Grace Subat

Dear Lawrence Community,

The recent shootings in the Atlanta area mark another tragedy involving gun violence. We mourn the loss of the lives of all eight victims. But the fact that six of those killed were women of Asian descent serves as a troubling reminder of the increase in anti-Asian hate incidents, harassment and discrimination in this country since the beginning of the pandemic.

As a community that values inclusion, I know you join me in standing with the Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities; we must oppose all forms of hate, including the scapegoating and xenophobia directed at individuals who belong to these groups. This is part of our commitment to become an anti-racist campus community.

If you seek support or need someone to talk with, please contact campus resources including Wellness Services, Spiritual & Religious Life, the Diversity & Intercultural Center, International Student Services, the Center for Academic Success and Office of Diversity & Inclusion. For those remaining on campus during Spring Break all centers will be open. Additionally, our employee assistance provider, ERC, is available at no cost, and employees on the university health plan can access an in-network counselor or mental healthcare provider by searching the United Healthcare Choice Plus Network online.  

For any incidents of concern, contact Campus Safety at 920-832-6999 or security@lawrence.edu.  If you witness a bias incident, please complete a bias incident report  or contact the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. In addition, the Rave Guardian App could provide access to safety and community resources. Information on downloading the app is available on the Lawrence website.

As we continue to move forward through these challenging times, I hope you find peace and support with friends, family, or other loved ones during the break.

Yours,

Mark

Mark Burstein

President, Lawrence University

Dear Lawrence Community,

Like many of you, I am still digesting last week’s assault on the Capitol:  What does it mean for me?  What does it mean for Lawrence and our learning community?  The symbol of Confederate flags paraded through the nation’s capital continues to be in my thoughts and nightmares.  With many of us limiting human contact due to the pandemic and the beginning of the term, it is likely that it is much more difficult to process these events.  To play our part in responding to this attack on this nation’s basic principles of democracy, liberty, and justice for all, I believe that we must rededicate ourselves to our goal of becoming an antiracist, equity-minded institution and community.

In a statement last spring, the Board of Trustees wrote:  “Centuries of discrimination based on race have embedded inequities in every aspect of our lives, including here in Appleton and on the Lawrence University campus.  We affirm our commitment, led by all members of our community—the administration, faculty, students, and staff—to continue to eliminate the impacts of racism at Lawrence as we prepare our students to be leaders in their communities.”

Below is a summary of our current efforts, including initiatives connected to CODA’s recommendations and concerns from last fall.  We know that addressing structural racism is an urgent need, and while some of the initiatives will take some time to review and implement, we are prioritizing this work.  I want to again thank student leaders, as well as the many faculty and staff, whose energy is moving us forward.  Each entry is listed with the name(s) of the leader of the effort and a goal for completion.  While interconnected, the initiatives are grouped into three categories:  Changes in Processes and Policies; Fostering a More Diverse Community; and Creating a Safe Home for All.  These initiatives will provide a strong basis for future endeavors.  If you want to better understand any of these initiatives or potentially get involved, please contact the lead directly.  Our communal aspirations require all of us to engage.

I hope to see you at one of the MLK Day events this Monday.  You can find a full program schedule here.

Yours,

Mark

Mark Burstein

President, Lawrence University

___________________________

Changes in Processes and Policies

Fostering a More Diverse Community

Creating a Safe Home for All

Dear Lawrence Community,

I am sure all of you expected Winter Term to be unlike any other, but events, both national and local, have solidified the start of this new term as one that we will never forget.  

The vision of a mob storming the nation’s Capital yesterday violated the very core of what we stand for.  President-Elect Biden said, “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault unlike anything we’ve seen in modern times.  An assault on the citadel of Liberty, the Capitol itself…… Let me be very clear.  The scenes of chaos…..do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”  The President-Elect was joined in words of condemnation by many other elected officials on both sides of the aisle, including our own Congressional representative Mike Gallagher.  

Closer to home, the Kenosha County District Attorney’s decision earlier this week to not press charges in Jacob Blake’s case painfully illustrates the continuing inequality in our society.  These events and many others work powerfully against the values of Lawrence and the community we hold dear.  

We also continue to live in the middle of a pandemic.  Thank you to those who have decided to connect from locations around the globe and to those joining us here on campus.  I am grateful for our community’s resilience and care for each other.  I want to thank every member of our community who showed up for testing and who carefully observes the pledge as we gather in Appleton.  As the contours of COVID-19 continue to change, we will do everything we can to keep our community healthy and safe.  

Many of us have now lost loved ones to this deadly virus.  Within our own community, it was with a heavy heart that I learned of Pat Powell’s death earlier this week.  Pat, a beloved member of the Bon Appetit staff, contracted the virus after the end of fall term.  I know you join me in sending our thoughts and prayers to her loved ones and all others who have been touched by this deadly virus.  

It is against this backdrop that we begin our term.  Our world is certainly not one that meets the expectations of our community or the principles we discuss in classrooms, laboratories, residence halls, and studios.  Our challenge will continue:  to work every day to lead our college, our community, this nation and others around the world to meet our aspirations and the values we teach and learn here.  Your efforts to reach this goal inspire me every day.  

I look forward to seeing you soon on campus or via zoom.  Be well and please continue to make decisions that keep others well.  

Yours, 

Mark

Allison, thank you for that unusual and warm introduction and for your leadership of the Public Events Committee this year.  I look forward to seeing how you and the Committee reinvent our community gatherings. 

Thank you Professors Gomez, Oh Zabrowski, Sieck, Spears and Swan for that beautiful prelude.  You made an excellent selection this year with “Show Us How to Love” by Mark Miller.  No year calls more strongly for love than this one.  Thank you Jessica Hopkins’22 for reading our Land Acknowledgement this morning.  And thank you, Linda Morgan Clement, the Julie Esch Hurvis Dean of Spiritual and Religious Life, for providing closing words for today’s Convocation.  Our postlude today will also be a treat, a piece played by Hung Phi Nguyen’21.   

I also want to thank the many members of the Lawrence community who helped me with research for this talk.  Each year matriculation convocation has provided an opportunity for me to consider a topic with colleagues across the campus.  This year, as in years past, I leave the conversation impressed by the breadth, depth, and generosity of our intellectual campus discourse. 

Welcome to the academic year.  I want to specifically welcome our new first year, transfer and visiting students, and the many faculty and staff who recently joined us.  Since we will continue for the foreseeable future to be a community both on campus and dispersed to over 30 countries and close to 50 states, I ask that we all make an extra effort to extend a warm Lawrence welcome to our new members.  I look forward to working with all of you in finding new ways to sustain our vibrant learning community during this pandemic.

I began to think about the theme of belonging and home for this matriculation convocation last spring in response to the societal convulsion created by both the pandemic and the deepening recognition of systemic racism in our culture.  At that moment, I had no idea how personal this topic would become for me.  This summer has been a time for me to reassess my priorities and decide to prioritize family, specifically my mother and my in-laws, over a position I love.  Serving as your president has been the central privilege and pleasure of my professional career.  David and I want to thank all of you who have allowed us to join, to belong, and to call this university and Appleton our home.  Lawrence will always be in our hearts and we will always be proud to call Appleton our home no matter where we reside. 

What a year.  I expect many of you feel, as I do, the pain, the conflict, and the dislocation in our society.  The new presidential election cycle has unleashed overwhelming forces to divide us.  Our country’s attempt to reckon with systemic racism brings both hope and conflicting views of an aspirational future.  Environmental degradation continues to march on around the globe.  And, the pandemic has curtailed ways to process all of this stress, has upended family life, and has created severe economic burdens on many of us and the institutions we serve. 

This chaotic environment filled with conflict, inequity, anxiety and anger has forced me to raise basic questions about where I feel safe and accepted.  Where are my roots?  Where do I belong?  Where is home?

Can I truly feel at home in a purple state in a time when political discourse has morphed into verbal hand to hand combat and the middle ground has become suspect?  When we moved to Wisconsin eight years ago, I saw the state’s political tradition as a strength, a place to fully explore all sides.  Now it feels like an invitation to a daily political war.  Many theorists who have explored the concept of belonging find that one of its central aspects is the need to feel that your whole identity is recognized and affirmed.  This recognition is seen as an invitation to create a deep connection.  If this is true, how can belonging be created in a society in which racism and bias against minority identities continue to exist?

The pandemic has also made it harder to return to places where we once felt at home.  The virus threatens every travel plan and has led countries and regions of the world to limit visitation.  How can those of us who have deep human connection in multiple locations sustain ties that are integral to our sense of belonging? 

These questions and many others consumed me this summer.  As Ann Belford Ulanov recognized in an address entitled “Root, Uprooting, and Rootedness” at the CG Jung Institute in Chicago last year, our world has reinforced “internal flux rather than integrating themes.”  Privileged to join a sustained dialogue group on race and racism at Lawrence and in the Fox Cities, I realized that these questions are on many of our minds.  Countless researchers have studied the human desire for belonging.  Some posit belonging as the opposite of isolation: it ensures that we do not feel alone.  Others suggest that finding meaning in one’s life is anchored in the sense of belonging.  Research has found that the smallest social belonging interventions can yield lasting positive effect on individuals.  Many believe that belonging is critical to creating successful learning environments. 

In “The Need to Belong,” Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary suggest that “a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation.”  They explain that two criteria must be present to create a sense of belonging:  frequent and pleasant interactions with a few other people which take place in a stable context, and an enduring framework of affective concern for each other’s welfare. 

