Drew University and the Ecology of Education
Remarks of President Robert Weisbuch
Community Welcome
DrewUniversity
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Students, Staff, Faculty, Trustees, Honored Guests:
I like to begin talks with poor jokes, so here is the first of thousands I will provide to you.
The son or daughter says to the Mommy, “Mommy, mommy, I don't want to go to school today. Everyone hates me and makes faces at me and calls me names.”
“But Dear,” says the mother, “you must go back to school today.”
“Why, mommy, why?”
“Because, Dear,” says the mother, “you are the president.”
I heard that joke the other day and thought, my experience at Drew University has been the opposite. I can't wait to get here every morning. (Let me introduce two other people who can't wait for me to get here every morning: Candy Cooper, my wife, and Gabe Weisbuch, my son and mentor.) But it is true that I leave the house singing, for the generosity, the hope and the high spirits in which you have greeted me have amazed me. But even my distended ego knows that this enthusiasm has more to do with your love of the university. So too I am thrilled to be the excuse for bringing us all together; but what really matters is that we all are here together, experiencing ourselves as a community of scholars or learners, as a community of coworkers who are also a community of friends. I hope to gather you each term for town meetings where you will be the speakers and I the listener. Our university senate, which we will revivify, will then take the issues raised at our town meetings as part of their agenda for discussion and eventual action. Today only, it's my turn to introduce myself and to give you my sense of this university's reason for being.
I can get at it by what happened this past Sunday afternoon. Like today, it was one of these refulgent late summer afternoons that we have been enjoying, and as I drove up to Mead Hall it was natural to think of the goodness of life. I was arriving at an occasion, though, that might give rise to other and opposing thoughts. At Drew, over the last few years, our Center for Holocaust and Genocide Study has been working with Holocaust survivors who live in New Jersey to produce a remarkable book of writings created by the survivors themselves, a book called Moments in Time. As my colleague Bob Ready notes, these are not interviews but something braver still, self-inquiries, with each writer daring to face memories and render them in an act of painful bravery that is almost unimaginable to me.
I told the survivors and their families gathered at Mead Hall that, though this is merely my third month as president of Drew, I could be here for twenty years and never host a more distinguished group in Mead Hall. On their side, their gratitude to Bob and to Jackie Burke and Ellen Gerstle and, to a person, Drew University , made me swell with institutional pride, with absolute joy.
Somehow when I examine that joy, derived out of an event of extreme inhumanity, I believe the deep meaning and intention of Drew University is contained therein. In trying to locate that meaning, I circled around many aspects until I felt I had discovered the center of our reason for being at Drew.
First, I enjoyed the fact that this beautifully manufactured book will be going to all of the high schools in the state, and that it connects Drew to K-12. The abyss between public and higher education is greater in the United States than anywhere else in the world, and there is a growing consensus on this campus that Drew University needs to make a distinctive liberal arts commitment to working with the schools, something that I believe will give Drew an additional purpose and efficacy. Our teachers in the school too often are cut off from the kinds of active learning in the liberal arts that distinguish Drew, cut off from the ongoing discoveries and controversies of the academic disciplines that have their rich life here; and the result too often is relic knowledge and rote learning. In a situation where half the high school kids in America take advance placement and half the college kids take remedial course, Drew will take a lead in ending this senseless division. And so, having this remarkable book linking us with our colleagues in the schools, schools that here and throughout the United States send us their students to be our students, seemed to me a great thing. But it is not the central meaning.
Second, I was thrilled by the fact that our university, in this and many other ways, refuses that false ideal of the typical smaller university, the ideal of an oasis. As I have said to many of you before, as we turn in from Madison Avenue to campus, we experience that quiet that allows each of us the thrill of deep contemplation, the opportunity to explore and stretch our cognition. We inhale learning, but that requires that we exhale as well, that we enact our learning by employing it for the good of the human estate, 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. (Gene Lang) The university is certainly the critic of society, but it can be much more as well, not just the critic of someone else's reality but the maker, the constituent, of that reality. We do that in so many ways at Drew, and we will draw those ways into a total concept in the years ahead, and that will make Drew matter far beyond Drew. Yet even that larger purpose does not quite get at what I was feeling.
