Finding Community Among Differences
President Hiram Chodosh, in his speech at Opening Convocation on Aug. 30, underlined interdisciplinary solutions for complex problems and strong community inclusion for working through disagreements. Here is an edited version of his remarks:
Convocation calls us together to inspire our individual and collective responsibility to the mission of deeper study leading to greater action, and the liberal arts for thoughtful, productive lives and responsible leadership in the world.
We celebrate our staff and faculty through their impressive milestones of service and impact. We pause to reflect, remember why we are all here, what drives us, what we can and must learn from one another.
Even with all of the excitement of a new academic cycle, we face a series of steep challenges in the world, from the Middle East to our own streets, from our dry lands to our rising oceans, from our hospitals to our schools. And we look hard for ways to cut through our divisions. We try to seize the opportunities and reduce the harms of major forces.
We can only alleviate tough conditions and draw inspired solutions when we combine the power of thought and action, when we embark on a virtuous cycle of learning and doing. And we can succeed only if we do that together.
Study alone won’t solve these complex problems, and uninformed, isolated action often makes our problems worse.
So how do we do it?
We ask big and penetrating and disruptive questions.
We then put our learning into practice. We watch it collide with the real world, only to adapt new approaches from our trials and tribulations. We learn through experience.
We cross disciplines and borrow and adapt ideas.
We draw on this moment of convocation to call ourselves together in this shared purpose: to develop the learning capabilities the world needs from us.
That’s the purpose of our great faculty and their dynamic classes. That’s the purpose of our Athenaeum. That’s why we support research institutes and their engaged thought leadership in so many fields.
Our students live this example. Recent graduates who apply study in abstract math to economics, and put it to work on our leading equity trading floors;
who take their training in politics, economics, and philosophy to develop clean water sources in East Africa;
who combine their study of chemistry and management to consult for the world’s leading tech and biotech companies;
who take their course work in literature and history and government and world
We cross disciplines and borrow and adapt ideas.
We draw on this moment of convocation to call ourselves together in this shared purpose: to develop the learning capabilities the world needs from us.
That’s the purpose of our great faculty and their dynamic classes. That’s the purpose of our Athenaeum. That’s why we support research institutes and their engaged thought leadership in so many fields.
Our students live this example. Recent graduates who apply study in abstract math to economics, and put it to work on our leading equity trading floors;
who take their training in politics, economics, and philosophy to develop clean water sources in East Africa;
who combine their study of chemistry and management to consult for the world’s leading tech and biotech companies;
who take their course work in literature and history and government and world languages and international relations and make path-breaking films, advise governments, start new companies, run for office, serve their communities, love their families, lead a good life.
That’s what our college is about. That’s what CMC is for.
None of us alone—no student, professor, or institute; no one president or dean— can do this in isolation.
Our shared purpose is not a call for some kind of monolith, forced consensus, or dominant political position.
Instead, it is a call for mutual respect for, and support through, respect for our disagreements, a challenge of our assumptions, a call for humility in what we think we know, the openness to be wrong, a commitment to persuade with facts and reason, and grace.
Principles without sacrifice render words empty of meaning.
If we are to learn, we have to recognize what we don’t know. If we are to develop confidence, we must take risks. We must question ourselves.
If we are to cherish free speech, we must support and hear the speech with which we most disagree. Free expression without listening is of little use.
If we are to have an inclusive community, we must learn from those we have not yet met or don’t really know. We need to work and play and learn together to break down those walls.
If we are to challenge one another, we need to support each other as well, as teammates, as colleagues, as friends, as an extended CMC family.
This is hard work. At times, we may disappoint ourselves and one another. We can learn from that, too. If we are both patient and persistent in our practice, more often, we will succeed. And succeeding together is fun, fulfilling, inspiring. Our shared experience brings us even closer together.
And so as we convoke, we reaffirm these commitments to our College, to one another, to ourselves, to those we care about, to the broader society. And we honor members of our community who have served this mission: the faculty, staff, students, alumni, families, and friends who challenge and support us.
Making History
Diana Selig, Kingsley Croul Associate Professor of History and George R. Roberts Fellow, gave this year’s convocation address in Roberts Pavilion earlier this year. She invoked the legacy of suffragettes by way of encouraging this year’s incoming freshmen to search far and wide for inspiration and dedication in order to make history today; excerpts from her speech are below.
My task today is to offer some words of wisdom to new students as you embark on your college careers. This is no easy charge, especially given the state of the world today. News reports have been filled with stories of deadly violence and of conflict and tragedy, of divisiveness and extremism at home and abroad.
Luckily for me, we historians can look to the past for inspiration and ideas.
Let me take you back to that time when the class of 1920 came of age. That, too, was a period of global disruption.
But 1920 also brought the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. American women finally won the right to vote. The movement for the vote had lasted for over 70 years, since the first public proclamation in the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. The suffragettes finally persuaded Congress to approve the women’s suffrage amendment by a close vote in 1919. And by August of 1920, three-quarters of the states ratified the new amendment, again by a close vote, in time for the election in November.
Even with the passage of the 19th Amendment, the expansion of democracy was still incomplete: immigrants from Asia, along with many Native Americans, had no chance to cast a ballot until after World War II.
African-Americans in the South remained largely disfranchised until the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and young Americans of both sexes only gained the vote in 1971.
Despite these limitations, the 19th Amendment affirmed that women, like men, were autonomous political beings who deserved all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
But former suffragists were activists who had spent the first part of their adult lives educating for suffrage and the second half advocating for further reforms. They did not see suffrage as their final goal.
First, they wanted young people to know their history. They worried that young people would forget the struggles and the sacrifices of those who had come before. Susan B. Anthony, one of the great leaders of the suffrage movement, recognized just how quickly gains could be taken for granted.
In 1894, still 26 years before the passage of the 19th Amendment, she wrote, “When we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so. ... They have no idea how every single inch of ground … has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”
In response, former suffragists designed school programs and wrote curricula and textbooks that depicted women, along with men, as makers of history.
To you today, I would offer similar encouragement. Learn history. History reminds us of the humanity of the people of the past who thought and acted in ways perhaps unfamiliar to us.
Encountering their perspectives requires imagination and empathy. In the process, we gain compassion for people today who hold views and who live lives very different from our own, and so we gain compassion for ourselves.
The second hope of former suffragists was for young people to seek an education that would grant them the learning and the skills [needed] for active and engaged citizenship.
A liberal arts education can help you to understand the world and your place in it more clearly. Each of the academic disciplines that we teach at the college can inform and enlighten you, can help you to become a reflective human being.
The third goal of the former suffragists was for young people to stay active in the world. Former suffragists organized to abolish the poll tax, to allow citizenship for immigrants, to support suffrage movements around the world. Over the course of decades, activists continued to fight for women’s advancement.
I echo this call. Much work remains to be done. Activists today strive for LGBTQ civil rights, a topic that was not on the reform agenda a century ago. We are today far more attentive to a broader range of religious and cultural backgrounds.
At CMC, we welcome first-generation students and international students. We value differences of sexual orientation and political perspectives, physical ability and gender expression. The specifics may have changed from those of the suffragists’ day, but the broader goals of inclusion and respect endure.
This inclusion and respect is not a luxury. It is essential.
As Susan B. Anthony said, “The ground we stand upon today was gained by the actions of real people in the past.” This leads us to a simple but powerful insight: We make history. We have the power and the responsibility to move toward the realization of our ideals. This is what the former suffragists hoped for a hundred years ago.