In “Searching for belonging – an analytical framework,” Marco Antonsich takes this idea one step further.  He suggests that “belonging is a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place.”  For Antonsich ‘home’ “here stands for a symbolic space of familiarity, comfort, security and emotional attachment.”  But where does one find such a place?  Is home where we spend our childhood?  Where we find resonance and safety as adults?  Or as Robert Frost said, is home just “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”?

In a book entitled “The Politics of Belonging,” Nira Yuval-Davis analyzes the sense of belonging from the perspective of identity, politics, and intersectionality.  She understands that “people can ‘belong’ in many different ways and to many different objects of attachment.  These can vary from a particular person to the whole of humanity, in a concrete or abstract way, by self or other identification, in a stable, contested, or transient way.”  For Yuval-Davis, “Even in its most stable ‘primordial’ forms, however, belonging is always a dynamic process. . .” 

Ulanov also emphasizes process.  She describes belonging as the “searching for an environment safe enough to become our own most selves.”  By ‘our most selves’ she means an environment where we find, explore and create ourselves.  She believes we discover or uncover this root of belonging rather than create it.  Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls this Ubuntu, the assertion of being human. 

Brene Brown, in her book, “The Gifts of Imperfection,” also acknowledges the common human need to belong.  But she emphasizes the complexity of achieving what we long for:  “Belonging,” she writes “is the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us.  Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only hollow substitutes for belonging, but often barriers to it.  Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” 

Natasha Trethewey captures beautifully in her poem “Theories of Time and Space” this challenge that faces us as we seek to belong.  She writes:  

“You can get there from here, though there’s no going home.  Everywhere you go will be somewhere you’ve never been.” 

It sounds so simple to create for oneself, right?

Like many of you, I think, my own sense of belonging springs partially from my upbringing.  In the Jewish tradition, the biological family provides the core for belonging and those of us who have family are obligated to create it for others.  For example, on the central Jewish holiday, Passover, the Bible instructs us to gather in family units to feast and celebrate.  Family is so central there are special rules requesting every existing family unit to invite the stranger who is without familial connection.  This has been translated into our current tradition of an elaborate ceremony over dinner called a seder which involves roles for each family member and encourages families to invite those without a home to join the celebration. 

Kwame Anthony Appiah takes the power of biological family one step further to establish belonging.  In the preface to his book “In My Father’s House:  Africa in the Philosophy of Culture” he describes his sense of belonging as living, “in two extended families divided by several thousand miles and allegedly insuperable cultural distance that never, so far as I can recall, puzzled or perplexed us much.  As I grew older . . . I learned that not everybody had family in Africa and in Europe; not everyone had a Lebanese uncle, American and French and Kenyan, and Thai cousins.  And … now that my sisters have married a Norwegian and a Nigerian and a Ghanaian, now that I live in America, I am used to seeing the world as a network of points of affinity.”  Now that is what I call a home!

For many of us, the people we choose make a family and create belonging.  In, “Families we Choose:  Lesbians, Gays, Kinship,” Kath Weston explores this phenomenon.  She points out that the sign on the stage at the 1987 Gay and Lesbian March on Washington read:  “Love makes a family – nothing more, nothing less.”  Members of the LGBTQ community and many of the rest of us create family, roots, belonging through connections to spouses and friends. 

As Reginald Shepherd, an African American poet wrote in a poem dedicated to his husband entitled “You, Therefore,”

“home is nowhere, therefore you,

a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,

and free of any eden we can name.”

Clearly, for some of us, confidence persists in the power to create the place where we truly belong.

Antonsich suggests that other “modes of belonging” exist outside of family, both biological and created.  bell hooks in her book, “Belonging:  A Culture of Place” offers a compelling meditation on how location itself can create this sense of rootedness.  hooks’ view of her native Kentucky is not sentimentalized.  She chronicles the racism and the culture of white supremacy of her childhood in complicated and painful ways.  But still her heart returns to the landscape and people of her early years.  At the end of a chapter entitled “Kentucky Is My Fate,” she writes: “During my time away, I would return to Kentucky and feel again a sense of belonging that I never felt elsewhere, experiencing unbroken ties to the land, to homefolk, to our vernacular speech.” 

Place, as well as people, becomes the sustainer of belonging.

Many other traditions also connect belonging to a place or location.  From the Native American perspective, for example, Paula Gunn Allen, a well-known poet from Laguna Pueblo, made this connection very clear:  “We are the land.  To the best of my understanding that is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life.”  This view of belonging certainly makes sense here in the land of Neenah, Menasha, and Winnebago, all names that originate in Native American language and tradition.  But the idea exists as well in Victorian England.  As George Eloit stated in Daniel Deronda, “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love and tender kinship for the face of the earth.” 

A strong link to an ancestral home is not central to or at the core of everyone’s sense of belonging.  Pico Iyer, a British born essayist of Indian descent who splits his life between Japan and California put it this way in a Ted Talk entitled “What is home?”  “Home . . . is really a work in progress.  It’s like a project on which they’re constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections.  And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than you could say, with a piece of soul.” 

Later in the talk he mentions something that speaks directly to our mission here:  “home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born, it’s the place where you become yourself.” 

Not all of us have had the privilege of finding a sense of belonging during our lifetime.  Prejudice, racism, and bias have prevented many of us from finding spaces safe and supportive enough for us to develop a sense of belonging.  Candice Pipes chronicles the lives of Black service men returning to the United States in an article called  “The Impossibility of Home.”  She offers many examples of young men and women who enlisted, thrived in the military, and fought for our country.  But when they returned they encountered the same prejudice and racism that marked their lives before their military service. 

From a different perspective, Steve Striffler, in “Neither Here nor There:  Mexican Immigrant Workers and the Search for Home,” provides insight into the lives of people who have become an essential workforce in the United States as farm laborers, meat packers, and menial factory staff.  As the title suggests, their work here may lead to higher income but also to a persistent sense of dislocation and alienation.  Tragically, these experiences are repeated in many situations.  Others point to societal alienation and dislocation as forces working against our sense of belonging.  In “Home” Toni Morrison states, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’ is a vital question because the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world?”  Antonsich also believes that increasing cultural and ethnic diversification of contemporary societies could inhibit the formation of communities of belonging. 

Given what these sources tell us of the complexity, the challenge belonging presents now, here, can we possibly believe in our own capacity to create “home” for ourselves and others? 

Popular culture, especially recent television programs, try to point a way forward.  Multiple programs by Shonda Rhimes like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Station 19” and “Scandal” use work settings to create diverse, inclusive ‘families’ where straight and gay, black, brown and white characters all belong to each other and to a place.  Ryan Murphy’s many programs like “Glee,” “911,” and “Pose” follow the same path by creating connectedness and belonging among diverse groups of people who support each other like traditional families.  These become families in which we can all see ourselves.  Of course, I have recently wanted to be Travis Montgomery on “Station 19.”  As a gay fireman with a black firewoman best friend he is beyond cool.  Yes, his husband, a fellow fireman, died in the first season, but I digress.  Although Rhimes stated once “I am not changing the world, I am pretending to change the world on TV” the sense of belonging she creates illustrates for all of us the potential of redefining what “belonging” and “home” mean in this new century. 

The stories Rhimes, Murphy and many others tell help us imagine the sense of home that Congressman John Lewis described in his Lawrence commencement speech in 2015.  He said, “So it doesn’t matter if we are black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American.  It doesn’t matter whether we are straight or gay.  We are one people, one family.  We are one house.  We are brothers and sisters.”  His voice, his words, can still give us the courage to believe.

It is now critical for us as a community to revisit these themes and to make sure that all members of the university feel that they belong here.  This beloved learning community can and should become “home” for us all.  I look forward to hearing your ideas, reactions, and disagreements as we make Lawrence the “home” we all need it to be:  one that spans geography, race and all identities.   One that helps us all to becomes ourselves. 

Whether you join us from afar or on campus, good luck in this new academic year.  Thank you for recreating this learning community we call Lawrence, especially within the constraints of the pandemic.  It is a pleasure to have you all back and engaged in fall term.

Our weather is starting to cool down now, but fire has been on my mind and in the news this summer. Over the past two months the world has become aware of the significant increase in fires that threaten the Amazon. The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research as of August 23rd tracked close to 73,000 fires in that country since the beginning of this year. More than half occurred in the Amazon. The equivalent of one and a half soccer fields of rainforest have been consumed every minute of every day this year, an 80% increase from last year. Many tie these events to both the pressure for additional grazing land for cattle which provides critical livelihood for local inhabitants, and the now implicit support of this land usage by a new federal government in Brazil.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Amazon spans eight countries and covers 40% of South America – an area that is nearly two-thirds as large as the United States. This forest absorbs carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and produces about 20% of the earth’s oxygen. Many refer to the Amazon as “the planet’s lungs”. An overwhelming majority of scientists believe the Amazon fires will have a devastating impact on the Earth’s ability to produce oxygen and to generate rain – including the precipitation essential for farms here, in the Midwest. These fires also impact biodiversity. The Amazon is home to large numbers of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, most of them unique to the region. A new plant or animal species is discovered there every two days.

