By
Richard Warch
President, Lawrence University
One wag has noted that college presidents have one speech, which they give in different iterations on various occasions, an assessment that no doubt strikes a chord with those of you who have heard me speak over the past 25 years. In crafting my matriculation address for the opening of the 2003-04 academic year — my 25th and last — the question I faced was whether or not I had one more version of the one speech in me. As I have sought in recent years to translate that speech into my annual president’s report, the same question applies in this case as well. But, since I think that the topic of this report is of great import to the college community — indeed, to the broader communities in which we live — I am pleased to share my thoughts with the wider audience of Lawrence alumni and friends.
I have sought to craft this report not as a valedictory of sorts, but rather as an opportunity to reflect with you — and hence to invite or provoke your own reflections — on the Lawrence community. In addition to the proclamations to be found in the college’s statement of mission and purposes, we also profess the distinctive elements that make up the frequently invoked term — and frequently invoked as a way of showing that we don’t take ourselves too seriously — The Lawrence Difference. The five features cited in our promotional literature as constituting that difference are Freshman Studies, Individualized Study, Björklunden, the Conservatory of Music, and the Honor Code. I suppose one could identify such things as Trivia Weekend, Celebrate!, Zoo Day, and even the occasional aroma wafting down from Kaukauna as exemplifying The Lawrence Difference as well, but we understandably took the high road in the viewbook.
There are, of course, many and manifold aspects of the college and conservatory — from the course of study, to the composition of the faculty, to the attributes of the undergraduate body, to the character of residential life — that in the aggregate define Lawrence. It should also be acknowledged that each person’s “Lawrence” is inevitably different from every other person’s “Lawrence,” since our understanding of the place is shaped by our individual experiences within it, by our individual expectations of it, by our individual contributions to it, and, in the case of alumni, by when they attended.
That said, Lawrence
is not merely in the eye of the beholder. By virtue of its history, its circumstances,
and its purposes, Lawrence transcends in
some way our individual and idiosyncratic versions, existing not simply as
the sum
of its parts or the collective assemblage of our personal views, but as something
other and greater than all of those. So we talk of the Lawrence community,
perhaps too easily and uncritically, as a kind of shorthand for that larger
whole.
I don’t know when the word “community” began
to be applied to colleges and universities, but the term seems almost ubiquitous
these days,
as institutions describe themselves as — or at least describe their aspirations
to be — communities.
Community is a word laden with meaning, or perhaps meanings, but at its most fundamental level, according to the first definition in the Random House Dictionary, it refers to “a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and have a common cultural and historical heritage.” In many respects, that definition fits Lawrence, though with a caveat to which I’ll return in a moment. The second definition narrows the scope somewhat, referring to “a social group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respects from the larger society within which it exists.”
I recently came across an interesting example of community in reviewing a website providing services for people wanting to set up web communities. It turns out that in setting one up, you can have a public community, a private community, or a restricted community and that, further, you can choose to have an open community, a gated community, or a subscription community, with each descending choice narrowing the scope of who can participate. In some way, I suppose, the Lawrence community partakes in some form or fashion in each of these types.
It seems implicit in the foregoing that there are communities within communities, intersecting and overlapping. That is true on campus, and beyond as well. Lawrence is a part of the Appleton and Fox Valley community, includes an extended community of over 18,000 alumni, and participates in various communities based on shared interests and values, such as NCAA Division III, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Campus Compact, and the like. Our community, then, is hardly insular or wholly self-contained.
In the field
of American higher education, we are part of the higher education community
or, more broadly, the post-secondary education community, with various
subsets within those categories. One subset is the community of national,
undergraduate, residential, liberal arts colleges, exemplified in one sense
by the Annapolis
Group, of which Lawrence is a founding member. These institutions occupy
different localities, to be sure, but would see themselves
collectively as having much in common with one another and as being distinct
from, say, the large public research universities or comprehensive regional
universities and so on. Lawrence, in turn, seeks to demarcate itself from
others within the larger community of liberal arts colleges — hence,
The Lawrence Difference.
