WOOSTER, Ohio -- Called "the right leader at the right time for Wooster," R. Stanton Hales was formally inaugurated as the 10th president in The College of Wooster's 130-year history.

The inauguration ceremonies took place in McGaw Chapel, only yards from the site where the liberal arts college was founded in 1866.

Elected president in March, Hales succeeds Henry Copeland who had served for 18 years. Hales had served as vice president for academic affairs at Wooster since joining the 1700-student college in 1990 following a long career at his alma mater, Pomona College in California.

The oath of office was administered by Stanley C. Gault, a 1948 graduate of Wooster and former chairman of both Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and Rubbermaid, Inc. Gault, who is chairman of Wooster's board of trustees, said of Hales: "We know you are eager to use your skills so that Wooster's many strengths are more widely known in the national arena. You are indeed the right leader at the right time for Wooster."

Referring to the trend to assign a particular model to all industries, including education, Hales said Wooster must resist the temptation to consider its students as customers and its faculty as employees. What happens at a college like Wooster, Hales said, is more than a market transaction.

"Wooster is not a subsidiary of the education industry. Wooster is a community. A personal community. An academic community. A civic community," Hales said, adding: "We must never take any of those aspects for granted."

He called upon the institution to embrace opportunities to work together as a community and reinforced Wooster's historic emphasis on independent learning, which is symbolized by the nationally known Independent Study program in which every graduate prepares a senior thesis.

Moreover, Hales challenged Wooster to become "a hothouse for the cultivation of civic engagement."

Although liberal arts colleges like Wooster represent only two percent of all institutions of higher education today, Hales said he believes that these are the colleges that will prosper in the next century.

The principal speaker for the inaugural, Harvard's Edward O. Wilson, agreed with Hales' assessment in his remarks. Wilson, who is the Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard, where Hales did his graduate work in mathematics, emphasized the importance of unifying knowledge.

Citing the critical role of scientific understanding for future generations, Wilson said that the solution of the most vexing moral problems of our time requires "a wise blend of the best that science and the humanities, working together, have to offer."

Today's political leaders and public intellectuals, Wilson said, are not prepared to think in this way and are, for the most part, scientifically illiterate "lacking knowledge equivalent to a freshman course in science."

"The time has come for leadership by a new generation of less lopsided public intellectuals and spokesmen who are informed across both the humanities and the sciences," said Wilson, who added that he believes liberal arts colleges such as Wooster have the greatest potential to attain the unification of knowledge that will be crucial in the next century.