“Preach a Crusade Against Ignorance”

On a slow Sunday morning browsing through the paper, I came across Nicholas Kristof’s column describing what he calls “our broken escalator.” He is referring to our education system, what has been for so many of us the moving stairway of social mobility. He details the ways that his own beloved high school is being slowly eviscerated by budget cuts. More than 80% of school districts across the US are going to cut their budgets this year, and three quarters of them made cuts last year. “The immediate losers are the students,” Kristof writes, “in the long run, the loser is our country.”

These thoughts echoed with what I’ve been reading lately about education programs at the very beginning of our country’s history. I am spending a good part of the summer doing research for a book about why liberal education matters. Recently I’ve been reading Thomas Jefferson, and also some of his contemporaries. The political importance of education has rarely found as powerful a proponent as Jefferson, one of whose proudest achievements was founding the University of Virginia on a model of liberal learning that is ultimately practical. His friend and political rival John Adams was also a stalwart proponent of the importance of an educated citizenry. At the dawn of the Republic Adams, too, knew that only through education could citizens ensure that their government would remain responsive to their needs. As he wrote to Jefferson: “Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people… arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and for him this meant faith that the accumulation of knowledge would improve public and private life. His conception of “useful knowledge” was capacious — extending from an array of languages to mathematics, sciences and history. He wrote: “education generates habits of application, of order, and the love of virtue; and controls, by the force of habit, any innate obliquities in our moral organization.” The experience of undergraduates, as we all know, doesn’t at all points stimulate the habits of moral organization that the author of the Declaration of Independence had in mind. But don’t we still hope that our students acquire a love of virtue, even as they discover through hard work and sociability just what “love” and “virtue” might mean?

Of course, we have grown accustomed to criticizing problematic aspects of the Enlightenment worldview of our nation’s founders. Jefferson’s hypocrisy is legendary; his insight into structures of oppression didn’t disturb his own personal tyrannies. If our third president understood that education was inexorably linked to the possibility of freedom, his racism and sexism led him to think that women, Africans or native peoples should not enjoy that possibility.

But this summer, as I listen to the partisan haggling over the debt ceiling in Washington while the epidemic of unemployment rages on, and as I hear about school districts and university systems across the country slashing budgets and cutting back on educational programs, I read Jefferson with renewed energy and engagement. As representatives in 2011 labor to preserve the tax advantages of multi-millionaires, I admire how Jefferson recognized that a sure way to preserve the privileges of wealth is to curtail educational opportunity for those without them. In his proposal for public education in Virginia, he advocated a system for discovering youngsters with talent who would benefit from scholarships so that they could pursue their studies and serve the public at the highest level. His proposed that “Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.” In our own time, with school districts shortening their academic calendars to save money and universities struggling to replace financial aid support once provided by government, we are undermining the hope for change and improvement that is so essential to both learning and democracy. What will become of this nation if it turns its back on the promise of education as a vehicle for social and economic mobility?

At many of the highly selective universities that have the benefit of alumni support and endowment funds, we aggressively look for “worth and genius” in all areas of the country so as to create a diverse cohort of students who will stimulate learning for and from one another. Through programs like QuestBridge or Posse Posse, and with many community-based organizations as partners, we find young men and women who can thrive in and contribute to our campus communities. We do this not out of some imagined commitment to “political correctness,” as critics of higher-ed like to complain, but so that every student (rich or poor, private, public or home-schooled) has the opportunity to expand his or her horizons. And we do this, to paraphrase Jefferson, because education should be the keystone of the arch of our nation.

As the morning wore on, I left the newspaper in the kitchen and headed out to our town’s local Sunday softball game. It’s a great community event, with kids, parents and grandparents joining in our version of the American pastime. Waiting our turn at bat, two neighbors talked with me about how the local towns had balanced their budgets this year. Guess what had to be cut in order to balance the books? Education turned out to be the easiest target. My neighbors shook their heads in sadness because, as they said, the towns balanced the books at the expense of the future. Students lose now; in the long run our region will suffer.

