REMARKS ON THE OCCASION OF HIS INAUGURATION AS THE 18TH PRESIDENT OF ST. LAWRENCE
The Marks of the Happy University
William L. Fox – Saturday, October 24, 2009
Dr. Rose, Mrs. Bijur, Members of the Board of Trustees, Presidents Gulick and Sullivan, Members of the St. Lawrence faculty, Senator Collins, Classmates, Students of all the years, and Friend—Laurentians, all: Thank you.
Before I ever knew or joined St. Lawrence, I belonged to a wonderful family with parents who sacrificed much to make so much more possible. They instilled in us the closest bonds of togetherness, which is again in evidence today as I hope my own love and gratitude are, too. Furthermore, let me say something about my self-evident dependency. Without Lynn and Hallie I would never be or consider being in this dual station of responsibility and honor.
My St. Lawrence professor, Dan O’Connor, knows that I was not his best student. He may not know, however, that he made me a better student, the one I became after many years of study. Dan’s scholarship, which I later read, understood, and admired, was about one of the most enduring and fascinating leaders of antiquity. It is this person who once described a large experience as “that great, resplendent day” in a man’s life. This splendid moment is that day for me.
By most theories of public ritual, ceremonies mirror circumstances and do not create them. A building dedication does not add a single course of bricks to the front wall. And yet, this event illustrates the exception; a symbolic idea attains reality. In the ceremonial presentation of the St. Lawrence medallion and its historic charter, a significant exchange occurs: the symbols are not just transient markers or an individual’s temporary personal possessions, but actually create the vital community they were first meant to represent.
These objects have been touched, read, and circulated by a great many people over the years and they bring us together as common holdings—linking monumental achievement in our history, the vivid challenges of the present, and the implicit opportunity in the years ahead.
A community of thoughtful tradition translates the material and the verbal, the medallion and the charter, into its shared love of study, conversation, and learning. We become today, somehow, a little more of what we say we are and have always been at St. Lawrence.
There is also, perhaps, communal whimsy and catharsis for occasionally seeing a president wear a horse collar with jeweled hardware that resembles the tack and yoke of old farm days. When St. Lawrence’s own Irving Bacheller entered his freshman year in 1878, according to his memoir Coming Up the Road, he planned, as if referring to a North Country plow horse, “to draw the load or die in the traces.”
While wearing the St. Lawrence presidential medallion is the rarest kind of privilege, it also suggests the analogy of being hitched up to do the labors of a mule. While I appear in harness for the next few minutes, let me offer a few observations about our shared resolve to keep the field of our work cultivated and productive.
Many inauguration speeches set forth lofty plans, strategic goals, and imagined achievements. They often include details, metrics, and the mechanics of reform. Meanwhile, many of you in this gathering are already involved in this kind of institutional work that will plot the map and draw the roads we will take. Rather than offering that sort of speech, I am exercising the personal privilege of telling you why I think St. Lawrence is simply astonishing. My unconventional approach is a set of reflections on what I value most about St. Lawrence and wish to protect with the office I bear.
When John Henry Cardinal Newman wrote his famous discourse, The Idea of a University (1873), he left many compelling arguments about the fundamental purpose of our enterprise: to achieve an expansion of knowledge, both broad and deep; to develop probing, analytical habits of mind; to encourage a larger capacity for social sensitivity and moral decency.
Newman stressed “intellectual excellence,” about the time St. Lawrence was originally conceived; it remains his wisest principle for a university’s mission. He argued fiercely against the mere economic utility of knowledge or what we recognize today as the pressure for more specific career training in the undergraduate experience. One of Cardinal Newman’s most recent interpreters (Frank M. Turner in Yale edition of The Idea.., 291) affirms that “[this] transcendent uselessness…has preserved much of the freedom of university life… to be havens where students may pursue studies and activities not directly or practically applicable to later life while they mature toward adulthood.”
Education at St. Lawrence vibrates with an affinity for Newman’s philosophical framework. We should be grateful that it has and it does. But there is a signal difference that sets St. Lawrence apart from Newman’s dream university and many others I have come to know over a lifetime. And that is where I would like to focus my thoughts.
One of the most frequently questions posed to a new president comes with me today: what is so special about St. Lawrence? When families were on campus recently, there was a moment in one of the public forums I was leading that drew me farther down this line of inquiry than the usual transaction. The mother of a first-year student wanted assurance that our work, which we believe is distinctive, really passes the “so, what?” test. I kept listing all the amazing opportunities for learning and belonging, the superb campus facilities, and our long traditions of intellectual excellence and creativity. And she kept pressing me. What else? I kept reciting data and anecdotes. What else? And then, just when I feared an impasse, we found a turning point. I said, “St. Lawrence is special because it is a happy place.”
After many readings, I have never seen “happiness” mentioned in Newman’s classic treatise. And yet, from my experience as a student to my impressions decades later, the St. Lawrence idea of a happy university is not a trifle and by no means does it compromise the measure of our excellent work. In fact, we risk losing so much of the St. Lawrence essence and way, if we dismiss this quality as misguided or uncompetitive.
Many years ago, an elder of my childhood, whom we adored, taught me a simple Latin sentence that she insisted I memorize. I believe it comes from Marcus Aurelius. Hic est gravis orbis terrarum. This is a hard world. As I have made my way in the world, I have lived in and witnessed some very mean places. The other day, a rabbi in London, who established a drug clinic there to serve both Jews and Muslims and had himself survived a close call in the terrorist subway bombings of a few years ago, was heard to say, “who said the world was supposed to be easy?” (The Christian Science Monitor, September 20, 2009, 7).
