Talks and Articles

Last weekend Drew hosted Parents Weekend, and this led me to ponder the best advice parents can give to their children.  One phrase suggested itself:  Don’t be afraid.  Don’t be afraid, because being afraid is a terrible way to live.  It occurred to me too that this is a chief motif for the kind of education we offer at Drew.  Don’t be afraid to question; don’t be afraid to look at any issue from all perceptions, including those inimical to your own.  Don’t be afraid to try something new or to change your mind or to innovate.  Don’t be afraid of difference or of awe before beauty or of sorrow before ruin or of any emotion elevated by fellow-feeling.  “Don’t be afraid” is one credo of the liberal arts education I believe in more than I believe in anything else. It is deeper than any politics. It is the foundation of a democratic republic and the hope of the world. And it is not an automatic. It is something that needs to be advocated and fought for.

There are always more reasons we can think of not to do something than to do it, yet for the world to matter, it must be an adventure.  We in the liberal arts teach going out into a world of unending and fecund interest with eyes open with wonder—wonder toward all the interests in the world, wonder toward the adventure of getting to know something new, most of all a new person.  And we teach Drew and Do, not only widening our range of understanding but actively applying that understanding to the messy, vital world in which we shape our own lives.

Don’t be afraid. Yet on campus, in the nation, in the world, this has been a period of fear, and Drew has not been immune.  This past year, we have been battling especially hard for our kind of education; and we have battled most against our own skepticism. But the University has practiced its preaching as rarely before, has answered fear with the courage of creativity.  And so despite the loss of nearly $100 million from the peak of our endowment, I can say to you today that the state of the university is strong.  I have said that in earlier years but never before have I experienced such relief in saying it.  Last year at this time, we were preparing for the consequences of the worst economic downturn in 80 years.  On a sheet of paper that I locked in a drawer, I sketched what we might have to do if we didn’t have very many students this fall.  Happily we never got near to the draconian measures I was required to contemplate.  And I am happy to affirm today that we can look forward next year to a reasonable salary increase, acknowledgement of the great work of the faculty and staff. But we did spend last year simultaneously cutting budgets and inventing new programs and courses.  This took courage and dedication and trust on the part of the entire community.  And despite a few understandably bitter moments, we were “drewn together” by a sense of crisis.  We were “drewn together” and we triumphed together.

I want to capitalize on that spirit and apply it next to the realm of campus life; and the second half of my talk today concerns seeking a higher ground especially for the undergraduate student cohort.  But it is important for the staff and faculty and students of a university that has been weathering a storm so well to take a moment to celebrate their own efforts.  I want to use the first portion of this talk to express my thanks for the extraordinary efforts you have achieved.  And perhaps the best way to say thanks is briefly to recount those achievements.

Almost every office in the University was required to do more with less, and yet I heard more plaudits from students and parents and fewer complaints than at any time in the past.  Presidents come and go but the staff endures—endures hard times and demanding presidents.  And this one, pestering as he can be, is aware of how greatly you have contributed, and more now in hard times than ever before.

As for the faculty, over the last year or two, you undertook a dizzying array of new efforts.  In the College, you initiated a new General Education program, including a Common Hour that makes for student community.  This year as well there is a new undergraduate major in Business that treats that important social sector from a liberal-arts viewpoint.  It joins a new undergraduate major in Environmental Studies along with a sustainability effort to green our campus, with both drawing from a spectacular range of academic disciplines and university offices. I have rarely seen the interest and creativity of an entire campus so dramatically captured by a particular effort.  Great student interest also was displayed for a new minor, in Public Health.  This year too, the faculty initiated an undergraduate Baldwin Honors program that brought us sixty students where we had foreseen twenty.  

In the Theological School, which already had taken new authority for the PhD in religious studies and found ways to improve student aid greatly to a more highly selected cohort, faculty thoroughly revised its programs for ministers, again with sterling early results.

In the Caspersen School, there was equally great innovation. Now in its second year, a Masters in Teaching program is flourishing and we are busily creating other efforts to link Drew to the schools and to contribute to an end to the separation between public and higher education in America.  Also in its second year, a low-residency Masters in the writing of poetry has brought a cadre of creative faculty and students to campus.  It is accompanied by Drew’s becoming home to the Dodge Poetry Festival archive, one of the world’s best collections on contemporary poetry, and just last week the international home to the great materials of the Byron Society.  This year a new MA and PhD program in History and Culture is beginning, one that trains students in the humanities not only for academic careers but for a whole range of possibilities beyond the academy as well.  The doctoral program, which begins next fall, will offer splendid support for a small cadre of students.  And in all we’re busily creating a small range of Master’s programs that might even tempt our Drew undergraduates to get a BA/MA and, if I might borrow a phrase from the New York lottery, Take Five. But they won’t need a little bit of luck. They’ll have Drew.

