A Happy Anniversary
Five years ago today, I enjoyed the remarkable
privilege to be inaugurated as Susquehanna’s fifteenth president. As part of
that ceremony, I delivered the address below to assembled trustees, faculty,
staff, students, and friends of the university along with numerous delegates
representing sister institutions. It was an outline of the foundations of our
enterprise and my goals for the university.
Dramatic complications have been interjected into
those plans, but, as an academic community, we have continued to pursue the
objectives presented that day. I am so proud of the concerted effort of so many
to advance these objectives. Some highlights include:
·
Community
o We have continued to engage our broader
community by hosting numerous meetings of regional employers to collectively
improve inclusion efforts in the valley.
o We will soon move into our Downtown Center on
Market Street to shorten our metaphorical driveway and build on our
relationship with Selinsgrove.
o We have strengthened our ties to the Greater
Susquehanna Valley Chamber of Commerce and amplified our government relations efforts.
·
Citizen
Leadership
o Over the past three elections, we have
dramatically increased voter participation among our students earning us the most
improved campus in Pennsylvania award from the All In Democracy Challenge.
o We were among the initial institutions to
join the Liberal Arts College Racial Equity Leadership Alliance.
·
Global
Citizenship
o We have continued to build on our Global Opportunities,
or GO Program, through which all SU students study abroad. During the pandemic,
we created virtual opportunities for meaningful intercultural engagement.
o Our Sigmund Weis School of Business became
the first business school in the world to guarantee an international internship.
·
Access
o We have continued to expand our support of
all students with a focus on increasing persistence and graduation rates.
o We are recipients of a TRiO grant that provides additional resources to support the success of
at-risk students.
o We joined the American Talent Initiative, a collective of the best colleges and universities in the nation that
are collaborating to increase the number of students from lower- and middle-income
families who enroll and graduate from our institutions. Susquehanna was one of
the institutions lifted up by the ATI in their annual report for leading the organization in meeting our
goals.
These lofty goals remain our collective loadstones
as we continue to advance the university’s noble mission.
The New American Scholar
20 October 2017
On September
first 1858, at the laying of the cornerstone of the Missionary Institute, now
Selinsgrove Hall, Joseph Casey, Esq. provided remarks that included this quote:
“Education, in
its legitimate sense, includes not only the cultivation of the mental powers,
but the proper training and development of the moral sentiments and faculties,
and its true object is to ‘make us not only wiser but better…’”
Over the past
few months, many of you have heard me refer to the four pillars of our work
together: Engagement, Citizen Leadership, Global Citizenship, and Access. Truly
these are four perspectives on the same fundamental objective of Susquehanna
University: helping students to be not only wiser, but better.
Susquehanna has
always been an integral part of this community. Leaders of 19th-century
Selinsgrove provided land and financial resources to create the Missionary
Institute. It was local leaders who insisted that the Susquehanna Female
College and the Classical Department be founded along with the Missionary
Institute to provide a transformative education for their children who were not
called to the ministry, and it is those two branches that persist as the
University we know today.
We will strengthen
our rich symbiotic relationships with Selinsgrove, Snyder County, and the
Greater Susquehanna Valley through an expansion of our Service Leaders Program
and a broader array of internships and externships in service to local
businesses and non-profits. We will work with commercial and community partners
to organize a diversity summit to unite our leading institutions in efforts to
improve diversity and inclusion throughout the region. We will build upon our
success in developing strategies to improve the environmental health of the
river, its tributaries, and our region. We will also expand our capacity to be
a resource for action research to the broader community by applying student and
faculty expertise to real challenges brought to us by the community.
We
will be not only wiser, but better.
This
is what we are called to do.
Citizen
Leadership has always been at the core of liberal education (meaning a
broad-based education rooted in free inquiry and critical reflection), but
rarely in our nation’s history has anti-intellectualism been so prominent, and never
in our history has the critical relationship between liberal education and the
preservation of an enlightened democratic republic been so poorly understood.
