January 25, 1996 |
Mr. Dunn, members of the Trustees', Visitors', and Alumni Boards, distinguished delegates; Wesleyan faculty, staff, alumni, and students; special friends, my family, and honored guests. Thank you for the trust you have placed in me. With God's help and your support, we shall together renew the spirit of this College and move into the future.
If I may be allowed a personal moment, I want to acknowledge and thank Dianne, my spouse, my greatest supporter, and partner in my work; my mother, Emily, who would rather I had become a Methodist preacher, but may see this position as an acceptable second choice; and my children, Andrew and Sarah, young Hoosiers, who allowed me to disrupt their lives with a move to the land of the Tarheels. On this latter point, I am quick to observe the following: "Let's Go Duke!"
I send greetings to Dianne's mother, Carolyn and eldest sister Cheryl who are in the audience. I want also to recognize dear friends and colleagues from Indiana. Your support and presence here are unspeakable riches, an occasion for joy.
There is another group in the audience today that I would like to salute and in so doing, begin my formal remarks. That Wesleyan is still a young college, we have the privilege of having among us many of the Founders. Today I want to acknowledge the sacred trust that they have given us in preserving and advancing the ideals and principles upon which this college was founded. I greet you and pledge to you my commitment to see North Carolina Wesleyan College renew its spirit, move forward, and thrive in fulfilling its noble mission of "wisdom and courage through Christian education."
"Wisdom and courage" are apt terms to describe the qualities needed to face the complex and challenging future of liberal education and the private, liberal arts college. Forty years after its founding, Wesleyan is now coming of age in a time of significant, and surely tumultuous changes in higher education. Yet, the vital mission of this college, to sustain inquiry into those ideas and issues that have framed humanity's experience and to further not only the development of the intellect but also of the body and soul, shall continue to flourish.
Even in our short history, we have inherited an important legacy of wisdom and courage bequeathed to us by those teachers, leaders, and institutional servants who have guided this College since its founding. Let us also recognize them. The administrations of Presidents Collins, Petteway, and Garner and the Board leadership of Chairmen Smith, Hill, Pearsall, Carlton, and Dunn furthered the interests of the College and have underscored both the insight and the resolve needed to nurture a young College, born late in season, and growing up amongst challenges that have shaken even the most enduring of institutions.
The boldness of our founders to establish a four-year college which would play a critical role in the development of the City, the region, and the Church should serve as a guide to us today to lead Wesleyan College into the next century. But who are we, this College coming of age in challenging times? Of all the questions we face and important issues that must be raised, our identity as a College and our self-definition may be the most fundamental. This quest for identity of the contemporary church-related college is particularly imperative given our discussions about the role of faith and the academy and the continuing conversations between the United Methodist Church and its colleges.
Our Hebrew ancestors of faith collected a corpus of literature about life, identity, and self-definition and termed it hochma, or "wisdom." The range of this literature extended from the practical wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, collections of sayings on living life to its fullest, with a focus on seeking the good and the just, to the searchings of Job on the nature of justice and human limitation and Ecclesiastes on finding meaning in the face of life's often humdrum rhythms.
In Egypt and in other places in the ancient Near East, wisdom was taught at the royal court, the curriculum of the young professionals who were to become society's leaders, soldiers, and officials. Wisdom texts were used in Sumerian edubba (or Tablet Houses), the schools of the 3rd millennium, and they were at Thebes in Egypt's 18th Dynasty in the form of wise sayings and love poetry. By the Hellenistic period, the wisdom from the Hebrew and Near Eastern worlds was commingling with the philosophical currents from Greece and Asia Minor. The Greek notion of philanthropia, the virtue of goodness, kindness, and mercy, merges with the Hebrew "wisdom" to suggest that moral action has its divine imperative, and that the search for meaning is a search for wisdom, and search, ultimately for God.