As we wrestle with notions of “shared sacrifice” and “living within our means,” let us not ignore our responsibility to invest in the future by supporting education. We must not allow our representatives to protect tax breaks for the most advantaged while ignoring our responsibility to give the next generation the education they need. Only education will allow the youngsters on that baseball diamond and at others across the country to protect their freedoms while competing in the world. Only by supporting their right to learn, will we have the chance to strengthen our country’s economic, political and cultural future. As Jefferson said: “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people.” “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom and happiness.”

Cross-posted with Huffingtonpost.com

Our Desperate Need for Honest Leadership

This past weekend I posted the following on the HuffingtonPost, and it provoked a fair amount of comments. I cross-post it here, though it is somewhat more directly political than what I usually write for this blog. I won’t use this blog to support specific candidates, but from time to time political issues are so relevant to educational ones, and I do write on a variety of topics...

What a week it has been! On Monday the New York Times‘ conservative columnist, David Brooks, was criticizing the Republican Party in the harshest terms. On Friday, the paper’s liberal economist, Paul Krugman, was attacking President Obama for adopting the conservative fiscal agenda and betraying his core progressive creed. What’s going on?

For Brooks, we are faced with what he called “the mother of all no-brainers.” We now have broad agreement in Congress that we must deal with the long-term deficit, and this itself is a victory for the Republicans. They control the political discourse, and they can achieve many of their economic goals. But in a move that recalls the Dems’ ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the Republicans refuse to make a deal that would reduce the deficit by trillions.

Brooks is scathing:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

And he goes on:

Members of this tendency have taken a small piece of economic policy and turned it into a sacred fixation. They are willing to cut education and research to preserve tax expenditures. Manufacturing employment is cratering even as output rises, but members of this movement somehow believe such problems can be addressed so long as they continue to worship their idol.

He concludes that if the talks on the debt ceiling fail, it will be clear that the Republicans are not fit to govern.

Krugman is just as exercised by what he sees as Obama’s failure to apply either progressive values or sensible economic principles in his approach to dealing with the Republican deficit hawks:

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth.

For years, Krugman has viewed Obama’s compromises as an abdication of his responsibilities, and he speculates that the president is trying a Clintonesque maneuver that may have political sense but is an economic disaster. In a period of anemic job growth, Obama’s channeling of Herbert Hoover’s economic philosophies will only prolong the experience of dire recession for millions of Americans.

Brooks and Krugman both see that the Republican Party has been enormously successful in focusing attention on fiscal responsibility, which is resulting across the country in massive cuts to spending. These cuts will necessarily cause most pain to the most vulnerable — those who depend on government services. If the GOP were really serious about fiscal responsibility, its members would complement the cuts already won with increased revenue from those who have reaped the greatest rewards from our economic environment. This is what a political party ready to govern should do.

Meanwhile, we have an epidemic of unemployment, and nothing that the government is now doing is addressing this issue. Where is the enormous intellectual and political energy that Obama’s team displayed in preventing a banking system collapse, and that saved a large segment of the American automobile industry? Why has the president not had the courage of his convictions? Can he really believe that an imaginary bipartisan political pragmatism will trump economic realities?

Sensible government seems to have become a contradiction in terms. Democratic leaders have no ideas of their own, while Republican leaders are dedicated to protecting the rich — not to fiscal responsibility. Republican “non-starter” talk about additional revenue is an ideological fixation, not an economic theory. Democrats pandering to their base with calls to maintain the entitlement status quo won’t produce a sustainable health care system.

Protecting the least vulnerable remains the Republican’s highest priority, while protecting their political future seems to be what concerns Democrats. Where can we find honest leadership worthy of the name? We desperately need it.

