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January 28,
2002
How thrilled I am to be here;
how honored and excited I am to become president of Smith;
I am also proud to become a member of the faculty. Thank
you for the welcome and hospitality this visit.
One of the questions I have
constantly been asked over the past few months is the relationship
between Smith and Berkeley. Isn't it a big change? Smith
and Berkeley seem -- indeed, they are -- very different institutions.
Smith is private; Berkeley is public. Smith is in the East;
Berkeley in the West. Berkeley has palm trees; Smith has
snow. Smith has about 3,000 students; Berkeley 30,000. Smith
defines itself as a liberal arts college; Berkeley as a research
university. Smith is a women's school; Berkeley co-ed.
For all these differences,
the two schools share a great deal. They were founded within
three years of one another -- the University of California
in 1868, Smith in 1871. At their founding, they shared a
vision of extending the benefits of education to students
who were not being served by institutions of higher learning.
The founders of the University of California wanted to build
a university for the people of California equal to the finest
in the East, but established on more democratic principles-in
the words of the charter, "to promote the liberal and
practical education of the industrial classes." Sophia
Smith wanted to provide means and facilities for education
for women, "equal to those afforded now in our colleges
for young men." Both are distinctively American institutions
-- the public land grant university and the private, residential,
liberal arts college. Both kinds of institutions developed
as our country developed, contributing to the expansion of
educational opportunity critical to our nation's achievements.
The complex of our universities and colleges is one of the
greatest of those achievements, a model that other nations
seek to emulate and the choice of over half of the students
studying outside of their own countries.
Although Smith and Berkeley
offer different choices to students in that broad spectrum
of institutions, they share core values. Those values are
my values, and I want today to tell you what they are.
The first is academic excellence.
Both institutions aspire to the highest level of excellence,
in their faculties, in their academic programs, in their
recruitment of students. I know that there is a common assumption
that research universities achieve the distinction of their
research programs at the expense of undergraduate education
and that institutions that teach hard must sacrifice some
research aspirations. I believe strongly that excellence
in teaching and excellence in research support one another
and that the institutions are best whose cultures value them
both, not as conflicting but as complementary strengths.
To achieve this, we need to create programs that support
the continuous development of research and teaching throughout
faculty careers.
A second core value that Smith
and Berkeley share is access. The founding motivation of
both schools was a vision of access, for all classes of California's
populace, and for women. Smith has been a pioneer in expanding
access, in the Ada Comstock Program and in the recruitment
of minority students. Access is not only a matter of recruitment
but of financial aid. With the increase in college costs
beyond the financial capability even of middle-income families,
colleges face a significant challenge in providing sufficient
financial aid. Expanding access to older students, to economically
disadvantaged students, to foreign students, requires creative
thought about financial aid and energetic fund-raising.
A third core value that Smith
and Berkeley share is diversity, and I would like to spend
some minutes talking about my understanding of diversity.
I will begin by describing Berkeley's experience. In a period
of 30 years, the length of the time I've been at Berkeley,
Berkeley changed from an institution in which over 70 percent
of its undergraduate students were Caucasian to an institution
in which there is no racial or ethnic majority in the student
body. The largest ethnic group is Asian -- 40 percent; Caucasians
comprise 30 percent; Hispanics 10 percent; and African Americans
4 percent. In the late 1980s, when faculty first perceived
the composition of the student body as dramatically different,
it instituted a requirement in what it calls American Cultures.
An American Cultures course studies the experience of at
least three American ethnic groups in significant detail.
The groups are often those currently designated as minorities,
but they need not be so. Some courses include the experience
of Jewish Americans , Irish Americans, Italian Americans.
It is not an ethnic studies requirement, and it is taught
by departments across the campus -- by last count, 374 courses
in 48 departments have been approved to satisfy the requirement,
including courses in such seemingly unlikely places as architecture,
environmental science, material science, human biodynamics.
The creation of this requirement did a number of striking
things to the campus. The faculty had to re-educate themselves
to develop these courses; we provided stipends and faculty
seminars to support them in doing so. The seminars changed
not only the curriculum; they changed faculty research. Faculty
developed new areas of knowledge and analysis that led to
books and articles, and they developed new cross-disciplinary
relationships with one another. But perhaps the most remarkable
effect of the American Cultures requirement was the impact
that the new understanding of minority cultures had on what
had traditionally been called majority culture. American
Cultures created a very different understanding of diversity
not as a dividing principle -- you're diverse and I'm not
-- but as a uniting principle -- we are all in some way diverse.
I do not believe that any community
that categorizes some members as diverse and others as not
will ever succeed in making diversity part of its identity.
