Opening Convocation - August 26, 2007
President William G. Durden '71 convened the college for the 2007-08 academic year and delivered the Convocation address about the defining dimensions of a Dickinson education.
In his opening remarks, President Durden made some important announcements for the campus community:
- He called for the formation of a college pep band to play at athletic and other events.
- Reiterating the college's commitment to environmental sustainability, he listed steps that both individuals and the institution could take to conserve resources.
- He introduced an effort for students, faculty and staff to study the college's investment approach from the perspective of social responsibility.
- He announced the receipt of a gift for $2 million, the first installment from the estate of Walter E. Beach ’56.
You can read more about these announcements.
“The Defining Dimensions of a Dickinson Education”
Excerpts from the Address by President William G. Durden '71
The Core of a Dickinson Education
The core of a Dickinson liberal arts education engages you first and foremost with the “world” of the classroom. It is here that, in close interaction with your professors, you are invited to explore knowledge and develop your critical thinking skills through the study of selected texts and theories in the expansive liberal arts tradition.
Textual Immersion
During your years at Dickinson, you will have the luxury of immersing yourselves in those texts and theories that have historically defined human thought and action (by “texts”, I mean any product of human culture). You should seek knowledge of historical contingency—that is, understanding yourself in relation to others in different times and places and embrace the absolute necessity to apply “historical” thinking to understand and acquire knowledge.
To that end, I urge you while at Dickinson to study and explore the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, the myths and cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Confucian teachings, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Modernism, Postmodernism, the Scientific and Technological Revolutions, capitalism, communism and socialism. You should also seek those counter texts and theories of marginalized groups that have been largely ignored or forgotten entirely in the above litany. I challenge you to be demanding of your self, your fellow students and our faculty and to engage fully in this dynamic community of inquiry. Do not forgo this rare opportunity—these very few years to absorb unimpeded those intellectual fundamentals that will guide you for a lifetime.
Experience Beyond the Classroom
I also challenge you to use the knowledge and critical thinking skills you acquire through your academic pursuits to engage the world beyond the classroom. Engage experience. Strive to apply your intellectual acumen to your own life and your community. We will give you ample opportunity to do so through course-related internships, faculty-student research publications, poster presentations at regional and national conferences, field study, off-campus programs abroad and within the US, art exhibitions and musical performances. You will also have at your fingertips valuable non-credit experiences through community service, student government, athletics, student clubs and interest groups.
You will “engage the world” in the ultimate meaning of that phrase only when you confront and absorb conflicting intellectual material and points of view—those that extend well beyond what you already know and that often confound positions you already believe are securely yours.
Perspective
What we intend for you as a result of our time together is nothing less than what the 19th century psychologist and philosopher, William James, termed “perspective.” In the first lecture of several he devoted to the subject of pragmatism, James defines perspective as a sense of “what life honestly and deeply means.” For James, perspective is achieved from the serious study of texts—but only to a certain degree. Perspective, he wrote, “is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.” For James, one achieves perspective through experience and this is what Dickinson aims to give you.
Quest for Conceptual Understanding
I would even go further than James and suggest that perspective has yet another meaning for us at Dickinson. A Dickinson education asks us to gain perspective by going beyond facts to secure a deeper understanding of the basic concepts that organize and yield them. The quest for conceptual understanding will be the most challenging—and ultimately, the most rewarding—undertaking of your years at Dickinson.
Harvard professor, Eric Mazur, described this challenge in a recent New York Times article, with particular reference to the learning of physics. “From what I’ve seen,” he wrote, “students in science classrooms throughout the country depend on rote memorization of facts. I want to change this. The students who score high do so because they’ve learned how to regurgitate information on tests. On the whole, they haven’t understood the basic concept behind the facts, which means they can’t apply them in the laboratory. Or in life.”
These students, in Jamesian terms, have no perspective. Our goal at Dickinson is to give you every opportunity to develop perspective. One only, for example, need look at our nationally renowned Workshop Physics pedagogy to know that we approach the teaching of this subject far differently from that described by Professor Mazur.
Pace of Learning
We, of course, recognize that each of you will develop perspective at your own pace and in your own time. I was reminded of how individualized the process of intellectual progress and maturity is when I read an article in the New Yorker magazine earlier this spring about playwright, Tennessee Williams. In June of 1949, Williams wrote to his friend, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of the New York Times, about his inability to produce a new drama quickly following the immense success of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “The trouble is, “he wrote,” that you can’t make any real philosophical progress in a couple of years. The scope of understanding enlarges quite slowly, if it enlarges at all, and the scope of interest has to wait upon understanding….All artists who work from the inside out have the same problem: they cannot make sudden arbitrary changes of matter and treatment until the inner man is ripe for it.”