Summer Reading: Review of Saramago’s SMALL MEMORIES

This weekend the WASHINGTON POST ran my review of José Saramago’s posthumously published memoir. For me, summer is a time to catch up on reading that I can’t quite get to during the school year, although I also have to get a lot of writing done myself over the next couple of months. I enjoy reviewing books outside my scholarly field. I have to think about them more intensively than I would as a casual reader, and yet I do not have a scholarly investment in the reception of the work. I did not know Saramago’s work before I reviewed SMALL MEMORIES, but now I can understand  why his achievements as a writer have seemed so remarkable to so many — especially in Europe. Discovering writers that matter to you is an intensely personal process, a process that began for me as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. Reviewing is one way for me to share that process.

What are the chances? That a child surrounded by illiteracy, shuffling between his family’s new life in Lisbon and their roots in the countryside, will have such an intense appetite for words that he relishes pages from discarded newspapers, seizes on fragments of Molière in a guidebook, and will one day create parallel worlds in which an entire nation goes blind, in which Jesus apologizes for God’s sins, in which death suddenly stops occurring. These worlds, fantastic as they are, turn out to be uncomfortably like our own.

What are the chances? That a writer whose early efforts were greeted with harsh criticism (or mere silence) leaves the literary world behind to concentrate on journalism, returns in his 50s to pen novels that capture the imagination of European writers and critics, is celebrated for political bravery and artistic originality and crowned with the Nobel Prize for literature.

José Saramago (1922-2010) was this child, this writer, and in “Small Memories” he has provided us with a collection of memories of his childhood and adolescence. The recollections don’t follow a linear path but instead touch lightly on lives framed by poverty and frequent brutality. But in Saramago’s retrospective imagination, these are also lives infused with dignity, affection and deep connection. The author knows the tricks that memory can play, and on some matters he has taken great pains to test his recollections against recorded facts. Saramago is fascinated by the vagaries of remembrance, at one point wondering if certain memories he had were really his.

Although his parents moved to Lisbon when he was just 18 months old (his father was to be a policeman), Jose continued to shuffle between Portugal’s capital and Azinhaga, his native village. The village was the “cradle in which my gestation was completed, the pouch into which the small marsupial withdrew to make what he alone could make, for good or possibly ill, of his silent, secret, solitary self.” The reader is introduced to various family members: a father consumed by jealous rage; grandparents who are hardened, stoic workers but who keep the weakest of their piglets warm by bringing them into their bed for a few nights. The author’s mother is long-suffering, but she is also the young woman who on passing through a doorway forgets she is carrying a jug of water on her head because she has just received a proposal from her future husband. “You might say that my life began there too,” Saramago writes, “with a broken water jug.”

After relating this incident of the broken jug, Saramago tells the reader that his older brother, Francisco, died at age 4 in the spring of 1924, some months after his mother brought them to Lisbon. The author wonders about his memory of his brother, the “happy, sturdy, perfect little boy, who, it would seem, cannot wait for his body to grow and for his arms to be long enough to reach something.” “It’s the summer or perhaps the autumn of the year Francisco is going to die,” Saramago writes, adding it’s “my earliest memory. And it may well be false.”

I was unprepared for the piercing sadness of this hazy recollection, steeped in sorrow but told in the same calm, matter-of-fact style as Saramago’s other childhood recollections. From the loss of his older brother we are led to a memory with a “fierce and violent truth”: Saramago’s brutal encounter with a pack of older boys who, holding him down, thrust a metal wire into his urethra. The horror and sadness of the wounded little boy, blood streaming from his penis, is startling in the context of the quiet charms of the volume as a whole. Francisco is dead; little José has no one to protect him. The physical wounds will heal, but the longing for the missing brother — and a concern for those who are vulnerable to all sorts of brutality — will always remain.

