Inauguration Address: Love's Labor Found
Let me begin by expressing sincere thanks to all of you who have gathered here today
to help us celebrate not simply the inauguration of an officer of the College, but
more importantly, the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of an idea—an idea that
evolved into this extraordinary institution that today is Skidmore College.
So to Chairperson Sue Thomas and other members of the Board of Trustees and trustees
emeriti, members of the faculty, staff, and administration, current students, alumni,
parents, delegates representing so many sister institutions of higher learning (with
a special word of greeting to President Song of China's Qufu Teachers University who
has traveled so far to join us today), as well as governmental and civic organizations,
those who have contributed musical selections to enhance this ceremony, families of
former Presidents—John & Bettina Moore, Ruth Wilson, Anne Palamountain, Helen Porter,
Gary Smith—personal friends and colleagues, and friends of Skidmore from the community,
I say thank you for joining us. To former Presidents Porter and Studley: thank you
for being present; our task is to build upon your accomplishments
Let me also extend a special word of gratitude to Bob Boyers, James Longenbach, Mary
Lynn, and Laurence Thomas, who yesterday challenged us to reflect on the future of
higher education, as well as to Mark Lewis and Mary Burgan, who have inspired us today
by their words. And finally, let me acknowledge the good work of all those who participated
in the planning and realization not only of this inauguration but of all the events
of this week (for example, all the hard-working folks in Facilities Services, Food
Services, and CITS)—most especially Michael Sposili and the members of the Inauguration
Committee and from my office, Liz Bourque, Jeanne Sisson, and Susan Weeks. Finally,
let me thank the members of our family who have joined us here today: the Millards,
the Cavanaughs, and most especially Elizabeth, Jason, and Marie Glotzbach. Your support
means more to me than you could know; I simply could not do this job without it.
Last May, you invited me—and with me, my confidante, partner, and toughest critic,
my wife, Marie Glotzbach—to serve Skidmore College as the seventh in a line of distinguished
Presidents. Today, I formally and most enthusiastically accept the responsibilities
of this office. I do so with relish, with energy, with profound respect for the achievements
of so many who have created the Skidmore we know today, and with unfailing optimism
for the Skidmore of the future. Or to put it another way: Sue, now you're really stuck
with me.
I also accept with deep humility and awareness of my own limitations. Indeed, the
beginning words of a prayer from the Jewish tradition seem most apposite: "Lord I
stand before you poor in word and deed." That truly is how I feel in standing before
you today. The water indeed is wide, and I cannot swim over alone. Consequently, in
order to fulfill your expectations and help us achieve our collective dreams, I must
depend upon all of you for assistance, for support, for inspiration, and of course
for criticism when I go wrong. (I surmise that our faculty and staff will be well
up to that task.) The broad and deep community that is Skidmore can carry all of us.
And I assure you that what we cannot begin to imagine as individuals we shall accomplish
if we choose to pull together.
As human beings, we all at least occasionally find ourselves poor in word and deed.
And yet for those of us who devote our lives to higher education, our limitations
and failings are subsumed in the realization that we participate in an enterprise
far grander than our personal shortcomings would otherwise allow—an enterprise that
is collaborative and inspirational to the core, and one that represents some of the
most important work human beings can undertake: educating young persons at their point
of transition between late adolescence and early adulthood. As a liberal arts college,
Skidmore is committed to providing its graduates with both the essential skills and
an entree to the accumulated knowledge that our species has collectively developed
over the course of recorded history. This is no small undertaking. And I do not exaggerate
in saying that upon the success of our efforts depends the future of the world. The
future of the world perhaps sounds a bit strained or pretentious. But who will address
the extraordinarily daunting challenges facing us if not the young people now preparing
to take their place as leaders in business, the arts, science, government, education,
and the not-for-profit sector of tomorrow's world? And who will prepare them if not
us? Indeed, Skidmore is uniquely positioned among our sister colleges to perform this
work because the value of creativity is deeply ingrained in our history and it permeates
our thinking today.