Third, I could not help but be struck by the fact that here we were at a university profoundly connected to the United Methodist Church with a Jewish president hosting Jewish survivors at a place where nearly half of our students are Roman Catholic and a happily growing number of students are Islamic—and where there are a bunch of informal atheists as well. This is beyond that, a community where some are gay and others straight, where some are pale and others are dark, where every difference that can create contention and make history a bloodbath seek a means to create, despite occasional difficulties and failings, a model community, a campus life that does not hide from difference but seeks it out, capitalizes on it; that does not hide from conflict and argument, but civilizes it and teaches the great and courageous art of listening, of active listening, of learning to fully empathize with views that may well oppose one's own—the act of education by which we each grow beyond our tiny enclosed frames and our pathetic moment of life to live with all humanity from the beginning of time and to forge a future where the only war will be the war of ideas. I thought of how far Tom Kean has taken us, a modest hero who personifies the liberal arts in action as well as anyone I could cite, but I also thought of how far we have to go—I hope, for instance, that we can double in the next few years those of us who are people of color in terms of students, staff, and faculty, and that we can improve dramatically our capacity to be a true rainbow campus where we embrace our many multi-everythings. But also I appreciated on that day how far we have come. I have been meeting with groups of faculty all summer and now with groups of students and visiting staff offices, asking what you hope I will further and what you hope I will change and improve. And what you have told me again and again in my first ninety days, when I have asked you what you best like about Drew, is that there is a warmth and deep good collective nature on this campus; and I certainly experienced it that day at the celebration for what the survivors had achieved. And yet even that did not get at the center of how this event spoke to Drew's deepest purpose.
Let me tell you what I finally landed upon. These Holocaust survivors and we, their friends, seemed unable at moments to decide between tears and laughter—and there was much laughter. (After we all spoke at that event, one woman came up to me and told me she was embarrassed in being included among the writings for she had herself not been a prisoner but had been hidden for two and a half years by a remarkable Christian family. “That's me in this photo on the cover,” she said. “Who are the people with you in the photo?,” I asked. “Those are my parents,” she said, “and this was my brother. They were killed.” The humility of one who felt her terrible tragedy nonetheless insufficient to be included among the others struck me anew with the greatest dismay. And yet she was so proud of her writing.) As was the elderly man who, holding the book, said to me, “We beat the evil once, and this book defeats the evil again.”
And it does, it really does—in Yeats's famous phrase, “gaiety transfiguring all that dread.” That is what we do at Drew, that is what a real education, an education in the arts and sciences, does. It discovers the means to maximize life's delights—our interests, our capacities, a dancer pirouetting, a scientist discovering, a talker like me yakking. But it also takes what life deals us—the mystery of humanly chosen evil in Nazi Germany or Rwanda or Bosnia or the natural disaster of New Orleans or the simple fact that each of us too soon must die—and it finds the means to be transformative, to wring from the most frustrating and deathly humiliations that nature and ill-nature visit upon us new life. And so that book. The content of these memories were so terrible, and yet the writing of them so exuberantly freeing.
And I found myself thinking, Oh take that lid off. When I became the chair of the English department at Michigan , I recall, a friend said, “good luck keeping the lid on.” But when you keep the lid on, the water boils over, as both cooks and Freud know. Take the lid off, expose the conflicts, express the frustrations, and make a plan.
We are making plans, you and I. We love this place—I have caught the fever, believe me—we love this place and the way we love it best is to challenge it and to dare ourselves to make it still more learned and more loveable, to be constantly dissatisfied and striving.
You have told me what you do love about Drew—the amazing relation between students and faculty and between students and staff that every single college profile book emphasizes. I will tell you that it is not just typical of smaller universities. I have visited hundreds of campuses and I want to tell you that this is the best, number one, that I have seen nothing quite like this willingness to cherish the individual anywhere else. Put some more wind in your sails, Drew—this is great, and terribly important.
You have also told me what frustrates you—sometimes a lack of resources to do all that we wish to do well, sometimes a sense that we have been provincial, cut off, stodgy. You have asked for more adventure, and I would ask to be judged by our capacity to provide it.
And so the other day, acting on recommendations made to us less than a month earlier, determined to make the submission of SAT test scores optional—did that because we want our admissions process to express our values and our values begin with respect for the wholeness of individuals. And yet we may be wrong, and we can afford to be adventurous because we will assess the results and be ready to reverse ourselves with no sense of injured pride if we are proven wrong, that this step will improve quality and diversity at once by removing a barrier to adventurous, high-potential learners who we dearly wish to engage in our community.
