Colby | Inauguration of President William D. Adams

Inauguration Address of William D. Adams

October 21, 2000
Colby College, Waterville, Maine

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Mr. Crawford, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty and administrative colleagues, Colby students, Colby alumni and alumnae, members of the Waterville community, representatives of the community of higher education, friends, and guests–thank you for your warm welcome and for your presence on this important day in the life of the College.

Occasions such as this result from many forms of effort and call for several kinds of thanks.

First and foremost, I want to thank the members of the Colby community for inviting Cathy, Sean, Carmen and me to this good place. We are proud and grateful to be permanently among you.

The long process leading to this day began with the announcement of the presidential transition a little more than two years ago. I want to thank the members of the presidential search committee, and especially its chair, Jim Crawford, for their labor in this most laborious of all processes. I admire your stamina almost as much as your judgment.

To the Board of Trustees, which supported that judgment, thank you for your confidence. I look forward to our work together in the years to come.

The inaugural committee, ably led by Earl Smith, worked hard to imagine the shape of this day. Thank you for your efforts, which have now come to such handsome fruition. And thanks to all those who worked so hard in several places–in dining services and physical plant, in the scheduling office and in security, to name a few–to bring the committee's plans to life. We appreciate your efforts.

To the members of my extended family who made considerable journeys to be here today, thank you for coming. I promise I won't do this to you again. At least it isn't snowing.

To my friends and colleagues from Bucknell University, I also extend special greetings. Thank you for being such good and patient teachers, and for giving me the opportunity to observe and learn from so many forms of excellence.

As some of you may know, Bucknell and Colby have at least two interesting historical connections. Both were founded by Baptists with a longing for rustic locations. And the institutions were joined once before by presidential migration. Bucknell's second president, Justin R. Loomis, was a faculty member at Colby before being called to Lewisburg in the early 1860s. That debt has now been repaid.

Loomis was notorious for appearing unexpectedly on the campus in the dead of night, camouflaged and ill tempered, ready to ferret out student excesses that might be occurring. He possessed great foot speed and endurance, which enabled him to capture any miscreants and return them to their quarters, but probably not before delivering some form of 19^th century discipline.

But other presidential practices in Colby's past are most worthy of emulation. For the past century, this place has been blessed with extremely capable and long-serving presidents. Two members of that distinguished group–Bob Strider and Bill Cotter–are with us today. To them I send collegial greetings, along with my deepest personal thanks and admiration for what they achieved here. I am hoping they will share with me before too long the secret of their longevity.

I wish to thank representatives of the Waterville community gathered here today for your presence and for your past support of the College, which includes the ground upon which we stand today. I look forward to the work of advancing our common interests, which are numerous and profound.

Finally, I want to thank Cathy, Sean and Carmen for making this journey to Maine with me. I especially want to thank Cathy for her endlessly patient support, for her steady partnership in this and other challenging enterprises, for her presidential management skills, and for her humor, which might yet save me from seriousness.

Presidential inaugurations have been uncommon in the modern life of Colby–only six in the entire 20^th century and only two in the last 40 years. As I contemplated this day and what I might say to you, these facts were very much on my mind. If Colby's history is in any way predictive–and I very much hope it is–this moment will not come again soon.

What sort of moment is it? In the most common meaning of the word, it is of course a moment of beginning, the start of something new. And what is new, what begins today, is only partly connected to the relatively unfamiliar face among you, though that is not unimportant. The fullest meaning of this day embraces the entire Colby community and signals a collective beginning, or more precisely a re-beginning, of the common enterprise. It is a moment, then, that leads us naturally to recall our most fundamental commitments and the ways in which we currently meet them.

In a still broader sense, however, the moment is also about the future and things not yet known. This sense of anticipation is wonderfully inscribed in the root of the word "inaugurate," which has to do with "augur" and "auguration" and the interpretation of signs and omens.

