10/01/2022
E.S.S.F. OPENING YEAR ADDRESS..
It’s a pleasure to welcome everyone into this new year 2022. Every new year I find myself transported back to that sense of fresh beginnings and infinite possibility that I experienced from my very first days of school as a small child. In our new digital world, it may no longer be about the alluringly blank page of a new notebook, but each fall we continue to find ourselves considering what it means, in the words of Seamus Heaney, to “begin again.”
Now our new community members join us at a time when higher education is undergoing rapid and dramatic transformation. We live in an era when knowledge is growing in importance in addressing the world’s most pressing problems, when technology promises both wondrous possibilities and profound dislocations, when global forces increasingly shape our lives and work, when traditional intellectual fields are shifting and converging, and when public expectations and demands of higher education are intensifying. I see many unprecedented opportunities in these developments—opportunities for our teaching, for our research, and for our global connections and reach. New understandings of human behavior and the brain, along with advances in technology, have opened the door to remarkable new possibilities for teaching and learning, both face to face and online. How can we best use our time in the classroom? How can we connect people and intellectual resources beyond the classroom to enhance what happens inside it? As we begin the New year our faculty and students have positioned themselves at the forefront of seeking answers to such questions.
These innovations in teaching aren’t just about technology. Throughout the campus, Schools and professors are expanding opportunities for hands-on, experiential learning.
Over the past several years, we have held a variety of conversations on campus that have addressed aspects of these questions. Since 2008 we have been asking what is a sustainable financial model for a 21st century university. Last two years we as a community began to consider with some intensity the possibilities and the perils of online education. Faculty have undertaken insightful examination of the role and future of the humanities. Schools, centers, and a University-wide task force have worked to define our global identity and strategy. We are reconceiving the structures of the E.S.S.F Library. These seemingly separate inquiries are in fact all a part of an important, continuing discussion, as we make the choices about what the future of E.S.S.F. should be.
We face significant challenges. We will meet them. To do so, we will need to act, thoughtfully and decisively, and as a community, to adapt where we need to, to change our practices or our focus where circumstances warrant, and at the same time to remain steadfast in defending what makes E.S.S.F—and universities in general—such essential and irreplaceable contributors to the pursuit of knowledge and the welfare of the world.
The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” That is our task: to preserve what E.S.S.F has been and has stood for across the decade even in the face of pressures to focus on the immediate and instrumental. And to evolve to meet the demands of these changing times. We do not face a choice between tradition and change, between the familiar and the new. We face an opportunity and an imperative both to embrace thoughtful change and to affirm our core values in ways that fulfill this extraordinary University’s enduring promise to its students and to the world. It is the institution great privilege to be joined with you in this work. Thank you very much