On a more immediate level, however, there is the Lawrence
community itself, bound together in principle by a shared commitment to liberal
learning in the
arts, sciences, and music, a feature that is expressed in our mission
statement in the first entry regarding our purposes, which asserts that
Lawrence seeks to enroll students who have “the will to join a community
of scholars and artists in the vigorous pursuit of knowledge.”
The underlying assumption in that statement is that such a community already exists and one chooses to join it. The further assumption, of course, is that every entering and returning student possesses that will to join and that members of the faculty and staff do too. Which is not to say that the end result is a homogeneous community of like-minded women and men who all subscribe to identical understandings of “the vigorous pursuit of knowledge.” Indeed, on one level, there’s the rub — and, I suppose, the special genius of the institution. We strive to investigate many forms of knowledge, many ways of knowing, and to develop and hone many intellectual skills and attributes, many habits of mind and character.
The genius of the place is that such is the case. The rub is that some people wish it weren’t, wish, that is, that their understanding of knowledge and their interpretation of vigorous (usually pronounced as rigorous) ruled the proverbial roost. In other words, the community is at risk of fragmenting when individuals seek to impose their personal version of the community on others or, conversely, demean and demonize those who may have different versions. Difference, in other words, can become not a value we share, but an attribute we dispute.
Beyond what we might style
as intellectual differences or sub-communities on campus, there are many
others as well, communities within the community,
as
it were: the communities of students majoring in this or that discipline,
the community of conservatory students and faculty, the community of student-athletes,
the communities of students belonging to this or that social organization
or
club, and so on. Indeed, at times I have thought of student life at Lawrence
in terms often applied to the early church: when two or three are gathered
together, they form a group and seek recognition from LUCC. At
present, there are over 90 such groups on
campus, so the larger community consists of many smaller communities as well,
with overlapping memberships of students and faculty
who often belong to several of them. The vast majority — in web-community
terms — are public and open.
Which leads me to my next and larger point. The challenge
for Lawrence, it seems to me, is for us to be not only a community of communities
but also
to be a
place that embraces and celebrates differences, and of many kinds. Some differences,
of course, we accept almost as a matter of course: that the humanist will
think differently than the scientist, that the musician possesses different
skills
and insights than the social scientist. No one sees those sorts of differences
as problematic. But other differences do not fare quite
so well. That one humanist may think differently from another about which
texts to teach and the pedagogical strategies by which to teach them becomes
a big-deal
difference, a difference for which the term problematic often seems woefully
tame and inadequate, though which at times also seems to reflect Freud’s
observation about “the narcissism of minor difference.” A little
jingle about a 19th-century master of Balliol College in Oxford gives this
attitude a humorous spin:
Here come I, my name is Jowett,
There is no knowledge but I know it.
I am the Master of the College
And what I don’t know isn’t knowledge.
In campus life, the issue may not be so clear-cut or contentious, though there are inevitable differences between and among students (and alumni) who have views about others who affiliate with Greek-letter social societies, or join the Yuai community, or promote the aims of the Lawrence University Objectivism Club, or perform the Vagina Monologues, or run the College Republicans. I have no jingles to share on that front, though I am pleased to report that last spring when the Lawrence Christian Fellowship and the Lawrence University Pagan Organization were at Björklunden on the same weekend, all went well.
There are lots of differences here, and I am not suggesting that these are not real and at times significant, only that the community suffers when these differences become occasions for accusation or, to quote Justice Learned Hand, when “denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence.” The aim of the Lawrence community should be to deal with such differences openly and freely, to debate them in the spirit of liberal learning, though without the notion of winning or losing but rather of acknowledging and understanding. In my president’s report in 1997, I wrote on the topic “Tough-Minded or Thin-Skinned,” and I would reaffirm here the case made then, that liberal learning at its best is often argumentative and contrarian and that it is typically in those situations of uncomfortable learning that we learn best and most.
As Ruth Benedict wrote in 1946, “the tough-minded...respect difference. Their goal is a world made safe for differences,” a sentiment echoed by President Kennedy 40 years ago, when he said, “If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”
We should adopt those principles at Lawrence and
make our community a place that is, at the very least, safe for differences
and for diversity.
