10/17/03
Inaugurations are important occasions in the life of an institution. They are not directed primarily to the celebration of one person’s assumption of office. If so, then a simple “thanks for coming” might suffice. Rather they are an occasion to step back, to consider our primary purpose, our reason for being. To put the institution into a perspective that is more than just a recital of its various features. But those features are important to us to be sure.
For example, behind me is the newly reopened Talbott Hall, once our library, and now one of the most sophisticated centers of computer and internet technology of any small college in the United States. Ahead of me is Seibert Hall the first building on our campus, home of our Humanities, Social and Behavioral Science and Education Faculties. To my left is Westminster Hall, a beautiful hundred year old church reborn as a center of Creative Arts and Technology with students learning digital animation, musical composition, sculpture and other fields. Down the street to my left is our Business Division with instruction in fields from accounting to Materials Management and Economics, one block away our Natural Science and Mathematics Division, down the street from that our Nursing Division.
But an inauguration requires more than a listing of activities. We ask the fundamental questions. Why is the mission we follow important to us, our region, our state, our nation?
We ask the central question, how can we live and prosper together? I last spoke in front of Talbott Hall last month, on September 11, commemorating a transforming event in the history of our country. We considered, as a college, what it means to be a member of the global community. How can we continue to evolve as a species that can live together in peace?
We think about where we came from. We are a species that has spent most of its conscious evolution in small isolated tribes. We descend directly from those small tribes who hunted across the savannas of Africa, shivered in the caves of Lascoux, France leaving astonishing cave paintings, wandered through the prehistoric heaths of Hungary, clung to life in pre-historic China. Our instincts, subconscious and conscious survival techniques, honed over many hundred thousands of years when we learned to hunt, protect our territory, conquer more fertile lands, occurred in what we would regard as a very sparsely inhabited planet. As we evolved into extended clans, villages, cities, nations, we find those same survival impulses badly suited to a planet with six billion people, millions upon millions living in vertical skyscrapers in a single city, hearing each others’ noise, smelling each others’ scents, crossing through each others’ spaces. How do we learn to accept one another, coming from so many backgrounds?
The uniqueness of America is not only the extraordinary diversity of our people, but the speed with which more and more layers of diversity are added to those already present. One era of immigration and diversity is further enhanced by the next, and we are left continually adjusting to changes that seemed almost inconceivable only a half generation ago.
Approximately ten years ago I had occasion to spend much of an evening over dinner, and a few drinks, with a prominent European scholar who was visiting Cornell for a year. At the time several articles had appeared regarding the tension and sporadic violence that had broken out in certain European cities and the growing population of “visiting workers”, that was becoming a source of concern. He told me that while such violence was unacceptable, I had to understand that, as he told me “We are not like America. We are not a nation of immigrants. We regard the nation as its people. Foreigners are welcome, but they are still foreigners.”
What was clear to me was that it is not what Americans mean when we talk about diversity. We ask, how can we adjust to this world with changing political realities, changing populations, and astonishing changes in technology so that our lives have stability, real meaning, and appreciation of core values that hold us together as a single people of many backgrounds?
To me, this is what higher education is all about. This is the central core of Bloomfield College. How do we reach out both to the future and to one another? Technology is one obvious answer and higher education must provide it.
The availability of information useful for true learning grows at a rate that is astonishing to those of us old enough to remember an age before the internet. I recall attending a conference about 15 years ago in Boston and seeing a young Steven Jobs talking about the wonders of the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt which for over 500 years was the center of the world’s knowledge. Generations of scholars risked their lives to make the treacherous pilgrimage to that library. Jobs predicted a day when any student could reach from his or her bed in a dormitory to a computer and have instant access to a thousand Libraries of Alexandria. I wondered if I would live to see that miracle. Today, his prediction seems far too limited. And I recall reading in amazement just five years ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education of the development of the Abilene Network, also called Internet 2, which could transmit the entire contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in approximately one second. Today many use that speed, however, to download bootleg Hollywood movies rather than the Britannica, but that is another matter.