Other parts of the world are also burning. Hotter, drier weather has created fire conditions from Alaska and the Arctic to the Canary Islands and California. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the global temperature for the month of July was the highest since recording began in 1880.
In addition to the environmental impact of these fires, the spectacular pictures brought to mind the scholarship of Lawrence Professor of History and Latin American Studies, Jake Frederick. He teaches us that fire through history has represented domestication, conflict, and consumption. But these fires which consume many parts of the world fall into a different category he suggests, fire as foe.

July in Appleton was hotter than usual, but we felt the impact of the climate crisis more directly this past winter when a polar vortex descended in late January. It brought temperatures lower than 40 below, which established new records throughout Wisconsin and the Midwest. The Governor declared a state of emergency. Schools were closed and basic services like the US Postal Service ceased.
Some of us, expecting the planet to be warming not cooling, did not immediately connect our arctic weather with the climate crisis. But some climatologists now believe that warming air in the Arctic forced colder conditions south into the Upper Midwest.

The inconveniences we experienced last winter, missed classes and practices, frozen pipes and ears – paled in comparison to the challenges that face people in other places. The citizens of island countries in the Pacific, for example, directly confront the problem of rising oceans, because their island homes crest only 3 to 4 feet above sea level. As the ocean rises, some countries have begun to try to raise land levels or to plan for total and permanent evacuation of their island homes.

Weather related events have displaced an average of 24 million people every year since 2008. The World Bank estimates that another 143 million people will be displaced by 2050 in just three regions: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. According to estimates from Swiss Re, an insurance company, natural disasters caused 165 billion dollars of economic losses worldwide in 2018.

These losses and displacements illustrate the impact of a global climate crisis. Increased frequency of destructive storms, rising water levels due to melting ice caps, and changing weather patterns now affect millions of people every year. Twenty years ago, I worked in West Harlem with Peggy Shepard, executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and recipient of a Lawrence honorary degree in 2018. She taught me that the impact of the climate crisis hits low income populations the hardest. According to a study by the World Bank, 100 million people could be forced into extreme poverty by 2020 as their home environments deteriorate due to climate induced changes in weather patterns.

As an institution that prepares students to be citizens of this nation and others around the world, we have developed many initiatives that offer insight into this central global challenge. Our Environmental Studies program provides excellent opportunities to learn about environmental systems from economic, policy, cultural, biological, chemical, and geoscience perspectives. Thanks to a grant from the Margret A. Cargill Foundation, and leadership by both special assistant to the president, Professor Jeff Clark, and our sustainability coordinator Kelsey McCormick, we are turning the Appleton and Door County campuses into living laboratories. Within these communities we have opportunity to learn about the choices we make through daily habits that affect the environment. They also lead the University’s effort to conserve resources and lessen our environmental impact on our surrounding communities. We have hosted numerous speakers who work on this central issue – including our own David Gerard, the John R. Kimberly Distinguished Professor in the American Economic System, who gave a convocation in 2015 that helped us understand the economics of climate change.

But our efforts and those of colleges across the country to clarify the most important challenge the human race will face over the next decade are easier said than done. Researchers help us to understand the forces that work against our best efforts. Riley Dunlap and Aaron McCright among others have shown that political and economic forces have worked to discredit climate science. In an article entitled “The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public’s View of Global Warming,” they detail the effect of those forces on our awareness of this problem. Using the Gallup Organization’s annual environmental poll for a ten year period, Dunlap and McCright also clarify the impact of both political beliefs and college education on people’s views on climate change.

Dunlap and McCright found that 82% of college graduates who identified as liberals or Democrats believed that climate change existed, and that human activity is a contributing factor to climate change. 62% of liberals or Democrats without a college degree had the same view. Among those with a college degree who identified as conservative or Republican, 43% believed that climate change existed. 42% of conservatives or Republicans without a college degree had the same view.

There are at least two remarkable aspects of this data. First, political beliefs significantly influence one’s view of the climate crisis. Second, and maybe even more important for us, a college education has little impact on students’ understanding of climate science if they identify as conservative or Republican. I am concerned the Lawrence community may follow both of these patterns, in which political belief supersedes scientific facts.

But even those who agree that a climate crisis is real approach the issue now with an incapacitating fatigue. In Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, Bill McKibben stated “Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it – it’s part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.”
To correct this attitude the American Meteorological Society now suggests using the phrase “climate crisis.” Even though extreme weather has become common place, they ask that descriptions include the unusual nature of events. For example, there are locations in the US that now, repeatedly, experience what was once considered a flood that should happen only every 500 years. They ask meteorologists to describe such events so that all of us will understand what should be extraordinary has now become ordinary. But no amount of improved communication seems to weaken the feeling that this crisis is inevitable. That nothing we do can change the course of this unfolding natural disaster. This attitude prevents important interventions.

Dunlap and McCright finished their study in 2011, but the division between those who do and those who do not accept the urgency of the climate crisis has persisted. A survey completed by the Yale program on Climate Change Communications in 2018 continued to find stark differences in people’s views according to their political affiliation. They found that 52% of Republicans and 91% of Democrats believe that global warming is happening. It appears that our deeply divided social environment continues to extend to views on the climate crisis. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece Jim Mattis, President Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, described our situation this way: “We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future, instead of rediscovering our common ground and finding solutions.”

This adversarial approach that ignores the need for policy to protect our environment is a relatively new phenomenon. For generations, leaders of the United States held a more common view of environmental issues. When asked who the “greenest” president of the United States was, leaders of twelve national environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, and the Sierra Club chose Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama as the top four presidents, in that order. Two Republicans, and two Democrats. Conservation was central to Teddy Roosevelt’s vision for America’s future. He preserved land and natural beauty at the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and hundreds of other locations across the country. Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency, banned DDT, and created the regulatory infrastructure that continues to this day. But this public consensus is disappearing.

The lack of consensus brought Frank Bruni to suggest in an opinion piece in the New York Times that “Dogs Will Fix Our Broken Democracy.” His recent experience as a dog owner made him realize that dogs provide the impetus to interact outside of one’s prescribed group. People are no longer conservatives or progressives. Instead, they are “Bandit’s” owner or pet sitting “Daisy.” As a new dog owner myself, I agree with Bruni that owning a dog widens your social circles immensely and scooping up poop is a great social leveler. But I do not believe that requiring every Lawrentian to own a dog is the right solution for our community.

So, if dog ownership will not energize every Lawrentian to engage more deeply with the climate crisis – then what should we do to more fully embrace our central role in fostering an educated citizenry? We need to continue to believe in the power of the role we play. As one of our founding fathers, James Madison said, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

I believe we must first acknowledge the challenge to reach ALL members of our community. Will Happer’s year-long term as science advisor to President Trump brought home to me the importance of acknowledging this challenge. Will was a colleague during my time at Princeton. A well regarded physicist whose research focuses on optics, Will rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. During my time at Princeton I spoke with climate scientists there, some of them international leaders in their fields, about how to engage Will on this topic. Their response was: he is a physicist, not a climate scientist; no one will take him seriously. Well, he set our country’s carbon policy for the last year.

It is crucial that we engage with those who dismiss the findings of 97% of climate scientists who now confirm that a climate crisis has begun, and that human activity is a root cause. We need to continue to broaden the learning opportunities we offer and to avoid partisan framing of the climate crisis if we aim to reach all of our students, faculty and staff. Thanks to the interdisciplinary nature of the Environmental Studies program we offer a wide array of learning opportunities for students to consider how human activity impacts the natural world. But I think that other avenues of exploration are also available to us.

Direct and sustained experience of the natural world can open our minds to how human activity impacts the environment. Experiences can sensitize us to the deep and far reaching effect that the climate crisis will have. My year as a farmer during a break between high school and college changed my views and established conservation as central to my personal values. Living directly in the cycle of a dairy farm significantly influenced the way I thought about the natural world.

I am sure each of you have your own connections to nature. Could we find additional ways to encourage all of us to explore the rich natural resources of Northeastern Wisconsin and Door County? Could this be a way to reach students who might otherwise avoid enrolling in an Environmental Studies course or joining an environmental organization? Are there ways we can more closely tie the prodigious natural world that surrounds us into our curriculum?

Science continues to be a central avenue to help us understand the climate crisis and to recognize the ways our own human activity impacts the natural world. According to our General Education Requirements we believe that every student should “learn to use their understanding of a scientific concept to interpret a natural phenomenon and to draw reasonable conclusions from scientific data.” I applaud colleagues working to redesign our introductory science courses with the support of a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. As we rethink pedagogy, sequence, and content could we also rethink this core graduation requirement to ensure that all of our students will graduate understanding basic scientific facts?

Aside from curricular requirements, could we provide more ways to engage with science on our campus? Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped an entire generation understand the harmful impacts of pesticides by giving the lay reader access to the science involved. I was very pleased to see The Death and Life of the Great Lakes selected as a community read last year and to have its author Dan Egan join us on campus for a talk. As a non-scientist he allows the reader to understand how human activity is killing the world’s largest freshwater system. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can help Save the World, written by our own Marcia Bjornerud, the Walter Schober Professor of Environmental Studies offers a different and important frame within which we can consider the climate crisis.

Can we find new paths to access the ways scientific knowledge unlocks our understanding of the world’s present and future?

