Inaugural Address, March 6, 2005

“The Imperative to Explore”

Members of the Board of Trustees of Lewis & Clark College, distinguished delegates, faculty and students, alumni, colleagues, parents, and friends. I am honored and humbled to stand before you today as the no longer so terribly new president of Lewis & Clark. In fact, our festivities today take place some seven months after I assumed my duties. I trust you will take comfort in knowing there is no correlation between the span of time from then to now and the length of my remarks today.

I owe much to many individuals, too many for me to single out each one, but I do want to express my gratitude to the Board of Trustees of the College and particularly to Chair John Bates, who over the last year has become a mentor, a friend, and an inspiration as together we face the challenges of leading this College forward. I want also to express my thanks and that of Lewis & Clark College to one of Oregon’s truly great citizens, Paul Bragdon. Paul, your speaking here today is only the most recent of your countless acts of generosity on behalf of the College, and we are all very much in your debt. I also want to thank the faculty, staff and students who have accepted me into your midst and made me feel in no way the newcomer through these months of getting to know each other. Thank you also to my sisters and my brother who have come many miles to be with me today. And finally, I am most grateful to Marcia and our sons Ben, Taylor, and Will, who have borne with me as I have followed the peripatetic star of my career. To you I can only say that we are at home at last; our Wanderjahre are now behind us. And to all of you who have chosen to be here today, I extend my heartfelt thanks.

We are here today for many reasons, some personal, some collegial, all meaningful. We are here not only to mark what is a milestone in my life and in that of my family, but also to celebrate as a community this college and the future that we will build together. Our coming together on this occasion offers an opportunity to examine our world with regard to the challenges that agitate our thinking about higher education today. In particular, I would suggest those challenges are associated with three momentous developments of our age: the technology revolution that we are living through; the increasing competition internationally for ideas and students; and the extraordinary increase since the middle of the last century in the cost of educating a student in the world today.

I will return in a moment to these themes and why we must give them due attention as we move toward our desired future. But before I do, let me assert that we are here today, not least and not incidentally, because in the fourteenth century a gentleman from Tuscany walked up a mountain in southern France and came down to share with us—to teach us—what he saw, what he felt – what he learned—along the way. We know that ancient climber as Francesco Petrarch. On his walk that day, he was not merely “taking the air”—he was taking in an abundance of new experiences and at the same time inventing for himself a new way of engaging the world. In doing that, he was, in today’s vocabulary, modeling what we as the Lewis & Clark College community of scholars and seekers do each and every day: set forth on a journey that leads to informed participation in public life and, surely, to personal growth.

All of which makes Petrarch a person worth knowing.

Francesco Petrarch was born exactly seven hundred years ago in the Italian town of Arezzo in the Tuscan hills, south of Florence. Petrarch’s family, like that of Dante, had been exiled from Florence during the political troubles of that era. Young Francesco, finding himself in reduced circumstances, was forced to use his wits to earn his living—a state of affairs not entirely unfamiliar to many of us here today. And yet by the time of his death, Petrarch, through his writings and letters, had done as much as any other thinker in Renaissance Italy to establish the tradition of liberal learning of which we today are the distant heirs.

On April 26, 1336, Petrarch, aged 31, still in exile and living at Avignon in southern France, determined to undertake an adventure. His adventure has ever since been considered a turning point in Western civilization and to that extent a milestone in human history generally. On that day, Francesco Petrarch determined to climb a mountain. In that one act, he affirmed and established within the modern Western intellectual tradition the imperative to explore. The mountain that Petrarch climbed that day was Mont Ventoux, the Windy Mountain not far from Avignon, now one of the more challenging legs of the Tour de France. Francesco’s brother Gerhardo accompanied him on the climb. When they returned that evening, the single-minded Gerhardo went off to dinner while the reflective Francesco sat down and wrote a letter to a friend living in Italy, sharing why he climbed Mont Ventoux and what he experienced.

Petrarch climbed because he wanted to see what the world looked like from the mountaintop. And what a spectacular view rewarded his efforts! To the south and east, he saw the distant Alps. To the north, the plains and hills surrounding the city of Lyon. Off to the south, the shore of the Mediterranean lapping the coast at Marseilles. And down in the valley to the east, the River Rhône flowing southward to the sea. Petrarch’s ascent is noteworthy because he was the first person since antiquity known to climb a mountain just to see the view from the top. But his feat is extraordinary because he saw fit to record in some detail exactly what he experienced—yes, what he learned—during the course of that one day’s climb.

