Thank you, Imam, for your inspiring words.
Good morning to you all.
As we capture the excitement this morning for where we have been and where we are headed, I would like to pause for a moment to reflect on a recent, sad loss for CMC and the world beyond.
On August 25, Tom Neff, CMC class of 1976, and member of our Board of Trustees, unexpectedly passed away. Tom and his wife Donna, who serves on the Scripps board, are the parents of Elena (CMC Class of 2021) and Maddy (Scripps Class of 2021).
Tom provided invaluable leadership on our Board, informing and supporting our commitment to integrated sciences, public safety, Title IX, and many other initiatives. As the CEO and Founder of Fibrogen, he dedicated his professional career to finding cures for some of our most deadly and mystifying diseases.
As a major in both government and biology and a star of the water polo team, Tom cultivated his broadly and deeply integrated intelligence and tireless work ethic at CMC, pushed imagined limits, took on ostensibly impossible challenges, and succeeded.
CMC shaped him, and his leadership and legacy will shape us for many decades.
Let us take a moment of silence to remember Tom and send our love and prayers to Tom’s family from a community that meant so much to him as he does to us.
Thank you all and welcome to our convocation for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Before we begin to enter another powerful cycle of productive experience, responsive reflection, and higher, broader, deeper learning here at the College, we call ourselves together.
Our deans honor special milestones and recognize those whose contributions have earned significant awards.
We hear from Professor Gastón Espinosa on the cultivation of intellectual life and President Dina Rosin on student leadership.
We sing our college song about civilization and how it prospers through commerce (exchange of value, ideas, values).
And we look both back and forward: both for inspiration and for direction.
Historians know that we often see the past in terms of the future we want to create.
And we see the future in ways bound by how we remember the past.
For physicists, the lines we draw to divide time are even more arbitrary. Einstein observed: “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
So we are guided simultaneously by both our origins and our destinations, and the CMC Strategy gives us the compass to navigate the journey ahead.
We tack three ways to sail in a single direction.
And before setting off, we look both out at the horizon and inward to the power of our vessel.
- Our vision for the liberal arts and responsible leadership;
- The commitment, increasingly necessary to realize our founding vision, to strengthen and integrate the sciences and computation; and
- The expansion of student opportunity to meet the needs of an increasingly complex, competitive world.
Each rooted in our past; each inspiring our future.
Each responsive to challenges in the world around us; each amplifying the singular strengths of what we do best.
First, we look out at a world that beckons for responsible leadership.
Responsible leadership that can bring us together, when we are falling further apart. When the national discourse is plagued with ad hominem attacks, conclusory arguments, and intentional dishonesty, we all need responsible leadership based on integrity and principle, reason and evidence.
Leadership that is open to free expression when it is most disagreeable, that engages in debate with respect, that commits to open inquiry to get at a deeper, shared understanding and masters effective dialogue to resolve conflict in creative ways.
Leadership informed by foundational fluencies for a flourishing civilization and numeracies for more sophisticated empirical understanding, the core qualities of good character, and the highest human capabilities for discerning truth, solving problems, creating value, inculcating values.
“There is no incompatibility,” our founders reasoned, between an education “for specific types of leadership” and “an education to develop a liberally informed mind. In fact, real leadership presupposes the latter, and, in turn, a liberally informed mind can find no more satisfying vocation than in such leadership.”
Our founders would be proud today of the many ways in which we are animating the original idea of the College: “a rationally balanced education to meet the political, economic, social, and cultural needs” of this generation to prepare “for tomorrow’s world of affairs.”
Our powerful liberal arts curriculum and its commitment to open, multidisciplinary inquiry in the search for truth; the problem-solving research opportunities from our institutes, centers, and labs; the exposure to diverse viewpoints in our Athenaeum, nearly every weeknight of the academic year; the teamwork learned from our student enterprises, organizations, and accomplished athletics program; the skills in debate, diplomacy, and dialogue our students learn from our forensics, Model UN, the CARE Center, and Open Academy programs — each and all together put our Original Idea to the test of our national and global educational imperatives, the greater needs for responsible leadership in our communities, in our democracy, in our economy, in the world beyond.
