Inaugural Address - April 28,2006

“I celebrate myself,” said Walt Whitman, who quickly added, “and every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” I am happy to join you in this celebration if that “me” stands for each of us who is here because of the life-changing education we received.

Speaking of sharing atoms, take a deep breath. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules exhaled by, say, Aristotle, Leadbelly, Newton , even George W. and Hillary. This is a little gross. Yet this scientific fact speaks to our national ideal and the education that follows from it. We are each profoundly individual and profoundly connected—as Whitman chants, “Always a knit of identity/ Always distinction.” Our education somehow encourages each of us to be fully distinct but also to knit together, to go beyond mere tolerance and actively embrace difference.

A few weeks ago in Mead Hall, a distinguished scholar described the Iraqi situation in alarming terms. Shiites and Sunnis are quickly separating into enclaves as their mixed neighborhoods become disputed territory. In isolating themselves and in rewriting centuries of history so as to demonize each other, they threaten our next Bosnia.

Listening, it was easy to despair over a humanity that chooses conflict. But I found myself thinking, this is why we are here at Drew. I had said this before, but the meaning blazed for me newly: We are required by a liberal arts education to adapt every possible perspective, even the perspective of our stated enemies, before we can earn our way to a conclusion. Indeed, at that precise moment when primitive emotion most threatens to topple reason, that is when this demand of thinking with the Other becomes most crucial.

“I unsettle all” says Emerson, and our education encourages us to seek out those who will re-open our closed minds. The individual who most encouraged me to apply for Drew's presidency is a friend whose political ideas are utterly different from my own. For instance, mine are good. But we are friends not in spite of our differences but because of them.

Or again, I am teaching a course this semester on the literary conflict between British and American writers in the nineteenth century. In their greatest works, for instance, Whitman belittles Wordsworth or Melville mocks Charles Dickens. I call this course The Battle for Reality. But I can celebrate this battle precisely because it transforms conflict into ideas and avoids the squalor of actual warfare. We are here at a university not to end conflict but to elevate it.

As the Jewish president of a Methodist-based university with a preponderance of Catholic undergraduates and an increasing number of Islamic students, I am here today to affirm that democratic education is the hope of the world, the only hope and nothing less.

It's also fun. Learning is joy; and while I've been talking about the truth basis for the liberal arts, as Keats writes, “Truth is Beauty/ Beauty Truth” and now I come to the Beauty part. Each of you knows the joy of seeing world upon world disclose itself as full of interest: a world of genetics or gemology, of dance or the dance of atoms, of social policy and of lyric poetry. We learn at the university not just some subjects; we learn that the subjects of human curiosity are innumerable and inexhaustible. At Drew, our best lesson is in wonder.

Well, truth and beauty, then, great. But what kind of practical agenda does that set?

Whitman's friend Thoreau titled a famous chapter in Walden “Where I lived and What I Lived For.” Where we live at Drew is in a forest 45 minutes from one of the world's great cities. Our dual location speaks to the two parts of what we live for.

This quiet forest encourages thought. The solitude of this glen allows us to stretch the limbs of our minds.

Will wonder never cease? So we say, and yet it may if we do not tend to it. At Drew we will initiate an effort to examine every assumption of how we organize knowledge and how we share it. By this we will restock our forest for the time ahead, renewing a culture of learning.

A real culture of learning exists in and beyond the classroom throughout a campus, and it exists beyond the campus as well. And this expands the notion of where we live. The motto above Drew's gate reads, “Freely have you received…Freely give” and the gate is open. Thus our New York programs in the arts, at the UN, on Wall Street. The forest has its claims, but so too the nearby cities of social urgencies.

This is a university founded first as a school of theology, to serve the good. For that, the liberal arts must become less exclusionary and effete. The pure is neighbor to the puerile. The practical world is not the evil empire.

And so as we redefine our academic work, we must consider also how we enact our learning in the various social sectors. It is very fine to be society's critic. How much better, though, to constitute reality than merely to critique it! As a counterpart to study abroad I urge upon us Study Beyond—to encourage a new notion among students and faculty of the citizen scholar.

Nor will we scorn the world of work but actively help our students to take their liberal-arts learning into every meritorious occupation—help them, that is, not to fit in but to stand out, as agents of improvement.

In all, From Madison New Jersey to that other Madison Avenue, back and forth between the academic grove and the turbulent city, we must enact our learning and learn from experience as well as from books.