For many humanists, like me, other avenues to comprehend the climate crisis are also important. The relationship between humans and the natural world has fostered essential values for many cultures and religions. Native American, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and many other traditions provide clear direction. For example, when Pope Francis declared a “climate emergency” this past spring he said, “Future generations stand to inherit a greatly spoiled world. Our children and grandchildren should not have to pay the cost of our generation’s irresponsibility.” Pope Francis echoes many Native American traditions; for example the Iroquois have a saying, “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”

Hinduism teaches that all living things – human, animal vegetable – are sacred because they are part of God. They must be shown respect.

Can we provide more access to these and other teachings that encourage us to consider the place and responsibility of human beings within the natural world?

Maybe most difficult for those of us who believe the climate crisis is the central challenge facing society today is to approach this crisis with consideration for the skeptics – the members of our community who do not accept climate science. One of the tasks I had when I joined the New York City Department of Sanitation in the 1990s was to write the commercial recycling laws with colleagues. The team comprised members who represented business interests and others who held fervent environmentalist beliefs. Some argued all garbage must be recycled; others believed mandatory recycling would place an undue burden on commercial establishments, especially ones that were family owned. I asked all committee members to tone down the accusatory rhetoric and to consider options that would work for all parties. In the end we agreed to mandate recycling only of material whose beneficial reuse ensured that recycling would be less expensive than disposal. It was hard for me to modify my passionate commitment to this project. But to get all on board I needed to moderate the conversation so all could participate and find the middle ground. For us, now, to engage our entire community, we must provide a learning environment in which we can all participate without criticism or rejection.

I am sure that within this community there are many other ideas that would help us to deepen our learning of the ways human activity impacts the environment. I hope you will commit yourselves, with me, to making sure that this generation of Lawrentians will graduate with the knowledge, the tools, and the energy to provide leadership on the most important challenge that faces all of us in this century.

I look forward to hearing your reactions, disagreements, and responses to my words today. Good luck in this new academic year. Thank you for creating this learning community we call Lawrence. It is a pleasure to have you all back here in Appleton.

Beth, thank you for your leadership of the Public Events Committee this year.

Thank you Kathrine Handford for providing an organ prelude that sets the stage for this and all our Convocations. Thank you Phillip Swan, Steven Sieck and members of the entering class for beginning our year with such beauty. I look forward to many future performances. And thank you, Linda Morgan-Clement, for providing closing words for today’s Convocation. I also want to thank the many members of the Lawrence community who helped me with research for my talk today.

I am grateful to David McGlynn and the Public Events Committee of last year for assembling a provocative and engaging Convocation series for us to enjoy. I hope you will join me in attending them. I want to specifically mention our convocation with Matika Wilbur on April 11. Matika will be with us to discuss “Changing the Way We See Native America.” Her talk will be part of a larger effort to renew our connections with Native American communities both in Wisconsin and around the country.

Welcome to the academic year. I want to specifically welcome 425 first year, transfer and visiting students, eight new tenure-line faculty and many other new faculty and staff. I know you will join me in extending a warm Lawrence welcome to all new members of our community.

Preparing for Matriculation Convocation provides a moment to look back at the previous year, to see what we as a community need to discuss. For the first time in the six years that I have had the privilege of addressing you, an overwhelming number of issues rose to the surface. Extreme weather and resulting emergencies such as forest fires, drought, and hurricanes filled the news cycle. We learned more deeply about the effects of electronic interconnectedness and the open door social media provided to foreign influence in many democracies. The Me Too movement woke the nation to the corrosive impact of a toxic blend of power, gender, and sexual assault. Especially concerning for those of us in the academy: we were reminded that this trend continues on college campuses as well as in the larger society. Many voices have mounted a direct attack on the value of facts and evidence based research, concepts that live at the heart of the education we offer. And communities around the world continue to struggle to connect across differences of race, religion, political views, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class.

The education provided by Lawrence and other institutions of higher learning has never been more needed. I look forward to discussing and debating these themes and many others both inside our classrooms and on campus this year.

But in the end, for me, the most searing image of last year were the pictures of young terrified children in deep pain as they were taken from their parents at the border. These pictures represented over 2,300 children separated due to a new “zero tolerance” policy instituted on the southwest border — a policy that ushered in the next stage of our country’s changing attitudes toward immigration. These images as well as images of refugees risking their lives in forced marches and sea travel in decrepit boats, rafts, and dinghies filled our consciousness this past year; they have brought to a boil in the United States and around the world the issues of immigration, refugee resettlement, and the growing number of displaced persons.

The numbers alone are shocking. According to a 2017 report by the UN Refugee Agency, at least 68.5 million people are now forcibly displaced from their homes due to political strife, environmental degradation, and other calamities. This is larger than the population of the United Kingdom. Over half of these displaced persons are younger than 18.

The trend line is also concerning. The number of displaced persons has grown by 60% in ten years. In 2017, 16.2 million people were displaced from their homes: three times the population of the state of Wisconsin. From the public conversation, one may assume that most of these displaced persons have now moved to Europe and North America. Actually, the vast majority – more than four out of every five – of these displaced persons reside in countries adjacent to their homelands. Turkey hosts the largest number. Pakistan, Uganda, Lebanon and Iran round out the top five host countries. Growing destinations include Bangladesh which received over half a million refugees from Myanmar in a six-month period, and Colombia, which has become the destination of close to half a million refugees from Venezuela.

After visiting a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner,” said: “These are important numbers. But it is a hard thing to picture millions of faces all at once. Numbers have a way of making them merge, turning them into a blur of human tragedy, a calamity so sprawling, that it undermines our ability to truly see it.” Recent authors such as Leila Abdelrazaq, Alaksandar Hemon, Dave Eggers and Hosseini himself have tried in their writings to humanize – to allow us to feel as we imagine the moving and desperate plight of displaced persons.

Given that there are fewer than six million Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Native Alaskans in a country of 325 million, America is a country populated almost entirely from elsewhere. Many of us remember our own family’s immigration narrative. Some of our stories include the choice to emigrate, others tell of displacement from homelands by expulsion, force, or enslavement. The popularity of companies such as Ancestry.com and 23andme underscores our growing interest in these stories.

My husband David’s and my family origins illustrate some of the different choices that led people to become citizens of this country. My grandparents on one side of my family and great grandparents on the other side fled economic and religious persecution in Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. They came here as uneducated refugees, unaccompanied minors with no skills or resources. To survive, they built small family businesses like the Irish and Italian immigrants who surrounded them in the New York metropolitan area. They also practiced what some now call “chain migration”: frantically trying to bring family members to the United States before what turned out to be certain murder by Nazi Germany.

My in-laws immigrated to the United States in the 1950s from Colombia, South America. Because they were highly educated, a doctor and a nurse, our government actively recruited them to this country. When my father-in-law went to the US Consulate in Medellin the official asked him what visa he wanted. When he responded he didn’t know, the official suggested a green card would be the best option because it gave him the most flexibility. He finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke and began to practice pathology at the University of Chicago.

My family successfully fled persecution and likely death. David’s family experienced both economic opportunity and prejudice for the first time here in the United States as a Spanish speaking family marooned in a wider, white, English speaking society.

I am sure family narratives in this room range even more widely than David’s and mine. Some of us lived on this land and were forced to migrate to reservations. Others affirmatively decided to emigrate for a better life, or were kidnapped into slavery, or fled persecution, economic hardship and imminent death.

Can we take our personal narratives and develop a policy perspective from them? Last year I suggested three possible core values for us as a community: 1) To teach emotional intelligence and practice empathy; 2) To reinforce our commitment to academic freedom and freedom of speech with limits; and 3) To pursue equity in all that we do. I want to thank the many of you who contacted me afterward to discuss and debate this list. If we agree that practicing empathy and pursuing equity are core values for our community – then perhaps we can learn to see parallels to our own families’ narratives with the experience of people fleeing economic hardship and political persecution around the globe today.

The impulse to support the stranger in our land is reinforced for many of us by our religious beliefs. For example, Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible states, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Galatians from the New Testament states, “… the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” From the Buddhist perspective, The Way of the Bodhisattva states, “Since I and other beings both, in fleeing suffering, are equal and alike, what difference is there to distinguish us, that I should save myself and not the others?”

But our history suggests that we, as a nation, have struggled from the beginning to learn from our personal past and from these teachings. And here in the United States, the past fifteen years of political conflict over immigration policy simply recapitulate that long struggle. This is particularly true for people who want to join us and who represent religions, races, or ethnicities different from the majority of citizens already here. Many scholars point to Roger Williams and the establishment of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in 1636 as the beginning of our debate about this country’s constraints on immigration and citizenship. Williams, an early immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England, believed in religious freedom and the separation of Church and State. This philosophical stance did not sit well with the Puritan leadership of Massachusetts. In response he founded a new colony, despite the objection of the Puritan leadership, that welcomed people of all regions including Baptists, Jews, and Quakers. He established a close connection with the Narragansett tribe and he pursued anti-slavery policies. Thus, began one of the first debates of who can truly be an American citizen.

In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg chronicles the long internal struggle to define American immigration policy. He writes that this country’s policy, from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence into the twentieth century, has been influenced by the amount of land available for development; by national economic conditions, including the demand for labor; and by racial, ethnic, and religious considerations. State and federal legislators alternately enacted and relaxed restrictive policies through the early 1920s. This period of general welcome allowed millions of new citizens to immigrate to the United States – including many who made their home here, in Wisconsin.

