Opening Convocation, August 26, 2004

Members of the Board of Trustees; members of the faculty, current and emeriti; members of the Class of 2008; parents of our incoming first-year class; returning students; alumni; staff; and other valued members of the Lewis & Clark College community:

Greetings and welcome to the opening of the 137th academic year of Lewis & Clark College. Please let me introduce to you, after the fact, the Rev. Mark Duntley, who is the Dean of the Chapel here at the college and who has led us today in our invocation. Mark leads a lively and varied program with regard to the moral, ethical, and spiritual life of the college out of the Agnes Flanagan Chapel across the way, and I encourage you new students to make yourselves known to him and his staff. It will reward your effort richly if you do.

My name is Tom Hochstettler, and I have the honor to serve as the president of Lewis & Clark College. In fact, I am the brand spanking new president of this institution—I have been in office now all of ten days. It gives me particular pleasure today to welcome you, our first-year class, to this festive occasion, because in welcoming you, I can at last begin to move out of the category of one who is constantly being himself welcomed to Lewis & Clark and into the more congenial role where I myself am doing the welcoming. I am indeed most pleased that we are gathered here today to open the new school year.

In choosing to come to Lewis & Clark College and to eschew other, highly selective and distinguished institutions, you the Class of 2008 have taken a step that is, I think it is safe to say, the single most important decision in determining your life’s direction that you have until this point ever made. I along with you spent a great deal of time last winter and spring contemplating whether or not to come to Lewis & Clark. That is something that we have in common. Together with you, I examined the view book, the catalog, the web page, and the other glossy, seductive literature of Lewis & Clark. Together with you I sifted through the polished words and weighed the carefully cadenced arguments about why Lewis & Clark stands head and shoulders above its peers in terms of the quality, breadth, and depth of its programs. As were you, I was impressed, and I also had the opportunity to come for a visit to see the place for myself. As did you, I received an “acceptance” letter, and together with you, I have looked forward all summer in high anticipation to the day when I could at last take up my work here. And finally, the same as you, I am required to live in college housing.

But let’s be honest with ourselves. There are dozens of colleges and universities in this country that offer, on the face of it, programs similar to those to be found at Lewis & Clark. There are many colleges and universities that are programmatically quite similar to us when measured against such metrics as class size, student-faculty ratio, average SAT or ACT scores, and so on. I have pondered, as I am sure you have too, trying to determine what exactly it is that makes Lewis & Clark a truly special, a unique institution of higher learning. And in the final analysis, I have found the answer. It’s the people.

In my short but intense two weeks as the leader of this college, I have been simply awestruck by the degree of commitment that I have found in every corner, at every level of this institution to our main purpose in being, namely, the education of young people. More than that, however, I have discovered in the people here, my new colleagues, a deep and abiding sense of responsibility with regard to the students who resort to Lewis & Clark for their education, with regard to the colleagues with whom they work, to their environment, and to society at large.

As someone who has some experience in international education and affairs, I for one am convinced that the world needs places like Lewis & Clark today as much as at any time in recent history. Some fifteen years ago, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, most of us believed that the dangers of international destruction posed by the nuclear arsenals within the Free World and in the old Soviet Union had been eliminated. The hands on the doomsday clock were turned back, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. The attack on the World Trade Center in New York City in September, 2001, however, disabused us of any false sense of security, and once again and just as intensely as at any time during the Cold War, we were reminded that the world is not a safe place. What we also have learned is that the world is an extraordinarily complex place with tremendous diversity in how people live, in what they believe, and, for better or worse, in what they are prepared to die for.

It is just such a world that desperately needs exactly the cardinal qualities of a place such as Lewis & Clark, namely a commitment to reason tempered with humanity. We live today in a polarized world, where men and women feel forced increasingly to take extreme positions in response to threats, both real and imagined, to their fundamental beliefs and way of life. We see this phenomenon in the escalating confrontation between the great world religions and in the mounting antagonisms among nations who otherwise share a common heritage of freedom and a commitment to democracy. In our own country, we see it in the rancor of our political contests. It is precisely in such a world that reasonable people must intervene, not by relinquishing or compromising their beliefs in the interests of simply keeping the peace, but rather by bringing high intelligence and informed thinking to bear in ensuring that sound solutions based on mutual respect and understanding can be realized. Lewis & Clark is a place that fosters in its students the qualities of reasonableness and humanity that this troubled world needs.

In closing, let me promise you our new students that we who teach you will never seek to impose our beliefs and convictions on you. We will, however, insist that you be honest with yourselves and that you question your most cherished assumptions and test your convictions about the way the world works. In this way, we can best equip you to confront the task of living your life in the complex world that awaits you at the end of your four years here. Through the crucible of Lewis & Clark College, you will be superbly well prepared to assume the leadership role that we expect of our graduates, in whatever walk of life you may choose to follow. I am persuaded that you, the Class of 2008, along with me, have chosen to come to work, play, and grow at one of the most exciting places on earth. I am so pleased to have you here. Welcome to our new home.