And next week, after some time of discouragement in the resources available to the sciences at Drew—and I consider the sciences integral to the liberal arts—a distinguished committee will visit us, including the head of HHMI's education division, the former chair of NSF's panel on women in the sciences, the head of undergraduate education at NSF, and two provosts who are scientists at universities like ours. They will work with us on the shape and character of the sciences at Drew and we will forge ahead.
Challenging as that will be, it is only a beginning toward something greater, a redefining of the liberal arts at Drew. It has been nearly sixty years since the last thorough and sustained attempt to think deeply about way we provide an education in the arts and sciences produced the Harvard Red Book, over fifty years since Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Andover, Exeter, and Lawrenceville worked on how to introduce the major disciplines; and we now intend to begin that sustained discussion anew and then visit our conclusions upon our practices. We are beginning with faculty study groups this term that eventually will engage the entire community; and don't you dare say, can Drew really do this? To paraphrase Scripture, if not Drew, then who?
But so much still challenges us—how to make a total concept out of that great new Arts center, how to give to our administrative staff the centrality it deserves as the lifeline of our intellectual village, how to bring faculty back into student life issues, how to integrate the vitality of the Theological School with the other two schools, when it has so much to offer. (Let me linger for a moment on that. Many of you who are undergraduates know very little about our Theological School , yet it is there that all of the big life questions that loom so large to all of us but particularly to college students—what does it mean to be human? Is it natural to be ethical? Who am I and what is it to be alive?—are the very heartbeat of the place. After 9/11 too, we have become newly aware of the failure of cross-cultural understanding, especially in religion; and the last presidential election demonstrated the deep interest of Americans in spiritual matters but also the fact that too often that interest is pandered to by the cheap prejudices of talk radio rather than uplifted by sustained and rigorous learning. How much the School has to offer all of us; and the Graduate School can provide that expertise and that love of fresh discovery at the highest level that can invigorate a campus and serve as a center for intellectual integrity;) we are losing so much by the current separations and there is so much to gain by collaboration that we simply must determine to make these three schools truly one world-class interacting university.
Speaking of theology and the sciences reminds me to close by saying why all of this matters, why Drew matters at this moment more than ever before.
Here we are in the most exciting age in the history of the biological sciences, the age of the new genetics, and yet these very discoveries raise timely questions about public policy and timeless questions involving human identity and ethical behavior. Thus the sciences, and religion, and social sciences, and the humanities and arts all come together, must come together if we are to face the new opportunities that are equally dilemmas. When was the last time this kind of moment took place? And here I will hazard the skepticism of my colleagues by suggesting that the other moment was called the renaissance, when Christianity rediscovered classical learning and moved it forward, when Leonardo combined the new sciences with the arts in unprecedented combination. This is a different renaissance, a renaissance for our own time.
It is not too much to say that one of its centers should be in the little town of Madison , New Jersey , for name for me another setting more apt for the redefinition of the liberal arts in our times. I have spoken with many of you about the decline of the liberal arts as the untold crisis, have said to you that, if I wanted to take over a nation, the best way would be for no one to know it was happening. Hundreds of lib arts universities have gone totally careerist, hundreds! And the percentage of BA's who major in the arts and sciences is barely half what it was thirty years ago. And yet the interest in the raw materials of the arts and sciences has never been greater as evidenced by the multitude of new cultural cable channels, the huge audience growth of NPR, the mega-bookstores just packed with readers.
But that evidence for the continuing potential audience for our kind of education is less important than this, the bedrock human need for the arts and sciences. This real education is more basic than food and water, for only learned expertise can guide us on how to share the earth's food and water and other resources more equitably, just as it is learning that can cure what ails us, physically and spiritually. And when I speak of the need for the arts and the sciences, I mean the democratic need, not for a chosen wealthy few but for the many, indeed for all. Education, we hope, is meant to be the means for individuals to realize themselves and raise themselves, whereas too often now in a world of tracking it is the means for keeping people in their place.
Let us dedicate our Drew not to fitting in but to shaking it all up, to becoming a fully engaged university. Let us work harder, listen better, embrace difference more completely and sincerely, care more, love more, and enact our learning to ensure the future good of our world. In my first column for the alumni magazine I wrote simply, this is exactly where I want to be. This is precisely what I wish to do. But if it is all about “I this” and “I that,” I will fail miserably. And so I will close my talk not with a grand statement but with a simple question: are we ready to attempt this together?