The classicists among us know already what the Oxford English Dictionary says about this matter. The augur was "a religious official among the Romans, whose duty it was to predict future events and advise the course of public business, in accordance with omens derived from the flight and singing and feeding of birds, the appearance of the entrails of sacrificial victims, celestial phenomena, and other portents."

Wishing to leave no stone unturned, the inaugural committee has cleverly arranged for pigeons and the sacrifice of the representatives of certain neighboring liberal arts colleges. Your names will be called shortly.

A bit more seriously, I want to share with you today some thoughts inspired by these related meanings of the inaugural moment: the sense of collective beginning and purpose, and the sense of looking ahead to see what might be coming.

Engaging first in the role of the augur, I would tell you that many of the omens hovering about this remarkable enterprise of ours are most encouraging. Indeed, I think that it may not be too stretching to say that things have never looked more promising in several important ways.

The most encouraging omen of all, of course, is the level of interest in the education we provide. Like other highly selective liberal arts colleges, Colby has seen applications grow steadily and impressively in recent years. More and more high school seniors are seeking us out, and the students we ultimately enroll are by every measure more talented with each passing year.

What those students find when they arrive has also changed in many ways over the past several decades. The physical changes–from academic and residential spaces to the ubiquity of new technologies–are notable and exciting. But in still deeper and more consequential ways, the power and range of our teaching and learning have also advanced appreciably. We offer more in more compelling ways than ever before, and the creativity, professional aspiration and competitive pressures that fuel these changes will certainly not abate any time soon.

The College's capacity to respond to these pressures and opportunities has depended in part on our recent success in augmenting the financial resources available to us. That success has had a great deal to do with the remarkable vigor of the U.S. economy during the past decade. Partly as a result of that vigor, several things are true. First, the financial markets have permitted us to increase our endowment even as we invest strategically in the institution. And second, philanthropic support of this and similar institutions has expanded dramatically in recent years.

Other encouraging omens might be observed here, but I think this is sufficient to suggest that the picture of what the world has in store for us is reassuring in several important ways.

But you will probably not be surprised to hear me say just as quickly that this is not the whole picture. And while it may not have been politically correct for the augur of ancient times to mention less than perfectly reassuring things, let me tell you what else I think the "flight and singing and feeding of birds" are currently telling us.

Nearly forty years ago, Clark Kerr, Chancellor of the University of California, published The Uses of the University, a short but remarkable book on the future of American higher education. The basic premise of that important work was that the American system of higher education had entered a new and altogether different phase of its history, which Kerr called its "second great transformation." At the very heart of that transformation, he argued, was the growing importance of the "knowledge industry"–our industry–to the basic structure and fundamental health of the American economic system.

At the risk of being slightly hyperbolic, I think it is the case that American higher education may be approaching its "third great transformation," or at least an important new cycle within its second. And that transformation is rooted in the steady intensification of the reciprocal dependency between our enterprise and the nation's productive life and organizations.

The evidence for this amplification is everywhere, but nowhere is it more obvious than in the closer and more consequential collaboration between colleges and universities and the many small and large corporate concerns committed to the elaboration of new technologies —informational, biological, and productive. These "knowledge-industry clusters," as Kerr called them, have emerged across the country, in both familiar and new places, and in many forms of industrial and economic collaboration.

Principally because of these connections, American colleges and universities have experienced deeper and more insistent demands for a perfectly obvious kind of programmatic relevance. The demands come from two directions–from the corporate and industrial consumers of the products of the knowledge industry, and from parents and prospective students who clearly and correctly sense the increasingly tight correlation between higher education and the prospects for professional success in an economy so dominated by knowledge.

A related change of much recent discussion is the notion of "the virtual university." The ultimate promise of this formation is unclear, but its advocates are already challenging the core assumptions and condition of the liberal arts college–the campus, the classroom, and the real (as opposed to virtual) relationships among students and teachers in a residential setting.

Another even more radical prospect, less broadly discussed but every bit as fateful, is the possibility that the knowledge industry will begin to migrate, in part or in whole, outside the nearly exclusive control of colleges and universities and into for-profit corporate settings of either the virtual or embodied variety.