We must not, we cannot fail our students, simply because human knowledge is not like
a recessive gene that can remain hidden in one generation and yet emerge to be expressed
in a subsequent one. Rather, a generation that fails to gain access to some area of
knowledge will be incapable of providing it to its successors. That indeed is a lesson
of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose—there may be nothing more powerful than knowledge, but it is paradoxically fragile,
always in danger of being lost for eternity. A similar observation holds true for
the development of new knowledge, new works of art, or new solutions to global problems:
None of these can occur without a base of information and skills that others have
developed. True creativity cannot occur in a vacuum, and creative thought does matter.
It is, then, our task and our privilege as educators to inspire in each successive
generation of students the passion for knowledge or artistic creation that led those
of us here on the faculty to make teaching and learning our life's work. It is the
task of the rest of us who have grown to love Skidmore College and who work to support
the central labor of teaching and learning to lend our efforts to this work as well.
But the work is not always—and perhaps not often—easy. Certainly our students know
this best of all. One of our new admissions postcards captures this reality quite
graphically: On the front is a photograph of a young woman bent over her desk writing,
an intense expression on her face. The caption reads, "PAIN." Turning the card to
its obverse side, we read: "IT HURTS. The throbbing rolls through your brain like
a line of thunder boomers. Who said Advanced Calculus would make it rain? Check the
weather."
So what passion can inspire us to make the effort on a daily basis to do this most
difficult work of teaching and learning: to meet our classes, to grade the papers,
to keep our scholarship or creative work moving along, to deal with administrative
challenges, to keep Skidmore College functional and well-maintained in times of scarce
resources? Let me suggest three sources of such inspiration that are available to
each of us in the extended Skidmore family.
First, I am certain that many of us, at some crucial moment in our lives, have been
inspired by a teacher; and the more fortunate of us have had this experience on multiple
occasions. But to make this point more concrete, I want to pause for thirty seconds
and ask each of you to think back and identify just one such teacher in your past
—someone who has had a transformative influence your life.
I hope that a name and recollection quickly came to each of you. In fact, I suspect
that a number of us may have thought of a Skidmore professor, perhaps even someone
present here today. That obviously is not the case for me, but still, my experience
may not be atypical. Mark Lewis already has told us one story. Now it's my turn:
In my junior year at Notre Dame, as an unfledged but eager philosophy major, I asked
a professor I had come to know, Dr. Fredrick J. Crosson, to sponsor a directed study
on the main work of the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
a 456-page book entitled The Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty was a contemporary—indeed, a friend and colleague—of Jean-Paul Sartre
and wrote Phenomenology of Perception about the time when Sartre was completing Being and Nothingness, the early 1940s. I knew that Dr. Crosson had studied with Merleau-Ponty in Paris
in the late 1950s, and I was eager to study with someone with so direct a connection
to the source. Fortunately, he agreed to this project, and we spent the spring of
1971 meeting on Thursday afternoons, working through one chapter per week. Think of
it as my Thursdays with Fred and Maurice.
I will not attempt to summarize this complex philosophical work, but I do want to
provide a few relevant details. Merleau-Ponty's book is about an unlikely philosophical
topic: the body of the perceiver, that is to say, each of us. This topic is unlikely
because traditionally philosophers have been expected to write of more lofty conceptual
matters. Indeed a dominant rationalist tradition in Western Philosophy reaching back
to the Greeks, holds that human beings are best understood as disembodied knowers
(as spirits in a material world), with Descartes as an archetypal example. An equally
venerable but opposite tradition, the materialist tradition, holds that thinking can
be explained as a physical operation described, ultimately, in the same terms that
the science of physics uses to explain the behavior of falling bodies and the like.
(Think of the radical behaviorists of the twentieth century.) Much of the history
of western philosophy (and psychology as well) can be viewed as an oscillation between
these two incompatible alternatives, rationalism and empiricism.
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, charted a middle course, a third way, describing the
body as experienced—the body as lived—as an entity that was not explainable in the
terms of either the rationalist or empiricist alternatives.(1) Moreover, in making
his case, Merleau-Ponty employed the data of empirical psychology (including the best
neuropsychology of the time) arguing that neither of the traditional alternatives
could explain the observable data of language learning, perception, the effects of
certain kinds of brain damage, and more generally the way we physically operate in
a perceptually rich environment.