What seemed particularly salient to me as I thought about what is happening today is the period from the end of the First World War into the late 1920s when the United States government decided to significantly curtail immigration. In that period, we directly restricted non-Anglo Saxon peoples. Right after the war, books like The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, chairman of the New York Zoological Society and a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, and The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, encouraged a belief in white racial supremacy. The Ku Klux Klan, which targeted African Americans, foreigners, Catholics, and Jews, also saw a resurgence of membership and activity during this period.

Some people spoke against this trend. For example, the New York Times proclaimed in an editorial, “This new historic idea (of racial determinism) runs counter to our spiritual convictions as to the brotherhood of all human beings and the identical preciousness of all human souls.” But the insistence on white racial supremacy remained powerful in the country and in the political process.

What followed was a series of laws that imposed drastic restrictions on immigration to the United States – including the requirement of a literacy test, the direct barring of immigrants from Asia and Mexico, and quotas for individual European countries based on the number of US citizens who had already come from that country. These laws specifically curtailed immigration of Italians, Mexicans, Jews, Japanese and Chinese. As James Davis, Secretary of Labor, asserted in 1923 in the idiom of his time, “We want the beaver type of man. We want to keep out the rattype.”

Concerns about security, national demographics, and economic health led presidential administrations and congressional majorities from both parties to sustain these policies through the early 1960s. Even the severe persecution of Jews and other communities by Nazi Germany and the uprooting of millions of people in the wake of the Second World War did not lead to major changes in policies.

As Breckinridge Long, a senior member of the State Department in the Roosevelt administration, confided to his diary after a conversation with another colleague, “He says they are lawless, scheming, defiant – and in many ways unassimilable. He said the general type of intending immigrant was just the same as the criminal Jews who crowd our police court dockets in New York and with whom he is acquainted . . . I think he is right – not as regards the Russian and Polish Jew alone but the lower level of all that Slave population of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.” Exceptions were approved by Congress for refugees after the war, but the quota system remained in place. These laws were reaffirmed in 1952 by act of Congress over the veto of President Truman who called the legislation, “a slur on the patriotism, the capacity, and the decency of a large part of our citizenry.”

In 1965, legislation passed and signed into law at the Statue of Liberty by President Johnson eliminated the quotas, prioritized family re-unification, and opened up immigration from Asia, Mexico, and Africa. This new policy lived up to the words of the poem inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty by Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” This significant change in national policy also set up the present debates on immigration and the future of our country.

Many of the arguments deployed during these legislative battles continue to be alive today. For example, we hear that immigrants commit more crimes than US citizens, a similar argument to ones made in the 1920s. But in an article in USA Today three weeks ago Alan Gomez reviewed data from a number of different sources that uniformly point to a lower crime and incarceration rate for immigrants than for US citizens.

Moreover, multiple studies find that immigration, and even specifically refugee resettlement, increase economic activity. Immigrants actually have a positive impact on wages in the country. On average they have more advanced degrees than US citizens. They start new businesses and file patents at higher rates than US-born citizens. Taxes paid by immigrants and their children, here both legally and illegally, exceed the cost of services they use.

So why is the United States headed back to policies first put forward in the 1920s? In Social Identity Theory and Public Opinion towards Immigration, published earlier this year, Maurice Mangum and Ray Block Jr. suggest there are two reasons for citizens of this country to oppose immigration in all forms. “Americans generally oppose immigration if they believe immigrants will not adhere to American norms, prompting cultural change . . . and if they believe they are competing with immigrants for their economic wellbeing.”

Thus, Laura Ingraham’s statement last month on Fox News that, “in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people. They’re changes none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California we see stark examples of how radically, in some ways, the country has changed. Much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration.” Such pronouncements – informed by opinion, not data – directly fan the flames of resentment felt by many.

There have been other – very different – examples around the world in response to the refugee crisis. Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, clearly took a different path with her decision to welcome one million refugees in 2015. Many tie this decision to her research, which included a book by Jurgen Osterhammel entitled “The Transformation of the World.” This book argues that the most successful 19th century economies championed open markets and liberal immigration laws. Among other benefits, these policies spurred technological advances. Her decision was also personal. As she said at an EU summit in characteristically very few words, “I once lived behind a fence. That is something I do not wish to do again.” Merkel’s comments were echoed four weeks ago in the late Senator John McCain’s final letter to the American people. He said, “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change that they have always been.” Knowing our past struggles and seeing our current situation, how can we, as individuals and as a community, Stand with the Statue of Liberty? The University has taken steps in this direction. We joined 39 other institutions in signing friend of the court briefs for two lawsuits against the current Administration’s decision to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. These cases have been successful at the Federal Appeals Court level which has so far prevented the discontinuation of this policy. We have also worked with our students, faculty, and staff to ensure that everything has been done to protect our community and to qualify citizenship and immigration status. We have reached out to recent immigrants in the Fox Valley to offer employment.

But we must do more as individuals and as a community to ensure – at this critical juncture for the United States and other nations around the globe – that we do not return to the policies of the 1920s; that we do not restrict immigration to this country out of imagined political, economic, and racial fears. Even locally, immigrant communities, which have been hosted and nurtured by our neighbors in the Fox Cities, need our support and friendship. There are thousands of immigrants and refugees in our midst here and close to 70 million people around the globe counting on our leadership.

This work connects to our own institutional values, but also to this nation’s highest ambitions for itself – as the Statue of Liberty’s inscription and symbol reminds us: we are a nation of natives and immigrants. We must stand for these values today, and always.

Again, I look forward to hearing your reactions, disagreements, and responses to my words today. Good luck in this new academic year. It is a pleasure to have you all back here in Appleton.

David, thank you for your leadership of the Public Events Committee this year.

Thank you Kathrine Handford for providing an organ prelude that sets the stage for this and all our Convocations. Thank you Phillip Swan, Steven Sieck and members of the entering class for beginning our year with such beauty. I look forward to many future performances.

And thank you, Howard Niblock, for your thoughtful selection of the opening and closing words for today’s ceremony.

I am grateful to Monica Rico and the Public Events Committee of last year for assembling a provocative and engaging Convocation series for us to enjoy. I hope you will join me in attending them.

I would like to dedicate this matriculation convocation address to the many families, including Lawrence families, who have felt the direct impact of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and their aftermath.

Welcome to the academic year. I want to specifically welcome first year students, transfer and Waseda students, nine new tenure line faculty, their spouses and partners, our new Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Katie Kodat, our new Vice President for Student Life, Chris Card, and many other new faculty and staff. I know you will join me in extending a warm welcome to all new members of our community.

This has been a trying and troubling year. One that felt more like a nightmare than a dream.On the global stage, among other challenges, the refugee crisis continues unabated. According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, over 65 million people are now forcibly displaced from their homes due to political strife, environmental degradation, and other calamities. Over half of these displaced people are younger than 18.

And in the U.S. just this past month, we have borne witness to what many people described as a terrorist attack by white supremacists and neo-Nazis on the University of Virginia and its host municipality, Charlottesville. The death of Heather Hayer and the wounding of eighteen others by one of the demonstrators as well as the loss of two state troopers added to the horror of this series of events.

In response to that horror, James Murdoch, chief executive of 21st Century Fox whose family owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets, wrote, “It has not been my habit to widely offer running commentary on current affairs. . . but what we watched this last week in Charlottesville and the reaction to it by the President of the United States concerns all of us as Americans and free people. These events remind us all why vigilance against hate and bigotry is an eternal obligation — a necessary discipline for the preservation of our way of life and our ideals. . . I can’t even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis. Or Klansmen, or terrorists.”

My own response turned toward the role of the liberal arts college in such a time of conflict. I believe that the extraordinary pain, dislocation, and tragedy in the world dramatically reinforce the importance of our mission. Lawrence’s mission statement is simple and clear. It includes this statement: “The university is . . . committed to the development of intellect and talent, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, the cultivation of sound judgment and respect for the perspectives of others. Lawrence prepares students for lives of achievement, responsible and meaningful citizenship, lifelong learning and personal fulfillment.”

We continue to honor the intent of this statement.

But in a time when external turmoil affects our own community, as it will, we need to restate the enduring truths that define us, even as Murdoch felt the need to do after the events at UVA. In a time when forces threaten to pull us apart, we need to remember who we are and what values hold us together.

This need to reconsider what one would expect to be commonly held principles became clearer to me a few weeks earlier, on July 4th. Like many media outlets, National Public Radio used our country’s Independence Day to circulate the Declaration of Independence. This year they decided to tweet it. Reactions underlined the forces at work in society. One person tweeted: “So, NPR is calling for revolution. Interesting way to condone the violence while trying to sound ‛patriotic’. Your implications are clear.” Another person tweeted, “Glad you are being defunded.
You have never been balanced on your show.” A third responder wrote, “Seriously, this is the dumbest idea I have ever seen on twitter. Literally no one is going to read 5000 tweets about this trash.”

Each of these comments and many others provoked thousands of re-tweets and favorites before NPR could post the entire document and make it clear they wanted simply to celebrate this national holiday with the Declaration itself.

We have come to a cultural moment in which the words of the Declaration of Independence are seen by some as a leftist conspiracy just because they were broadcast on NPR. Instead of listening for value, people from all sides of the political spectrum immediately assume the other side is wrong without consideration. At a time when enduring values have never been more important, we are finding it difficult to determine our own core principles. But if we still believethat education, learning, personal growth, and change must be the way forward, then we need to try to state clearly the nature of our enduring values as individuals and as a community. We need to ask ourselves and one another: what do we stand for?