Two forces are driving this prospect. First, and in spite of the recently strong economy, powerful concerns about the steadily growing cost of our enterprise remain very much alive. That concern will surely reemerge, and when it does so too will the notion that other, more efficient means of transferring knowledge need to be developed.

In the meantime, and in light of the magnitude of the education market in the United States, there is plenty of interest among investors and entrepreneurs alike in the prospect of profit-making alternatives to traditional, not-for-profit public and private educational institutions.

All of these trends and pressures have contributed in various ways to the erosion of the ideals and practices of liberal education. That erosion has not always been noisy, but its effects have been steady and incontrovertible: of the roughly 14 million students enrolled today in this country's colleges and universities, fewer than 250,000–about 2 percent–are enrolled in residential liberal arts colleges like Colby.

And herein lies the precise and important irony of our situation. While Colby and other highly selective national liberal arts colleges flourish and grow stronger each year, the practice of liberal learning in the broader context of American higher education is in decline.

This trend is worrisome for several reasons. First, the relevance and impact of our enterprise has in part to do with its reach across the American social landscape. We ought to view the narrowing of that landscape with some concern.

Second, one of the important characteristics of liberal learning has been its commitment to a unifying vision of the educational enterprise across disciplinary and professional academic boundaries. The weakening of that vision will lead to the further compartmentalization of our intellectual practices, with distressing consequences for our public life.

Consider how much shared intellectual purpose and interdisciplinary dialogue it will require for us as a nation to deal with the massively complex issues that the knowledge industry has already placed in our laps and that are now matters of high public policy debate. The moral and political conundrums created by the information technology revolution and the biological sciences, for instance, are not vague apparitions looming somewhere down the track; they are going by us even as we speak. How will our students–the ultimate arbiters of many of these matters in the political realm–acquire the intellectual capacities to deal with them if we do not teach them?

What do all of these omens–the encouraging and the worrisome, the comforting and the not so comforting–mean to us as we consider the other side of this inaugural moment, the moment of collective beginning and renewal?

We should agree to recognize, first of all, that the encouraging omens I mentioned earlier have a great deal to do with the commitment and accomplishments of this community over many years. The Colby of this precise moment–so admirably attractive and strong–is something that everyone associated with it–students and faculty, administrators and support staff, Trustees and alumni, parents and friends–should view with enormous pride.

Especially in this inaugural moment, that recognition should give us considerable confidence–confidence in our fundamental quality and capabilities, first and foremost, and confidence in the likelihood that we can be even better and stronger in the future.

But better in what specific ways? With an eye on the all the omens, let me mention briefly several that are on my mind.

Now and in the years ahead, I think we must be committed to the steady reinvention of the practices of liberal learning. I say this not because I fear that demand for the particular brand of liberal learning we provide will somehow evaporate–the omens here suggest something very different–but rather because our strength and excellence create the opportunity to do some striking things, and because the dynamic leadership of places like Colby will have a great deal to do with the prospects for liberal learning in the broader context of American higher education.

At the risk of sounding ironic and perhaps even contradictory, let me suggest that the guiding spirit of this reinvention should be a kind of pragmatism. By this I do not mean a narrowly utilitarian vision. I mean instead to invoke the philosophical pragmatism that William James had in mind when he spoke of his own philosophy as being concerned with "the conduct of life."

What James had in mind, I think, might be best understood in terms of several closely related questions. And the first and most important relates to our vision of the historical moment we inhabit and the challenging terrain that all of us encounter as members of a common enterprise. What are the broad and broadly shared contours of the experience our students will have as members of American society at this moment in our collective history? What demands and challenges will they confront as citizens, as professionals, as private persons? And what in light of those experiential features and demands are we certain they will need to encounter and experience in their time with us?