Twenty-one
years before the laying of the cornerstone of the Missionary Institute, Ralph
Waldo Emerson gave his now famous address, “The American Scholar,” to the Phi
Beta Kappa society in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a remarkably
forward-looking essay that did much to transform higher education and higher
thought in our nation, and ultimately, the world. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
referred to it as America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”
In his speech,
Emerson outlined three tenets of a scholar’s work, and for these purposes, all
who teach and study here and at our sister institutions are the scholars to
whom Emerson spoke. In summary, these tenets are:
First:
The scholar is our most attuned observer and interpreter of the natural,
physical world.
Second:
The scholar interprets the past and the works of the past to help inform our
understanding of the present world.
Third:
Now this is where Emerson was seen as revolutionary. The scholar must be a
person of action. The scholar must proclaim his observations. He must report
his analyses so that they may be applied to the pursuit of a greater good.
As Shirley Chisholm said, “You don't make progress by standing on
the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing
ideas.”
Emerson further
defined the duties of the scholar as:
The office of the
scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst
appearances… He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of
human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and
breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye.
He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades
ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble
biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever
oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered
as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart.
And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the
passing men and events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promulgate.
As ground
breaking as Emerson’s words may have been to his audience, liberal education
has always had its roots in application. The ancient Greeks organized the
framework of studies they believed were necessary to prepare free men to be
informed and effective citizens. The Latin, artes
liberales, referred to the intellectual pursuits for free citizens.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses
the differences and interrelatedness of applied skills or techne (τέχνη),
practical wisdom - phronesis (φρόνησις), and theoretical wisdom - sophia (Σοφíα). We could think about these as skills,
problem solving, and an understanding of universal truths. What is true, what is good, and why?
This kind of
thinking is our contemporary world’s greatest want, and it is what liberal
education makes possible. The Stoics, in a prescient nod to the enlightenment,
declared that this intellectual endeavor is what truly made one free.
Professor Coleen
Zoller recently reminded me that Plato’s Academy was so named because he chose
the location for his lectures to be within a beautiful grove of olive trees
named for the hero of Greek mythology, Hekademos (Ἑκάδημος). Our beautiful arboretum campus is an
intentional nod to that heritage.
The rise of the
cathedral and monastic schools in medieval Europe led to the integration of
liberal and professional education to prepare students to lead the church. In
addition to the Trivium and Quadrivium, these schools provided training in
canon law, disputation, and accounting. The Faith had rules, priests preached,
and churches had treasuries.
It was at this
time that the guild model came to be applied to university life. The
Magistorum, or masters, professed and the Scholarium, or scholars, were their
students. We acknowledge this part of academic history every time we don these
robes for formal events.
The scientific
revolution set the stage for the enlightenment and provided some of the best
role models for Emerson’s scholar. These scientists observed the natural world and
imparted the truth of their science. Copernicus determined that the sun was in
the center of our solar system through mathematics. This was then confirmed
through direct observation by Galileo, who when asked to recant his finding in
the face of 17th-century “alternative facts,” apocryphally declared,
“E pur si muove — And yet it moves.”
This same rigor
came to be applied to the humanities leading to the Age of Enlightenment, an
era that was guided by the motto, “Dare to Know,” and led to the advancement of
personal liberty, tolerance, the separation of church and state, and
constitutional governments.
The spirit of
the enlightenment found fertile soil in the American colonies. The founding
fathers were keenly aware of the relationship between liberty and knowledge. In
1765, John Adams wrote A Dissertation on
Canon and Feudal Law in which he stated:
The poor people, it is
true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found
either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength;
ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame
and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to
be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to
wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of
their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the
latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all
earthly government, — Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human
laws -- Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.
Our nation’s founders were rapacious
consumers of information and systematic in their application of that knowledge
in their world’s laboratory. They knew that their inspired experiment to create
a democratic republic would require broadly educated citizen leaders to foster
and develop this revolutionary form of modern government.
George
Washington’s belief in the critical role education would play in our national
development continued throughout his career of public service. The draft of his
first inaugural address embraces the foundation of liberal education:
Whenever the opportunity shall be furnished to you as
public or as private men, I trust you will not fail to use your best endeavors
to improve the education and manners of a people; to accelerate the progress of
arts & sciences; to patronize works of genius; to confer rewards for
invention of utility; and to cherish institutions favourable to humanity.
In
his final annual address to Congress, Washington outlined his dreams for a new
nation, calling for the formation of a national university and a national
military college:
The assembly to which I
address myself is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a
flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity
and reputation.