I say all this because that semester's introduction to the work of one philosopher
set me on a path that led through graduate study and fifteen years of teaching and
research. Although I never wrote an article dealing solely with Merleau-Ponty, his
was an explicit or implicit presence in virtually everything I did write. That influence
on my life continues today. It is serendipitous that Merleau-Ponty's refusal to restrict
his discourse to traditional philosophical topics, narrowly conceived—the power of
his appeal to psychology, to art, to music, and to neuroscience—as well my own experience
in interdisciplinary teaching and research, resonates so strongly to what I see as
a unique ethos of this institution: Skidmore's breadth, its interdisciplinarity, its
predilection not just to teach, create new knowledge, and make works of art but to
synthesize those processes of teaching and creation in uniquely original and meaningful
ways.
But the truly salient point of my narrative is this: When he agreed to work with
me, Fred Crosson was not only a professor but also Dean of the College of Arts and
Letters at Notre Dame. He was incredibly busy, and offering a directed study to some
wet-behind-the-ears philosophy undergrad surely was not in his formal job description.
On the other hand—as is the case with so many Skidmore faculty members—he understood
his job in vastly broader educational terms. And in his passion to share his own love
of philosophy, he saw his mission as helping students learn. Certainly, my experience
in college and with Fred Crosson is unique to me, but I suspect it was structurally
not very much different for a number of you. That youthful passion of mine for Merleau-Ponty's
philosophy, stimulated by Crosson's knowledge, his own passion for teaching, and his
excellence as a mentor and role model, reinforced my sense of the academy; not simply
as a locus of intellectual life, but as a vibrant and indeed supportive community
of kindred spirits. My experience working with him truly was transformational, and
he no doubt would be pleased to learn that two of my own former students have continued
on to earn Ph.D.s, specializing in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty—just as generations
of exceptional Skidmore faculty have passed their knowledge, and their passion for
that knowledge, along to many of you and thousands of others.
And I know, not just from personal conversations and intuition but also from documents
such as the Distillation Report, that this is precisely the case at Skidmore. The work of the Skidmore faculty in
the classroom, laboratory, or studio and, even more, in our mentoring, advising, and
collaboration, has inspired and nourished this passion for learning in our own students
yesterday, it does so today, and it will continue to do so in the future. This summer,
Marie and I met a young alumnus in San Francisco who said that literally everything
he values as an adult he learned about at Skidmore. Those of us not directly involved
in teaching and learning at Skidmore especially need to keep such narratives in mind.
For they help us focus on the core work of the College and in doing so enable us to
see the value of our own efforts in contributing to the transformational experiences
of our students.
This talk of passion leads me to introduce a second source of inspiration: Skidmore's
unique heritage, a heritage both present throughout our history and sedimented (to
borrow a word from Merleau-Ponty) into our very buildings and grounds. For colleges
too are embodied entities; they are communities of brick and mortar as much as communities
of learning.
One hundred years ago a fifty-year-old widow of independent means stepped outside
of her own job description, narrowly conceived. That is to say, when Lucy Skidmore
Scribner founded the Young Women's Industrial Club to meet the educational needs of
the middle- and working-class women of Saratoga Springs, she did not need to go to
the trouble. No one expected her to do so; no one would have criticized her for thinking
it was someone else's problem. But Mrs. Scribner perceived a social need and responded
to it in the context of a personal mission to leave the world a better place than
she found it.
As we know, it took nineteen years for the institution Lucy Scribner founded to evolve
into an accredited college, another forty years for Skidmore to acquire the land that
became the site of the present campus and begin making that transition, and another
ten years still to reach the decision to admit men. But throughout those years and
to the present day, the College has held to its own middle course, its own third way,
we might say, as charted by Mrs. Scribner and her successors—a course that initially
combined practical instruction (in the beginning business and other "industrial arts")
aimed at providing young women the wherewithal to obtain gainful employment as well
as "cultivation of such knowledge and arts as may promote [students'] well-being,
physical, mental, spiritual."(2)
This dual legacy of hand and mind, praxis and episteme, remains apparent in Skidmore's
broad curriculum that offers students choices among a full range of traditional majors
in the letters, arts, and sciences, along with selected professional majors and strong
interdisciplinary programs. More tellingly, it is reflected in our culture of encouraging
students to make their own choices, to define themselves through curricular options
that serve their individual needs and respond to their interests, resulting in both
expected and quite unexpected combinations of majors that students pursue with a purpose.
