Annual Address to the Community, October 12, 2006
October 12, 2006
What would it mean for our university to take a lead in a renaissance for the arts and sciences? I've used that phrase before to state an ambition we might set not only for Drew but for all universities and for the nation. While the number of students whose degrees are in the liberal arts has decreased sharply over the last forty years, in the culture at large there is abundant evidence of a great hunger for the subject matter of the arts and sciences. How can we take that interest into the academy and recapture the center of higher education for real education, the liberal arts?
Eighteen months ago, interviewing to become your president, I read Drew's strategic plan and said “yes.” In fact, I got such an appetite to participate that I actually said, “yum.” You spoke in that plan to diversity, a lifelong interest for me. You projected a Masters degree in teaching, and I had become a convert to the need for new partnerships between public and higher education. You wanted to strengthen the sciences, and I had been the humanities ambassador, the designated dummy, for some national science initiatives, frequently enough to know that what had been called the alienated two worlds badly require a common universe. We have worked together, you and I, to make a clearly evident beginning in each of these regards—in greater diversity, in creating a model liberal arts degree in education, in strengthening the sciences.
But now, in my sophomore year as your president, it is time to make the rest of the rhetoric real, to transform words into deeds. The next few years will be a time of reaffirmation and adventure, of renewal and change. I intend it to be, for every member of the Drew community, a time of joyful and productive commotion.
Several years ago, I wrote that a department chair's job is to take the large and often hazy goals a university president sets and help that president to understand what she or he really means by them. I invite each of you to do that for me and for yourselves.
This is a plain talk, getting down to business. Folksy is for some other time. In the next half hour, I'm going to raise basic questions, announce new programs, and describe major conversations by which you will tell me how you wish to shape our future. Then we will have our own conversation via any written questions that Dave Muha will collect and organize. In February, I will address the community on issues of the campus, in terms of the lives we daily live and our physical resources. Among other things, I want a serious discussion about fun. Today, I am going to focus on what brought us together onto this campus, the academic program.
We all want most a university that is intellectually alive and that can employ its learning for the good of humankind. We want it to be worthy in itself and a model for others—a model within academia as it relates to education and in the world as a model community that cherishes difference and practices an affectionate civility.
There are really just two questions for us as a corporate body. How do we maximize learning by best organizing the quest for knowledge and its communication from one generation to the next? And how may we employ what we have discovered to benefit the human estate?
In confronting these questions, I'm informed by Brother Salik. Brother Salik is the name of my son's fifth grade teacher and Gabe adores him. On the first day of class, Brother Salik wrote a class motto on the blackboard: “There's good, there's better, and there's us.” I like the twin implications of that saying, both its energy of ambition and its insistence that we will define the good not by the standards of others but for ourselves. Now we aren't going to have all the ideas; we should learn from other institutions and shamelessly forage best practices. But when we adapt just as when we originate, everything we do should bespeak our identity.
Over the next two years, we will be discussing with each other some overarching questions, tantalizing though difficult, challenging but tractable, that will define that identity for our beloved university. How should we shape the liberal arts academic experience? How might we best employ a small unit of highest learning, the Caspersen School , to energize the campus? What resources will we require and how shall we gather them? And finally, toward what will we put these resources? That's to say, Who do we want to be when we grow up? Now that we are fulfilling the strategic plan we set for ourselves, what lies beyond? How might we best capitalize on the potential synergies of the three schools and make for ourselves truly a united university?
I will return to these giant challenges in the second half of this talk. But we must not wait upon reaching consensus on these issues to act. The university requires, I believe, some immediate pep in its step, an adrenal charge, and I have spoken to enough of you to feel confident we can take some concrete major steps beginning today. There are three of them.
If one were to list the themes of greatest interest in higher education today, they would include interdisciplinarily, diversity, globalism, civic engagement, and accountability. Frankly, these terms can be empty bromides or they can provide a university with an authentically greater purpose. Each of the three steps I am announcing today combine all of these themes and give them specific reality.
First, we will promote the existence of Centers, which would treat crucial concerns beyond the bounds of single disciplines. God bless the disciplines so long as we recall that God didn't invent them. The disciplines provide depth and coherence and a possible progression of knowledge, and that is why universities mimic disciplines by the creation of departments. But disciplines and departments can also sponsor narrowness and may establish arbitrary but high fences. The challenges we face as bearers of discovery often do not live within a single disciplinary boundary, and thus the call for inter- and multi-disciplinarity, for what Lee Shulman calls “Crossing the ‘T',” mating depth to breadth.
This is actually a going tradition at Drew and we need still more of it, a sense of multiple perspectives and of intellectual life as occasionally collective. As David Domrosch writes in We Scholars, “We scholars rightly cherish our independence of mind and our originality of perspective, but we need to balance the hermeneutics of exile,” by which he means the solitary activities of the single scholar, with what he terms “a more creative hermeneutics of community.” Think, for instance, of how the lab sciences have profited from collaboration!