… and a primary object
of such a national institution should be the education of our youth in the
science of government. In a republic what species of knowledge can be equally
important and what duty more pressing on its legislature than to patronize a
plan for communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the
liberties of the country?
Washington was not alone in his patronage of
the intellectual future of the republic. The five authors of the Declaration of Independence were public
intellectuals of the highest order. Robert Livingston was a distinguished man
of letters who amassed a personal library of over 4000 volumes. John Adams was
a founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Roger Sherman was a member
of the Yale University faculty and served as the University’s treasurer.
Benjamin Franklin provided the leadership to create the College of
Philadelphia, which became the University of Pennsylvania, and of all his
accomplishments, Thomas Jefferson took his greatest pride in having established
the University of Virginia.
Ours
is a nation conceived in intellectual idealism. The visionary leaders who
conceived this republic were deep thinkers who embodied the best citizenship
that is at the heart of liberal learning. They were avid scientists, political
theorists, natural historians, and moral philosophers. Theirs was, however, an
idealism deeply rooted in practical wisdom.
Among
the many articles in the first volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (whose early
members included Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Thomas
Paine, and Benjamin Rush) were the Society’s observations of the Transit of
Venus in 1769, an essay on grape cultivation and wine making, and designs for
an automated bilge pump. The preface of that initial volume stated:
Knowledge is of little use, when confined to mere
speculation… the members propose to confine their disquisitions, principally,
to such subjects as tend to the improvement of their country, and advancement
of its interest and prosperity.
The
American Academy of Arts and Sciences was established in 1780. Its founders
were John Adams, John Hancock, and James Bowdoin. Among the members inducted
the following year were Washington and Franklin. Its creation is another
notable example of the founders’ belief in the relationship between liberal
learning and citizen leadership. As their Charter states, the purpose of the
Academy is:
… to cultivate every art and science which may tend to
advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and
virtuous people.
The same spirit of scientific thinking
and its companion flourishing of the enlightenment that fueled these societies,
provided the spark that created our new republic, and to provide a citizenry
equipped to lead this nation, the founders cultivated institutions of higher
education rooted in the liberal arts.
As noted before, Franklin founded Penn
and Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. Washington provided support
for the creation of Washington College in Maryland, and he provided a
transformative gift to the Augusta Academy, which is now known as Washington
and Lee University. Patrick Henry and James Madison were critical to the
founding of Hampden-Sydney College, and Madison succeeded Jefferson as Rector
of UVA. Hamilton College was named for Alexander Hamilton, one of its first
trustees, and Benjamin Rush founded Dickinson.
These institutions and those founded
upon their model, prepared the next generations of leaders. Our liberal arts
colleges have continued to produce a disproportionately high percentage of
leaders in science, letters, business, and government. We develop informed
citizen leaders in no small part to safeguard democracy from thuggery and mob
rule.
And so, here we are 241 years after the
signing of the Declaration of
Independence and 180 years after Emerson’s address in a nation so starved
for citizen leadership that we find ourselves perilously divided not over
competing social philosophies of left and right, but quite literally over
issues of right and wrong.
We have entered into an
anti-intellectual climate in which a significant portion of our populous is
willing to reject scientific facts in favor of convenience and self-interest.
An inconvenient truth is no less true.
Likewise, spewing hate speech is not an
exercise of civil liberties; it is a mockery of them, and denying social
justice for any of us, diminishes justice for all.
We must do better. The domains in which
we will apply citizen leadership are sustainability, social justice, and
diversity. I frequently tell students that we are here to learn how to have
difficult conversations. Like Emerson’s scholar who “raises himself from
private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious
thoughts,” we must rise above the noise that distracts our public discourse
from the fundamental aims of responsible action, compassion, and human decency.
We must be the world’s eye, we must be the world’s heart, and we must be the
world’s voice.
We must not
despair, as Abigail Adams wrote, “These are times in which a genius would wish
to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific
station, that great characters are formed…Great necessities call out great
virtues.”
This was our
calling in 1858, and it remains our calling today. We must not only be wiser,
we must be better.
This is what we are called to do.
At Susquehanna University, we welcome
the stranger. Our friends in Hillel recently reminded us that this is the most
frequent command in the Torah. This is how we learn what we have in common and
how we can learn to celebrate our differences. This is what it means to be a
Global Citizen.
