Most of you know that colleges and universities are feeling increased pressures on the cost, price, and quality of education. In private institutions, access to our classrooms remains problematic for disadvantaged, but also now for middle-class, students.
Beyond these increasingly familiar problems, each year knowledge and skills may well become easier to acquire outside the formal structures of higher education. Well before the end of the decade, the telecommunications superhighway will make it possible for citizens to hear lectures, participate by interactive video in seminars, or take whole courses from the most eminent minds in each field. Preserved through technology, modern-day Galileos, Newtons, Jeffersons, Freuds, Brontes, Gandhis, and Curies will remain available to future generations. Eventually, virtual reality may simulate complicated dissections and other experiments for students sitting in their homes at any hour on any day of any week. Over the next decade, some academic institutions could be reduced to evaluators of these courses and credentialing agents for the consequent degrees.
Indeed, the pressures colleges and universities now face to cut costs, increase quality and expand access could eventually be alleviated by our becoming redundant! The low cost, ready availability and perhaps even the high quality of the “edutainment” technology ahead of us may offer attractive options to the families now spending $25,000 ($33,000 before taxes) per year for our kind of personal, private, residential education.
In this environment we must be clearer than ever about the real value of a Connecticut College education for students now and ten years from now. As members of a small, private residential liberal arts college community, we face a real challenge to know vividly the answer to the question: Why should we exist at all as the millennium opens? What is our reason for being? None of the pressures we face matter if we do not have a compelling answer to this question.
To address it, we must first ask: What have we been and what should we preserve for 2004?
We must remain, as one of our colleagues said recently, a school where our commitment to reason and critical questioning levels all hierarchies and presumptive ideologies, where the questioning mind deflates all demigods and unmasks traditions that divide and polarize communities. That is because the inevitable conclusion of a liberal arts education is an insatiable curiosity about difference; we cannot stop ourselves from turning the page to find yet another meaning and nuance in the cultures, the histories, and the physical phenomena we study. It is this openness to the world that opens us to other people and that makes communities where there were none before. Yes, we must remain an excellent liberal arts college.
But in my view, Connecticut College also must remain a school where:
- our unique Honor Code shapes ethical choices and creates trust among students, faculty and staff at all levels;
- our volunteer spirit emerges from both compassion for others and the commitment to analyze, understand, and reduce human suffering;
- our struggle to share governance and common vision creates trials and triumphs, but also opportunities to forgive, forebear and foresee.
For I believe that the distinctive value of Connecticut College in 1994 is our civil society, the best values of which were shaped by a secular tradition. Neither our way of life nor our honor code was pre-shaped by a religious tradition as it was at our Quaker or Episcopalian peer institutions. We are a community that has shaped its own way of being in a secular world, we have particular relevance. Our Honor Code, our high commitment to volunteer service, and our explicit struggle to share governance and common vision make us a distinctive and valuable model of a civil society formed and sustained by diverse points of view.
We are more than Francis Oakley’s learning community, where people give and take courses and services in exchange for tuition, fees, and salaries. Our students do not simply fulfill majors and get degrees. A four-year experience of living at Connecticut College prepares students to be citizens who have knowledge and skills and who can analyze and judge, but who also can love one another. Connecticut College prepares students to understand the past and the present, but also to imagine a better future and make personal sacrifices on behalf of others. It is not just what they come here to do, but whom they come here to be, in secular civil society, that fundamentally justifies our existence in 1994.
But why should Connecticut College exist in the year 2004? Because, I believe, having demonstrated the capacity to evolve and refine modes of civility on the campus and in the local area, we will extend our influence outward to arenas national and international. The values we now share have a universal quality — consensus based on trust, promotion of individual rights and liberties, preservation of traditions through innovative responses to a changing world. By 2004, I believe we will have become a model of a civil society in a global community.
Connecticut College will exist in the year 2004 because we will have had the courage on this hilltop to engage ourselves in new forms of the perennial struggle humans face to thrive as unique entities and still sustain others, both the beloved and the bedeviled. We will have worked to strengthen our own community and still build and sustain relationships among diverse communities around us. As technology thrusts new levels of intimacy upon human beings, the significance of national borders will erode. Common environmental, economic, and social challenges will make strange bedfellows and create new labels, categories, and allies in the international landscape of 2004.
How can civil society be sustained in this mobile, disparate and demanding global context? Finding answers is, I believe, the fundamental challenge humans face as we approach the 21st century, and it is made more difficult because the evolution of modern political and economic systems has outpaced the evolution of modern social systems.