And thus Centers, places on campus that will draw from any number of our departments and all of our schools to consider large and basic questions of human experience. These centers, to be established at about the rate of one each year for the next five years, will sponsor programs and visiting scholars, infiltrate our curricular offerings, and provide new opportunities for students and faculty.
I will be bringing to the trustees this fall a proposal for a first such center, on social and religious conflict and difference, which would open next fall, under the direction of Professor Christopher Taylor. Both Jewish and Islamic families are creating initial funding for this extraordinary project, and that in itself has a significance beyond Drew. This center on social and religious conflict will bear the great task of the liberal arts that I described in my inaugural address, of converting difference from a basis for hatred to a goad for understanding, not hoping to end conflict but to raise it from the squalor of warfare to the humanity of dialogue. It will draw richly from our Theological School , and in particular its sponsored project on varieties of world Christianity, as it will from all the departments of the social sciences, humanities, and arts. This is globalism Drew-style, filling a term too easily employed as an empty honorific with a strong and specific purpose.
We have also begun to discuss a center for civic engagement, because somehow we need to collect our various endeavors at experiential learning into a more conceptual whole. I will soon name an all-university committee to lead us in this effort, and we will bring leading theorists and consultants to campus early in the next term. The Theological School and several College departments have taken a lead on experiential learning and these special sessions will focus that second question I raised, how we employ learning to meet social urgencies.
But not only this particular center, but each one that we establish will give us rich opportunities to interface with the world beyond academia, to create that discourse between the world and the academy that freshens learning while it elevates the public life. And Andrew Scrimgeour has been working with the faculty in the arts to bring the Dorothy Young Center fully into this notion of a center as providing rich exchange between academia and the public as well.
Another idea for a center responds to my first question, on how we foster, organize, and communicate knowledge—a proposed center on academic innovation and on teaching and learning, something of a center, then, for all the other centers, since teaching is at the heart of this student-oriented university. And finally, since the day I arrived I have been emphasizing a definition of the liberal arts as emphatically the arts and sciences; and we surely will wish to create centers that crucially involve the sciences, just possibly centers for the environment or for the neurosciences. But now I am just guessing. The number of centers will be limited, of course, and it will be the students and faculty who define the centers we will create together.
That's for centering. Now let's talk about mastering. I have emphasized frequently the need to give the liberal arts more sinew and muscle by considering their employment in the world around us more systematically. This can take three forms at Drew, the first of which will be the intensified civic engagement that I mentioned just now. Another will consist in an enlarged career center that offers lifelong guidance in transforming talents into careers. But a necessary third will be the BA/MA plan, the idea that undergraduates who wish to extend the liberal arts into the practical arts may join other students from elsewhere in a set of terminal MA programs.
Douglas Bennett, the superb president of Earlham College has written memorably of how the liberal arts in the twentieth century practiced self-definition by exclusion. That is, the liberal arts could not be material or practical, and thus such endeavors as law and education and the various professions were expelled. This led to institutions of professional education and the creation of a deeply unfortunate opposition. The world did not reject the liberal arts; the liberal arts too fully rejected the world. This rejection is understandable as a protective reaction against a too-pragmatic society; but, Bennett argues, it may have sponsored an effete notion of the liberal arts as wholly theoretical that has not served it well. Former Princeton president Harold Shapiro has argued recently that liberal and professional education share essential values. And even a humanist like Louis Menand has called for a more connected notion of the liberal arts that would expand our territory into the social sectors.
The goal both Bennett and Menand set is not to dilute or compromise the liberal arts but to give them a far more informing role in the actual workings of society. This is equally a challenge for the Theological School , where the most complex questions of existence and the practical training of ministers must meet and mingle. Just so, the establishment of a select number of Drew-specific terminal masters degrees can bring the liberal arts to the practical arts and empower our graduates.
The first such program we have encouraged, a Masters in Teaching, is perhaps the most difficult to establish, for it requires attention to state and federal requirements. Yet we have been heartened by the faculty enthusiasm, by the number of interested students, and by the frequent visits and encouragement of state education officials. And as we develop this degree, we also will forge new partnerships with schools, seeking to heal a rift between public and higher education that is arguably greater in the United States than in any other nation. The quality of our schools is this generation's Sputnik, and we can apply our liberal arts expertise to it.
The Presidential Initiatives Fund stimulated several further ideas for BA/MA efforts ranging from writing to international justice to aspects of public health. Here too, we are in the testing stage, considering what best would capitalize on our intellectual resources and add to them. But again, with each new BA/MA as with each interdisciplinary center, we can connect newly with the various social sectors and make Drew matter beyond Drew.