Over the years, Skidmore has sent forth its alumni into the arts, sciences, law, medicine,
and education. Her graduates have included an ambulance driver in France during World
War II, generations of nurses, officers of charitable foundations, social workers,
investment bankers, members of the media, writers, artists, and contributors to the
entertainment industry. Our students marched for Franklin Roosevelt, protested the
Viet Nam war, and stood in silent vigil to commemorate the victims of 9-11. Going
back to Mrs. Scribner herself, the history of Skidmore College is a story of individuals
making unordinary choices and extraordinary differences in the world. Creative thought
has indeed mattered in their lives. Creative thought also has mattered to students
who have completed our Higher Education Opportunity Program, and who over the years
have graduated at rates approximately 15% higher than our overall student population.
It has mattered to readers of Salmagundi, to students and teachers in our summer arts and writing programs, and to students
who have completed degrees through our University Without Walls and the Master's in
Liberal Studies programs. It has mattered to our students who have studied in China
at Qufu Teachers University or in our London program.
Yet these statements, as true as they may be, have not yet captured Skidmore's uniqueness.
So let me try a different description, excerpted from the 1961 Charge to the Architects and Planners of the new campus by former Chairperson of the Board, Josephine Young Case. Mrs.
Case began her two-page statement with the following admonition:
"You will design a campus which will provide for both student and teacher a feeling
of freedom and wide horizon, and you will provide the physical opportunities for attaining
that freedom in the mind and that horizon in the spirit.
"You must allow space for contemplation and for play; privacy for thinking and study;
and a pervasive atmosphere which will be at the same time serious and gay, somber
and warm, traditional and forward-looking, made up of time past, time present, and
time future."
The architecture that resulted is both physical and symbolic, incorporating intentional
traces of the old campus, in the choice of red brick, in our tree-lined main quad
whose path lights suggest the street lights of old Saratoga Springs, and even in the
semicircular windows that crown Scribner library and echo the decorative semicircular
windows so characteristic of the Victorian structures on the old campus. So even on
the present campus, we live, quite literally, in the midst of our history as we create
our future.
A third source of inspiration, one that Marie and I have felt virtually everywhere
since we arrived, is Skidmore's unique sense of community. In talking with alumni
from the '30s to the '90s, to our most recent graduates, in talking with current students,
members of the faculty, members of the staff, and trustees, we hear a similar theme:
Skidmore is a College that inspires love. A number of our employees, across all areas
of the College, have worked here for more than thirty years. Our alumni find it easy
to connect across the generations. Our students immediately learn that they are members
of a close-knit, caring community, and our faculty members speak about the connections
they feel with their students and with one another. This expression of community is
so powerful and apprehensible that even prospective students visiting campus can sense
it, and it correspondingly drives numbers of them to know that this will be their
place too!
My use of words such as "love" and "passion" throughout these remarks has been quite
intentional. In one of the first philosophical treatises on education, Plato's Republic, the character Socrates provides his own list of attributes that characterize the
most promising of young students—those who are capable of attaining the highest levels
of knowledge and thus are worthy of being admitted to the theoretical institute of
higher education that he is describing. The first such trait identified is "a constant passion" [emphasis mine] for any knowledge that will reveal to them something of that reality
which endures forever and is not always passing into and out of existence." Here Plato
employs the same word that signifies passion between a lover and a beloved. In short,
the true student, according to Plato, must be smitten with the desire to learn.
Now, it would be a stretch to argue that all students enter Skidmore with such a
passion—just as it would be a stretch to suggest that I entered Notre Dame in that
manner—but it's not at all a stretch to claim that many, perhaps most of our students,
graduate with that passion. Again, the sentiments in the Distillation Report make that clear, as does our research; and, although I'm quite reluctant to validate
it, so does the US News college rankings—in which Skidmore is cited for graduating a significantly higher
percentage of its classes than the data of our entering students would forecast. Clearly,
something very special happens here during a student's four years that literally transforms
her or him and is not infrequently inspirational. Passion is engendered, in part by
what our faculty members do and how they do it, by the care and commitment of our
staff, by the very place itself, and by our heritage and the indomitable spirit of
the institution.