Petrarch’s legacy of discovery stretches across the centuries right down to our own day. But let us leave him for the moment on his mountain, with the assurance that we will return to glean the lessons of that spring excursion in 1336. Let us reflect today on the act of exploration as an animating principle of our lives and more especially of our mode of education. And let us examine some features of the terrain that colleges and universities must traverse today as they seek to fulfill their role in preparing students for useful and rewarding lives of discovery.

On this campus especially, we cannot speak of exploration without speaking of the two leaders of the great expedition that two hundred years ago brought Euro-Americans for the first time over the plains and across the mountains, through the great gorge of the Columbia River to the shores of the Pacific: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In their urge to discover what could be seen from the crest of the next mountain and in their practice of recording what they saw along the way, Lewis and Clark were the spiritual heirs of Petrarch, suffused with that same centuries-old and ever-new imperative to explore.

When we speak of exploration at Lewis & Clark College, we speak first and foremost of the voyage of discovery that every student who comes to us for an education must make. That exploration is intensely personal, and at the end of the formal course of study, we hope that all of our graduates, with the help of our skilled faculty as guides—both in breakthrough, “Eureka!” moments and in quiet, bookish encounters with the great minds of the past and present—have broken through the successive barriers that impede their understanding of the world. And when we speak of exploration at Lewis & Clark, we speak of scholarship, the breaching of the unknown, and the discovery of new perspectives through which to view our universe.

Encouraging lively intellectual curiosity is, of course, a hallmark of every American institution of higher education and has been so for the last three hundred and fifty years. The presence here today of so many representatives from our nation’s colleges and universities bears testimony to the common values and shared mission that guide us in our life’s work as educators: To educate the whole student, to foster in each student the imperative to explore.

That imperative holds tremendous capacity for personal enrichment. Paradoxically, it compels us to seek the shock of the new when we may be tempted to stay in safe harbor, especially in our world of accelerating change. Let us be clear: The rate of change poses many challenges to us individually and collectively. It most surely challenges the cherished ideas and historic models of education that we in this country have evolved. So it is useful and necessary for us as a society to examine, frequently and critically, our educational environment. We must do that for ourselves, for our children and for our children’s children.

So, let us consider in particular three forces that now affect how we think about our philosophy of education in this country, and that have far-reaching ramifications for our society as a whole: the technological revolution that envelops us, the expanding international competition for ideas and students, and the escalating cost of educating a student in this generation.

As a gloss on the explosion of technology in the last quarter century, understand that within five years some 35 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, with half the world’s population logging in regularly. Recognize that current chip technology will have reached the physical limits of efficiency around the year 2015. And know that coming breakthroughs in nanotechnology and atomic-sized machines will propel us toward ever-more-abundant mountains of data, toward ever-increasing functionality, with ever-more precise accuracy, at ever-higher speeds, and at an ever-lower price.

Those of us engaged in teaching and research must view the information age as transformative. Consider:

• The entire contents of the New York Public Library and of the university libraries at Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford are being electronically scanned and will soon be available to users everywhere on the face of the earth, free of charge or at very low cost, at every moment of the day or night.

• At last count, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had placed 900 of its 1800 course offerings on the Web, for use by faculty at other institutions or by students around the globe, free of charge.

• Students and scientists anywhere on earth now have constant access to the most up-to-date information in virtually any field of inquiry.

• Simulation models and sophisticated instruction programs will continue to affect, dramatically, the way we teach, the way we conduct classroom experiments, and the way our students think about and encounter the educational experience.

What does all this mean for us here today? As a college president, I worry about the impact it has on sustaining our traditional vision of education: The collection of scholars and students in one location, the campus, for the purpose of intense intellectual encounter. Our college and the vast majority of other institutions of higher learning, both public and private, provide students and faculty a place, a space, and time for stepping back and taking in the larger vista. For students, the campus is a forum for stoking up on knowledge, refining their intellectual gifts, and preparing for their careers in life. For faculty, it is a venue for their own intellectual broadening, for research and exploration. Newly emerging alternatives, such as online courses and virtual colleges and universities, may very well transform the traditional role of the teacher as expert within the classroom and instructional laboratory.

We must do more than simply acknowledge these developments as real. We must consider their meaning, critically and in depth. Then we must craft thoughtful, deliberative, and strategic actions. And having done that, then we must lead the way. When we do that, we position Lewis & Clark as a competitive institution in a world where electronically delivered instruction will only increase in quality and quantity.