Yet, we well understand wisdom's inaccessibility, and like Job we ask, "Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living..." (Job 28:20-21). After much thought and reflection, Job confesses that wisdom's origins are in creation itself. "God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens....then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out. And he said to humankind, 'Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding" (Job 28:23-28).
Wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures did not pronounce the mighty acts of God as did the great stories of the Torah, the Deuteronomic literature, and the prophets, but it did exhort values of responsibility, duty, citizenship and the like in the context of a community's quest for understanding. The human quest was to seek to fathom the unfathomable, to make sense out of the ordinary, and to confess that true Wisdom has awe and reverence for God. Thus, Proverbs also holds, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov 9:10).
The maxim of the Hellenistic world, "know thyself," is akin to many wisdom and philosophical traditions. Self-knowledge is promoted as an essential prerequisite for the other virtues: honesty, love, empathy, social responsibility. Self-understanding was a goal of the ancient sage, thus our quest to examine our community life, is not only deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition but is also a continuing quest in a future that faces more intense competition for institutional survival than we have yet witnessed. Such self-knowledge is critical for our seizing the future of Wesleyan College. As Wesleyan examines itself -- "its strengths and weaknesses, its limitations and its potential" -- it has much more promise in carrying out its own mission and achieving a better self-understanding (Astin, 1993, 252).
Wesleyan College was founded as a church-related college. Today, however, many church-related colleges from many denominations have distanced themselves from the church just as the church has become more absorbed with its own pressing needs. How shall North Carolina Wesleyan and the church define its relationship in the future, and how might Wesleyan's religious heritage inform its future?
Historian George Marsden's recent book, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, is the latest in a series of works describing and analyzing the role of religion, particularly Protestantism, in molding higher education in America. His conclusions suggest that religion and its manifestations, which may have initially occupied center stage, have mostly moved to the wings or even out the stage door. This displacement of Christianity may have been fueled, in part, by American Protestants themselves, who, eager to create "an excellent university," were quick to adopt the German notion of the autonomy of the academic disciplines and Max Weber's concept of vocation.
Charles William Eliot, in his inaugural address at Harvard in 1869, dramatically underscored what has become a widely held part of our culture: faith is inconsistent at a very fundamental level with the academic culture. Eliot noted, "the very word education is a standing protest against dogmatic teaching. Authoritarianism and inculcation are intolerable in the university." To Eliot, "authoritarianism" and "inculcation" were the outgrowths of faith. He further suggests that "the worthy fruit of academic culture is an open mind, trained in careful thinking, instructed in methods of philosophical investigation, acquainted in a general way with the accumulated thought of past generations, and penetrated with humility." He concludes with the following: "It is thus that the university in our day serves Christ and the church" (Marsden, 192-194).
Thus, the religion of humanity or the religion of Harvard transcended the pettiness of every sect. This new freedom of inquiry was defended as the embodiment of Christian ideals.
Where Christian faith had once been the foundation of every field of study, it was now relegated to a specialized field, worthy of study in the religion department, perhaps, or in the theological school.
I am not suggesting that Wesleyan College turn back the clock to a pre-modern time when the synthesis of faith and culture existed more hospitably. Nevertheless, Marsden suggests that feminist and postmodernist scholarship's challenges to the "myth of objectivity," demanding that we be attentive to issues of social class, race, and gender as well as the object of inquiry, surely allows room at the seminar table for those with religious commitments. Likewise, in our commitments to further a more diverse society, there is surely a place for colleges that allow substantive religious concerns to enter into academic discussion (Marsden, 439).
Let us at Wesleyan reaffirm our commitment to the faith tradition which formed the College and champion the high standards of charity, openness, inclusivism, and grace that are associated with the highest ideals of the Christian life. Having high expectations of ourselves, not just those manifested in some mission statement or creed, but particularly in the quality of our common life, confirms our authenticity as a church-related college.
