Conjunctions
"Soft you, a word or two before you go," says Shakespeare's noble Moor at the very end of the tragedy Othello. Before I have my word or two, I should assure you that, unlike Shakespeare's hero, I do not intend to conclude my speech by plunging a sword into my breast! I do, though, want to push my luck, and begin my remarks with not one but two citations from the bard. Here's the other:
It is spoken by Henry Richmond, soon to be King Henry IV, at the conclusion of Shakespeare's Richard III. Henry says, "Smile, heaven, upon this fair conjunction." Sometime in the mid 1950's my Dad dragged me to the Varsity Theater in Evanston, Illinois, to see the Lawrence Olivier movie of this play, an event which changed the direction of my life, sent me to college, made me an English major and a Renaissance Drama lover and set me on the vocational course which, in a rather labyrinthian and convoluted fashion, brought me here today to talk about "conjunctions."
I.
One interesting way to think about this very interesting job is as a kind of connector; someone who joins things together. A Chancellor here helps to link the Morris Campus to entire University of Minnesota, and its central administration and Board of Regents. UMM's chancellor builds bridges between the campus and the communities of Morris, Stevens County, West Central Minnesota, and the entire state. Part of my job is to explain our unique character, history and contributions to legislators, donors, parents, prospective students and other potential friends of the College. And, often my office is a kind of communications nexus, through which, say, staff concerns or those of students are communicated to faculty or administrators. So, if a Chancellor is a part of speech, it is usually a "conjunction," that part that links other, more meaningful units together into one coherent utterance. Sometimes, I confess, Chancellors might be more like exclamations, even expletives, than conjunctions, but, hopefully not too often!
Today, I want to focus on two kinds of linkages or conjunctions, the first rather abstract and institutional, but definitive of this place, at this time, and the other a bit more quirky and personal.
II.
First: When we say, as we should say all the time, that UMM is the best public liberal arts college in America we are, of course, expressing a value judgement about our quality. But we also are capturing the idiosyncratic character of our core mission. We bring together in a very important and a very rare way, the characteristics of small liberal arts colleges, virtually all of which are private, and of public universities, virtually all of which are larger and more comprehensive than we.
We need to remind ourselves steadily - and to remind others - that being a public liberal arts college does not mean that we are just like a private liberal arts college, but cheap (although we are, in comparison, breathtakingly inexpensive). Nor does it mean we are just like public universities, only small (although we are proud to be a human-sized learning community). Public liberal arts colleges are one case where two plus two equal five: our two parts, put together, make for more than their sum.
As a fine liberal arts college, we are dedicated to a rigorous instructional program of undergraduate learning, in which the focus is on helping students to be their own best lifelong teachers. Whether a UMM student is studying philosophy or physics, psychology or secondary education, she or he is learning how to define a problem or question or issue, imagine solutions and interpretations, test them, reject some, pick the best, and remain perpetually open to reexamining the matter if new data appear. This is what I think people mean by "critical thinking." It is certainly the kind of learning which is liberal in the sense of liberating; it is learning which helps to make free the consciousnesses of those who pursue it. It is certainly the most useful learning of all, especially in an era in which the pace of change continually accelerates, and any particular knowledge of today is likely outdated tomorrow, but the ability to think clearly and with lithe agility is never out of style.
But - and here is the conjunction - we practice liberal learning in the public sector. We are committed, therefore, to providing access to the best liberal education, to the best potential students, regardless of their financial resources, their racial, ethnic or geographic background, the educational history and sophistication of their families, or, in fact, anything other than the keenness of their intelligence and - even more important in my opinion - the strength of their desire to learn and their willingness to work ferociously at it.
Being a public college means that we have a duty, an opportunity, to serve the public. Through student volunteerism; continuing education; programs like the center for small towns; service learning; special programs for high school and elementary school pupils and teachers; in a whole inviting array of settings, we can (and do) affirm that the public support for our college mandates a payback of civic consciousness and duty on our part. And, as it happens, that constant awareness of our public nature enhances rather than distracts from, our core educational mission. By studying and by service focused upon our particular location, we provide a laboratory for liberal learning without peer.
So: as a public liberal arts college, we stress our accessibility, we are attentive to our public character in our curriculum, and we are responsive to the needs of our city, county, region and state. As some of you know, I have been heard to define the job of academic administrators by paraphrasing the English poet Geofrey Chaucer: we are the servants of learning's servants. Similarly, I think that UMM enhances and increases its role of leadership in Minnesota and in American Higher Education, in its stance as a servant of our region and its people, all of its people.
So, my first conjunction is that of the closeness and intensity of the liberal arts college conjoined with the public character of a great state university.
III.
The second and concluding conjunction about which I wish to muse with you today might be called, brashly, "what's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this."
Let's trace two parallel tracks of history: In 1887 an order of Catholic nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, began the first school in this place. The town of Morris itself was only an adolescent at that moment, having been founded a mere 16 years earlier by the Chief Engineer of the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, Mr. Charles Morris. For scores of years earlier, American Indians had moved through this territory, with the Pomme de Terre river dividing Chippewas to the East from Sioux to the West. And it was service to young native Americans that was the mission of the Sisters of Mercy.
From the perspective of the 21st century, it may appear that those 19th century Sisters were perhaps a bit eurocentric and possibly misguided. In the 1880's, their goal to provide a helpful education to American Indian boys and girls was selfless, open-hearted and heroic. Those young people had been increasingly confined to segregated reservations to the North and West of Morris after the treaty which made this area part of the United States of America in 1851.