As the 21st century dawns, a global consensus is emerging around democracy as the political system of choice. Similarly, a global consensus is emerging around open markets as the economic system of choice. Each of these systems has been evolving for over two centuries. The immediate challenge for the human race is to define the broad outline of a social system that will complement democracy as a political system and open markets as an economic system. This new social system will have to be flexible enough to adapt to a variety of national and cultural settings. It must offer opportunity and incentive, but also security for individuals in their communities and security for their communities among others in a globally interdependent world.
The human race, for all intents and purposes, has completed the settling of geographic space on earth. The pioneering task ahead involves the settling of new social space within and among human societies. The process will be dangerous and dynamic, but not more so than the thousands of years of settling geographic space. The civil rights movement and the women’s movement are two examples of efforts to settle social space, one between races, the other between genders. These movements are expanding the meaning in the texts that shaped our democracy and are giving breadth to the phrase “all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights.” Yet rampant violence, persistent racism, materialism, and anti-intellectualism continue to poison social space as surely as plagues and natural disasters inhibited the original settlers.
Small private residential colleges have a larger role to play in society than ever before. In the past 50 years, other social structures like churches, neighborhoods, and even families have fragmented. Cities, towns, and universities have grown inhumanly large. It is difficult to point to another structure besides the small, private residential liberal arts college that remains a human-sized community which has a chance of modeling life in newly settled space, of serving as a training ground for life in the civil societies of the future.
Connecticut College is particularly well-suited to this task. Our 80 year old Honor Code explicitly connects rights to virtues in our citizens. Our 80 year old commitment to volunteerism establishes a tradition of education for others, not just for self. And, after all, we began as settlers of new social space in 1911, with women’s education. In 1963, during the civil rights movement, we took a lead role in changing race relations, and in 1969 we were leaders in changing gender relations with co-education. In the ’80s, we settled new social space between the college and the community through the enormous growth of our student volunteer service. Over the next ten years, we must become a school whose reason for being is defined by a willingness to expand the model of a civil society to the global community.
One way to pursue this goal, I think, is to ask the faculty to be willing to reach even beyond its current commitments, to take more risks. I believe that over the next decade we must become a school where the vast majority of the faculty has studied and taught in less technologically advanced societies than our own. Our students will be among the most privileged 15 percent of the world’s people — the “haves.” They will influence profoundly the well-being of the 85 percent of the world’s “have nots.” Whatever life pursuit our students choose, they must be people whose education is fundamentally non sibi — not for self but for others. It is our job to help them know those others , but we cannot help them to know others whom we have not sought to know ourselves. The faculty alone can make this connection.
In 1994, 80 percent of the world’s population cannot be confident of the survival of its first children. Those people should expect us to hear the simple sentence that describes their daily life: “We suffer.” A faculty whose members have personally seen this world, its hopes and wholeness, its fears and pain, a faculty whose members have spent time living and learning in these environments; that faculty will teach any discipline differently because it will be transformed by its experience and will more vividly see that a major goal of teaching and learning is to enable people to know and help others. That faculty will be prepared to learn as we teach, to temper modernism with respect for cultural differences.
All that faculty members will absorb in those societies abroad will powerfully advance our progress toward refining a civil society in a global community. Faculty members also will reflect more deeply on the relationship of each discipline and its pedagogy to the broader framework that human beings will inhabit in a globally interdependent century.
By the year 2004, I believe we also must be a school where:
- the majority of our students have held internships overseas before graduation;
- an increasingly diverse faculty and student body have lived with fellow Americans in public housing projects and threatened neighborhoods;
- the curriculum connects the experience of volunteer service to the learning process;
- the most advanced technologies enrich course content;
- the traditional skills — writing, critical thinking, quantitative analysis, and foreign languages — are complemented by skills such as negotiation, public speaking, and team building which facilitate human interactions in civil societies.
Many of these initiatives are already in embryonic form at Connecticut College. Some are under discussion in the strategic planning process. As they develop more fully, these and related ideas will contribute to our evolution from a model civil society to a model of civil society in a global community.
Our future is in our own hands, and particularly in the hands of the faculty. After reading the annual reports of this faculty in the last few weeks I can tell you that I am more optimistic than ever about our readiness to evolve and shape this next phase of our work as a community. Budget constraints must not cloud our vision of our future. I know that as you look forward, some of you have concerns. Others have ideas and programs. I am open to hear from each of you and welcome your thoughts.
The pioneering spirit that gave birth to Connecticut College and sustained it with strength in these last 80 years is evident. That spirit will give us the courage to envision and undertake the task of becoming an explicit model of a civil society in the global community of 2004, thus serving our students and the world we share and defining our reason for being.