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A chronicle of where we've been and where we're going | Fall 2014
Great expectationsDuring the presidency of James Wagner, Emory has embraced a strategic vision that aspires to nothing short of greatness. |
| It started with 37 words, the expression of eight ideal characteristics, and one big call to action. That is the vision statement of Emory University, and its development was one of the first actions that President James Wagner spearheaded when he arrived on campus in 2003. Written with wide participation from the Emory community, the aspirational statement soon saturated the campus. If you stopped a person on the Quad, odds are likely that she could recite some, if not all, of the wording. Wagner himself spread the vision near and far, in speeches to the Emory community in Atlanta and at alumni events around the country. He often quoted these 37 carefully chosen words from memory: Emory is a destination university internationally recognized as an inquiry-driven, ethically engaged, and diverse community, whose members work collaboratively for positive transformation in the world through courageous leadership in teaching, research, scholarship, health care, and social action.Development of a precise vision and accompanying mission statement for Emory University was the first of a series of intentional steps by Wagner to clarify Emory's aspirations and keep them climbing. Next came an ambitious strategic plan, Where Courageous Inquiry Leads, which charted a roadmap for Emory development from 2005 to 2015.
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values and principles matter for the practical reason that no single person can make all of the critical decisions. But it is possible for all of those making critical decisions to be able to do so based on shared values." -- President James Wagner in a presentation to the Emory Administrative Council on October 16, 2014 |
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Religions and the spirit of inquiryAt Emory, the study of religion is alive and well, with scholars taking the field in surprising new directions. |
| Google the two words "Emory God" and your browser will supply the phrase, "is dead." That's a legacy of the 1966 TIME cover story that linked Emory to the "God is dead" theological controversy. Anything but dead, the study of religions is more alive than ever at Emory. This revitalized study of religion across the university is thanks, in part, to Emory's strategic plan, Where Courageous Inquiry Leads. The plan capitalized on two important points concerning religious study at Emory. Unlike many leading research universities, Emory has maintained a strong interest in religion and advanced an intentionally pluralistic study of religions in their many forms around the world. Moreover, the study of religion at Emory is pervasive. It extends throughout the university from the Candler School of Theology and the Emory College of Arts and Sciences to the Laney Graduate School and the School of Law as well as to the schools across the health sciences. |
Engaging studentsAt Emory, learning doesn't stay in the classroom. From volunteering to farming, creating to leading, Emory students are expanding their lessons in unexpected places. |
| Before Jake Krakovsky even graduated from college, he had one of those rare openings where years of work culminated in one special moment. It came as the play he wrote about the Holocaust premiered at Emory, while his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, watched him perform. The theater studies major had honed his honors thesis into a comedy, based on Jewish folklore, about catastrophic tragedy. He hoped humor could help his generation grapple with the history it had inherited. Krakovsky's one-man show is now slated for performance at Atlanta's Woodruff Arts Center in 2015. "Theater invites you to empathize and open yourself up to something different than yourself," the 2014 alumnus says. "If we want to make the world a better place, empathy is about the best place to start." Krakovsky is starting his career with a clear understanding of how and why his work makes a difference. His experience touches on just a few of the many opportunities for engaged learning at Emory, which increasingly is combining co-curricular learning with academic coursework. Krakovsky wrote his play during a fellowship with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He studied theater in Italy for a semester, and he received two arts-related internships with the Ethics and Servant Leadership (EASL) program, which combines service hours and classroom instruction. |
Work + life supportAwarded a national seal of distinction for three years running, Emory's WorkLife programs are helping people reach their potential -- both at work and in life. |
| "Close your eyes and imagine you are driving on a freeway at night in the worst possible conditions -- bad lighting, blinding rain, heavy traffic, wipers not working properly, and worst of all, a nervous back-seat driver who insists on blasting the weather report at full volume. An 18-wheeler passes on the left, sending a wave of water across the windshield, prompting the passenger to scream and grab your sleeve. "Tell me what that feels like," says nursing professor Ken Hepburn to participants in this session on caregiving. "Imagine living in a universe where the stimuli are so raw and frequent." Beyond sharing strategies for taking care of loved ones with dementia, Hepburn wants these participants from the Emory community to understand the losses that come with dementia, both in thinking and feeling. Each time he makes this presentation, several people stay behind. "Their questions are not trivial," he says. "They are wrestling with big issues." Supporting members of the Emory community with these caregiving and other work-life issues is part of the mission of the Emory WorkLife Resource Center. In 2006, President James Wagner commissioned the Work-Life Initiative Task Force to participate in the cross-cutting strategic theme, Creating Community and Engaging Society. This theme arose from Emory's desire to be a destination place to work, recognizing that to meet that goal, the university needed to be provide support to faculty and staff for not only work but also raising families in a supportive community environment. |
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A Time for Courageous Universities
James W. Wagner
Emory University
Address to the National Press Club
25 April 2007
Good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us on this first "Emory Day
at the National Press Club." I must say -- not only to the Emory alumni who are
present but also to those of you in the Fourth Estate -- that my colleagues on the
faculty and in the administration who have traveled here to be part of the panel
discussions later in the morning are among the most committed, the most
passionate, indeed, the most courageous scholars and teachers in the country.
Whether their vocation is to forge a new and more deeply humane understanding
of the many "voices of Islam," or to extend health care to the millions of
uninsured, or to expand the political franchise and rights of minorities and
women -- these are distinguished scholars whose work will repay your attention.