Also in about 1887, halfway around the world, in the Eastern European area of Minsk, which is today part of Russia, my grandfather was born in a shtetl, which is another sort of segregated reservation, where the Jews of Poland, Eastern Europe, Russia were by law confined, forbidden most travel, restricted in their means of livelihood. We never knew exactly when or where my paternal grandfather entered the world, because there was no written record of his birth, and he himself was unlettered. Indeed, when he and his brother came to this country, after what must have been an epic voyage on foot and across the ocean as steerage passengers in a flood of Eastern European Jewish immigration in the first decade of the century, we are not even entirely sure what his name was, since the immigration official who processed his entry into the USA gave his brother a different last name than he gave my grandfather. This would have happened sometime around 1910.
Meanwhile, in 1910, here in Morris, the Indian Boarding School, which has passed from the nuns to the US government, ceased to exist, and this land was given to the State of Minnesota, with the provision that as long as there was a school here, American Indians would be admitted on a basis of equity and free of charge. That is an inheritance and a charge which we continue to honor today, and which has enriched immeasurably our history as a college.
On the site of the old Indian School was created an agricultural boarding high school, where young men and women from West Central Minnesota came after harvest, studied through the bitter prairie winter, and went home for spring planting and summer farm work. Many of the graduates of the West Central School of Agriculture are today important citizens of our area, in agriculture, but also in business, industry, the professions and civic service. For example, our district's state Senator is a WCSA alum.
The agricultural boarding high school flourished for 50 years, from 1910 to 1960. During those 50 years, my grandfather flourished as well. When he and his brother arrived in the United States he, like so many other Eastern European Jews, settled in New York City, where he took a job making cigars by hand. Saving his wages, he became an urban peddler, selling used men's clothing from a push cart in the lower east side of New York, and saving the income from that job, eventually he and his brother, who was named Sam, moved to Chicago and bought a clothing store, which became ultimately several clothing stores. When the West Central School of Agriculture was in it's first decade my dad was born, when it was in its thirties, I was. When it was in its last decade, my grandfather moved to California, invested heavily in real estate, and became a rather wealthy, although still essentially illiterate, old man. My Dad became a lawyer; I grew up comfortably in suburban Chicago. In the fall of 1960, I graduated from High School, and went off to a small liberal arts college in Iowa.
If I had shifted my eyes a bit further North, I could, instead, have been a member of the very first college class at the University of Minnesota, Morris. 40 years ago this semester - in fact, 40 years ago 19 days from today - we first opened our doors as a college of the University of Minnesota. A group of local civic leaders (some of whom are here today), regional politicians and educators had conceived, in the waning days of the boarding agricultural high school years, the outrageous idea of building a fine liberal arts college on the prairie. Our first chief executive, Rodney Briggs, in a act which today seems a feat of remarkable entrepreneurship, actually made this bizarre vision become a reality. Tales of the lobbying effort required to win the approval of both the University of Minnesota and the state legislature are mythicŠand would today be impermissible.
Here it is, September 2000, and both our school and our chancellor started college 40 years ago this month.
IV
So: very interesting, but is there a point? Certainly NOT that there is some sort of mystic link between my personal past and the history of this institution, nor that, somehow, our destinies were linked.
My point is a simpler one, and its power derives from the fact that not only is it not unique, it is probably true, to some degree, for everyone here: true for the grandchildren of Norwegian immigrants or the great grand children of Africans kidnapped into slavery or the descendants of uncounted generations of American Indians who are the only ones of us who did not come here from somewhere else. It is the forest which we sometimes cannot see through the trees of divisiveness or discontent or just daily business. My point is that THIS, just this, is the American dream that my grandfather - and probably your grandparents or great grandparents - dreamed. That someday we could stand together free and equal under the huge prairie sky. That we would have the chance - tragically rare in the history of our world - to be judged on the basis of our character and our keenness, not our color or creed. When my grandfather Izzy started to walk out of bondage in the rural ghetto in Russia, he was walking towards Morris, Minnesota, although he had surely never heard of Morris, or of Minnesota. When the Sisters of Mercy started a school in this place, they had a vision that education could be the instrument by which all Americans could forge their freedom. We are celebrating today and this autumn a great public liberal arts college, one which is sustained by, and operated for, the public, the people, us - Jews and farmers and African-Americans and Scandinavians and Germans, and Asians and Hispanics, all of us. We are at a place where the finest of liberal learning can take place, the sort of learning which, in former eras was the property of the aristocratic elite.
So, of course, my two conjunctions - the links between public education and liberal learning, and between my family history and the institutional past of this place - these two conjunctions are in turn conjoined. It all comes together for us, here and now. This fine little college in Morris is not just my American dream, nor just yours. It is, truly, THE American dream. And, for all its flaws, which are many and serious and real preoccupations of our work, it is a dream come true. What a treasure we have been given; what a responsibility to cherish and nurture it. The Sisters of Mercy, the students and teachers of the West Central School of Agriculture, the Citizens of Morris and the region who brought the University here, 40 years of teachers and learners at UMM, and my grandfather: they all knew what was behind them, but they all kept their eyes ahead and moved forward step by step, day by day, year by year. And here we are, and we must do the same. We must keep our eyes on the prize, we must preserve and enlarge the dream. Together, all of us: regents and central administrators, legislators, alumni, friends; civic leaders and colleagues; staff, teachers, and students and I: we must, we can, we shall.
I began my comments today with the beginning of Othello's final soliloquy. Let me continue a bit: "Soft you, a word or two before you go," you'll recall he began. "I have done the state some service, and they know't." I hope to do our state some service, too. He goes on to ask that his achievements be neither exaggerated nor denegrated: "Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well." I do not know how wisely I can love and lead UMM but I'll do my best, and I do promise that I will love it well.
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Last Modified Tuesday, February 01, 2005
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