The term
cosmopolitan is attributed to Diogenes of Sinope, the great Cynic philosopher
who is said to have lived in a large clay pot. When asked from where he came,
Diogenes said, “I am a citizen of the world.”
Our friends the
Stoics who declared that it was a liberal education that made one free,
developed Diogenes’s dictum into the concept that each of us is from two
communities: the place where we are born and the human community writ large.
Over 2,000 years later, in Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant wrote:
The
peoples of the earth have now gone a great distance in forming themselves into
smaller or larger communities; this has gone so far that a violation of rights
in one place is now felt throughout the world. So the idea of a law of world citizenship is not a
legal flight of fancy; rather, it is necessary to complete an unwritten code of
civil and international law as well as mankind’s written laws; and so it is
needed for perpetual peace. Until we can establish a law of world citizenship,
we must not congratulate ourselves on how close we are coming to that.
Susquehanna’s
Global Opportunities, or GO, Program requires that all our students have a
study-away experience that engages them in different cultures. Our academic preparation
before the GO trip and the interpretive unpacking that happens on campus after
our students return strives to give them the skills to appreciate and respect
cultural difference. We must prepare our students to be effective advocates for
their neighbors near and far.
This
is what it means to be a global citizen.
This
is what we are called to do.
There are many
things about this institution that inspire me, but our history of providing
access to a transformative, world-class education to meritorious students from
across the socio-economic spectrum remains one of the most moving.
As
Marie Curie said, “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving
the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and,
at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity.”
In 2014, the New York Times published a ranking of
the most economically diverse colleges and universities in the United States.
Susquehanna University was proud to be ranked 9th in the country
Susquehanna
achieved this position with the lowest endowment per student of the top-50
institutions. The average endowment per student of those top-50 institutions
was over 9.4 times that of Susquehanna, and the institution with the next
lowest endowment-per-student ratio was still 60% higher than
Susquehanna’s.
At Susquehanna,
31% of the students in this year’s incoming class are PELL-eligible, meaning
that socio-economically, they come from the lowest 20%. This means that
Susquehanna is making it possible for a 70% larger-than-average share of
America’s most financially disadvantaged students to transform their lives with
a high-quality university education. In contrast with our 31%, the Ivy League
only enrolls an average of 18% PELL-eligible students.
From these
humble beginnings and with our modest means, our students outperform the highest-ranked
institutions in the nation. This spring, Zippia
published a list of the colleges and universities in the United States with the
highest employment rates of its graduates. Susquehanna was ranked No. 1 in
Pennsylvania and No. 9 in the nation.
Since
its founding, this university has done more with less. This has been the result
of institutional grit and self-sacrifice coupled with the scrappiness of our
students and alumni who will not let go of their goals.
The landscape of higher education continues
to elevate the challenges in our path: when adjusted for inflation, the
families sending students to Susquehanna have less capacity to pay than they
did in 2000, and the resources required to sustain our academic competitiveness
and reputation have continued to outpace those means. The world needs
Susquehanna graduates now more than ever. This is why we must secure the funds
to make a Susquehanna education available to all deserving students in
perpetuity.
This is what we are called to do.
This is what we must do for the New
American Scholar.
Like Emerson’s Scholar, The New American
Scholar is an observer of nature, an interpreter of the past, and a person of
action, but the New American Scholar represents the spectrum of human
diversity. The New American Scholar is more likely to be a woman than a man. The
New American Scholar is truly a citizen of the world: as young people come to
our colleges and universities from around the globe to become, and to help all
our students to become, cosmopolitan citizen leaders. This is Susquehanna. We are
the New American Scholar.
Let us celebrate
our motto through action: Achievement. Leadership. Service.
We will celebrate
access through academic achievement,
We
will celebrate engagement through service to the community, and
We will celebrate
our citizenship in the world through leadership.
Susquehanna University
educates students for productive, creative and reflective lives of achievement,
leadership, and service in a diverse, dynamic, and interdependent world to “make us not only wiser but better.”
This
is what we are called to do.
Thank you!
__________: Eighth
Annual Address, 7 December 1796
Pierre Curie (1923), as translated by
Charlotte Kellogg and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, p. 168