But as with the fragility of knowledge, so the fragility of academic communities
themselves. We must recognize that Skidmore, as with so many colleges and universities
across the country, faces challenges—very real and daunting challenges—that must be
addressed over the coming years. Many of us know these all too well: ensuring adequate
funding to sustain our enterprise; compensating our faculty and staff in a manner
that satisfies comparative norms; controlling our costs; maintaining our financial
aid so that the students who can most benefit from a Skidmore education are able to
matriculate here; supporting a governance structure that is representative, participatory,
fair, and above all, functional; recognizing that we can't do everything well, and
having the wisdom and conviction to decide what we should and should not do; providing
more adequate resources for departments and units that are both critical and critically
under-supported; making meaningful assessment part of our professional lives; and
finding ways to make it possible for our faculty to both teach small classes and labs
and still closely mentor and advise individual students. Maybe I would have been better
advised to specialize in stoicism, but I would like to assure you that without underestimating
the gravity of these challenges, I remain supremely optimistic.
So let me outline the ambitious agenda that lies before us, an agenda that will build
upon our proud heritage that grows out of many conversations that already have occurred,
and that will continue to be shaped by conversations yet to come. For the only agenda
that will be completed is the one we create and embrace together. This agenda will
not be accomplished in the near term, but it clearly continues our tradition of making
no small plans. And it is essential that we do so because, as former President Palamountain
eloquently stated twenty seven years ago, "Institutions such as colleges cannot and
do not enjoy equilibrium: they either grow, in quality and/or quantity, or they decline.
These are the only two alternatives." (3) And I affirm to you today that I did not
come here to preside over the decline of Skidmore College!
Academic Vision: The notion that creative thought matters captures an important dimension of who we
are. My own first encounter with this phrase came in reading the prospectus for the
presidency of Skidmore. It struck me then, as it continues to strike me now, as a
unique apostrophe that underscores the power of hand and mind, of embodiment, of the
third way. But we have not yet fully realized the potential of this idea. As I have
said on another occasion to our faculty, understanding just how to enhance creativity
across our curriculum and for each of our students may be our greatest challenge.
Just what does it mean for us, and how do we do it? I would love to see us take up
these questions collectively and see where they lead us.
Here is an idea that could become part of this conversation: Quite reasonably, we
tend to interpret the phrase creative thought matters as creative thought is important, creative thought counts. But it also admits of a second possible reading, one that emphasizes its final word: creative thought must be made material. For an uncompleted thought—the building that is designed but never built, the novel
envisioned but never written, the peace plan that is promulgated but never put into
practice—remains decidedly unreal, a chimera, an illusion. (4) Truly creative thought
must be embodied . Who can teach this lesson better than our artists who quite literally
give their ideas material form? It is the special mission of the Frances Young Tang
Teaching Museum to embody thought as well—to give concepts physical shape and texture
and in doing so, quite literally, to create new ways of knowing, hence the forthcoming
Luce Professorship of Fred Wilson. If this notion sounds elusive, then I would encourage
you to visit the Tang and experience the death penalty exhibit (which was created
by two of our students in collaboration with a faculty advisor) or Nayland Blake's
challenging exploration of sexuality, race, and interpersonal relationships. We are
charting new academic territory with the Tang, and I for one am eager to see where
it will lead us in the future.
Other curricular ideas are also presently in play in lively discussions of the emerging
Academic Vision Statement under the very able guidance of Dean Joseph and the members
of the Committee on Educational Policies and Planning. Without at all attempting to
preempt that conversation, let me add my support for the direction in which it is
moving and highlight several features. I believe that we do need to pay increased
attention to the crucial and formative experiences of our students during their first
year, both as we mentor them in advising and as we bring them into our academic community
in introductory courses. The latter need to be owned by all members of our faculty,
with active leadership from our senior faculty. As we focus on the communication skills
of our students, let us constantly remind ourselves that we write not just to convey
our ideas to others but more importantly to develop— that is, to realize, to embody—our
ideas in the first place. Moreover, students need to learn that writing is very different
across the disciplines— writing in history looks quite different from writing in psychology
or writing in business. So we need to make an increased commitment to own the teaching
of writing across all our courses and at all levels in the curriculum. The same can
be said for the elusive but all-important value of critical thinking.