The church-related college must be one that honors difference and encourages a healthy pluralism that allows communities within communities to form so that difference may be celebrated and supported. Yet, as a College community we must never devolve into unhealthy pluralism where we become an association only of groups isolated by self-interest, having neither a center nor a sense of public good. We can be both a sanctuary for cultural citizenship to take root and be fostered as well as a community with a common purpose toward liberal education. (Tierney, 141-142)
The church-related College presupposes the college-related Church, and the quality of the relationship between Church and College is critical to the health and vitality of each. We can modify the Augustinian and the Anselmic formulae to reconstruct the meaning of religiously founded colleges and the intellectually seeking church: The faith-seeking College needs the Church. We seek faith in order that our knowledge might be deeper, that our understanding keener, and that we might seek something worth believing in. The Church needs the College as an outgrowth to faith itself which seeks understanding. Faith without understanding withers; it is incomplete. John and Charles Wesley recognized this mutuality as uniting knowledge and vital piety. We should embrace this mutuality as a way to deepen and enrich both the Church and the Academy, to further conversations, and develop new frameworks for facing the uncertainties of the future.
And what of courage? It was as an undergraduate that I first read Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be. Tillich suggests, "There are no valid arguments for the "existence" of God, but there are acts of courage in which we affirm the power of being, whether we know it or not." (Tillich, 181) It was a courageous act to found this College almost 40 years ago. It will take many more acts of courage for Wesleyan to thrive and succeed given the turbulent currents of higher education.
It was a courageous step for Wesleyan in the 1980's to extend its mission to include the education of adult students. Today, our Adult Programs continue to demonstrate the College's outreach. Two weeks ago today, the College announced a 23% tuition cut for the next academic year, and, at the same time, we are moving to increase the value and quality of the educational experience for students. This bold move commits us to making private higher education more accessible to students and their families at a time when tuition increases spiral upward.
Another act of courage will be for the College to see its excellence and quality in terms that differ from the norm.
Traditionally, there have been two widely used means of assessing excellence. The first considers resources available. Usually the take is, the more resources we have, the more excellent our institution. The second conception of excellence is "reputational." The most excellent institutions are often those having the best reputations, excellence being determined by an institution's ranking in the reputational hierarchy or pecking order. Former Chancellor at Vanderbilt University, Alexander Heard, once observed that it's no coincidence that the so-called "best colleges" are also the wealthiest.
One of the prevalent myths, however, in undergraduate education these days is this one: "Institutional prestige and reputation reflect educational quality" (Terenzini and Pascarella, 1994, 29). The literature suggests to us that after a number of variables are taken into account how much students grow or change during college is not related to traditional measures of quality such as E&G expenditures per student, student/faculty ratios, faculty salaries, percentage of faculty with terminal degree, faculty research productivity, admissions selectivity, or prestige in various rankings.
In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that real quality in undergraduate education resides more in an institution's educational climate. This fact is not to say that resources are unimportant, but that if one wants to examine quality and excellence one has to look beyond the obvious and easy measures of institutional wealth, the availability of resources and reputation. (T and P, 1994, 29)
At North Carolina Wesleyan, we must have the courage to embrace a third way of measuring institutional excellence: A "talent development" view. This view suggests that excellence is determined by our ability to develop talents of students; thus "excellence lies in the institution's ability to affect its students...favorably, to enhance their intellectual and scholarly development, [and] to make a positive difference in their lives" (Astin, 1991, 6). A talent development view suggests that what happens to students on our campus is of critical importance -- more important than the talents they bring with them.
Earlier this week, our Symposium focused on "What Should Liberal Education Be at Wesleyan?" We were challenged neither to mimic the research institutions nor to train people merely for jobs. We must have an identity distinctly our own. We were challenged to see liberal education as eminently practical in its goal of producing citizens; and we were challenged to teach the conflicts so students can better understand the issues that are contested in our society and world. Do we have the courage to continue our discussions of liberal education at Wesleyan, to include a wide circle of participants in that discussion, and to make important decisions and develop substantive programs that further liberal education?