We in this country and on this campus must similarly confront the challenges in education posed by events internationally. I am not speaking only of the problems of the immediate post-9/11, post-Iraqi-invasion world, where students from the United States are less welcome in some parts of the globe than they were before, or where well-qualified students from abroad have difficulty obtaining visas to study in the States. These developments are most troubling, especially for a college such as Lewis & Clark where internationalism has been a hallmark and a priority since the 1950’s. But there are other, more far-ranging changes afoot in the world that carry immediate and long-term consequences and to which, in the words of Arthur Miller, attention must be paid. How we understand, assess and respond to these international developments will shape our own vision for education in the years ahead.

Let me cite a few examples. Europe has implemented a series of major initiatives designed to streamline the pathways to university degrees and to make the Continent a far more competitive environment for educational services. The Bologna Protocol and the related Erasmus Project already make it possible for students in nineteen countries to study in any other country, tuition-free, without loss of time or course credits. Germany is working to establish a set of world-class Spitzenuniversitäten, pinnacle universities that will rival in quality the best that this country or any country can now boast. To achieve this goal, the German government is prepared to sell off its gold reserves, so serious are they about challenging American hegemony in the realm of quality higher education.

Tremendous changes are occurring in Eastern Asia as well. In China, the number of university students has doubled since 1998. Last spring, Chinese universities graduated more than 200,000 students with baccalaureate degrees in engineering, compared with 60,000 from universities and colleges in the United States. The shift is unprecedented and promises far-reaching implications for China’s manufacturing, building, and transportation infrastructure – and our own. And the rapidly expanding Yong-In University in Korea and Waseda University in Japan demonstrate that private interests are already responding to the rising popular demand for education.

American colleges and universities now experience a dramatic decline in the number of the best-qualified students from other countries who want to come to the United States. The number of applications from Chinese students for graduate study in the United States fell 45 percent from fall 2003 to fall 2004. Last year also witnessed a 30 percent drop in the number of Indian students applying for admission to U.S. institutions. Although 9/11 was in part responsible for the decline in applicants from other countries, statistics suggest that the events and consequences of that day have accelerated rather than caused the decline.

I ask again: What does this augur for our future? As Americans, we need to be concerned on several levels about these shifts in the global marketplace for education. Our concerns do not stem from a constricted nationalism or narrow protectionism. Our concerns are rooted in questions of how best to maintain and advance the integrity of our values as Americans and how best to discern our proper role within the global community. As the numbers of talented international students decline, the quality of students applying for admission to our colleges and universities, and especially to graduate programs, diminishes. This shift carries uncertain implications for the future of research and other disciplines in this country. This shift portends a secondary but perhaps more profound concern: the loss within our workforce of skilled people after graduation. And perhaps most troubling of all, the decline in the number of international students who spend time in this country will ultimately reduce the number of our friends abroad—trained professionals who have encountered and even lived American values first hand, and who are therefore more inclined to know and understand the premium that we as a people place on personal freedom and the worth of the individual.

The third element in the landscape that challenges our assumptions about education in America today is that of rapidly escalating costs. As the father of three soon-to-be college-aged sons, I note personally the rising price tag of a college education. As a college administrator, however, I am equally aware of the need to upgrade and improve the quality of our educational and student life services—and to do so continually. Our success in retaining and recruiting the best students requires this commitment. More to the point, our standards, our faculty, our staff, and our students demand and deserve nothing less.

Large tuition increases have been a fact of life in the United States for at least the last forty years. I calculate that since 1965, average tuition at private colleges and universities in this country has grown at a rate of over 7 percent per year, while the price of a market basket of goods and services has increased by less than 5 percent per year. To be sure, private institutions routinely discount their tuition for students with financial need. At Lewis & Clark, we actually receive only about 60 percent of our gross undergraduate tuition dollars because of the amount we forgive in the form of need-based grants. But the hard fact remains, education is expensive and likely to become more so as the years go by.

Every college president must occasionally scan the horizon for opportunities and challenges—and be able to discern the difference. In a sense, because of my confidence in the evolving leadership that colleges and universities will continue to provide, the very changes that we will confront in the years and decades to come stoke my own enthusiasm for advancing liberal arts education in this country. My optimism and my energy flow from my deeply held belief in the viability, adaptability, and value of our educational methods and institutions. That faith goes back far into the past, as far back in fact as the fourteenth century, where, I would suggest, some of the roots of our strength lie, back in the era of the great awakenings associated with the founding of the first universities of Europe, back in the era of our friend and mentor Francesco Petrarch.

