President's Letter, November 2004

Dear Fellow Members of the Lewis & Clark College Community,

Greetings from Palatine Hill.

Since our arrival in Portland last August, my wife Marcia and I have enjoyed enormously the opportunity to meet many of you and to express our pleasure at being called to Lewis & Clark. This letter has a twofold purpose: first, to reaffirm my conviction that this is a wonderful college with a truly great future ahead of it; and second, to invite each of you to celebrate both the present and the future of the College at my inauguration as president this spring. That event will be held Sunday, March 6, at 11 a.m., the day after our 40th annual International Fair and on the same weekend as the College of Arts and Sciences Family Weekend.

From the moment I set foot on this beautiful campus, I have been struck by the energy that drives this community. I have met with students of widely differing opinions and interests—undergraduate, graduate, and law—and I have been uniformly impressed by their intellectual engagement, their enthusiasm, their idealism, and also by their thoughtfulness and depth. They come with high expectations, and I have full confidence that Lewis & Clark can meet, indeed exceed, those expectations. I have met with faculty and staff from each of the three schools and I have been reminded of the keen critical edge that marks every fine academic community and also, happily, of the way it is tempered at Lewis & Clark by love of teaching, loyalty to colleagues and passionate concern for our world.

The excellence of the programs at Lewis & Clark, both academic and nonacademic, is cause for great pride. The faculty in our schools are producing research and scholarship comparable to those at first-rate research universities, and the growing level of sponsored research funding at Lewis & Clark confirms this opinion. The great advantage we have at Lewis & Clark over these other institutions, of course, is that our faculty are at the same time superb and dedicated teachers. For us, research is one important element within a larger educational purpose, not an end in itself. It is a thrilling environment to work in, and every signal points to great things ahead for the College.

Learning at Lewis & Clark takes place within a context of activities that are broad and deep. Students at each of our schools contribute to the wider community through service in local schools, legal clinics, and organizations like Start Making a Reader Today and Habitat for Humanity. We recently hosted our seventh annual Symposium on Environmental Affairs, dedicated this year to the memory of the person who founded the symposium, Professor Evan Williams. In a related area, the Natural Resources Law Institute, now in its 17th year, heard a keynote address from Professor Nicholas A. Robinson, the Gilbert and Sarah Kerlin Distinguished Professor in Environmental Law at Pace University School of Law. And the Graduate School of Education recently launched its Oregon Center for Inquiry and Social Innovation with a series of Middle East/South Asian Conversations designed to build paths of understanding between cultures. All of these are expressions of our commitment to make learning and scholarship of relevance to our world. We are blessed nearly every day with stimulating talks by visiting lecturers; with musical, theatrical, and dance performances of exceptional quality; and with artistic exhibits and shows that are among Portland’s best.

This is an invigorating environment in which to work and study, and I hope you share my enthusiasm. I welcome your thoughts about the state of the College or about areas you think we should address, and I look forward to learning from you about the Lewis & Clark that you know. I encourage you to visit our Web site regularly to keep abreast of College news and events, and please feel free to e-mail me (pres@lclark.edu) at any time.

This is a moment of great opportunity for Lewis & Clark. We should determine to seize it and to transform our College into one of the most exciting centers of learning in the world today.

With all best wishes,

Thomas J. Hochstettler

President