Shortly after relating this incident, Saramago recalls his older friend the “prodigious shoemaker,” also named Francisco, who asked the young author-to-be if he believed there were other worlds, where other possibilities were realized. When Saramago first decided to write a memoir, he tells us that he knew he would want to write of his brother. Bringing the forgotten back through words is the writer’s alchemy, his power to create when faced with the harshness of the world.

Saramago, a poet, journalist and diarist in addition to being an acclaimed novelist, knew that words mattered a great deal — that they can even point to one’s destiny. The writer’s paternal family name, for example, was de Sousa, and the author tells us it was a town clerk’s joke to register his surname as Saramago — the name for a wild radish eaten by the poor in harsh times. The boy grew into his name, taming his wildness but always remaining faithful to his roots in poverty. “Small Memories” is an expression of that fidelity, a small but nourishing last gift from a great writer.

Cross-posted from washingtonpost.com

 

Wes Trustee Joshua Boger in Biotech Hall of Fame

Yesterday I had my final conference call of the fiscal year with Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees. This devoted group of alumni and parents help steer the university for the long haul, and they find time in their busy schedules to provide support, critique and financial assistance for key Wes priorities. I am so grateful for their efforts.

The Board of Trustees is led by Joshua Boger ’73, P’06, P’09. A philosophy-chemistry major here as an undergraduate, Joshua has had an extraordinary career as a scientist, entrepreneur, philanthropist and citizen.  Recently he was recognized for his work in biotechology and chemistry. He  received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Boston Biotech CEO Conference.  Shortly after this honor, a large international gathering in Washington D.C. presented him with  the Biotechnology Heritage Award, jointly given by BIO and the Chemical Heritage Foundation (non-profit keepers of the history of chemistry, located in Philadelphia).  This means that Joshua is a member of a very small and distinguished group known as the Biotechnology Hall of Fame.

Joshua Boger

Congratulations, Joshua!

 

Midnight in America: Renewing the Pantheon

Last week I posted the following on the Huffington Post College site. I’ve been thinking about the limits of critical thinking for many years now (in the title essay of The Ironist’s Cage and recently in “Beyond Critical Thinking“); and the course I starting teaching last fall (The Modern and the Postmodern) could be described, I suppose, as an effort to “renew the Pantheon.” That is, I want to give students the opportunity to discover in strong books from the last two hundred years ideas that can make a difference in their lives today. Many professors at Wesleyan offer students the opportunity to ignite or re-ignite their relation to diverse cultural forms. That’s one of the ways students learn to discover opportunities, by finding achievements in other (sometimes surprising) times and places.

Reading David Denby’s New Yorker review of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, I was struck by the phrase he uses to describe the director: “The ultimate fan of great musicians and writers, the culture-mad student forever renewing the pantheon.”

What does it mean to renew the pantheon? In the case of Midnight in Paris it means envisioning a city and conjuring up artists who spent time there in the finest fantasy versions of themselves. Owen Wilson plays a writer who is looking for renewal, for creative inspiration that will change his life and work. When he hears the clock strike midnight, he travels back in time to the Paris of the 1920s, the city of his dreams, where he runs into Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali. This is often played for laughs, as when Hemingway speaks with the predictable clipped phrases and frequent references to fighting and courage. Paris likewise is presented as a series of visual clichés, but the shots are filled with so much affection that they exude more charisma than familiarity.

What does it mean to renew the pantheon? I’ve been thinking about the resistance of some of my own students to this renewal — a resistance accrued over years of being encouraged in school to become better “critical thinkers.” It is, alas, so much easier to find reasons to turn oneself off to a work of art (music, literature, film) than to discover how to open oneself up to it. And you often look smarter when you criticize something than you would if you embraced something. Condemnation seems to elevate the critic (especially when the critic is ironic), and so it’s often safer than finding what the powerful core of a work might be.

