Annual Address to the Community, September 24, 2008
In my first two State of the University addresses, I asked you to dream into being a Drew University that directs our traditions of liberal arts learning and social idealism toward a sharply defined end, of real learning for a change. I’ll return to that phrase in my conclusion but for now I want to emphasize that you have been doing a great deal of dreaming and of dream-doing. It is because you have been so responsive that my call to you today is more down-to-earth, more what I say to my 12 year-old son at 6:45 every weekday morning, “Wake up, it’s time to get ready for school.” Drew has thought and talked and proposed and built. To move the metaphor, we’ve been in the kitchen and now it’s time to begin serving the feast.
Let’s review what we have been cooking up. In material terms, we’ve been building our first new residence hall in 37 years and it will open, on schedule, in January. We’ve made our two ugliest res halls into arguably our two most commodious and also created inviting new spaces for student gatherings of all kinds. We’ve made the Suites better and safer and we have a new coffee bar in Brothers, an important blending of the social and academic aspects of our campus that had been held asunder by geography. Once the new Res Hall is completed and named, we’ll create a patio and terrace to connect the buildings and something of a village will have sprung up. We’re also going to continue to renovate older res halls and other campus buildings, and we have a new campus master plan for the trustees to approve next month. It pushes autos to the peripheries of campus, creates new paths and meeting places, and maximizes the beauty and the potential for human interaction on our spectacularly lovely campus. What we have accomplished materially has given our students a newly affirmative spirit this Fall, and everyone has been noting and enjoying it, most of all me.
But it is the non-brick and mortar aspects that are most essential to an academic community, and here the list is a testament to your energy. We have created three new interdisciplinary all-university efforts. The Drew Center for Religion, Culture and Conflict looks unblinkingly at the difficult relations of peoples in the realm of religious and political and social beliefs. An initiative in Environment and Sustainability perfectly complements this by considering the relations of human choices and the natural world that supports human life—so people to people and people to nature, though the two so completely overlap it is hard to keep them separate. And we have just this month initiated a Drew Center on Civic Engagement, which will take learning to the streets, will emphasize in both our environmental work and our cultural conflict studies and by a few more areas like education itself Drew’s social responsiveness, our Drew and Do ethic of enacting learning.
In the College, we have a new plan for the Sciences at Drew, supported by the award of a $1.1 million grant from the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute emphasizing the social benefits of the sciences, and more largely a plan for General Education, the heart of the liberal arts requirement for producing the whole person, including a common hour each week for first-year students and an exciting emphasis on the basic literacies. We have initiated a new major in Environmental Studies and a new minor in Public Health; and the College faculty will be voting upon a new Honors Program, a major in the Economics department in Business that will demonstrate how a liberal arts college adds value to a terribly important social sector, and eventually a Creative Writing major by portfolio audition.
The Theological School will be revising what is its own equivalent of general education, its Masters in Divinity programs, having taken charge of the Phd in Religion, a complicated move that already has shown great benefits and quieted some fears.
Meanwhile, the Caspersen School has been reformulating graduate study at Drew, with a new MA in Teaching that began (very well) this past summer, a new MFA in poetry that begins this January, and a wholly new and I believe revolutionary doctoral program in History and Culture to begin in Fall 2010.
We are expanding our opportunities for adult education, and introducing these options by a Drew for a Day program beginning in a month; and we have created a Drew for Life guarantee, which allows all Drew graduates to benefit by our career office and our dynamic alumni network. Finally, we’ve made international programs more attractive by new aid policies. That’s a heck of a lot of curricular activity in Madison, N.J. and yet it all is informed by a single theme, an attunement to reality, Real Learning for a Change.
But there’s more. We’ve revised our rules and practices for faculty appointment and promotion and in these three years we have been joined by over 30 new tenure-track faculty, a fifth of our total population. More importantly, they’re terrific. We’ve achieved a far greater diversity than ever before in our undergraduate student body, more than doubling the number of students of color and more importantly working toward a community that mixes it up, that not only values differences but makes living friendships out of them. We are piloting and researching an SAT-optional policy. We have become the international home of the Dodge Poetry Archive, the greatest electronic collection of the poetry of our time, and we have become the international home of the Shalom Institute, a Methodist-based effort that employs churches to help poor people become self-supporting and socially influential.
In my neighborhood of activity, we’ve successfully recruited 11 new trustees in these three years, and we’ve begun the quiet phase of a major capital campaign that will bring us improved science facilities, a new university center, and far better support for student scholarships and distinguished faculty positions.
The list of your accomplishments is both impressive and dizzying. And so I have something to say to you—and to myself—in paraphrase of the first President Bush. “Read my lips, no new ideas”—at least for the next year. A faculty member in Theology quipped a few years ago, “I know the biblical saying that where there is no vision the people starve. But I would add that where there is too much vision the people go crazy.”
We don’t want to “go crazy,” enjoyable as that can be, we want to go to work. We are just beginning to serve dinner but we have a lot on our plates. Let’s make certain every dish is well-served, that we get each of these efforts right, and, just as importantly, that we coordinate with each other to create shared labor that will lessen the prodigious workload.
