Inauguration Address

I must move towards my conclusions, so I am not going to talk about:

• Debra A. Schwinn, a distinguished physician scientist, who received the American Society of Anesthesiologists' 2007 Award for Excellence in Research. She earned her medical degree at Stanford, and later joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center. Last year, she was named chair of the department of anesthesiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. While at Duke she revised the research curriculum for the medical school: "It was easy," she says, "because in essence it was Wooster I.S. all over again."
• I am also not going to talk about Samrat Upadhyay who came to Wooster from his native Katmandu, Nepal. After graduating from Wooster, he earned a master's degree at Ohio University and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii. Now a well published author, whose portrayal of Katmandu in his novel, The Guru of Love, the San Francisco Chronicle called "as specific and heartfelt as Joyce's Dublin."
• It is hard for me not to talk about Professor Ronald Takaki, a person whose scholarship has shaped my own. Ron graduated from Wooster in 1961 with a major in history and with an I.S. written under the guidance of Professor Helen Osgood. Ron's remarkable academic career has spanned five decades, much of it at the University of California at Berkeley, where he founded and chaired the department of ethnic studies. Ron's major scholarly works include A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, a book I have taught dozens of times in my own courses.
• I am not going to talk about...Danny George, who is here today, and who graduated in 2004 and had the audacity to slip his Independent Study under the door of Dr. Peter Whitehouse, who directs the Memory and Aging Center at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals. Was he impressed? This January St. Martin's Press published a book, The Myth of Alzheimers, co-authored by Danny George and Dr. Whitehouse. Danny is now pursuing a degree in medical anthropology at Oxford.
• Finally, I will not say a word about the eight graduating physics majors last year, 100% of whom are enrolled in top graduate programs like Purdue, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon, nor a word about Colleen Burkett, who, while doing research in the lab of Paul Edmiston, Professor of Chemistry, came upon a remarkable discovery of a material that absorbs hydrocarbon pollutants from water, like gas and oil, but not the water itself, or that this material is now patented and being developed for environmental clean-up applications, while Colleen is in graduate school pursuing her doctorate in chemistry.

In conclusion, let me offer some of my own thoughts about what has to be the case for a college to produce alumni of this quality, commitment, and impact. First, of course, a theme that you heard again and again, is that our program of faculty mentoring students in the process of inquiry and research should not be called "Independent Study" but "Interdependent Study". Over the decades this faculty has developed an unparalleled culture of mentoring: independent minds working together. These collaborative relationships between faculty and students are paradigmatic examples of the social nature of knowledge production. Knowledge is developed in and through human relationships, through searching dialogue and inquiry. These relationships call for trust, patience, persistence, and a constant commitment to listening.

This year I have had the great honor and pleasure of working with a senior philosophy student, Jaimy Stoll, on her Independent Study. In this work we have both been mentored by Professor Ron Hustwit, whom you will recall as the mentor of Sol Oliver's I.S. Ron has demonstrated time and again a cultivated capacity for intellectual empathy and generosity. Like Socrates in Plato's Meno, he grasped what Jaimy was reaching for even while she was still reaching. He led her to clarity through very finely honed questions.

In my short time here it has become clear to me that our unique educational program that culminates in the senior Independent Study is what we do that makes us who we are. Our excellence is to be understood in these terms. Our integrity measured in it. We are a college that changes lives one by one, but we do so as a community.

True integrity of mission is our most valuable asset. It is not one that can be bought, or faked, or developed quickly were it missing. It comes from decades of commitment; it is the product of passion. We have challenges before us, some particular to our situation, others the result of national and global dynamics. But The College of Wooster rests on an admirably rock-solid foundation, not so much of bricks and mortar, but of history, of the humanity of our graduates, of the hearts of our faculty, and of the promise we find in each of our students.

I am impressed with what I find to be the ethical potential of a life shaped by a Wooster education. In our alumni there are decades of evidence, in the form of lives well lived, that Wooster is doing just the kind of work Professor Nussbaum has articulated as our mission.

Here is what I wish for our students, and what I will seek to support while I am here. I will look for them to be engaged and responsible global citizens, doing well in the world and doing good. I will look for them to manifest in their lives an intolerance of injustice, the wherewithal to intervene, compassion for the frailty of happiness, and a sense of humor sufficient to take joy in the adventure. And of course, I will look for independent minds with a highly developed capacity for working together with others equally independent. Finally, like John Newton, our graduates will encounter storms, moral upheavals, both personal and political. I wish for them, perhaps above all, a capacity for amazing grace.

For all of these bountiful reasons, I express my profound gratitude for the opportunity to serve as The College of Wooster's 11th president. Thank you.

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