We should, therefore, not fear the argument and the expressions of difference
but engage
the argument and acknowledge the differences in those honorable ways
that befit a community devoted to the vigorous pursuit of knowledge, and
hence model these values and behaviors for the national and global communities,
which sorely
need them.
Other differences challenge the community as well. Returning to our statement of purposes, I note that the fourth affirms that Lawrence seeks “diversity within the university community as a means to enrich teaching and learning and to promote tolerance and understanding.”
If community is a word laden with meaning, diversity is even more so. Seeking diversity is an unexceptionable purpose, though we perhaps infrequently consider the many forms in which diversity — hence, difference — appears. In terms of domestic demographics, the diversity of the college population hardly matches that of the national population, to say nothing of the global population. That is true in everything ranging from race to national origin to religious preference to sexual orientation to political persuasion. As David Brooks pointed out in a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly, if college faculties, for example, reflected the general American population, “32 percent of professors would be registered Democrats and 31 percent would be registered Republicans. Forty percent would be evangelical Christians.” Clearly, that’s not the case, here or at the vast majority of other national liberal arts colleges.
Nonetheless, I do believe we should recognize the diversity we do have: students from 48 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia and from 51 countries; from small towns and big cities, and everything in between; students of profound religious conviction and those without; students and faculty on the left and on the right; students from American racial minority groups — 7 percent of the total — and so on. Above all, we should remember, the community is populated not simply by members of various “diverse” groups, but by individuals, each of whom possesses those distinctive characteristics of experience and outlook that define our differences.
In his book The Will to Believe, William James writes, “An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: ‘There is very little difference between one [person] and another, but what little there is, is very important.’” We should learn about and affirm those important individual differences.
But, let’s face it, the difference that has been historically and is now presently the most difficult and vexing, for Lawrence, other colleges and universities, and the nation at large is the difference embodied in the diversity relating most directly to race.
That topic received wide and broad coverage in the last year when the cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger — the two so-called affirmative action suits filed against the University of Michigan’s admissions policies and practices in the undergraduate college and the law school — were considered by the Supreme Court. As you know, the court decided in favor of the law school case — where considerations of race were part of a nuanced approach to seeking racial balance in the school — and struck down the undergraduate case — where a point system that looked very much like a formulaic quota system had been in play. Thus, as the headlines trumpeted, here quoting The New York Times, “Justices Back Affirmative Action by 5 to 4, But Wider Vote Bans a Racial Point System.”
I refer to this as a “so-called” affirmative action case because Michigan’s argument was not that these programs were an effort to compensate for past discrimination — though no one in his or her right mind would allege that prior discrimination had not occurred — but rather that they were designed to enable and promote the educational benefits of a diverse student population, thus affirming the Bakke decision of 1978, in which Justice Lewis Powell ruled that diversity contributes to a richer educational environment and that the state had an interest in that being so.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor echoed that view in her majority
opinion in the Michigan Law School case, agreeing with the law school
that
a diverse student body “helps to break down racial stereotypes and
enables [students] to better understand persons of difference races.” Further,
she went on, the educational benefits of diversity also mean that “classroom
discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and
interesting” when
students from different backgrounds contribute. Finally, the court also
agreed that diversity in the student body promotes learning outcomes and “better
prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society.”
That last point is worth highlighting. Not only
is our nation a heterogeneous conglomeration of individuals from
multiple
races, creeds, faiths,
national origins, sexual orientations, geographic locations, and
political preferences,
but we are also increasingly part of a global network of extraordinary
diversity and even a local community that is becoming so. In recognition
and response
to that fact, American businesses actively promote diversity in their
workforces, with Kimberly-Clark being a dramatic local example, and
public schools
do the same, as an article in a recent Appleton Post-Crescent pointed
out to be the case in the Appleton Area School District.