So mastering also has to do with our range, our range beyond the university. But now to the issue of range within the university, the attempt to create a more cosmopolitan and less provincial sense of knowledge. In this context, I understand diversity to include the diversification of the American mind.
How do we make our campus community not merely inclusive but richly interactive? Inspired by the Theo School 's efforts, CLA has made a terrific beginning with student recruitment, and now we must bring a renewed effort to the faculty and staff cohorts. There are all sorts of challenges here, but today, as we focus upon academic issues, I want to announce the initiation of the Drew National Faculty. It will encourage and fund the appointment of scholar-teachers of distinction who can enlarge our understandings, and it will include both visitors and permanent faculty, scholars of diverse background and scholars, sometimes freshly minted and sometimes newly retired, of special ability and range. We will establish a board for nominations, and all of us then in every department will be on perpetual search for potential colleagues who will bring new perspectives to our campus.
I hope that these three initiatives provide an answer to a query of one of my Drew friends, who asked recently, what do you care about? Do you want a more student-oriented, socially aware faculty or a faculty of scholarly excellence? My answer was and is, yes. Innovation must rest upon good governance and strong standards for all of us or it will fall through a trap door. With continuous rather than belated assessments of both programs and people, we can be a community of learners who also can apply what they learn. “Do Both” says the sign in an office at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and we can and, in fact, must.
But we cannot do all things, and that leads to the four conversations that we will be conducting over the next two years and the four challenges I wish to set for us. These are challenges for the students and the staff as well as the faculty. Indeed, when I asked my 16 year-old what I should do as a university president, he replied, “Let the students run the place.” Meanwhile, the staff already do run the place, and I expect staff and students to play a major role in each of these conversations.
The first concerns general education in the undergraduate college. Our individual courses are hugely successful but I hear little praise of our overall design. Can we make that design compelling rather than merely compulsory?
There's been a long-standing advocacy in the academy for a set of literacies that would apply to all students, a notion of completeness or rounding; and the near-unanimous agreement among non-scientists that we must strengthen the sciences at Drew is proof of this healthy dedication. But Core's a bore, Core's a snore, and distribution requirements seem to reduce the potentially exciting notion of a holistic education to the status of filling out a tax form. Wendy Kolmar and John Muccigrosso and their colleagues on the curriculum committee will be leading an effort to define a Drew undergraduate experience with a greater sense of adventure. Perhaps we should return to a more traditional set of beginning courses to assure the communication of civilization's knowledge. Perhaps instead we could require not courses but experiences, engagements that might include courses—naming, say, civic education, study abroad, a lab experience and so on. Perhaps we should do away with majors in an age of specialization—or perhaps we should require only a major or two and augment individualized counseling to ensure that branches of each student's major reach to a full range of other disciplines. Or perhaps we should think in terms of each year, first through fourth, as separate stages. Whatever we choose—and a set of differing options each upheld by passionate believers rather than a weak compromise might be the way to go—the challenge is to devise something, a shape for the arts and sciences, in which students and faculty can engage with intellectual passion.
A second discussion concerns our graduate school. Drew is by far the smallest university to offer doctorates in humanities fields, and this is both an achievement and a challenge. Dean Lawler and her colleagues at Caspersen will give a fresh look upon existing and proposed programs while asking how graduate education at our particular institution should function. My own goal is to further it, to enlarge Caspersen into a site for advanced learning, a site that will inspire all of us and bring us together. It can be the center for the various centers I described earlier, and it will be the home of any new masters programs. The theological school has pledged to forge new linkings with Caspersen, and the graduate school already offers courses and degrees for people returning to academia after years in a career-- something I view as one of the great growth prospects for universities in a learning-based society, a key integral for that renaissance in the arts and sciences. In all, I challenge the community to take the great traditions of the fifty years of the graduate school and shape a future that makes the most of our strengths.
Let me underline this. Caspersen has from the first been a unique and innovative graduate school. I urge that it grow, not shrink, and be creatively world-class in what it chooses to do.
Throughout what I have said to this point, you might notice two implications, one for doing more and another for doing it in a more united way. We will be discussing the budget differently this year, looking at a five-year perspective that calls for measured growth in our student population, with the new MA programs adding some students gradually and a first-year class growing over time to the level we surprised ourselves with this past year—a class, by the way, that would include a significantly greater number of international students—and this year we have appointed a globe-hopping recruiter for this exciting prospect.
Please know that I have carefully considered an alternative of selective distillation. We could of course eliminate many things and concentrate on those that are at present most strong. Circling the wagons, though, seems to me a demoralizing business and not in our traditions. It recalls to me why my daughter hates soccer, because in second grade she had a coach whose whole idea was to have the team collect around the net to prevent the other team from scoring. I want to emphasize offense, which translates in academia to innovation.