Diversity and Global Thinking: All of us who live in the twenty-first century—and most of all young persons just
entering adulthood—need to be adept travelers in a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural,
global milieu that scarcely could be imagined even a decade ago. Moreover, given the
now-widespread recognition that increasing the diversity of a college community brings
it new vitality, it is important to be clear about how concerns with diversity fit
into the larger framework of fundamental values.
Liberal education puts in play a multiplicity of ideas, viewpoints, and cultural
perspectives. Enhancing the diversity of a college or university advances this project
because persons from different identity groups frequently experience divergent forms
of life that expand the range of ideas and insights they bring to the table. At the
same time, even though we all are shaped by our backgrounds, we need to remind ourselves
that we cannot read the quality of one another's character from color, ethnicity,
cultural background, sexual orientation, religion, or any other such traits. Each
of us is a unique individual, with a rich personal story that needs to be heard before
we can be understood, much less judged. Most important of all, the deep affinities
we share as human beings influence us far more profoundly than do our sometimes more
apparent differences. Ultimately these commonalities simply matter more than do our
dissimilarities.
These realizations support the Academic Vision Statement's attention to the issues
of citizenship broadly conceived. Josephine Case concluded her Charge to the Architects with the words, "One thing we do not want for our new campus and that is walls or
gates. For we want the world to enter." We still want the world to enter Skidmore,
and we want Skidmore's students and faculty to enter the world, bringing a global
perspective to their work. At the same time, all of us need to understand the dynamics
of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, sexual orientation, and so on as they historically
have played out in America and continue to do so today. I would situate these two
projects—gaining a global perspective and understanding domestic issues of diversity—as
part of a larger overarching agenda, but they nonetheless represent quite distinct
kinds of inquiry. So as we follow through with the commitment to diversity articulated
in the Strategic Plan, we need to pursue the complementary goals of becoming a more
diverse and open community and continuing to develop our capacities of cross-cultural
and multicultural understanding.
The umbrella of citizenship also encompasses an increased commitment to community
involvement, particularly as that involvement advances specific educational goals
for our students under the broad heading of internships and service learning. One
noteworthy example is the Expanding Horizons program in conjunction with the Schuylerville
School System that at once provides assistance to the Schuylerville students and learning
opportunities for our own students. We are presently exploring ways to increase such
opportunities. And in fact, it is my goal that each of our graduates leaves us not
only having earned a degree but also having identified a social cause that she or
he finds personally compelling—his or her own way to leave the world a better place.
Academic Departments and Programs: Josephine Young Case included one additional comment in her Charge that merits our attention:
"Buildings do not cause academic programs, but they can impede them. Therefore, all
[the] learning rooms [of the new campus] must be so placed and so designed that the
campus expresses the unity of knowledge. Access between departments must be easy,
so that students moving through this rich array feel from the first a single impact,
and gather from the harmonious interplay of disciplines some inkling of the universality
of human experience." (5)
Regardless of what we might say today about Case's references to the unity of knowledge
and the universality of human experience and even noting the very real vitality of
Skidmore's present commitment to interdisciplinary, I am not convinced that we are
have fully realized the promise in Case's vision. Both our students and our faculty
would benefit if we were to take a fresh look at the functioning of our academic departments
and interdisciplinary programs. Departments especially need to see themselves not
as walled city-states but rather as cells in a common living tissue that survive only
because of the permeability of their external membranes. Departments are the local
instantiations of larger disciplinary communities, and as such they represent crucial
concentrations of expertise that are valuable in their own right and provide essential
support to interdisciplinary.