So our first priority this year is to celebrate, reinforce, practice, and continue to perfect this founding mission.
Second, we look out at a world that is shaped at an accelerated pace by science, computation, and the applications of new technology. The exponential growth of technology is outpacing the technical, ethical, economic, and policy intelligence of our civilization.
From the first decade of the College, President Benson envisioned, but never succeeded in developing, a central and independent role for science education at CMC.
The natural and physical sciences, mathematics, and related fields have always been firmly incorporated within our core liberal arts program; however, like the rest of the country, we have not kept pace with the demands of our time for a sufficiently resourced multi-disciplinary, computational, liberal arts, research focused education in integrated science and computation.
We seek not only to catch up to our greatest challenge, but here to seize the opportunity to jump ahead: to build a highly collaborative program that has not been developed before, one that will strengthen all of our departments, one that will shape the further development of our campus.
As the faculty envisioned last year, this means one department that can take advantage of scientific inquiry across disciplines.
A focus on computation within science, and in adjacency to it and other disciplines.
Strong bridges to and from the social sciences and humanities.
The vital role of research at basic and advanced levels of scientific inquiry.
In sum, we seek to create the next generation liberal arts program in integrated sciences and computation, in ways that can educate our emerging scholar-leaders to reach a better understanding of the complex world we live in, shape responsive solutions, design new financial models, develop stronger policy, ensure ethical decision-making, and persuade through compelling rhetoric and story-telling.
So our second priority this year is to fine-tune and develop sufficient resources to realize this exciting vision.
Third, we look out and see a world with significant financial barriers to the full opportunity for our people to thrive and succeed and contribute to those around them.
Nationally, we are struggling to address large gaps in educational attainment, mounting student debt, and poor performance within our most selective institutions on measures of social mobility.
We have yet to realize what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the promissory note on our constitutional commitment to equal opportunity.
In 1946, our College was founded with a commitment to give our students the financial support and intellectual and social tools they needed to pursue their dreams.
According to Kevin Starr1, our very first students, nearly all veterans returning from war in 1946, were not waiting in line to start a college, although the college could not be founded without them.
They were waiting in line to redeem dreams nurtured in the Quonset huts in the South Pacific...
dreams of getting an education ...
of becoming someone, something, somebody ...
The GI Bill provided financial support for a generation of veterans, and CMC’s young ambitious program provided them an opportunity to grapple with the big questions of our civilization; build a future for themselves, their families, and the country; and prepare themselves to be someone, something, somebody.
And that’s precisely what we are doing today through the Student Imperative, the Kravis Opportunity Fund, the Soll Center for Student Opportunity, and our entire academic, residential program to expand student opportunities for every emerging scholar-leader in our CMC community.
Thus, our third priority this year is to build on that legacy and our recent achievements to help our students remove the barriers in their way to strive and thrive, to expand the opportunity to become “someone, something, somebody.”
So this morning:
We look out at the world and ask what it needs from us.
We look back to our founding vision and mission for the answers.
We look within to see the strength and self-confidence to encourage our ambition.
We look to each other to forge our future path, to:
- Perfect the liberal arts education that is rationally balanced to prepare our students for their future world of affairs, and cultivate the responsible leadership we all need from this generation;
- Prepare our students to understand and shape the future applications of technology in our world, by strengthening and fully integrating the sciences, computation, the social sciences, and the humanities; and
- Expand opportunity for all to take on the challenges and seize the opportunities of our time.
For this moment, joining here together in these three core commitments, in common purpose, many thanks to each of you, very best in your vital pursuits, and congratulations to you all on the launch of another successful academic year.
1Commerce and Civilization, Claremont McKenna College, The First Fifty Years, 2 (1998)