We must all see ourselves as having histories, attachments,
allegiances that make us different from others. Diversity,
of course, is not only a matter of race and ethnicity, but
of sexual orientation, political and religious conviction,
social class and other attributes as well. And diversity
changes with the community in which you find yourself. In
Berkeley, Republicans are diverse; in the Castro district
of San Francisco, heterosexuals are diverse. At Smith, men
are diverse. Just as liberals rightly feel that conservative
communities must not merely tolerate but respect radical
perspectives, so they too must respect points of view with
which they profoundly disagree.
In building a community that
embraces diversity, it is important to realize the complexity
of our identifications. One of Smith's most distinguished
alumnae, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, recently delivered
a set of lectures at Berkeley about cross-racial and cross-cultural
identification in early modern Europe. She described the
lives of several Europeans who constructed their identities
on the basis of strong identifications with African and Islamic
cultures. Natalie's argument -- that identifications with
other cultures can become integral parts of our identity
-- has much to contribute to understanding our contemporary
situation. It is a rare person who identifies herself through
a single affiliation. We more frequently construct our identities
through a variety of ideas and allegiances, not all of which
are native to us. A single identity politics simplifies this
situation. How do we conceptualize mixed race identity or
the experience of immigrants, who identify both with their
native and their new culture? What is the identity of the
convert to Buddhism, or Islam, or Judaism? How do we describe
the identity of jazz musicians or rap artists that are not
African Americans? Just as we must understand the sense in
which we are all different from one another, we must understand
the diversity of our identifications.
The understanding of diversity
that I am describing is not only an issue of tolerance and
community. It involves the intellectual culture of an institution.
Conversations about difference can be hard, whether they
concern racial and ethnic difference, difference in sexual
identity, differences in physical abilities, in political
or religious convictions. Frank discussions about these matters
can often cause anger and hurt feelings, fear of which sometimes
motivates an exaggerated concern for speaking correctly about
difference or avoiding the subject entirely. One of the most
stimulating pieces of mail that I have received in the last
few months from Smith was the September issue of the Kahn
Chronicle, the newsletter of the Kahn Institute. In his back
page essay, Professor Fantasia writes about his concern that
academic culture at Smith may tend to avoid or elide intellectual
differences. I don't know Smith well enough to know whether
there is a widespread reluctance to engage in debate but
I do know that I come from a culture of sharp intellectual
elbows. Real struggle over ideas -- ideas with social and
political consequence -- is an important part of valuing
diversity.
A fifth value that Smith and
Berkeley hold in common is the embrace of change. Berkeley
has been home to so many revolutions that its name has become
synonymous with radical protest. Smith also has a revolutionary
past, though one in a less flamboyant mode. Its founding
was a revolutionary act, and it has embraced change often
in its history. We most readily associate change with political
and social movements. Intellectual change, with its consequences
for curriculum and for disciplinary organization, is equally
significant. One of the most important changes that Berkeley
has experienced in the past two decades has not been marked
by protests in Sproul Plaza; it has been the reorganization
of its biological sciences, in which 12 departments in two
colleges became three. This was not just a reshuffling of
faculty but a change in the paradigms by which the campus
organized disciplinary thought and teaching. As fields become
increasingly inter- and cross-disciplinary, we must all be
ready to embrace the organizational and curricular consequences,
something I know will engage Smith as its engineering program
and science center move forward.
Finally, Berkeley and Smith
share a sense of public responsibility. Public universities
have public responsibility written into their charter; it
constitutes their mission in any number of ways. Private
colleges also have public responsibilities, responsibilities
of citizenship in their immediate community, their region,
their country, their world. One of the things that attracted
me to Smith is its sense of public responsibility, in policies
that guide student recruitment, in educating students for
public service, and in focusing research and college resources
on social problems. Smith is a private college with a public
conscience.
Since I was named the next
president of Smith, I have often been asked what I see as
the most important challenges facing the college. They are
connected to the values I have just described; faculty development
and renewal, to preserve and build Smith's academic excellence;
access and affordability; sustaining an environment that
supports diversity in all of its meanings; planning for change;
and building its public commitments. Direction on the individual
issues that I know will engage me much in the coming months
and years -- admissions, student housing, the capital campaign,
the science and engineering initiatives -- will derive from
these core values.
The first body of material
that Smith sent me in the search process included the literature
written for the capital campaign. Its slogan -- This is about
Smith -- echoed in my mind as a question over the following
months. I kept asking what is Smith about? I now know some
of the answers. Smith is about academic excellence. Smith
is about access. Smith is about diversity. Smith is about
change. Smith is about public responsibility. And Smith is
about women.
I very much look forward to
being your president. Smith is a wonderful institution, and
I am privileged and honored to lead it.
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