Do we have the courage to seek greater coherence in our curriculum? In a world increasingly fragmented and in colleges subdivided by disciplines and subdisciplines, Wesleyan must help students see the connections. A more coherent view of knowledge and a more integrative approach to learning flows from our worldview and self-understanding. The intellectual quest should not be limited to our organization of knowledge and the fragmentations we have created.
We must have the courage to embrace the moral dimension of liberal education. Wesleyan College must teach students both how to learn well and how to live humanely, furthering the public good. As a society, we will face moral quandaries that will threaten to undo us. The divisions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and age will thrust us into intense conflict. How might we equip students to life amidst such conflicts, seek to ameliorate them when appropriate, and press toward a social contract that allows us to "learn to live together?"
Wesleyan must have the courage to assert its leadership in the City and Region. The Dunn Center for the Performing Arts must become the hub for artistic celebration in Northeastern North Carolina. The College has a critical role to play in human relations, around which so much else depends if we are to move forward in the Region. The College must be a place where we can achieve common ground. Wesleyan must continue to play a role in furthering economic development and in strengthening public education.
Liberal education must be "liberating" in that it frees us from the provincial and insular, making us aware of the international and multicultural dimensions of knowledge. (Scott, 52-53) The questions we raise, the liberation we provide, the hope we secure, adds richness to the human enterprise. As Proverbs suggests, "[Wisdom] is more precious than jewels." And then the writer alludes to Egyptian iconography, "Long life is in her right hand, in her left hand are riches and honor." To life! To the truly good life!
We need to support courageous, dedicated teachers who provide models of faith seeking understanding and keep the quest for knowledge alive. More important than curriculum, creed, policy, or procedure, the teaching-learning conversation of a mentor keeps the flame of scholarship burning brightly. Looking back on my own undergraduate education at Emory & Henry College, among the most important influences on me were those of two gifted teachers, Maurice Luker and Ed Damer, who modeled faith and learning, doubt and affirmation. They taught me that they too struggled with pressing questions and invited me to join them in the struggle. Both in class and outside, in conversations in the halls, at the tennis court, in discussions after films and convocations their quality commitment to me made a difference.
The wisdom and the courage this College needs for the next century can neither be reduced to a sound-byte for television nor to an easily digestible inaugural address. It is wisdom that comes through the quality of our conversations together--conversations that occur in our classrooms, offices, in Doc's and the Cafeteria, in Braswell and Spruill, at the gym, in faculty homes, on the IM field, and at the President's House. The College must extend its conversations to include the City of Rocky Mount and the Region for our futures are intertwined and we have much to gain by working and cooperating together.
Wisdom and courage, brought together by founders of this College, to further Christian higher education at this place have brought us to this day. I pledge to you my commitment as a servant of this College to work with you to secure the College's future, secure in our sense of the history of the College, cognizant of the challenges that confront us, and undaunted by the demands that gaining our momentum may entail.
"God of Grace, and God of Glory, on thy people pour thy power. Grant us Wisdom, grant us Courage, for the facing of this hour."
Astin, Alexander W. Assessment for Excellence: The Philosophy and Practice of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. New York: Macmillan, 1990
Berquist, William H., Quality through Access with Quality: The New Imperative in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
Henry, William A. III, In Defense of Elitism. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Hoekema, David A. Campus Rules and Moral Community: In Place of In Loco Parentis. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994.
Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford, 1994.
Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Murphy, Roland E. The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Scott, Robert. The President as Philosopher. Liberal Education.
Volume 79. Number 3. 1993.
Tillich, Paul. The Courage To Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952.
Willimon, William H. and Naylor, Thomas H. The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.
I value discussions with colleagues Robert E. Calvert and Robert D. Newton of DePauw University who have, over the years, offered keen insights into liberal education. Conversations with DePauw Professor Karin Alhm have been instrumental in furthering my views on the importance of institutional assessment. I thank my spouse, Dianne Hardin, for her willingness to comment on drafts of this manuscript and assistance in refining my views, not to mention her support in getting me to the occasion of this address.