Answering this last question in this forum is both difficult and risky. I will try nevertheless, knowing I will have years to explain and defend myself:

A pragmatic conception of liberal learning will be interdisciplinary in spirit, striving to acquaint students with the interconnections among things and the means we have of understanding them;

It will be multicultural and international in perspective, providing the intellectual foundations for engaging the cultural diversity and complexity of American society and the world;

It will be committed to the values of democratic citizenship, community service and social justice, and to understanding the principal forms of institutional and organizational life and how individuals shape and change institutions and organizations;

It will be concerned with the forms and history of technology, and with the methods and practices of the natural sciences, which form the intellectual foundations of those technologies;

It will be committed to providing the intellectual foundations of moral judgment and the ability to negotiate complex moral terrain;

It will be committed to the creative imagination and to the works and practices that embody and exemplify that imagination;

It will be committed to fundamental intellectual capacities–the capacity to communicate, to think analytically and critically, among others.

The democratic thrust of this view of liberal learning is closely related to a second major element of our ambition in the coming years: let us make certain that the education we provide remains accessible to all those qualified to benefit from its riches. This involves at least two additional areas of concern and effort.

First, and in spite of the recent and surely temporary hiatus in public anxiety about this matter, we must continue to worry about the cost of what we do. The social relevance and impact of the form of education we practice will have a great deal to do with our capacity to stay within reach of a diverse population of prospective students.

Second, we must continue to expand the permanent resources available to us to provide financial assistance to those who cannot otherwise afford the full freight of what we do. Especially in light of the highly competitive company that Colby now keeps, financial aid will become an increasingly important part of our commitment to access and to the broader ambition we must have to remain a viable and compelling part of the landscape of American higher education.

The concern for access is closely related to a third major challenge for Colby–the need to continue to diversify the institution. That ambition has been prominent on the agenda of the College in recent years. I hope we can agree to seek its fuller realization in the years to come.

Doing so will require several things of us. The first and perhaps most important is for all of us to place this matter at the head of our busy individual and professional agendas, wherever we find ourselves in the institutional framework. Everyone needs to be on this train all of the time.

The second is the willingness to admit that all of us, regardless of our backgrounds or current commitments or places in the institutional structure, have a great deal to learn about this matter and its complexities. Seeing ourselves as learners will be helpful in at least two ways: it will give us the eagerness and openness of learners, while it also will promote understanding of the inevitable false starts and temporary setbacks of the learning process.

The third and last requirement is the recognition that we are in this together. We cannot get to where we want to go unless we all understand ourselves to be pulling on the same rope.

Innovation in liberal learning, accessibility, achieving greater diversity–these are some of the important challenges this moment places in front of us. What will we need to succeed?

Since I have focused on three challenges, let me also mention three virtues: confidence, aspiration, and community.

Our confidence, as I noted earlier, springs from an objective and healthy regard for our achievements and the excellence of the educational experience we provide. And that is where we must remain focused.

At the same time, this is a place that rather naturally aspires, and must aspire, to be better. And better not in relative or comparative terms, but in the fundamental quality of what we do–in the teaching and learning that forms the core of our enterprise, in the quality of the human relationships that define the life of the campus, in the ways we support and are supported by alumni and friends, and in the general aspiration to excellence.

But nothing will be more important to our success than our sense of community. And here Colby has a great deal to rely upon.

My own acquaintance with that sense of community is brief compared to the familiarity that most of you have. But it is long enough for me to know something about its prominent features. Colby is blessed with an extraordinary level of commitment and affection among those who work here, in every part of the institution. It is a place of remarkable friendliness and warmth, as I have come to know in a personal way over the last several months. And it is a place that inspires and relies upon the generous and continuous loyalty of many thousands of alumni, parents, and friends across the country, and indeed around the world, who have benefited from what we do here and who feel a part of our fortunes and future.

In the long run this deep and extensive sense of community may be our strongest asset. For it is what we have to rely upon as we change and grow; it supports everything else that we do and will aspire to do. We must therefore consciously appreciate, nourish, and preserve it.

I look forward to that work and to the many other challenges, large and small, that accompany this office and the moment in which we find ourselves today. Thank you for sharing that moment with me, for listening so patiently to these inaugural reflections, and–most of all–for your company on this extraordinary journey.