When our family arrived here 26 years ago, I heard the story of a young boy who asked the folks who were moving in next door, “Are you Lutheran or Catholic?” as if those were the only choices. That quip suggests a homogeneity that no longer obtains quite as it did in the late 1970s. The demographics of the area have changed, though we still have plenty of Lutherans and Catholics. As Appleton North High School Assistant Principal Yvette Dunlap said, “Any time a student’s actual learning life experience can reflect what they encounter in the real world, the students are all the better for it,” a view that applies to college as well as to secondary school. What students encounter in the real world of Appleton is an increasingly diverse population — including Hmong, Hispanics, and African Americans — and they need to be prepared to live productively in the midst of that diversity.
So
do we all. As the Association of American Colleges and Universities
has stated, the civic benefits of campus diversity are real and lasting,
since
studies show that “great gains come when students from different
backgrounds achieve together the interracial understanding and mutual
respect that are
indispensable in a diverse democracy.” We should promote such
gains. The Lawrence experience should prepare students, as they graduate
to
become alumni, for their lives as citizens of a diverse community,
nation, and
world; should help them enter those communities with greater knowledge
and sensitivity
to difference; and should motivate them to have a greater commitment
to realizing the full benefits of diversity for all.
Many educators agree with these points. Stanford President John Hennessy,
for example, has stated that “Diversity in its myriad forms — geographic,
socioeconomic, gender, racial, and ethnic — expands the intellectual
base of the individuals engaged in research, teaching, and learning.
The result benefits all students and faculty.”
Comparable aims inform Lawrence’s commitment to diversity, a commitment that is expressed in the recruitment efforts of the admissions office, in the course of study, in the general education requirements, and in campus life. At minimum, we expect diversity to promote tolerance and understanding, thus supporting the position expressed by political philosopher Michael Walzer: “toleration makes difference possible; difference makes toleration necessary.”
To repeat, we do not seek any one kind of diversity, but pursue and honor many. But that very diversity, to the degree to which we find it at Lawrence, must be acknowledged — and here’s the caveat I mentioned earlier — as challenging the notion of community as having “a common cultural and historical heritage.” For in many ways, diversity and difference are meant to multiply and hence enrich the cultural and historical heritage of the community; community is not meant to homogenize diversity and difference into some uniform singularity. Diversity and difference make community more complex, even as they make it more stimulating, interesting, and life-changing. We need to work deliberately to realize those realities.
Two years ago, Lawrence convocation speaker Anna Deavere Smith said that she worked hard at listening to others, not just “for any old thing they say,” but “for that thing they say which is that poem that they’re speaking” and hence learning from and being shaped by the experiences and expressions of others. We may not achieve that sense of community imagined by Elie Wiesel, “in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others,” but we should try.
We should try, I believe, because the advantages of a diverse community are more easily articulated than realized, both on campus and in the society beyond. Realizing those advantages takes concerted will and effort; they do not occur merely as a consequence of the diversity and difference within the community.
David Brooks made that point forcefully in the article I cited a moment ago. Titled “People Like Us,” the article’s subheading is “We all pay lip service to the melting pot, but we really prefer the congealing pot.” Brooks makes his case at the outset: “We really don’t care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal.”
Brooks claims never to have seen a truly diverse community. “Instead, what I have seen all around the country,” he writes, “is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.”
"Make no mistake,” he goes on; “we are increasing our happiness by segmenting off so rigorously. We are finding places where we are comfortable and where we feel we can flourish. But the choices we make toward that end lead to the very opposite of diversity.”
Brooks cites a number of statistics and studies to prove his point, many of them drawn from — or at least referring to — colleges and universities, which he sees as “amazingly undiverse in their values, politics, and mores.” To illustrate that point, he argues that since brainy people who are Republicans and evangelical Christians feel they are not welcome at most elite colleges and universities, they do not even consider working there. Brainy people with generally liberal social mores, on the other hand, flow to academia.
“What we are looking at here is human nature,” Brooks states. “People want to be around others who are roughly like themselves. That’s called community.”
“The dream of diversity,” he goes on, “is like the dream of equality. Both are based on ideals we celebrate even as we undermine them daily.”
While Brooks sees this situation as “natural,” he
also believes it appalling.