I immediately made the connection between the creative process of playwriting and the intellectual transformation that we intend to occur for you at Dickinson. I have great ambition for you during your years at Dickinson just as you have for yourself. The understanding that we seek for you will enable you ultimately to contribute to the world in a self-conscious manner. That is, you will know more often than not precisely why you do what you do and say what you say—a substantial achievement for any human being and a most worthy ambition for a liberal education.
But Mr. Williams’ sage comments made me realize that each of you will achieve this ambition at different points of time and in your own distinctive way. A delicate tension between expectancy and patience will define your interaction with faculty, Student Life staff and administrators over these next several years as you absorb and react in various ways to our persistence to advance you along the path to perspective and understanding.
For some of you, the achievement of perspective will, indeed, occur during your years as an undergraduate student. For others, it will occur after you leave these limestone walls. Again, to quote Tennessee Williams, you must sometimes “wait” for that “understanding” to “enlarge” by knowledge and experience and evoke those “interests” that lead to engagement. You must wait longer, in the words of William James, for “perspective.”
The Five Dickinson Dimensions
Our ultimate intent during your years here is to give you the foundation for a distinctive type of liberal learning and a distinctive outcome—a globally engaged and useful life informed by perspective. I have already identified two elements of this foundation: the pursuit of knowledge and skill through your interaction with text and theory, and the experience you will acquire by applying and contextualizing these in the wider world. However, through seamless and continual participation in the community of inquiry that exists on our campus—both in and out of the classroom—you will develop a third essential element of your intellectual foundation: the five Dickinson dispositions, or as I prefer to think of them, the Dickinson dimensions.
As you embrace the liberal arts in a tradition that is distinctive to Dickinson, you will develop a set of habits of mind and corresponding actions that will forever distinguish you as a Dickinsonian. These dimensions are embedded in our revolutionary history and they are the characteristics that will allow you, ultimately, to achieve both understanding and perspective.
- Global Sensibility
What are these five dimensions? I believe you have already heard a bit about them. First of all, as a Dickinsonian, you will develop a global sensibility, far deeper and more extensive than that offered at other colleges and universities. Through your coursework and your experience, you will gain a profound awareness of other languages and cultures and appreciate acutely both the similarities and the marked differences among them. Regardless of your major, you will learn that you must pursue your intellectual interests fully cognizant of their global context. You will become comfortable and confident associating in unfamiliar environments and know that within the multidimensional world of the 21st century, you will only succeed by building bridges of contact and communication. You will be able to affirm that which you find admirable in other cultures and, as importantly, you will be able to discriminate on the basis of knowledge, experience and conversation (optimally, through direct contact) what you judge culturally, even morally, unacceptable. A Dickinson global sensitivity will provide you—in stark contrast to most people—the capacity to assert a personal point of view that rejects the notion that all difference is good simply because it is different (cultural relativism) and requires that difference be subjected to a more demanding test of worthiness by answering to questions of justice, social welfare, nobility of thought and even pragmatism.
- Engage the World
As a Dickinsonian, you will also learn to “engage the world” in the fullest sense of the term. You will seize learning opportunities in the classroom and through travel, internships and volunteer activity. You will recognize the importance of imparting and absorbing knowledge and skill constructively in various settings. You will move beyond your sphere of comfort to embrace with intellectual risk that which is different or uncomfortable and thereby enhance self-knowledge and perspective.
- Connections
Through your Dickinson education, you will also seek meaningful connections among people, ideas and disciplines. Where others will only see disparate dots, you will immediately see the value and power in connecting those dots. You will lean into the intersections of seemingly inconsonant combinations of ideas. And you will recognize that it is from these interdisciplinary crossroads that new knowledge will spring, spawning the discoveries, breakthroughs and creative conceptual paradigms that will shape our future.
- Civility
As a Dickinsonian, you will always respect and exercise civility in your discourse and your actions. By so doing, you will also assume a responsibility to speak out on issues of importance to you and society and recognize that you must arrive at your position through informed and reasoned conversation—not mere talk. As a result, you will stand firm in your convictions, finding the courage to be tenacious in the face of adversity and, at the same time, employ empathy and a sense of humor to establish substantive communication.
- Accountability
Finally, as a Dickinsonian, you will strive for accountability. You will understand that your actions never occur in isolation, but always have an impact on those around you. You will learn it is only in community that a secure sense of self emerges that will yield ultimately perspective and understanding.
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