There have been other moments in the development of human society in which institutions, cultures, countries have questioned and sought to reestablish their enduring truths. I learned how transformative determining community values could be when I studied the post-colonial period in Africa as an undergraduate. Leaders like Leopold Senghor and Julius Nyerere spent their lives redefining concepts like nationhood, a state’s obligations to its citizens, and the role of language and
culture in nation building.

Another period that has direct implications for our own learning community is the period of the enlightenment when philosophers like Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, and Smith created a world-view that has direct bearing on colleges today.

In The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay offers a holistic sense of the values expressed by what he calls a “clamorous chorus” of thinkers. Core beliefs of the time included the power and accuracy of science, specifically the efficacy of medicine; social sciences as an important tool to evaluate and improve the human condition; the impact of art and literature to humanize the soul, and the individual’s responsibility to oneself and by extension to the welfare of others. These values clearly influence society today. More specifically, these beliefs speak directly to college communities like the one we have here at Lawrence.

Even within the framework left to us by the Enlightenment, tensions exist for us. For example, if we assert the accuracy of science, how do we determine whether human activity has impact on changes in global climate? Our federal and state governments seem conflicted on this issue, but a vast majority of scientists assert that human activity of different types has a deleterious impact on the Earth’s climate. Their research supports this view. If the accuracy of science is one of this institution’s core principles then we must agree with the scientific view over the political, and we need to act accordingly in the classroom and in the way we steward the college’s operations.

As Maria Mitchell, the first woman elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences said, “knowledge that is popular is not scientific.” Our mission statement also suggests we will respect the perspectives of those who differ, but we will act in accordance with the confidence in science inherited from the Enlightenment.

Given the forces at play in society today, however, we need to go beyond the framework granted by the Enlightenment to truly accomplish our mission as an institution. If we ask what we stand for today, we have our Mission Statement and Statements on Academic Freedom and Diversity to use as a framework for our answer. But we need to look more closely at the enduring values that we continue to uphold as a community.

To help foster this conversation, let me propose three possible values as contenders: 1) To teach emotional intelligence and practice empathy; 2) To reinforce our commitment to academic freedom and freedom of speech with limits; and 3) To pursue equity in all that we do. I believe these values are intrinsic to who we are as Lawrentians, and as members of a learning community.

I would like to start with the first proposed value: to teach emotional intelligence and to practice empathy. For me empathy is an extension of a humanistic education. In an essay entitled the Natural History of German Life, George Eliot, a leading author of the Victorian period, describes the impact of art on human beings. She wrote, “the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies . . . a picture of human life such as a great artist can give surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.” Eliot’s description of the power of art to move us toward an awareness of others rather than ourselves could be described today as emotional intelligence and a predisposition toward empathy.

Beyond empathy, we need to be aware that developing these skills is useful preparation for our careers. In Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm, Christian Madsbjerg advocates for the importance of a liberal education. Madsbjerg endeavors to show that study of the humanities prepares one for corporate life. He defines “sensemaking” as “a method of practical wisdom grounded in the humanities” and he likens it to the Aristotelian concept of phronesis, the “artful synthesis of both knowledge and experience.” He believes that a critical ingredient for corporate success is the ability to analyze “nonlinear data” — a skill taught only by the humanities.

But a successful career is only part of the benefit that the teaching of empathy confers on us. In a paper published with a former student in 1990, Peter Salovey, then a member of the psychology department at Yale, coined the term “emotional intelligence,” which he defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.” Now president of Yale, he believes that his faculty, students, and staff must teach and act empathetically. His goal is to cultivate emotional intelligence in the culture of their institution.

I think that our re-commitment to the arts and humanities must lead us as well to cultivate emotional intelligence and to engage each other with empathy, especially in times of stress and conflict. This approach will not only increase our readiness to learn, but also, as Madsbjerg argues, will develop essential skills for a successful career.

The second enduring value is one we have spent a great deal of time discussing and fighting over recently, that of academic freedom and its corollary: freedom of speech. The faculty passed an updated Statement on Academic Freedom last winter which includes this statement: “In the classroom, laboratory, and studio, teachers must be free to teach and students free to learn; we must be free to challenge each other’s beliefs, to explore new ideas and critically examine old ones, and to listen to others without disruption. Knowledge, skill, understanding, and creative expression are acquired through interactions that are often complex and even controversial. Although these interactions may at times cause discomfort, they may not be obstructed. Intellectually honest and vibrant communities engage in complex interactions and the ability, hereby protected, to exchange ideas in a spirit of mutual respect is essential to our educational mission.”

I am grateful for the work the Provost, Curriculum Committee, and Faculty Governance Committee invested in updating this very important principle. What concerns me now is the extension of this value into the everyday life of our community. In The Contours of Free Expression on Campus: Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and Civility, Frederick Lawrence, a constitutional legal scholar and former president of Brandeis University, asks: when does hate speech, which is protected under the First Amendment, become a potential action that can be disciplined by a university?

One perspective that was helpful to me as a novice in the law is that our Constitutional protection of hate speech is fundamentally different from those of many other democracies. For example: in Germany, punishable speech includes attacks on “the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning or defaming segments of the population.” In the United Kingdom, punishable speech includes “threatening, abusive or insulting words, or behavior” intended to “stir up racial hatred” or likely to do so. Frederick Lawrence suggested that we look at the actor’s intent to decide if disciplinary action is warranted. If the speaker intends to cause harm to a particular victim, then he believes the institution can step in and adjudicate. Do we want to accept this limitation?

Our response depends partly on our sense of the effect such a limitation might have on our learning environment. Recent studies have tied the presence of psychological safety to the ability to learn. In a paper entitled “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams” Amy Edmondson, a faculty member at Harvard states, “Team psychological safety is not the same as group cohesiveness, as research has shown that cohesiveness can reduce willingness to disagree and challenge others’ views, such as in the phenomenon of groupthink, implying a lack of interpersonal risk taking. The term is meant to suggest neither a careless sense of permissiveness, nor an unrelenting positive affect but, rather, a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up. This confidence stems from mutual respect and trust among team members.”

This balance is difficult to obtain, but multiple studies show that if we create a learning environment that both fosters diverse opinions and responds in all situations with mutual respect and trust, we will enhance our ability to be a community of learners.

The past few years on campus have made it abundantly clear that we still have a distance to go to create a learning community that fosters diverse opinions and is based on mutual respect and trust. Hate speech directed at members of our community has had a negative impact on our ability to create psychological safety. Too many times members of our community have been targeted, making them feel vulnerable, unsafe, and unsure about their connection to Lawrence. For example, similar to many other colleges, last spring a series of messages were posted around campus targeting specific groups. I directly experienced this targeting, when a member of our community left a note on the windshield of my car that made a hostile accusation based on my identity as a gay man. The accusation made me question my connection to Lawrence, my willingness to be open to all members of our community, and my concern that this person was unwilling to discuss their concerns with me directly.

We must find a way to more actively respond to hate speech in our community. An absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment will not create the learning environment we need at this time.

The third enduring value I would like to suggest for us as a community is striving for equity. In a document entitled “Step Up & Lead for Equity,” the Association of American Colleges and Universities lays out a case for the centrality of equity in our mission. The pamphlet begins: “For generations, the United States has promised universal access to opportunity. It is part of our history and the engine of our economic and civic prosperity. But opportunity in America continues to be disproportionately distributed.” Although inequity faces multiple groups within our society, the pamphlet emphasizes socio-economic class and race. It cites significant disparities in median income by race, and disparities in academic achievement. It also argues that earning a bachelor’s degree significantly increases equitable outcomes. It is tragic that Martin Luther King’s words, spoken in 1963, are still true for many of us. He said: “Negroes are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty.” I believe we have a calling as an institution and as educators to do all we can to change this dynamic. We can only reach our full potential as a learning community if we strive for equity in all that we do. Our country’s economic and social prosperity depends on our success.

It will not be easy to uphold these enduring values: empathy, creating a learning community based on free exchange and psychological safety, and striving for equity. Many forces are aligned against us, including the increasing impulse to take aggressive action if one feels wronged. In a time when, as scholar Joshua Clover explains “the riot has returned as the leading tactic in the repertoire of collective action” we must work as a community to foster meaningful, humane, civil discourse of the issues of our time. But I believe if we are all focused on our core community values we will be successful. This will require us to be patient with each other and willing to learn together. This is our chance to be clear about who we are and who we want to be.

Thank you for listening to me today. In an effort to foster a community conversation about these issues we will host a panel discussion under the Polvony Lecture series this fall where we will hear from experts in free speech who see this issue from multiple vantage points. The President’s Committee on Diversity Affairs will also host a series of community conversations with the direct intent of fostering dialogue across difference.

I look forward to the academic year ahead. As a community, we must define these enduring values or they will be defined for us. The conversation will not be simple but the result will strengthen our learning community in urgent and essential ways.

Welcome to the academic year. I want to specifically welcome the freshman class, our transfer and Waseda students, the eight new tenure line faculty, their spouses and partners, and the many other new faculty and staff who join us this fall. I know you will extend a warm welcome to all new members of our community as you welcomed me close to four years ago.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, the Edward F. Mielke Professor of Ethics in Medicine, Science and Society and Associate Professor of Philosophy. Patrick will be greatly missed. His teaching and writing has influenced many, including me.