But to do their work well, academic departments and interdisciplinary programs must
be open communities that bring their disciplines to campus both in their formal curricula
and informally through reading groups, colloquia, symposia, and other activities that
bring students and faculty members together around topics of interest. Indeed, every
major and program should have a clear answer to two important pedagogical questions:
First, what kind of substantial independent project will each student complete by
the end of senior year? And second, what does it mean for a student to be a major
or minor, that is, how are students invited to engage with the discipline—beyond completing
the formal curriculum? The most ambitious goal would be for us to think systematically
about how departments and programs can move students from membership in an undergraduate
learning community to membership in a disciplinary learned community.
I also would like to open a dialog with departments to help them do a better job
of informing students about career options our major programs open to them. This is
not a point about our curriculum; it is not about somehow making the liberal arts
more vocational. My motivation is rather to free our students to pursue their own
passion for a liberal arts major, secure in the knowledge that at a later time that
major will help them construct a successful professional life.
Shared Governance: Let me acknowledge that the members of Skidmore's faculty, support staff, and administration
frequently feel stretched beyond capacity, and today I am envisioning a future that
will ask even more of all of us. I cannot make this request without addressing the
question of resources. I will return to questions of finance in a moment, but for
now let me address a question of an even more precious resource: time. Skidmore has
a deep tradition of community involvement in institutional decision-making, a tradition
that is woven into the fabric of this community; however, it is clear to me and to
many others as well that our present formal governance structure simply makes inordinate
demands on the time of too many members of our community. This burden falls disproportionately,
though not exclusively, on the faculty. Later on this year, I propose to work with
the Committee on Faculty Governance and other groups as appropriate to search for
ways to continue our tradition of strong shared governance with a more efficient structure
that makes fewer demands on our time. As part of this project, let us devote increased
attention to taking collective responsibility for the tenor of our shared discourse.
And let me acknowledge that any changes we collectively decide to make in our formal
governance structures must be predicated on increased levels of mutual trust—a goal
toward which we already are moving together.
Resources and Strategic Planning: Lastly, as we continue to set our course for the future, we must deepen our analysis
to ensure that we understand the cost of each potential initiative we envision. We
need to factor in a plan to ensure the upkeep of our beautiful campus that is now
beginning to age; we need to build a new music building not only to support that program
but to provide a large gathering space where we can bring the world to Skidmore; and
we need to create new student housing to make this campus even more residential than
it is at present. Even more importantly, we need to set and achieve strategic goals
regarding compensation for all those who work at Skidmore. A few moments ago I referenced
some of the challenges that impede our path to achieving these and other goals. In
response to those challenges, we have made difficult choices already this year, and
in all candor I must say that more such choices lie ahead of us. Even so, my remarks
today have continued in the Skidmore tradition of making no small plans—envisioning
a future that at present is simply not affordable. In the past we have marched ahead
often not knowing how the necessary resources would be forthcoming.
Skidmore always has been an institution on the edge, surviving by cunning and audacity,
by a willingness to take risks and pursue objectives that sometimes seemed to defy
rational thought. This history of risk-taking and institutional audacity has served
us well in the past, and we have modeled these values for our students to their great
benefit. And in the process, we have created a school that is competitive with some
of the finest and most prestigious liberal arts colleges in the nation. By any measure,
we are today—as we have not always been before—in the game. Unfortunately, our collegiate
playing field includes institutions with one or even two hundred years' more history,
with thousands more alumni, and with endowments millions of dollars richer. We cannot
contend successfully on this playing field by trying to imitate our competitors. That
is why we must know just who we are and make the unordinary choice to go our own way.
We have done so successfully in the past. If we continue on our present positive trajectory
and successfully communicate precisely what we do and how we are different, we can
become known and respected as a unique model for collegiate higher education in America.
However, it is time for us to realign our thinking about Skidmore in one fundamental
way: Given our present financial realities and even with a willingness to make difficult
decisions to control our costs, we cannot realize our dreams without a significant
infusion of new resources—primarily in the form of increased endowment. Our endowment
has grown substantially over the past decade, and superb management by the Investment
Committee has protected our corpus during the recent economic downturn. Still, our
current endowment remains insufficient to take us where we need to go over the coming
years. One of our Board members—a person whose own generosity to the College has been
remarkable—recently observed that our community has never been asked to support Skidmore
at a level beyond what they thought they were able to do. I say to you today that
that era must come to an end. If we are truly to compete at the topmost tier of selective
liberal arts colleges, if we are to fulfill our potential and our promise as a unique
and compelling institution where the presence of creative thought permeates the warp
and woof of our communal fabric, we must persuade the extended Skidmore family as
well as other friends of the College to see us as worthy of substantially higher levels
of support than we have received in the past. We must ask our alumni and friends to
step forward and demonstrate their own passion for Skidmore in ways that are historically
unprecedented. I am prepared to ask for such levels of support, and I trust that I
can count on the affirmation of this community in doing so.