Like all my faculty colleagues, I want my students to develop their capacities for analysis, critique, evaluation and discernment. And like many, I want them to deepen their receptivity and expand their ability to take pleasure in a wide range of cultural expressions. I want them to experience wonder in the face of elegant experimental design, intricate musical or sculptural patterning, insightful literary or philosophical expression. Often the efforts to teach critical evaluation and expansive receptivity are in tension with one another.

When do “culture-mad students” more generally display the urge to renew the pantheon rather than to deconstruct it? Better yet, when can that deconstruction be a form of renewal? It happens when students are able “turn themselves” in such a way as to grasp what a work (or its author, if you prefer) is trying to achieve. Depending on what area the work is in, this takes empathy, language or math skills, and the informed imagination that comes from contextual thinking (as in history and anthropology). Turning oneself toward greater receptivity takes work, but the rewards are powerful — sometimes even transformative.

Increasing students’ ability to feel wonder in the face of important cultural achievements has been one of the great goals of a liberal education. Expanding our notions of what counts as cultural achievement is part of the educational process. You don’t always have to settle for the fast food culture that surrounds us, although sometimes one can find achievements there, too.

I can already hear the complaints that this view is elitist and impractical. On the contrary, what I am describing can be democratic and pragmatic (though I admit that it doesn’t have to be either). Finding beauty or thoughtfulness in surprising places can expand one’s appreciation for the possibilities of greatness, of lasting accomplishments. No genre of person or activity is excluded in advance, and this basic openness is intensely democratic. Why is this expansion of cultural horizons pragmatic? The process of discovering power in poems or pictures you at first didn’t understand, or in lines of inquiry that had seemed pointless, can strengthen capacities to discover opportunities generally. And just as we recognize that problem-solving is practical, we must acknowledge that discovering opportunity is pragmatic. Indeed, it is vital to our ability to shape the future.

I am hopeful that those who will shape the future will also have cultivated the ability to renew the pantheon of great work from the past. The pantheon will change over time as what we need from the past and recognize in it change. But unless we want to be stuck with the status quo, we must strive to hear our clocks strike midnight — to travel through different times and places to renew the possibilities for alternative futures.

Digital Media Alumni Shaping the Future

Last night I attended a terrific event in New York City with a large group of alumni working in the digital media sphere. We gathered at ZelnickMedia, and Strauss Zelnick ’79, Jim Friedlich ’79 and Andrew Vogel ’95 were great hosts to the more than 100 entrepreneurs. John Borthwick ’87 and Andy Weissman ’88 from Betaworks were helping with the hosting duties, and I learned about their entrepreneur-in-residence program. Now that’s something we could use at Wes! Imagine how many good ideas are bubbling up on campus, and how an enterprise builder might tease them out into some sustainable forms…

It was terrific to feel the energy of this crowd of inventive, ambitious alumni. I ran into my old friend Jane Polin ’80 and met Julie Burstein’80, whose recent book, Spark: How Creativity Works, is getting a lot of attention. There were folks from the venture capital field, like Stuart Ellman ’88, and Brad Burnham ’77, who were pretty much surrounded by eager alums with new ideas. Another giant in that field, Fred Wilson P’13, wrote his blog this morning about the confluence of science and art, and I can’t help but think he was inspired by some of the people he saw at the Wes reception. Recent grads (like Dina Kaplan ’93) were there as well as current student interns (like Benjamin Resnick ’13) and some senior media people, too, like Bill Blakemore ’65. Jake Levine ’08, as the lead volunteer heading the Wesleyan Digital Media effort, helped bring this all together.

I spoke briefly about the ways in which Wesleyan has been a pioneer in liberal education for more than 50 years. While other schools are playing defense or fighting over preserving turf boundaries, Wesleyan remains dedicated to expanding the boundaries of liberal learning. We believe that the liberal arts are INCREASINGLY relevant in an age of rapid technological transformation. We embrace the challenges of creating new networks of learning and positive social change. It was clear to me again last night in New York that our alumni are building on their Wesleyan education to shape the culture and economy of the future.

Go Wes!