On one hand, then, I pledge no new programs without new resources, including new faculty. We should never start something at the expense of diluting strong programs. At the same time, let's not make growth an excuse for failing to rethink what exists. Probably the most exciting prospect of all is doing more with less or the same through inventive reorganizing.
For the last year, several of us have been working on the economics of a plan for gradually growing Drew. Our vice president for finance and I engage several times a week in creative arm-wrestling, and we believe we are developing a financially sound way to grow smarter. I now challenge you to challenge us, to test-drive the plan and make certain that its goals are achievable. Our new provost Pamela Gunter-Smith will be convening the various groups to consider budgetary matters in the next weeks.
In terms of Growing Smarter, I also challenge us to think about the uses of this campus. It is under-populated by students four months each year, and we could strengthen our academic purpose while peopling it. New revenue streams are not to most a spiritual subject; but if we first agree that we will never do anything for the money, then I think it is okay to make some more. Just so, Drew does not bring in foundation and government funds in the sciences and elsewhere to the extent of many of our peers, and our provost this year will establish for all of us an office of sponsored research.
While we are discussing resources, I should mention that an upcoming special fundraising campaign for Drew is widely assumed by our trustees, and yet another part of this resource conversation will set its goals. Ron Ross and his team led us to our fourth highest year of fundraising last year—this in the absence of a special campaign—and I am very revved about this one to come. But today I am emphasizing improving our operational budget so that we don't have to wait upon the favor of friends. Let's do it ourselves and then add to that.
Finally, as we grow and build for the future, we need to be certain that we are clear about that future. In this regard, I will challenge the faculty, staff, and student body to work with Pamela Gunter-Smith to develop a vision, a set of goals for Drew 2020. How do we wish this university to be in fourteen years? What qualities should we seek in our faculty? Who will be our student population and how can they, with us, achieve a model community and live out our ideals every day? How might we reorganize our staff offices for maximum effect and by what policies can we make Drew the employer of choice in New Jersey ? What new physical resources will be required, from labs to student centers and spaces to student and faculty housing? How can we make the most of our differences, racial and ethnic, lifestyle and intellectual? Can we develop a 20-20 clarity of vision as we sharpen our goals and work backwards from those goals to determine our paths to them?
Now, as you've probably noticed, this talk has been by the numbers. I have defined two major questions, announced three initiatives, and set the grounds for four overarching discussions. But there is a missing number in this sequence, and that number is one. We are one University and as we move forward, we must do so together and with a sense of common purpose.
“I hate so many committees, but I worry that if I am not on them they will do something awful to me,” one colleague related. I challenge us to trust one another, individually and as three faculties, three staffs, three student cohorts that will strive to become one. Of course there are differences, and I recall Blake's proverb, One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression. Smaller cohorts are often necessary and life-giving. But let's all be lions and forego the distrust and jostling that has sometimes taken place here. Amidst the numerous and very powerful positive aspects of our character at Drew, I sometimes perceive an attitude that goes, “Let me do my thing, I'll let you do yours, and we will let the overall good of the university take the hindmost.” When we do that, self-government can become selfish government. We need to think of the university as something other than a mall of independent shops. Instead, it is our common home.
In all, I challenge us to think together, to be frank in our disagreements, to recall another of Blake's dictums, Opposition is True Friendship on our way to discovering authentic common ground. Again, today I have hoped to set a tone and a few general directions. Now tell me what I mean.
Some of you have already told me that I am overly directive, while others have asked me what I really want. Here's a clue to my low character. I am about as mysterious as a corned beef sandwich and I have nothing up my sleeve. (That's a badly mixed metaphor. I guess I don't have a corned beef sandwich up my sleeve.) I do have my own opinions and attitudes—my significant other, in fact, has told me that it might be refreshing if I just occasionally didn't have an attitude about something-- but my own attitudes at Drew go not toward giving orders but toward setting a broad agenda, one that is authentically heuristic. I will do my best to do your bidding.
But do bid high. Bid high not even so much because of the superb potential of Drew but because the world is tremendous and terrible and because universities don't exist merely to critique the world but to constitute it. At his daughter's graduation from Sidwell Friends several years ago, Bill Clinton said that the U.S. was attempting the first multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy in the history of the world. Whether you accept that firstness or not, it's a bracing notion. How do we shape a university in light of that democratic attempt? Or again, how do we shape a university in light of the revolution in genetics, or in light of the new tensions in the world, or in light of, in light of—well, how do we shape a university in light of light itself? “Let there be light,” commanded the president who dwarfs all lesser presidents. The university as an ideal and Drew University as a reality exist as a response to that divine injunction. We best honor that light and our traditions by meeting the new dawn with hope and an idea.