Events of the past year have made me keenly aware of how important our work is here on this campus and on campuses across the country. Conflict around human difference, and the degradation of essential communities, abounded at home and throughout the world. The events of the past few months have reinforced my sense of this painful trend. We, and our leaders, seem to lack the skills we need to stem this tide. Establishing consensus and response even to basic threats, like the impact of the Zika virus, seem beyond our collective capability. Education, like Lawrence offers, can provide the skills to help resolve these conflicts and solve these problems. But I wonder: will continuing to perfect the education we offer be enough to move us forward or do we need to also rethink the nature of our community and our interactions within it?

National and world events, even events in Appleton and on other college campuses, have focused my attention, and probably yours as well, on what is basic to our common enterprise. Can we nurture a campus environment that embraces learning and enables us to grow as human beings? Can we enhance our curriculum to address the challenges that face society? Can we find ways to better connect the education we provide to the opportunities available to our graduates, and the life challenges they will face? Can we more deeply learn from the diversity on our campuses?

What makes this set of enduring questions even harder to answer is the societal trend to become more inflexible in its approach, less willing to rely on those knowledgeable for solutions, and less interested in listening to build consensus. Can we, here, at Lawrence, together, work against the social tendencies that have led to this crisis in our communities today?

Many scholars and teachers offer advice that reinforces impulses within our learning community. In preparation for this talk I decided to look for sources I rarely consult, to open my own thoughts to different perspectives. I have been especially grateful for insights offered by religious leaders regarding cooperation and learning.

For example: when asked about how to move toward a culture of cooperation, the future Pope Francis answered, “such a culture has, at its foundation, the idea that the other person has much to give me, that I have to be open to that person and listen, without judgment, without thinking that because his ideas are different from mine . . . he can’t offer me anything. That is not so. Everyone has something to offer, and everyone can receive something. Prejudging someone is like putting up a wall, which then prevents us from coming together.”

This idea, to find value in views that are different from our own is, I believe, one of the core tenets of a liberal arts education. In Appleton this last year, this value was not always embraced, but if learning is a process of transformational change, it starts with new ideas and that requires listening to what others say and think.

This theme of listening to a wide range of voices and ideas is echoed in many traditions including my own. Maimonides, probably one of the most important Jewish philosophers, said, “every human being can contribute to human wisdom and knowledge.” What makes this statement remarkable is that Maimonides was born in the twelfth century, during a time when Christians and Muslims intermittently persecuted the Jews. His open minded approach to learning not only provided Maimonides the framework for some of the most important philosophical texts for the Jewish religion, but also helped him lead advances in astronomy and medicine.

From an entirely different tradition, one hears similar words of wisdom. In The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Heart Sutra, Thich Nhat Hanh (tĭk-nät-hän), states, “In Buddhism knowledge is regarded as an obstacle for understanding. If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that even if the truth comes and knocks at our door, we won’t want to let it in.”

If we listen to these philosophers, we begin to understand how important it is to sustain a learning community that is open to many different points of view. But this would require us to look for the positive in each contribution, rather than reverting to social media or other forums to criticize every expression of views that differ from our own. And it would also increase the need to teach and practice the ability to let understanding grow, even if it doesn’t conform to what we have always believed.

These are not simple challenges. Diana Eck recognized the difficulty in, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. She considers how the 9/11 attacks brought a new consciousness of the transformation of American society. She says: “Without question, some Americans are afraid of the changing face of our country. After all, the first response to difference is often suspicion and fear.”

This sense of our unease with change and difference was addressed earlier by John Dewey, one of the foremost philosophers on education of the last century. Dewey believed that the antecedent condition for learning is “to be uncertain, unsettled, disturbed.” We have learned that this state seems difficult to sustain when the social environment feels unsafe. But these voices lead us to wonder whether we might create a sense of communal safety even as we foster an environment that may feel disturbing and unsettling. Do we really need to reject everything new and unfamiliar when challenged with fear and uncertainty?

President Obama spoke to this problem in his commencement speech at Howard University last spring. Thinking about the way change happens in the world, he said: “don’t try to shut folks out . . . no matter how much you might disagree with them. There’s been a trend around the country of trying to get colleges to disinvite speakers with a different point of view, or disrupt a politician’s rally. Don’t do that — no matter how ridiculous or offensive you might find the things that come out of their mouths… That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t challenge them. Have the confidence to challenge them, the confidence in the rightness of your position… But listen. Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them.”

Essayists have published hundreds of recent articles on the state of learning at colleges and the impulse to create more inclusive campus communities. These writers chronicle student protests, administrative and faculty responses, debates about names and the power they have to create equitable learning environments, and efforts to redefine intellectual freedom within this new context. Interest in these issues is so widespread, one wonders whether American society is using the college campus as a microcosm in which to search for solutions to the challenges that face us today.

One such article, “The Big Uneasy, What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?” by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker, examined the current campus experience primarily through the lens of events at Oberlin but also with a nod toward Yale, Claremont McKenna, Ithaca, and Harvard. Heller’s description of events on those campuses reminded me of the pain we all felt and the conflicts we have had with each other here over the past year together. Heller’s article included student and faculty voices that argued against the belief that learning and personal growth are central to the work of the educational community we call college. It seems some of us no longer share the central mission of college of “changing lives,” but expect college to be a four-year holding tank where students, faculty, and staff can act out their identities in opposition to each other. Have we, as liberal arts communities, lost our central commitment to learning, growth, and human development?

I was heartened to read in The Lawrentian’s Welcome Week Edition that many columnists still believe that changing lives is at the core of a college education. They speak about the importance of personal growth and change; they give us hope that we, as a community, will take the path of openness, cooperation, readiness to listen, and to change.

Listening last spring to our visiting Scarff Professor, George Rupp’s lecture on campus, I wondered whether recommitment to the goals of learning, intellectual openness, growth, and human development might be only part of the task that faces us at Lawrence, and colleges across the country, as we prepare our students to be global citizens in this difficult world. When I attended this lecture I was not entirely open to new understanding, as the Buddhist teachings suggest. I joined the session to fulfill my role as host, hoping to spend more time with my longtime colleagues George and his wife Nancy. But what I heard was a deep and sophisticated critique of western individualism, which Rupp believes, is preventing the United States and other western countries from providing leadership to find solutions to global problems.

In Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities, Rupp speaks from his experience as dean of the divinity school at Harvard, president of Rice and Columbia, and most recently president of the International Rescue Committee, the largest refugee resettlement organization in the world. He writes: “to put the overall argument bluntly, the modern Western individualism so many of us (including me) know and love has led us into a global dead end – or, to mix metaphors for a slightly more positive image, to a wide channel so shallow that it is tough to navigate without running aground.” Rupp believes this primarily secular focus on the self prevents us from understanding the deep roots of community that form the framework for many societies around the world.

As you would expect given his experiences and commitments, Rupp is passionate about the role education can play in changing this dynamic. He hopes that, “one outcome of our education will be that we develop what psychologists call ‘tolerance of ambiguity’.” Not certainty, not knowledge, but ambiguity. He believes that “We need to compare what is generally accepted here and now, with what has been different elsewhere or might one day be different here. Such constructive criticism is the opposite of cynicism. It is engaged. It searches. It cares.” He wants us to foster learning environments that help us “To engage in a lover’s quarrel with our world, a quarrel that expresses restlessness with what is, on behalf of what might be.” Can we sustain this “lover’s quarrel” and also provide a welcoming and supportive community for all of our members?

Like hundreds of other college presidents this fall, I wish I could offer you more answers, fewer questions today. But I believe we are in the heart of an important process that requires all of us to move forward. I believe you join me in the desire to feel confident again in the strength of our community to support all its members. I believe we all desire to strengthen the rigorous and challenging education that is a hallmark of the Lawrence experience. We need to trust that we are together in this process. I know we have what it takes to recreate our learning community to meet our aspirations. This challenge need not weaken us. Rather, we are strengthened by the shared search for new and better answers.

Finally, I thought back to my own liberal arts education and the impact it has had on my life and choices I have made. As a history major at Vassar, I was required to take at least one class beyond the staple of European and American history offerings. My first foray in this direction, which at best I came to ambivalently, was a course on modern African history. As we at Lawrence would hope, the course turned into one of the most important of my undergraduate career. Through this survey course I fell in love with the nation-building period, especially with Leopold Senghor and Julius Nyerere, the first leaders of Senegal and Tanzania. Senghor’s combination of literary and political mind, and Nyerere’s steadfast vision for his nation and
people inspired hope and awe in me.

In his 1971 commencement address at University of Vermont upon receiving an honorary degree, Senghor spoke movingly of the promise of America: “ . . . you have all the necessary ingredients, it is you who can give it a truly universal dimension. Your population is composed of every major European and Asian ethnic group, but even more important, those from Africa as well . . . Thus it is the Americans, more particularly the United States, which already anticipates the world of the twenty-first century and holds in its strong but faltering hands not only its own destiny, but the destiny of the entire world.” Senghor’s life, in two worlds, African nation building and French culture, led him to an understanding of the promise we still need to realize.

If we teach and learn anything together it is the power of overcoming doubt and uncertainty. This skill is essential at a time when much is unclear about the future. We need to have confidence that considering a wide range of ideas, of debate, and change will make us stronger. I hope this vision can guide our work this year. I am honored and glad to join you in a continuing endeavor to reach Senghor’s lofty goal for us and to sustain this learning community we call Lawrence. I look forward to seeing how we, together, engage this year with the challenge he described.

