired an outside professional to help us craft a stronger identity for Drew. He interviewed students, staff, faculty, and trustees and independently came up with this form of engagement as the quality that Drew has to provide. Our proximity to New York and other urban areas, the diversity of our part of the country so that it is something of a preview of the American 21st century and a microcosm of the world’s population, our university’s heritage, and, most, our individual goals as intellectual citizens—all led him to the conclusion that I, far more informally, was reaching.
Many universities have combined public scholarship and service learning, but the truly engaged university has yet to be achieved in my view. Let me say clearly what we do not mean. We do not mean general volunteerism, though we will always encourage it. We mean a synergy, a vivid connection, between classroom learning and lived experience. We mean taking your learning into the world and we also mean bringing back into the formal academic setting what can only be learned by experiences beyond the classroom.
And so, I propose today engaged learning as Drew’s calling card to the world. Beyond that, I want to suggest a first emphasis within that theme, one that has arisen naturally and appears to unite the campus remarkably. This is environmental studies and sustainability, with our own campus as a test of our learning.
I am the very last person who could lead such an effort, as I can attest by reference to my mother. My mom was a child of the twentieth century, thrilled by the accoutrements of modern living. Her idea of paradise on a warm summer evening was to blast the air conditioning and then crawl into bed under an electric blanket. I am my mother’s son, and my favorite number has been 8, with a V in front of it. As I recently wrote in one of my columns in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I prefer nature in iambic pentameter and a friend once asked whether I had suffered a childhood trauma in a park or a woods.
But even I am learning of the effects of each of our habits on the natural environment, this gorgeous globe of gases that is not only the human environment but the scene and support for all living creatures. For many years we have been mindful of our campus practices in this regard—our new residence hall, for instance, is being constructed as one of Madison’s first truly green buildings—and our science and social science faculty has increasingly provided course offerings on environmental issues. Now faculty from across the disciplines are encouraging us to rethink and improve our curriculum and simultaneously to apply our understandings to this very campus—a campus that we call The Forest, but which also requires all the energy usage of urban civilization. And to this challenge I urge us to say yes, knowing it will take much persistence, ranging from major policy decisions to our individual habits.
In my address last year, I emphasized three immediate actions: centering, ranging and mastering. I’d like to briefly revisit them to provide an update on our progress and to illustrate how all three of them contribute toward the concept of an engaged university.
Centering meant the creation of new interdisciplinary places in the university that would bring together different kinds of expertise to study problems that do not fit within one or another discipline or department. We have important centers already—the Center on the Holocaust and Genoc ide Studies, that constantly thrills me with its programs, and a new center within the theological school on global Christianities, emphasis on the plural. But I wanted last year to emphasize new all-university centers. And now we have one center opening this very month, a Center on Religion, Culture and Conflict, and an initiative that could grow into a Center for Sustainability.
The new centers will bring Drew more fully into the world and world leaders to Drew, and will otherwise challenge us to use our learning to understand conflict and promote peace. And the complementarity with a center for environmental studies is very compelling—that is, one center for the relation of people and nations, another for the relation of the human and the natural worlds—though of course each involves the other. And these two centers may be followed by a pairing that is also logical and complementary, one that formalizes our civic engagement effort and another on learning, teaching, and academic innovation—again, Drew in the world and the world within Drew.
I also emphasized ranging last year to underscore the need to focus on diversity in the broadest sense of the word, and proposed a Drew National Faculty as a way to encourage and fund the appointment of scholar-teachers of distinction from diverse backgrounds, who will enlarge our understandings. I am pleased that this initiative was endorsed by the University Senate and will come before the Board of Trustees in October. Once approved, it will formalize a process that has already yielded two wonderful and dynamic new colleagues—Tiphanie Yanique and Jim Tatum.
Finally, I spoke last year of creating a limited number of Master’s programs that would move the undergraduate learning of the liberal arts into the practical arts, the social spheres, as we are about to do with the creation of the Master’s in Teaching, which begins this coming summer with a very exciting curriculum that itself will emphasize globalism and engagement. Others will follow—perhaps a new low-residency Masters in the writing of poetry, a very high residency MA in playwriting, and possibly a Masters in Islamic Studies which we are just now beginning to consider. Such programs will allow our students to extend the liberal arts into the practical arts and empower them and their learning across the spectrum of social sectors. And thus Caspersen, heretofore a small graduate school in the Humanities, will become not only a graduate school but the home for higher and interdisciplinary learning throughout the range of the University. Thus too, the University will engage our learning in the world, responding to needs, shaping our society.
Engagement, of course, may seem more natural in the social sciences than in the bench sciences or the arts and humanities. And of course I do not mean to say that everyone need participate equally or even at all—we mean to encourage opportunities, not to create an engagement gulag! But I believe that faculty and students in fields beyond the social sciences may well surprise themselves if they give themselves an opportunity to think about what they would wish to do in this regard, and we will find institutional means to encourage that.
Further, emphasizing Drew’s ties to the world beyond it should not imply neglect of our own campus world. Indeed, with the environment, with diversity, with everything we do, we must walk the talk and make our rhetoric our local reality. With Dawn Williams, Dean of Student Life, and our SGA reps, we hope to develop a stronger code for an ideal of community. If we are going to practice civic engagement, then, we must start with ourselves.
Just so, I have asked Professors Sara Webb and Fred Curtis to lead our effort in environmental studies, with Sara chairing a committee on curricular development and Fred leading efforts that will unite students, staff, and faculty in campus sustainability; and in the coming months we will appoint a full-time individual on the staff side to monitor and extend our effort to make our campus a model for environmental responsibility and innovation.
I’ve also asked the firm of Mundo and McGuinn, that is Professors Phil Mundo and Patrick McGuinn, to lead the overall engagement initiative in alternate semesters this year as we get started. They and a representative all-university committee will not only help us to sharpen our definition of engagement but will lead a search for a senior faculty member who has been successful elsewhere and who can work fulltime on engagement here.
We have come a long way together in a few years. That is not because I arrived with a new set of ideas but because this community over decades, and especially during Governor Kean’s presidency, established great traditions and set inspiring goals to which we have brought only some new applications. I came to Drew because I liked what you had done. Now, though, I love this place, and that draws me closer to those of you whose institutional love and loyalty easily predates and humbles my own. I’m not here to create ideas out of my own poor brain, but to help organize the prodigious energy of Drew students, faculty and staff. The future of the university will be shaped by your passions and your persistence.
This new beginning then, in engaged learning, in truth is less a beginning than a natural extension of what Drew already is and who we already are. But another New Jersey governor who was also a university president, Woodrow Wilson, warned, "So long as instruction and life do not merge in our colleges, so long will the college be ineffectual." And so I also am enamored of Drew University’s potential to be still more, still better, still more full of life and still more influential in impacting the life beyond 36 Madison Avenue.
Together we proclaim the efficacy of liberal-arts learning without at all denying the joy and more subtle efficacies of learning for its own sake. We do not hesitate to acknowledge that unapplied research has often had the greatest human consequences. We affirm that the desire to understand and the desire to create, without any specific aim, are as human as breathing and require encouragement particularly in a society that can easily become all too pragmatic. But it does not follow that we should banish the world and its urgencies fr om the academic halls and lawns. The pure can become too easily puerile, and it is a fatal mistake to make irrelevance an automatic virtue. We are here on earth not simply to be but to forge a purpose; we are here at Drew not simply to learn but to act, to enact learning.