This is an especially challenging time for a university on the move, because, as you may have noticed, we are in an economic recession that will be with us for at least another year, maybe two. So aside from filling faculty positions, which I see as a priority, I want to take this year off from the cumbersome task of requesting new goodies and rather ask you to think with me and the finance gang—Howard and the Heavies—about making certain we are using what we already have to our very best advantage. It is easy to do better with more, and our overall plan for an eventual gentle expansion of the number of students is based on the simple fact that it will allow us new faculty and additional programs without compromising the highly personal quality of a Drew experience. But while it is easy to do better with more, for the next year we need to do better with the same, and I believe we can.
To those of you who’ve been here longer than I, I know how often you’ve been asked to hold the line on expenses or reduce them. But we need to take a hard look again, this time with an eye toward reallocating funds. I want us to be able to say to each student and each parent of a student that they are receiving great value for their support, without which Drew does not exist. I want to be able to justify every expenditure as in the interest of student learning and student life at Drew. Affordable Excellence is the way we need to go out into the world, for part of Real Learning for a Change is to make it available, as education is intended, as a means to social mobility, and we can’t do that without the best possible internal spending strategy.
At the same time, I want to say something a bit different. Our tradition of community participation in the budget process, greater at Drew perhaps than at any other university, is healthy and must continue. But please also lift your eyes from the ledger and look to the horizon. I want the physicist’s first thought every morning to be on physics, not the budget. Let me lose the sleep. And I will try to communicate better, so that silence is not filled by scary rumors.
I urge upon us, then, a year, maybe two, not of new ideas and new expenditures, but of getting it right, of internal strengthening. There is real joy in that too. The other evening, after the College faculty barbeque with an unprecedented number of young children running around and imaging the vibrancy of our Drew, I stopped with my son at Mead on the way to the soccer game. We passed a full-to-overflowing room gathered for a talk sponsored by the Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict, along with Women’s Studies. That center was really mostly an idea a year ago. Now, after several overflow programs and sponsored research projects and a distinguished visitor lined up for next year, it is real as it can be. And as I watch the Environmental Initiative already leaping into action on every front—the major, the bicycles, the silver-Leeds certified new res hall, and on and on--, I’m aware there is just nothing like realization, taking an idea and making it tangible.
Yet as we execute, let us also use this breather for deep breathing, for contemplating together the nature of the education and the life we offer on campus. Real Learning for a Change has all the limitations of any slogan, but it has two virtues. First, it is a useful mnemonic device, a way to keep our priorities in front of us; and second, it serves as an invitation to define its meanings. I will end this address with my own musings on it, but only to invite yours.
Real Learning for a Change: “Real” is a pun here. It means liberal-arts learning that indeed promotes the whole person, reminding us that liberal learning is not the opposite of “conservative,” but means, in Cicero, learning befitting a free person. But “real” also refers to reality and implies that, while learning needs no further justification than the state of being human, we are on this earth not only to enjoy but to serve; and so it is a goad to apply learning to the great social urgencies that confront each and all of us. The most learned of citizens must not become the most irrelevant but the most central of citizens, as Plato told us a while ago.
The word “learning” in Real Learning for a Change is worth a moment as well. It emphasizes the outcome of teaching and reminds classroom hams like me that it is the result that matters. Assessing student learning is the means toward bettering it, and we intend Drew to be a leader in that as time goes on as well.
“For a change” in one meaning simply completes the emphasis on the social function of a university, to alleviate suffering and maximize truth and beauty. But it also has a feistier aspect, for Real Learning for a Change implies that there is a lot of false learning out there, a lot of learning that does not really deserve its standing. We are in the minority as an institution of higher learning. The small liberal arts university accounts for about four percent of all undergraduates, and our fascinating triad of an undergraduate college, a theological school and a small graduate school and interdisciplinary center is, if not one of a kind, almost that. What do you make at Drew?, my then-young son asked me when I took this position. I found myself saying, we make people. We take very good students and turn out great people. He seemed to want a more literal answer, but as I thought about it I added something more general. Gabe, I told him, we also make democracy. Because a free society depends utterly for its health upon an intelligent citizenry, Drew becomes more than itself in that act. That’s real learning for a change.
At a recent lunch, Professor Kathleen Madden reminded me that I had written many years ago on what I called American actualism. It’s the renewal by freethinkers like Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman of the original Puritan idea. “They had come to America,” writes Sacvan Bercovitch, “not to break with either the world or the kingdom of God but to fulfill both...uniting the visible and the spiritual.” The New World, writes A.N. Kaul, served as “a visible proof that ideals need not always end in starry-eyed idealism.” And thus the continuing wish two centuries later and still now to make the giddiest hopes into an everyday lived reality. Making the vision real, of course, is utopian thinking, and its great danger is that reality always resists the ideal, with cynicism as the possible and dire result. But Emerson and company did after all create a distinctly national culture; and in a year when an African-American has succeeded in becoming one of two principle candidates for national leadership, one in fact who rises above the revenge tragedies of history to emphasize that his DNA contains something of all of us, it is not to me silly or dangerous to think in large and elevated terms of our collective future at Drew. Reality and recession will indeed resist our vision, and we will dedicate ourselves to solid achieving. So no new ideas, indeed; but, as you may recall, George the First couldn’t quite live up to his pledge, and something just might sneak through. Speaking of nineteenth century American writers, Melville in a letter praises his friend Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance as a severe satire upon moony dreamers; yet then he adds, “But who the devil ain’t a dreamer?”