Our students may already know and expect the world’s difficulties. And I would not advocate that St. Lawrence should ever be easy or unchallenging, far from it. But I will insist, with “a deep sense of serious resolution,” that we never forsake the idea of being a happy university.
It is the St. Lawrence I have known and come back to that holds the idea of our progress and potential. In a hard world, we need to show students how to be happy and what it means to help the earth become a happier dwelling place. And that simple idea of a university is perhaps what St. Lawrence will need to be more public about in its self-definition.
Near the end of her life, the American chef and cook-book writer Julia Child published a memoir called My Life in France (2006, 66). There is one sentence I particularly commend: “The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly.” Take out the word “French,” substitute it with “Laurentian community,” and we have something that scans and rings true about our different idea of a university at St. Lawrence—generous, polite, humane, and friendly—in short, happy.
What are the marks of a happy university? We need to remind ourselves that we cannot take happiness for granted in this setting. In fact, the word has a cognate that can tip in either direction between pleasantness and painfulness. One’s “hap,” as it comes down to us from Middle English is an event that comes about as the individual’s lot, fortune, or chance—good or bad. George Eliot understood this condition when she wrote, “all the haps in my life are so indifferent.” We, therefore, have to account for this idea of happiness as having a kinship with both “perhaps” or “haphazard.” So, happiness is never a certainty and its fragile nature is one we need to understand in our university.
I have a fondness, however, for a more obscure idea of happiness in the root word “hap.” In the Scots dialect, it conveys the idea of a cover, as in covering up with bedclothes or putting on a warm outer garment. I think this has immediate warrant for our situation at St. Lawrence, perhaps even a North Country adage, “keep them warm and happiness will take care of itself.”
Now, we must move forward in our effort to understand why happiness matters today and how it functions to our best effect. A happy university must offer its students “a seamless coat of learning” (cf., Whitehead) to warm the mind, protect early thoughts from the world’s cynicism, and fire up the spirit and will-to-do. We do not offer one student the collar of computation, another student the sleeve of rhetoric, while a third student grabs the coattails of history, and a fourth gets a pocket of psychology. Rather, St. Lawrence has figured out that the best way to attain happiness is to offer each one a coat, not necessarily of uniform style, but one of consistent quality that covers the whole person with an indivisible fabric of exquisite weaving and stitching.
We must not be glib or cavalier in thinking of ourselves as simply a happy camp. Instead, I hasten to point out that happiness is an extremely difficult concept to think about or express cogently. It requires the deepest philosophical study and often the most disciplined spiritual exercises to grasp, if only in a spark or gleam. The mention of happiness in time of want, war, and austerity also holds a peril of the psyche. With that as warning, how can St. Lawrence be happy and not lose its soul?
The most outward and visible sign of happiness at St. Lawrence is and must be the intellectual rigor of its community. There is nothing fated about the “kick of discovery” or the joy of findings things out, as Richard Feynman used to put it. This kind of happiness, as the best teachers will demonstrate in their given assignments and by their own scholarship, is realized when the elements of intellect connect and concentrate two ideas simultaneously—perhaps ideas as seemingly distant as physics and religion, economics and psychology, art history and geology.
These are the liberating moments in a student’s intellectual journey that we can never plan with precision, but they are the prime elements of a St. Lawrence experience. You must know more than one thing, one culture, one discipline to know the best moments of intellectual awakening.
Another mark of a happy university may be even more self-evident than the academic work at hand because it is found in the highly social nature of this place. An education in friendship, to have a friend and be a friend, is a critical factor in the success of St. Lawrence. This force of social education at St. Lawrence is a very large reality that we must take seriously because it also changes lives for the better.
It is in this intense experience with other human beings that we learn important skills about keeping a confidence, learning to negotiate, taking criticism, defending a principle, and remaining loyal. Because of this idea of a happy university, I doubt that the rise of the virtual campus will threaten, though it may well challenge, our commitment to residential life. Texting and “friending” are no surrogates for table-talk and the open office door.
A final mark of happiness at St. Lawrence will have the quality of the coat’s inner lining, not usually seen, but always closest to an individual’s sense of identity, purpose, and well-being. It is the quality of moral reasoning that exists here and has since St. Lawrence began. It’s not the first thing anyone necessarily notices, but it is a substantial presence and, if anything, ought to increase in the years to come.
There is a doctrine of the common good on this campus and a student’s sense of fairness, justice, and responsibility will be tested, sharpened, and activated at St. Lawrence. It is a habit as deeply rooted in the university’s founding as is its liberal arts heritage. To engage in moral questions and attempt to do something about them—in society, in nature, and among nations—is an unequivocal necessity of the 21st century.
A happy life cannot be divided from a moral life, for happiness, if it can truly be called that, cannot exist as something shallow and superficial. It requires a deeper engagement with the issues of life.
One of the first causes of happiness at St. Lawrence is its Universalist Church heritage, a source that has sometimes been forgotten, though its presence has always been influential and decisive. The Universalists were a people of a happy, positive, and optimistic belief. No less a sourpuss than Henry Adams said in the last chapter of his nine-volume masterpiece on Jefferson and Madison (The History of the United States Under the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison), that the Universalists brought to the American character “the increasing cheerfulness of religion.”
The Universalists, who planted this garden in the wilderness, naming it after a north flowing river, never gave up on humanity’s capacity to do better and get it right. They were among the first to say the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. They gave witness to the philosophers who said a thousand years ago that if people are happy, they will also be good.
And that is why, in the end, the idea of a happy university in the 21st century matters so much. The hard world passes near and does not pause long for us on the St. Lawrence campus, which is our great advantage to get our students ready. While we are not exempt from its problems and heartache, the world, as this day symbolizes, would be so much better if other places in it, where our students will someday go to live, were as happy as St. Lawrence is and must always be.