More generally, we’ve made important progress in advancing Civic Engagement as the University’s central theme, and a new center on Engagement is now thriving.  We also initiated scholarships for high school students who had excelled in community service to attend Drew, with the agreement that they would continue their involvement and help to lead our fledgling efforts.  The other center for the entire university, on Religion, Culture, and Conflict, speaks to the deepest value of the liberal arts—to question even one’s own beliefs and to seek to understand the views of others.  And the Center has created a range of programs and hosted a number of compelling speakers, and this year is gifted by its first Wallerstein professor, Saad Ibrahim, a world leader who has championed democracy in Egypt.

That is an enormous and even exhausting amount of activity for just a few years on the academic side.  It has had everything to do with our remarkable success this year in attracting new students. Even better, these are not random innovations.  They share a common theme, of making an education in the arts and sciences more answerable to the social urgencies we face, more answerable too to the career aspirations of our students, while all the while reaffirming the sheer joy of discovery, the pleasure of knowledge.

And so today, I celebrate you.  While real challenges remain ahead, the efforts of faculty and staff and students have taken us out of a financial deficit more rapidly than nearly any other American university, and they have done so by furthering our academic depth and reach, not by vitiating it.  

Let me now move to the second part of my address, for the first community to which we should apply our learning and our liberal-arts idealism is our own.

In taking stock, we should find joy in the fact that Drew has become far more diverse in its student population over the last few years.  Of course, that has brought on some new challenges about embracing differences, but we welcome such challenges as crucial learning opportunities, a gain for the human spirit and for the practical experience of living together in the 21st century.  In addition, three improved residence halls, the cafe in Brothers, and, most, McLendon Hall, have made life more commodious on campus, actively promoting conversation and friendship; and we’re about to start plans for a new University Center.  But most importantly among our present strengths, nearly everyone who walks onto campus notes a warm, supportive environment, a huge strength for Drew.  We can’t really say this in any of our institutional literature, but we have great young adults here.  We can’t really advertise: “Drew—our students and staff and faculty are nice”—but they are exceedingly so and it matters tremendously. Those individuals who populate this campus are spectacularly good individuals.  The whole may not yet live up to the sum of its parts, but the human quality of Druids provides the chief ingredient we require.

And across campus, there is so much activity. This fall, we already have been thrilled by a public interview with Saad Ibrahim, to me one of the great evenings in the University’s history; and we await the visits in the next month of Tony Blair and Gerry Adams, not, I would note, on the same evening.  Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Blackmon will be speaking as well. And former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan will join us for the Thomas Kean lecture in the spring term. Student athletics at Drew has taken on new life. If you’ve been to Ranger Stadium lately you’ve witnessed our much-increased crowds and participation. There is even a new costume for what had been our sad, tattered Ranger Bear. But more to the point, the atmosphere on campus has been extremely energetic.  In short, the joint is jumping.

Despite this, others have remarked upon a certain apathy.  Whether in relation to the turnout for Student Government elections or to the number of students at major speaking events or just the vibe on campus, we can live better, with more intellectual involvement and a greater sense of each other’s worth.  We can move to a higher ground.

There is an emerging and controversial academic field with the curious yet compelling name of Happiness Studies.  That sounds like a great idea to me—happiness is what we all desire—but, I would add, as a byproduct of engagement, and not at all costs.  Our challenge is to create a community of meaningful joy, to study and then enact happiness.  

A university should be a beacon, should be a model for an ideal community, and by that Drew can be more than Drew even while we make ourselves happier and more complete as individuals.  To achieve this ideal, Daniel’s Dictionary, and the entire emphasis on punitive actions, will not suffice.  Drew has an excellent Public Safety staff, the envy of many peer institutions.  They are tasked with enforcing such laws as the under-21 ban on alcohol, which we all know flies in the face of the norm of behavior for some college students everywhere.  The result is a situation of uneasy compromise, concealment and occasional hypocrisy, and to be honest I see no near-term alleviation of that.