Let me conclude by returning once more to the theme of risk: Lucy Skidmore took a
risk in founding her original club and then a second one in positioning it to become
a liberal arts college. Closing the nursing program was a risk. Creating an entirely
new campus was a risk. Admitting men certainly was a risk. Adopting the Liberal Studies
curriculum was a huge risk when it was introduced. Building the Tang Teaching Museum
and Art Gallery was a risk. Adopting a radically new Admissions recruiting strategy
was a risk. And proclaiming to the world—first through Admissions and now institutionally—that
creative thought matters may be the most significant, and most important, risk of
all.
Although I'm old enough to appreciate the virtue of caution, I hope I never forget
that a considered and prudent risk can be an enormous tonic for the spirit. Several
years ago I found myself standing at the crest of a Mammoth Mountain black diamond
ski run at 13,000 feet with my son Jason (who does not know fear). It was a very windy
day; the hill was mostly ice. I was not altogether sure I could negotiate it. But
at the same time, having committed to the ride up, I was painfully aware that there
was no other way down. I still can recall the feeling of dropping over the edge, the
adrenaline rush, and the eventual realization—somewhat delayed, in my case, being
a philosopher—that I hadn't been killed, followed by the subsequent and overpowering
urge to go back up and do it again. It is no exaggeration to say that that is precisely
the way I experienced the directed study with Fred Crosson so many years ago: anxiety
to the point of queasiness in anticipation, wondering just what I had gotten myself
into, uncertainty whether I could do it, and then great exhilaration over both the
experience itself and the final result. More recently, at the beginning of the current
semester, I had a conversation with one of our students—a senior sociology major—who
described her own impending senior seminar in precisely the same terms. It is one
of my goals as President that each of our students should have at least one such academic
experience prior to graduation, preferably many more than one.
Many of them are up to this challenge. At a recent gathering of new members of the
Honors Forum, I addressed a series of questions to the group that included "Who among
you will write a Pulitzer prize-winning novel?" (And that that group of students collectively
had already written more than seven novels.) Later on a young woman came up to me
and said, "I know those were rhetorical questions, but I want you to know that you
were talking about me: I'm going to write the Pulitzer prize-winning novel." That
is why we are here: to ensure that the confidence and native talent so evident in
that young woman is buoyed and seasoned by knowledge, by understanding, by perspective,
and by the skills to take her as far as her inherent ability, desire, and commitment
may lead.
So let us never lose our taste for taking risks, and let us never forget that to
love is to take the ultimate risk. Within the academic community we know that danger.
We know that our scholarly or artistic pursuits can fail us: that the answer to one's most important question can remain elusive; the muse can fail to settle lightly on one's shoulder. Revealing
one's passion for one's discipline to one's students is to risk a most profound form
of rejection for it involves laying bare one's soul. Teaching is psychologically dangerous
work. Setting our sights on a Skidmore that will set a new national standard for its
distinctive kind of educational experience is to commit ourselves to a very unordinary
and risky choice as well. We take those risks because to succeed is to know the joy
of the gods.
1. For example, he wrote that the "experience of one's own body runs counter to the
reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which
gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea and not the experience
of the body or the body in reality." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1962), pp. 198-99.
2. Constitution of the Young Women's Industrial Club, quoted by Joseph C. Palamountain
Jr., "'Such Growth Bespeaks the Work of Many Hands': The Story of Skidmore College,"
address to the Newcomen Society, 1976, p. 10.
3. Palamountain, p. 20.
4. This is hardly a novel realization. Karl Marx (who derived it from Hegel) emphasized
it in his theory of production.
5. Lynn, p. 246.