Photos courtesy of Jake Levine ’08

Celebrating Wesleyan Music

At the end of last week I was in New York City with a great group of Wesleyan alumni to celebrate the long tradition of musical innovation at Wesleyan. We gathered at the Thalia Café to salute Mark Slobin, whose book, Music at Wesleyan: From Glee Club to Gamelan was published last year by Wesleyan University Press.

 

The evening was great fun, and it followed the trajectory of the book. A subset of the Cardinal Sinners were up first. This women’s a cappella group started us off with the beautiful alma mater, and their set also included a Bob Dylan tune. As a long-time Dylan diehard, I was just delighted. The singers were followed by a great experimental trio of bassoon, saxophone and percussion. The group started from an Anthony Braxton composition, and took off.

 

The Gamelan closed the evening with beautiful sounds both serene and uplifting. Alumni joined newly named University Professor Sumarsam in an all-star group of devoted players.

Thanks to Mark Slobin and all who attended. I almost forgot, you can get a copy of Music at Wesleyan (it makes a great gift!) here.

Defending the Liberal Arts, Envisioning Education

Recently I participated in two interesting public discussions about the value of a liberal arts education in America today. The first came through an invitation from CNN to talk about the importance of science education in the context of a broadly based college experience. CNN was responding to increasing concern about “America’s math and science lag,” and my essay tried to make the case for science as a crucial part of a robust liberal arts education. The urge to take a shortcut to technological proficiency is short-sighted as public policy, I argued, because that sort of science education isn’t as rich, and also because we need a citizenry capable of understanding this sector in context. My CNN opinion piece can be found here.

At the end of last week a producer from PBS called to ask if I’d go on the News Hour to speak to why a college education is still worth the investment. This was prompted, in part, by a Peter Thiel’s recent awarding of grants of 100k to young inventors who would prefer to pursue their ideas outside school. Of course, Mr. Thiel is right to point out that some people can thrive outside a university environment, though he himself graduated with a philosophy degree from Stanford. I’m guessing it was at Stanford that he developed his deep admiration for René Girard, a philosopher/literary critic who also made a strong impression on me when he visited Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities in the 1970s.

We in higher education need to be clearer about what we think students are learning during their four years in college. American higher education at its best provides multiple access points for different kinds of students who become more literate, more capable of acting as citizens, and more able to work with others while thinking for themselves. Universities must encourage free inquiry and cultivate the kind of risk-taking, work ethic and planning that are crucial to entrepreneurship (and scholarship, and civic engagement). The issues facing families looking at higher education are daunting. Alas, our PBS interview seemed to be over just as it was getting started. You can find a clip of the broadcast here.

At Wesleyan we are always on the lookout for the best ways to fulfill the promise of higher education. Our scholar-teachers, in dialogue with students and staff, continually strive to improve a learning experience that becomes a lifelong resource. We’ll be reporting on some new ideas in this regard in the fall.

Reunion, Departures and… RETURN for Summer Sessions

Reunion/Commencement weekend is already becoming a blur in my memory as I think about all the alumni we welcomed back to campus, and the members of the class of 2011 that we sent off. So many people told me that the campus looked great, and I want to thank the Physical Plant staff for having worked tirelessly to keep things looking sharp. The University Relations crew managed the logistics with spirited grace, and I am so thankful for their efforts! From Faculty Marshalls to student workers, everybody pulled together.

Each year I take special pleasure in meeting with members of the class celebrating its 50th reunion, and 2011 was no exception. Bob Patricelli (who along with his wife, Margaret, received a Baldwin Medal for outstanding service) was the master of ceremonies at the reunion dinner, at which the class of 1961 made resounding clear why Wes has been known as “the singing college of New England.”

I had a little too much fun at the 25th Reunion dinner joining some of the musicians for a Class of ’86 blues.

I was really getting carried away — but then I realized there were real singers in the room, like Tierney Sutton and Dar Williams’89. Oy!

