2024 Convocation
President Hiram E. Chodosh
Monday, August 26, 2024
Thank you, Nick, for that moving, exemplary address.
Welcome to you all.
Thank you for being with us today to start an exciting, new academic year.
I can’t possibly substitute for the brilliant presentations today, but I want to put an exclamation point on the themes.
love, basecamp, ask
love
Congratulations to our Class of 2028 and new transfer students.
Priya, Theo especially, and I are excited to have you all back on campus.
I hope you had a great Move-In and first week in your dorms, in Collins, on Parents Field, and at WOA. We can’t wait to see your contributions to all we do.
A special thank you to all of our speakers for a wonderful program this morning.
Imam Hadi for your beautiful invocation.
Heather, Ellen, Drew for the power of your minds and voices and the tremendous leadership of our faculty, including our outstanding new faculty here with us today. So excited to have you join us.
Ava for setting a powerful example for every student-leader on this campus.
Nick for bringing us together in convocation with love and wisdom in the stories that guide us.
That love, that care for one another, that mutual respect and trust, that love of language all move us
to disprove the impossible, to prove the possible.
That love is core to everything we do. It’s foundational. Without it, we fail. With it, we thrive.
basecamp
Look around today, as we begin the new semester.
The leading role we earned, and now cherish, never take for granted, build on each and every day, to learn and lead, to grow and succeed.
With love at the core of all we do, I believe that the success of our College is rooted in its original idea and its focus on preparation for our future world of affairs. Especially when that future is already here. We frame and take on big challenges, identify the steep mountains we each and all need to climb.
Then, once we have sized up the rock face, we build a basecamp of human, social, intellectual, and financial capital at the bottom to support our ascent.
This basecamp does not guarantee our success, but it provides the foundation for our self-guided, shared journey.
We climb to empower our success.
To prepare this generation for thoughtful, productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions.
To contribute our intellectual vitality to the understanding of public policy.
Since our founding and now, we recognize the moment of profound consequence:
A high-stakes Presidential election in a polarized society.
Depleted trust in civic and public institutions.
A planet that is heating up and increasingly on fire.
The powerful advent and unknown influence of artificial intelligence.
High costs of living, including housing and health care.
Protracted disease and pandemics.
Higher education on its heels:
Increasingly politicized and fractured.
Struggling to make significant strides on social mobility.
Distracted from its primary purpose of higher learning.
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At the bottom of these framed challenges, we build our CMC basecamp.
We dedicate ourselves to take on these challenges.
Responsible leadership (KLI, Kravis Lab, Rose, Lowe, Policy Lab) in a world that desperately needs more of it.
The vitality of our liberal arts (humanities for our humanity) in a world that wants to crush it.
An Open Academy for a world that seems to want to close it.
Advanced research on the issues of our time (institutes, centers, labs, thesis) in a world of pulse journalism, increasingly political and commercial interference, and unaccountable social media.
Integrated disciplines of science, computation, policy, economics, ethics in a world that persistently siloes them—through the new Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences, to surmount the grand challenges of human health, brain, and planet.
Massive support for expanding student opportunity and accelerating social mobility (through the Soll Center, CARE, the Kravis Opportunity Fund) in a world that tends to foreclose it.
A fierce commitment to community, purpose, and play (WOA, FYGS, RAs, Romero Success Coaches, self-authorship, top 10 CMS Athletics, innertube water polo).
Through obdurate forces of division, a national pandemic of loneliness, an economy of hyper-credentialism, and the excessive commercialization of youth sports.
We build basecamp. We ascend. We reach new plateaus. We plan for the next one. This year, too, and beyond.
ask
One of the many steep mountains, the big challenges we face today—in our intellectual and social culture, in education itself—is that we put too much a primacy on the appearance of having the answers and the pretense that we have it all figured out.
Conclusory headlines for clickbait. The bubbles on our multiple-choice tests. The false confidence of sketchy projections. The silencing effect from the loudest voices. The confused educational goals of telling people what to think instead of encouraging improvements in how we think.
That’s our mountain, too.
And in building basecamp to surmount this challenge, we must never forget our core assets and strengths.
Our deep student-centered pedagogy. Our care for one another’s learning. Our humanity. Our intellectual humility. Our social warmth.
In this climb, there is one simple action. One verb. One mechanism that triggers our connection to one another and our curiosity, as the engine of our higher learning.
ASK
We ask. We pose questions.
Out of kindness and concern for others.
Out of our critical commitments.
Out of humility for what we don’t know or understand.
Out of our drive to improve ourselves or contribute to the lives of others.
Out of our sense of responsibility.
Out of our motivation to succeed and to lead.
The good question is one of our most powerful tools, whether in the construction of basecamp or in the climb itself.
Each year at orientation, I repeat the story of Izzy Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics in 1944.
He was asked about the big influences in his life, and he spoke of his parents.
Izzy explained that when he got home from school every day, his parents asked him a simple question.
Not about his grades or his accolades, or even what he learned that day. They simply asked: “Izzy, did you ask a good question today.”
The first ideograph in the Chinese word for question, wen-ti, is a picture of a mouth framed by two doors. My Chinese professor taught me that this means: when we open our mouths and ask a question, we open the doors in our way.
We learn through questions.
We navigate by asking for direction.
We connect and check in with one another.
We seek help.
We challenge our assumptions and avoid making false ones.
We stay open.
We combat ignorance.
We challenge ourselves.
We find our inner purpose.
We seek novel interpretations.
We frame the null hypothesis.
We interrogate the data.
We search for a theory of change.
We innovate.
We ask each other about the stories that mean the most to us.
We find non-obvious paths to our goals.
We solve sticky problems and strive to understand more about the wicked ones.
All through questions.
Questions alone can’t possibly surmount each challenge or seize every opportunity, but we can’t learn, we can’t lead responsibly, we can’t capture an elusive solution without them.
So this year, from the big steps to the small ones, from on campus to off, from within the classroom, to everything we do to apply our learning to the lives we lead, let’s reinforce our commitment to ask.
In the next step forward for the Open Academy.
In the launch of our Integrated Sciences curriculum and the opening of our Robert Day Sciences Center.
In the continuous expansion of student opportunity.
In our civic leadership commitments.
In the reinforcement of trust and respect in our community, our shared purpose, our sense of pure fun.
Let’s ask.
Ask ourselves what we don’t know—what we need to know.
Ask one another for support—and give others the support they need.
Ask questions in search for our purpose—to learn, to grasp, to reach our goals, to share the joy of joining in that process together.
Good questions. Questions that elicit honest, insightful, thoughtful, productive answers.
That is what we do best in the liberal arts. This is what we do best at CMC.
Many thanks to you all for sharing in that commitment, for all that you contribute to us.
Many congratulations on the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.
Thank you all for coming.
Cheers to you all.