But let me return to Thoreau's “where I lived” for there is yet another answer to where we live. We live in what is ideally a meritocracy. We need to look to our internal policies to ensure that our university will be, in William Bowen's words, an engine of opportunity rather than a bastion of privilege.

We want Drew's population to mirror more fully the streets and cities of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic America ; and we wish for Drew to bring more students from other continents and cultures. But it is no real achievement to have x percentage of students from here or there if students from differing backgrounds fail to interact. That is, we also live on a campus, and we aspire to make a living model of how people should live together. Strengthening the intercultural aspects of our studies will be one major aspect of this, but how we live from day to day will be our sternest test.

Finally, as an institution, Drew lives in an educational landscape, an ecology replete with everything from K-12 to community college to public universities to liberal arts colleges to professional schools and so on. It is a glorious variety, as I became acutely aware when I was privileged to lead the great Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. If we wish to encourage individuals and groups to take down the walls, we as educators must do so ourselves. And so today Drew pledges a new compact with the public schools and also with all of our neighboring institutions to share resources and heal the rifts in our educational system. We have so much to learn from each other!

And every institution plays a part in determining that educational landscape in its own policies. In all, to quote Emerson, we must realize our rhetoric and our rituals, turn our ideals into lived practices. It was in that spirit that we made the decision this past fall to allow applicants to Drew to submit graded coursework rather than their SAT scores if they wished. If we pride ourselves for bringing out the unique abilities of each of our students, we decided we should begin with the admissions process. We saw the frenzy of parents paying thousands of dollars for academic steroids to get their kids a 50 point increase in SAT scores and wondered why we were allowing our children's identities to be reduced to a single pair of numbers. We saw very bad values being practiced to get students admitted to institutions designed to inculcate idealism. And we said “stop the madness” and defined Drew away from that. But we have a long road ahead before our rhetoric is realized in all of our practices.

That is where we live and what we live for, but I have one last question, a crucial one—who is my boss? I forgot to ask my predecessor, though I have come to know him very well. And indeed, I could take all my words this morning about the liberal arts—about the value of discovery and about the need to employ it for the good of the world, about the virtue of believing in more than one idea and about interesting oneself in everything, about empathizing even and most with one's opponents—I could take all my verbiage about the values of the liberal arts and reduce them to two syllables—Tom Kean.

But for now, without his active help, I am trying to figure out who is my boss. It appears that you all are. The faculty is certain that I work for them. The staff were here before me and will be here after me, so I am temporary help to them. I like to think that I work most for the students, and it is certainly a president's responsibility to ensure that the student interest informs every discussion. Much as I work for them, let me remind my students that their term paper is due next Thursday.

The trustees can fire me, so they are definitely my employer. I mean to uphold the best traditions and enhance the value of their degree for the alumni. So I work for them. My family—there in front of me are my favorite journalist Candy Cooper and my mentors Gabe and Sarah—is vaguely aware Dad works for them.

This is exhausting—apparently, I work for all of you! But truthfully, at the end of the day, my sole responsibility and only true reporting line is to Drew University and its future, and it is only in regard to that future that I will make each decision. This is a thrillingly unique, tripartite place: with an undergraduate college for active learning, where each student receives an education that is custom fitted, not off the rack; with a graduate school for discovery in the life of the disciplines; and with a theological school for the wisdom that must accompany all learning and discovery, meeting the great and growing spiritual hunger of our nation with something far better than sound-bite religion. In all, what a great setting for contributing toward a 21 st century renaissance! What a great setting for contributing toward an education that is, in truth, the world's hope.

To realize that hope will take a determination few of us have yet recognized, for the kind of education we endorse and practice has, by some indices, failed to thrive in recent decades. This life-changing, world-saving education is not an automatic. Those of us who have been gifted by this kind of education must fight for it as if it was a political cause, for it is far more profound than any merely political issue—it made our lives and it requires our advocacy if we are to create a compact among generations. Have we the courage and wit to ensure the inheritance of truth and beauty, an inheritance that doesn't merely enable democracy but justifies it?

To work with you toward that renaissance and this Drew is my amazing privilege. Nine months ago, as a presidential embryo of sorts, I wrote to the alumni that this is exactly where I want to be. This is precisely what I wish to do. I feel that all the more strongly as we conclude my gestation. As Emily Dickinson wrote of an undeserved gift:

As if I asked a common Alms—
And in my trembling Hand—
A Stranger pressed a Kingdom
And I—bewildered—stand—

Happily bewildered by your kindness and trust, I thank you for the honor of forwarding a heritage I will cherish.

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