The ability to conduct research, to communicate around the world, to spread ideas and culture, to conduct and manage business, to create works of art, render the importance of such technology self-evident.
And yet higher education is more, much more. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend the Presidential inauguration of a man who only recently became a friend, the new President of Yeshiva University. One item that struck me was the explanation of the word “Yeshiva”. We think of it as meaning school, but its root in Hebrew means “to sit”. The notion is that to really educate we must sit, to reflect, to contemplate to understand, not in an electronic frenzy of speed and efficiency, but with intensity, in quiet.
The same idea, expressed in a very different cultural context comes from Williams College, a school quite different from Yeshiva. Former U. S. president James Garfield, recalling his favorite professor at Williams, noted that "The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." Again, the thought of sitting quietly, in calm conversation, serious attention paid between faculty and student. This is one of the hallmarks of Bloomfield College. The close care and interaction between faculty and students. A feature so well suited to the small and intimate environment of a liberal arts college. For those of you interested in postscripts, a trip to the Williams Club in New York City will reveal the James Garfield room next to the room named for Mark Hopkins. Now you know why.
This is not some antiquated way of learning, better buried with thoughts of Socrates in Athens; rather it is a precious and supportive introduction to higher learning. Large institutions can also be great and New Jersey is blessed with a superb state research University and other Universities, and I celebrate the presence today, of Rutgers President Dick McCormick and President Emeritus Fran Lawrence; and also presidents of other highly respected and critically important State Universities and State Colleges, including my new neighbor President Cole and other colleagues, time will not let me mention. But not all students learn best in the atmosphere of a very large institution. Many students need the closeness, the intimacy, the individualized care that takes place in the personalized environment of the small College. The truly great system of higher education is one that can accommodate and provide to its citizens the choice of large and small, public and independent, in an array of offerings that has made other American centers of higher education so vital, such as Boston or the Bay Area.
Bloomfield College is prepared to play its part in such an array of opportunities. Closer cooperation and coordination among New Jersey’s institutions is critical. Critical to offering service to the state. Critical to sharing resources. Critical to offering choice. Critical to keeping our best students in the state. Critical to building the future New Jersey. Since I arrived here a few months ago, Bloomfield College has rededicated itself to the initiatives undertaken by President Jack Noonan, into whose tremendous shoes I so carefully slip.
We have also reached out to the state’s community college system, to complete comprehensive articulation agreements whereby those students may, without the uncertainty or delay of old credit transfer procedures, continue their educations here. Bloomfield College, its more than a century of tradition, lovely campus, extensive academic program, extraordinary student and faculty diversity, flexible on-campus and distance learning, will be an option to a wide array of the students in New Jersey and beyond.
Our proximity to a great airport, highway system, mass transit including train and bus, and closeness to New York City as well as Newark, makes us a prime choice for future interest, growth and enhancement. I look forward to our campus becoming a center for performing arts as well. Our beautiful Van Fossan Theatre should become, over the next six months, the location of opera performances, other classical, jazz and modern music, and a forum for speakers of prominence. Bloomfield College will continue to be not only a blessing to our students, a home to our faculty and staff, but also a resource and a source of pleasure to our host Township of Bloomfield and neighboring Towns as well.
What we offer is an education rich in the business, technical and practical training so clearly needed by all students, but particularly for first generation students this College so proudly serves today, indeed has always served since its founding in 1868. But it also offers a well rounded liberal arts education which I pledge, with my faculty, to maintain and expand. No society can hope to survive without an educated citizenry well versed in those fields that promote both substantive knowledge and the arts of critical and independent thought.