Thank you.

Thank you Kathrine Handford for providing an organ prelude that sets the stage for this and every convocation. Thank you Phillip Swan, Steven Sieck and members of the freshman class for beginning our year with such beauty. I look forward to many future performances. And thank you, Howard Niblock, for your thoughtful selection of today’s opening and closing words.

I also want to thank Tim Spurgin and the Convocation and Commencement Committee for assembling a provocative and engaging series. I hope you will join me in attending all convocations this year.

Welcome to the freshman class and our seven tenure line colleagues who moved to Appleton this fall. You will create the future of Lawrence. For the rest of your lives you will represent this university in all that you do. Thank you for joining us and renewing what it means to be a Lawrentian.

It is an absolute pleasure to be here today with you to celebrate the opening of our 167th academic year. I begin, grateful for the work last year by many colleagues to enhance the education we offer, and to the larger Lawrence community who, by virtue of their recordbreaking investment in the future of this university, will allow us to make Lawrence more affordable. These efforts and others have given us extraordinary momentum. Thank you all for helping us sustain the exceptional education we offer.

I want to dedicate this talk to the 147 students who died at Garissa University College in Kenya last spring. We have reached a critical moment as a global community when a sectarian conflict can boil over into a terrorist attack on unarmed students who are trying to simply better themselves through education. We must stand with every other higher education institution to make our campuses safe from such violence.

It was a year of many remarkable events for Lawrence and for me, but what stands out most in my mind is a conversation that took place in a sexual misconduct working group meeting in July. As I mentioned in an email to our community a few weeks ago, a group of us met frequently this summer to update our sexual misconduct policies, procedures, and educational strategies in an effort to respond to issues that students raised last spring.

During the meeting a conversation began about the new web site. I suggested we post a rap video performed by a young man who lamented his having stood silently by, as a friend described a sexual assault. This video had a profound effect on me and I hoped the message would have the same impact on members of our community. Many in the working group thought this was a good idea. But one colleague asked, “Does the rap contain swear words?” I was then informed: we do not include content on our web site with profanity in deference to students and parents who would prefer not to hear this language.

At that moment my blood began to freeze. My mind ran to all the provocative literature and film with swear words that I have consumed. And I thought what have we done? How can it be appropriate for a college to self-censor our content in this way?

There have been many moments this past year where members of the Lawrence community have felt hurt, objectified, and unsafe in response to other people’s views or comments expressed on campus, in the classroom, and on social media. Students, faculty, and staff have approached me with concerns about speech or action in relation to their identity. But does this mean we need to self-censor to the point of eliminating swear words to ensure all members of our community feel safe and supported? Or might we, instead, find balance between engaging on one hand with different, sometimes uncomfortable ideas and language, and on the other creating a supportive and welcoming campus community where all members can thrive?

We are not alone with the problem raised by self-censoring. In an interview last fall, actor and comedian Chris Rock said he had “stopped playing colleges . . . because they are way too conservative. Not in their political views – not like they’re voting Republican – but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of ‘We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.’ Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

President Obama opined on this topic at a town hall meeting this past Monday in Iowa. He stated, “I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women, and I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that..” He went on, “I don’t agree that you . . . have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them, but you shouldn’t silence them by saying you can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say. That’s not the way we learn.”

The view that extreme sensitivity has taken over campuses is not limited to politicians and comedians. In a New York Magazine article called “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say: How the language police are perverting liberalism,” Jonathan Chait chronicles a number of incidents at UCLA, Harvard, Michigan, Mount Holyoke, and Stanford among others. He sums up this trend: “After political correctness burst onto the academic scene in the late ‘80s and early 90’s, it went into a long remission. Now it has returned.”

He argues that we, as faculty and administrators, have overreacted to this movement with trigger warnings and campaigns to eradicate microaggressions. He recalls one professor at a prestigious university telling him that, “just in the last few years, she has noticed a dramatic upsurge in her student’s sensitivity toward even the mildest social or ideological slights; she and her fellow faculty members are terrified of facing accusations of triggering trauma –- or, more consequentially, violating her school’s new sexual-harassment policy –- merely by carrying out the traditional academic work of intellectual exploration.”

Trigger warnings have been defined as “alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response.” And microaggressions have been defined as “small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent, but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless.”

Chait is not alone in raising the alarm. Many recent books and articles have been published claiming college communities have curtailed freedom of speech.

Not all efforts to sanitize the educational environment come from the political left. For example, this fall an entering Duke freshman started a Facebook campaign against the assignment of a book that Lawrentians know well, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. This student objected to it “because I think sexuality is becoming more and more commonplace in our culture, and that’s a risk. Universities like Duke . . . risk isolating or even discriminating against people with conservative beliefs.” Another student posted “I am a Christian, and the nature of Fun Home . . . violates my conscience due to its pornographic
nature.”

Fun Home has caused a stir on many campuses. Among other incidents of censure, state legislators in South Carolina proposed to cut government support for the College of Charleston in response to the inclusion of Fun Home on a reading list. At Lawrence two years ago, I found Bechdel’s convocation speech riveting but in no way subversive of core human values.

In a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Hiding from Scary Ideas: Do students really need cookies and Play-doh to deal with the trauma of listening to unpopular opinions?” Judy Shulevitz, tried to explain why so many people feel the urge to minimize controversial topics: “Safe spaces,” she said, “are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomforting or distressing viewpoints.” She cites events at Brown, Columbia, Oxford, Northwestern, and Smith to illustrate her point.

Shulevitz is not concerned that free speech has been diminished, or that we have become too politically correct. She worries that this trend limits the power of the education we as colleges can provide. She understands that, “keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive.” But she believes: “it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it. They’ll be unprepared for the social and intellectual headwinds that will hit them as soon as they step off the campuses whose climates they have so carefully controlled. What will they do when they hear opinions they’ve learned to shrink from? If they want to change the world, how will they learn to persuade people to join them?”

As Shulevitz suggests, we in the academy are not alone in our struggle to discuss topics where strong opinions vary widely. For example: Starbucks tried to foster a conversation about race earlier this spring in response to the troubling events in Ferguson and elsewhere across the country. They launched an advertising campaign and they asked baristas to write phrases like “Race Together” on customers’ orders. That effort was dismantled by the buzz saw of public opinion.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, called “The Coddling of the American Mind,” takes this argument one-step further. They warn that, “Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.” They insist that the demand for trigger warnings and avoidance of microaggressions “presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.”

Anyone who interferes with this effort is punished, even if the interference is accidental. The authors call this impulse “vindictive protectiveness”; they believe it “is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.”

As a result, they believe the campus environment “prepares [students] poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong . . . And [it is] bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship.”

Voices from management theory support this concern. For example, in the Harvard Business Review, Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes explained that: “disagreements sparked by differences in perspective, competencies, access to information, and strategic focus within a company actually generate much of the value that can come from collaboration across organizational boundaries. Clashes between parties are the crucibles in which creative solutions are developed and wise trade-offs among competing objectives are made. So instead of trying simply to reduce disagreements, senior executives need to embrace conflict and, just as important, institutionalize mechanisms for managing it.”

A recent research project by the Pew Charitable Trust also illustrates the need to discuss different points of view if society is to solve pressing global problems. The study discovered some interesting disagreements between scientists and the American public. For example, 88% of scientists believe it is safe to eat genetically modified foods, but only 37% of U.S. adults agree. Maybe more pressing issues: 87% of scientists believe climate change is mostly due to human activity but only 50% of U.S adults agree. And 82% of scientists believe growing world populations will be a major problem but only 59% of U.S adults agree.

Is it not the very core of our mission to discuss these issues even if they may offend members of our community?

Lukianoff and Haidt state that colleges must find a way to “balance freedom of speech with the need to make all students feel welcome.” This is an admirable objective for us but we need to find our own path toward this goal.

This balance is not easy to find for any of us personally, let alone at an institutional or societal level. Early in my career when someone noticed my wedding ring, the usual question was: what does my wife do? The question felt like a microagression. Why would someone assume I was straight? In fact, probability would dictate that I am straight–so it was a normal assumption. I now draw the line when someone persists in calling my spouse my wife, even when I have clearly given his name. Which, by the way, still happens about 20% of the time.

Providing a welcoming and supportive campus community is a Lawrence hallmark. But we need to sustain open discourse even as we navigate a campus where difference rather than similarity is the norm. We need to study problems from multiple vantage points, even if they are ones that go against closely held beliefs. We need to assume the best of other people, and also to become more educated.

We will find this balance, together.

Last winter in an opinion piece in The Lawrentian a student wrote that in her experience, “Lawrence has changed me irrevocably. It has arranged and rearranged the very fibers of my being. I didn’t really know that it would when I first arrived here. . . And while my formation is not yet over, Lawrence has already made me who I am and who I will be.”

To provide this kind of transformative education we must redouble our efforts to teach and attempt to understand the provocative, the unexpected, the different from ourselves. We must also work together to create a more supportive community, and to broaden the different views we hear and learn.

In the recent song, Brave, Sara Bareilles says:
Say what you wanna say,
And let the words fall out,
Honestly, I wanna see you be brave.

I understand that what I am asking is not easy– especially in today’s world. But I believe we are brave enough to take up the challenge.

Again, thank you for all you do to sustain this vibrant learning community we call Lawrence. I look forward to another year of education, growth, and celebration.