Recall that after Petrarch went up Mont Ventoux that spring day in 1336, he wrote of the physical challenges that impeded his progress. But he also described the thoughts and musings that came into his head during his ascent to the top and on his trek back down. This very contemplation of his life and of his own values, this inner contemplation made during the course of his external excursion, is what resonates so strongly with us today. Petrarch’s experience offers insight and reassurance as we examine the purpose of education in our own times and our means of delivering it.

Unlike his brother, who stayed on the main route, Francesco occasionally explored a side path, thinking to find a better way, an easier roundabout up to the peak. These diversions inevitably led to a dead end or a path away from the summit. Yet these very detours provoked him to contemplate the moral detours he had taken during his life. Let it be said that Petrarch’s personal history up to that point had not been entirely reputable. Francesco’s self-examination revealed a life full of moral lapses, of ethical fits and starts, leaving him in torment and fearful of eternal damnation. This is not the place to go into the nature of Petrarch’s sins of omission or commission. More to the point is the very process of self-examination itself, the impulse that Petrarch felt during the ascent of Mont Ventoux for internal exploration. In Petrarch, we have arguably the first documented example of the modern process of external discovery intertwined with the internal processes of self-scrutiny and ultimately of personal growth.

The thread of personal growth as an element of the training of the mind runs true through the history of higher education in this country. In its earlier form, that thread was bound intimately with the thread of religion. Religious denominations founded the vast majority of private institutions of higher learning in this country. Lewis & Clark itself was founded by and until 1966 affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. I mention this history to remind us all that the roots of American higher education are firmly planted in the imperative for young people to examine their first principles and to question their place and purpose in the world. I would go further and suggest that this quality in American higher education, this deeply rooted obligation to cultivate self-examination as a method for personal growth, sets us apart—and distinctly so—from our counterparts in other countries. It is the one force that will, if we are wise in our use of technology and prudent in harboring our resources, allow us to flourish in the years and decades to come.

I have been at Lewis & Clark long enough to have engaged in a few intense discussions with some of our faculty—that sounds somehow redundant; discussions with faculty are never anything but intense. These particular discussions focused on the theme of what might be termed “value-based education.” Some of my colleagues object to my occasional characterization of Lewis & Clark as a “college of conscience.” They argue that we should leave our personal beliefs at the door of the classroom and bring objectivity and dispassion to the task of teaching and research. At one level, I agree with their arguments. It is absolutely not the job of teachers to impose their moral codes or personal belief systems on students, let alone their political or philosophical biases.

But the purpose of education in this country has always been and remains much more than a purely intellectual one. On another level entirely, we can agree that our own first principle is to require our students to grow as individuals during their time among us. We expect that they will emerge as wiser, more reflective human beings, but also as citizens dedicated to a life of giving back in the interests of the common good. We expect that the intellectual curiosity that drove Petrarch to the top of his mountain and that brings us together in this scholarly community is only complete when coupled with a corresponding compulsion to rethink, and then to act on, our deepest convictions.

The challenges we consider today call us to affirm what we do best. So I enjoin those of us within the Lewis & Clark community, and those of you who celebrate the principles upon which this great College was founded, to recommit ourselves to the process of unending discovery. For discovery lies at the very heart of this institution that we have come to love and to which we dedicate our lives, our energy, and our talent. Let us not shrink from confronting squarely the challenges of our times. Let us instead find—yes, discover—in every challenge an opportunity to fulfill better than we ever have before our mission of lifelong exploration. And as the environment in which we live and work continues to change in ever more wonderful ways, let us remain true to our first purpose, let us embrace and together engage the greatest challenge we face: that of responding, with purpose and knowledge, in all that we do, in both our outward and inward learning, to the marvelous, exciting, eternal imperative to explore.

Thank you.

Notes and sources

The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books from 5 top Research Libraries,” January 7, 2005. Accessed February 20, 2005.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Paul Mooney, “Chinese College Enrollments Surge to Record Level,” January 7, 2005. Accessed February 19, 2005.

Forbes Magazine
Russell Flannery, “International Hiring Hall,” July 26, 2004. Accessed February 23, 2005.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Paul Mooney and Shailaja Neelakantan, “No Longer Dreaming of America,” October 8, 2004. Accessed February 19, 2005.

Council of Graduate Schools
“Council of Graduate Schools find Decline in New International Graduate Student Enrollment for the Third Consecutive Year,” November 4, 2004. Accessed February 23, 2005.