Spending time with our doctoral honorees was deeply gratifying. Biff and Jean Shaw shared words of wisdom about the power of community and the importance of service. Alberto Ibarguen added immeasurably to the weekend with his comments on the changing role of communication, and on how our grads might make their way through these revolutionary times. Paul Farmer was smart (expected) and really funny (an added treat) in his address to the class of 2011. I’ve admired Paul’s work for years, and it was delightful to see him engage with our students and faculty. Finally, I got to spend time with Barbara Cook, a singer who has brought joy, tears and passion to audiences for decades. It’s a little dangerous to finally get the chance to meet someone you idolize, but in this case it was pure pleasure.

I was impressed with all those who crossed the podium. As luck would have it, a good part of my commencement address was published on CNN.com over the weekend. Families came from far and wide to celebrate with their new graduates, and it is always bittersweet to say goodbye at the end of the festivities. But we will be start up again May 31 with summer session classes starting next week. If you want a dose of Wes magic in June, there is still room in some of the classes.

Liberty, Equality and Solidarity

When I first spoke (mp3 audio file) at Wesleyan after being appointed president-elect in the spring of 2007, I talked about education in terms of freedom, equality and solidarity. As an old French historian, I said then, this trinity of values had made a great impression on my thinking. Of course, I’d replaced “fraternity” with “solidarity” in my speech, looking for a gender-neutral way of talking about the bonds of community.

A liberal education, I have said many times since my introductory speech in 2007, is about overcoming your self-imposed immaturity (as Kant said), or learning to obey laws that you give yourself (Rousseau). I had felt liberated by my own Wesleyan education. The sense of freedom that came from discovering what I loved to do, getting better at it, and sharing it with others, is a gift that Wesleyan has given to generations of its graduates.

Equality remains such an important value at Wesleyan, which opens its doors to talented students regardless of their ability to pay. At Wes, our commitment to equality makes our economic diversity possible. Which is why financial aid is such a key part of our budget, allowing us to support students whose families could not otherwise afford to send them to our university. During the last several years, we have seen an unparalleled growth in economic inequality in this country, and wealth increasingly is the primary mechanism for accessing cultural, political and economic opportunity. When access to higher education is based on wealth, even strong universities just reinforce inequality. At Wesleyan, our embrace of equality and diversity is a commitment to fight this trend, and many alumni help in this endeavor by contributing to financial aid.

In my introductory remarks to the Wesleyan community in 2007, I stressed a third theme of “solidarity.” I spoke about how at Wesleyan we were a strong community that valued freedom and equality combined with diversity. I have since written about the affectionate solidarity that runs through our campus culture, and about the exuberance that creates individual excellence and deep social connectivity. Wes students continue to produce work at the highest level while remaining tied to one another in community.

Now, I look out on a peaceful, rainy, Andrus Field, the calm before the outburst of activities around Reunion Weekend and Commencement. As the weather brightens at the end of the week and alumni begin streaming in, I know they will be eager to re-connect with old friends, former teachers and the powerful memories that still reside for them on this beautiful campus. I trust they will be stirred anew by   the excitement of discovery that was part of their transformational Wesleyan experience. Freedom of inquiry combined with an ethos of equality and solidarity remain hallmarks of our campus culture, the culture that returning alumni have helped build over the years.

On Sunday a new group of Wesleyan students will join the alumni ranks. The class of 2011 began their college education with me four years ago, and I am grateful to them for their patience with a new prez, their spirited sense of play and work – their devotion to our traditions and their spirit of creativity.

It will be bittersweet for Kari and me as we say goodbye on Sunday — it seems like such a short time ago that we were all attending pre-frosh summer send-offs together. We wish our new alums only the best, and we look forward to welcoming them back to campus whenever they need to plug into the power of the liberty, equality and solidarity that are hallmarks of the Wesleyan tradition now and forever their own.