“It is appalling that Americans know so little about one another. It
is
appalling that many of us are so narrow-minded that we can’t tolerate
a few people with ideas significantly different from our own….It’s
appalling that people should be content to cut themselves off from
everyone unlike themselves.”
Brooks’s argument poses a sharp challenge to
Lawrence and to the civic purposes we profess for liberal education.
Rather than tumble to his assessment that “community” is
being around others who are roughly like ourselves, to retreat
to the safe harbors
of the familiar and comfortable, we should strive to be a community
of people who embrace those unlike themselves, who act intentionally
to become familiar with those unlike themselves, so that the educational
values — and, hence, the social values — of diversity
are real, and felt, and valued.
That intentionality should be evidenced in the classrooms and in the residence halls, in intellectual debate and discovery, and in personal give and take. We will learn with and from one another only to the extent that we discourse with and listen to one another. The communities within our community are perhaps most particularly at risk here, in that they are often imagined, constructed, and sustained by their fidelity to the comfortably familiar, seek to populate and repopulate themselves by cloning themselves in the persons of new members, and run the danger of isolating themselves from those who are not among them. That’s not always the case, to be sure, but being alert to the possibility may help arrest the tendency.
Conversely, the community at large faces another danger. Perhaps we will not isolate ourselves from others; perhaps we will indeed be tolerant and understanding of those different from ourselves. The danger is that some of us might see ourselves as belonging naturally to a pre-existing Lawrence community and then welcome others to it. That seems laudable enough, but it fails on one important point. It assumes that some people confer community status on others. The reality, however, is that everyone who has met the criteria for admission and passed the scrutiny of a hiring committee has an equal claim to membership in our community. The fact of individual difference and differences is not something that matters in that sense.
So we face the complex and serious task of acknowledging, respecting, and learning from our differences, on the one hand, and refusing to permit those differences to dominate our relationships with one another or to put some of us in one camp and some in another, on the other. That balancing act will require our concerted and collective efforts, in being open to each other, in reaching out to one another, in learning with and from one another, and thus in crafting and expressing together the Lawrence community. I have delivered a version of that message each September in my welcome to new students, and I believe, in conclusion, that the point is worth repeating here.
Writing some years ago in The New Yorker about five Orthodox Jewish students who wanted to be relieved of the obligation to live on campus at Yale because the conditions in the residence halls violated their religious convictions, David Denby notes that this issue offers a fundamental challenge to the very nature of the university.
“One thing that separates a faith community from a learning community,” he writes, “is that, in the latter, one’s preconceptions are constantly, and productively, under duress. The experience of confronting both new ideas and people who think differently from oneself has traditionally formed the heart of a liberal education.”
Liberal education is violated, then, when students either avoid or seek to be protected from the unfamiliar and from challenges to their preconceptions and worldviews, wherever those are confronted, either in courses or in persons. Whether in the case of the so-called Yale Five, who wished to be removed from the company of people with values other than their own, or the case of a student at Baylor who got the university to agree to substitute books she found objectionable in a literature course with ones she found acceptable, protecting students from the unfamiliar and uncomfortable may be seen as damaging the very purposes of liberal learning. The aim of a liberal education, rather, is to force students to come to terms with the “other,” both persons and ideas.
That openness to the unfamiliar and the novel is an exceedingly important attribute for students to develop as they live their lives at Lawrence. If they leave here with their worldviews unchallenged and unscathed, if they graduate with a circle of friends and acquaintances composed solely of those like the ones they left at home or those with whom they feel most “comfortable,” they’ve failed to take advantage of the college and of the community. Gerald Brenan wrote, “Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.”
College should be a place where natures are modified, not a place where our personal predilections and preferences are reified. Differences within the Lawrence community are attributes that should not only be tolerated, but also cherished; diversity is more than a fact to be acknowledged, but an opportunity to be seized. If and as students cherish difference and seize the opportunities embedded in diversity, Lawrence will be a stronger and better place, and the Lawrence experience — even The Lawrence Difference and Difference at Lawrence — will become more profound, more powerful, and more uplifting for all.