But even so I believe we can transform our campus by initiating a greater emphasis on a positive goal, creating an ideal community.  I am inspired by the prospect of an undergraduate honor code, created by students for students, and I look forward to the spirited discussions led by the SGA representatives who have initiated this effort as they begin larger discussions that will help to create such a code beginning with Common Hour next week.  

So, for instance, when we get at those difficult issues like alcohol and drugs, let’s remember we have four ways to tackle them:  One is education, another is enforcement, and a third is alternatives.  It’s up to us to provide a host of alternatives to sitting in a small room drinking.  But fourth and most, what if each student said, not to avoid points and punishment like a young child, but as a matter of creating this ideal community of Drew- Pride young adults, “No more stupid imbibing—I’ve got better things to do”?

More largely, as we create an ideal community of Drew quality and Drew pride, I wish to leave the characterization of it to the community itself and become one voice among many.  But my sense is that if we can state a few basic goals rather than fifty, we have a far better chance of achieving them.  A brief honor code and a set of goals can work only if they become a constant ingredient of our daily lives.  

When I took this position, I asked my son, then 16, what he thought I should do.  “Dad,” Michael said, “let the students run the place.”  I actually believe that, in terms of student-life issues, letting the students run the place is a terrific goal. If we create strong guidelines and high goals and, most of all, a deep urge in each of us to occupy a higher ground, to live up rather than down, then indeed, more and more, the students can run the place.

In the meantime, we ancients still have our work to do.  As you know, last spring I convened a group of staff and faculty to work on a strategic plan for Drew’s future and I’d like to conclude by saying a few words about it and what we’ve been up to.  

I called together this task force at a moment when the budgetary prospects for all universities were dire. In fact, it’s no fun to lose a third of an endowment, and the economy for higher education remains problematic. Yet I see this as a time to strengthen all that exists at Drew and to move boldly forward.  An article in an April New Yorker noted that the corporations and institutions that can strengthen themselves and also innovate during a recession period make far greater gains than at any other time.  There has never been more reason for not being afraid, for institutional courage, for an attitude of “let’s try it.”

“Let’s try it,” though, is an attitude that works only if you are also willing at times to say, “this isn’t working, we need to reorganize or stop.”  One of the efforts of the President’s Strategic Task Force will be to propose means for us to evaluate the university’s various efforts continuously so that we can make wise judgments in a democratic manner.  Democracy and decision can often be at war in the academy, and I am counting on the task force to help us to a process that accommodates both full participation and the capacity to move.

On this task force, we have had fascinating, educating discussions, especially between faculty and staff and between faculty from the three different schools.  We are learning how the proverbial other half lives.  In the next month, we will be sending to students, faculty, and staff our tentative draft of a new statement of university mission and a set of central rubrics.  From the campus response to these, we will revise.  In the meantime, we are divided into working groups on some aims that are widely shared and considering how those themes can translate into concrete actions.  How we maximize, for instance, a global perspective has implications for curricula in all three schools, for the admissions offices, for student life, and much else.  We mean not to specify overmuch, but to define a number of follow-on tasks for various groups.

One of my favorite clichés, Talk is Cheap, means to say that anyone can write a document and anyone can set goals.  Frankly, in academia in particular, people sometimes substitute rhetoric for reality.  I hope we have been able to characterize Drew in recent years as earnest and intentional in its rhetoric, as acting decisively upon recommendations.  It will not be the rubrics we name to characterize the University’s chief intentions in a student code or a strategic plan so much as the actions we commit on their behalf that will provide the Drew difference as we go forward.

I began by noting an emotion of relief in relation to the last year and I end by confessing to a sense of sharp anticipation as I look forward with you to the next few.  One of the frustrations of academic life concerns how long it takes for seeds to germinate.  You invest and plant, and then there come seasons of difficult faith, when you are asked to believe without evidence that the seed will sprout.  This past year, in the worst of economic winters, we witnessed our own green shoots breaking through.  With dedication and energy, we now can cultivate a new forest in the forest, a new Drew really not new at all, but one which is actually the outgrowth of our university’s original intention.  It was based on John Wesley’s great statement, “The world is my parish.”  And I believe the key to making social Drew all that it can be in the world depends less upon the genius of invention than in joining together the generosity of spirit, the creativity of thought, and the plain kindness that already exists in each of you.  To that thrilling work may we happily turn.