We must learn about not only technology, but about one another. Through the various disciplines in Sociology and Political Science we learn about our key social groups and the process of public policy; through Psychology we come to understand one another and ourselves as individuals, through the humanities including literature and philosophy, we begin to understand our process of creativity, indeed, begin to limn the meaning of consciousness and its impulse to be creative, the source of all progress; in business and science as well as the arts. We learn the importance of ethics and moral choice, without which even the most technologically sophisticated economic system will collapse. No society can survive when the only core value is punishment of wrongdoers. The core value rather is a commitment to the moral and ethical life. The parade of shameful conduct by people of prominence in so many walks of life, reminds us of this simple fact almost weekly.
We also need to learn how to think critically. Not in an age where we find it difficult to find enough information to form reasoned conclusions, but rather in the information age where there is so much information we need the skills taught by the liberal arts, including both the humanities and the social and physical sciences whose rational approaches to verifying knowledge complement and enliven each other. Unlike the thinkers of the past, we do not wait to hear the quiet voice of truth to penetrate the silence. We must now filter out the din, the shouting, the misleading, the charlatans who bark and bellow at us from every corner, every web site, every radio, to distill what is reliable, what is true, what is best for ourselves, our families, our country.
In short we must learn how to engage in real dialogue. If the idea of the Mark Hopkins log is obsolete, we must still learn to Yeshiva, to sit down and converse in a respectful, learned and considerate way. How do we inculcate all the new members of our society with the values that are essential to democracy? How do we curb the instinct to revert to our ancient past, that we protect our tribal property by excluding outsiders or by conquest? We hear every day the siren song of talk radio, both national and locally originated, playing on fear, on division, on resentment and even hatred. I even hear programming originating from our Garden State, spewing hatred about those minorities who “think they are entitled” to this or to that, or who do not speak our language, or who do not belong. We combat that not through counter attack, but through learning, through understanding our condition through the liberal arts. In short we learn the new survival technique, not of attack and seizure, but survival through understanding, learning, accommodating a world of six billion, rather than a closed universe of fifty mutually protective kinsmen.
There has been much emphasis on higher education throughout the United States and New Jersey over the last ten years. And this is to the good. We live in a state where our future is clearly post-industrial, where we must think and work smarter. We are mindful that any initiative to reinvent, reform or restructure our higher education mission must include the critical components of jobs and competitiveness, but let us also remember that any such effort that thinks of education only in those terms will bring lasting loss to a great state and its intellectual traditions.
Any system that does not place the highest value on our remarkable social achievements and aspirations fails us all.
Not long ago I had a conversation with a respected educator, from outside New Jersey, who stated, perhaps in a moment of exasperation, that we had lost sight of the difference between “Chiefs and Indians” as that expression goes. The Chiefs could learn philosophy, I was told, but shouldn’t the Indians learn useful job skills instead?
I wish I could say that I was dumbstruck by the notion, but unhappily it is not so unusual a thought: that only the few should receive the legacy of centuries of learning, and the best education possible. This we must reject. From 1944 and the earliest years of the G. I. Bill of Rights, this nation has committed itself to offering the blessings of higher education, not just for the continued empowerment of the lucky elite, but to the enhancement of the full population. Today we look not only to serve our veterans, but also women, minorities, adult population, all members of our human family. On this we must not retreat to the idea that it is job training for the many, the “good stuff” for the few. The glories of great art, music, literature; the analytical insights of social science, and the exploration of natural science, are not mere grace notes along the path of life, they comprise the essence of the human experience. We should not apologize for our commitment to these goals. We must continue to fight for them. A nation comprised of citizens who aspire to nothing higher than the latest episode of Temptation Island, is not one likely to protect its political and social freedoms.
I start this presidency then, excited and enthused. But also humbled.
Upholding and expanding the traditions of learning, of study, of rendering
service to the state, is a task that very few people can feel fully capable
of performing. I cannot succeed on my own, nor can any College or University
president. To succeed I need help. From an enthusiastic student body,
traditional and non traditional, a dedicated faculty, a hard working and
creative team of college officers and staff, and a generous and wise Board
of Trustees. And finally from an extended family of friends and supporters,
whose numbers I hope and believe, will grow to join us in this most
important of American and global missions.