I'm very proud to be able to share this day with them.
Of course all of us come to a discussion of higher education still very
much affected by the events of last week in Blacksburg, Virginia. Our prayers
and thoughts continue to be with the families of those who died and with the
community of Virginia Tech.
If we needed a reminder that the university is not an ivory tower, nothing could
have demonstrated that fact more terribly, more horrifically, than those hours on
the Virginia Tech campus, when the university as a microcosm of our society was
on display. I want to say more about this in a few minutes. But first let me say
something about our purpose for being here.
We have come here, in part, to dispel a myth or two about Emory. A
university that does not play Division I basketball or football finds it hard to be
noticed in our infotainment culture.
Although Emory is known in many quarters as "Coca-Cola U" -- and although we
remain indelibly proud of the cola-generated Candler and Woodruff legacies that
have been so momentous for us -- Emory now competes on a national, and
indeed, a global stage for talent and resources. Our admissions program is
among the most selective in the country, admitting only one-quarter of all
applicants this year, to the celebration and sometimes consternation of many a
loyal friend and alumnus; our degree programs rank internationally among the
best, elevating the stature of the whole as the parts become stronger and
stronger.
Among the aspirations to which we call ourselves in our vision statement
is the call for Emory to become a destination university. Supporting that
aspiration is that fact that our home city is a flourishing base, a destination itself
growing (in the last a'years) faster than any other metro area in the country, and
offering strong partnerships and collaborations with the likes of CARE, the
American Cancer Society, and the CDC. All of these things provide benchmarks
by which we can track the progress that Emory has made in the past three
decades to find its place among the top twenty universities in America.
In addition to getting the facts straight about Emory, we have come here,
in part also, to show off this constellation of stars -- just a dozen who will have to
stand today for many hundreds of others. We have left behind wonderful
scholars who have made great impact -- people like Dennis Liotta who is
committed to drug discovery and was the co-inventor (along with his colleague
Ray Schinazi) of the most widely-prescribed retroviral drug to control the ravages
of HIV/AIDS. And people like Frans de Waal, who, owing to his work on nonprimate
behavior, Time Magazine has just identified as one of America's top 100
interesting people. Or people like Harriet Robinson, who is leading human trials
of a potential HIV vaccine. Or people Like Natasha Trethewey who just last
week was awarded a Pulitzer prize for her poetry. But the faculty that are here
will give you a good flavor of the caliber of engaged scholarship that is so evident
on Emory's campus.
As a research university we work at the usual things that all American
universities are up to -- expanding the frontiers of knowledge, slaying ignorance,
discovering cures for disease, and, of course, finding places for people to park.
With the exception of finding parking space, perhaps, all of these other things,
related to academic achievement, are in some ways the easiest things we do.
But although academic enrichment is a very important part of the work of a
leading university, our world needs universities that can playa still more critical
role. That role is to provide a forum where people who disagree violently can do
so without actually resorting to violence. That role is one that requires courage,
because the more fully we embrace it, the more profoundly we are opened to
internal dissension and external criticism. It is a role not being played adequately
by any other insUtution in our increasingly fractious society. And it is about that
role -- that risky role that requires such courage -- that I wish to commit the
remainder of my remarks.
You here today don't need me to tell you what kind of world we live in.
Those of you in the media report on it every day. And the rest of us -- who rely on
you professionals to give us fuller insight into our world -- also know first-hand
that American civic life has grown harsh. It's not quite the Hobbesian state of
nature, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But we may
sometimes fear that we're devolving to that. We probably can't (and mustn't)
blame it on the Internet, television, talk radio. No, most of these are, in the truest
sense, mere media -- conduits -- for ideas and movements that would find other
means of expression even if electronic communications did not exist. It's simply
that we live in a contentious and often polarized world. Many who work as
researchers and teachers in universities are prone to vilification or worse, from
true believers of the left and right -- from those who oppose the use of animals to
test new drugs or vaccines, no matter how many years of human life they might
redeem from pain or death; from those who oppose research-driven state
policies requiring the use of seatbelts or the use of vaccines to prevent diseases
in children; or for that matter, from those who contest the teaching of evolutionary
theory, a foundation stone of the modern life sciences. The list could go on and
on in considerable detail, reminding us all of the unexpected way, at this late date
in the history of the West, that science and reason themselves have become
subjects of controversy. If you have former friends who now keep a distance
because of political disagreement, changes in religious belief or practice,
or contention over the way to raise children -- well, you can count yourselves part
of what seems to be a growing club.
All of us are familiar with the famous line attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald,
that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in
mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Less famously,
Conor Cruise O'Brien (contributing editor to The Atlantic magazine) described an
intellectual as "someone who is prepared to admit when another has made a
point in a debate."
On both counts it's fair to wonder whether our society has lost some of its
capacity for instilling -- or at least requiring -- this kind of intellectual
capaciousness, this (perhaps uniquely human but too often underemployed)
ability to experience or understand life from another person's perspective. Can
you imagine the talking heads on some of the cable TV channels and AM radio
stations pausing in the middle of their heated exchanges and saying, "You know,
Bill, or you know Sean, or you know, Tim -- I think you have a point there." It
doesn't happen, or at least it doesn't happen often. We are a society
increasingly trained to hold on like bulldogs to a narrow way of viewing things.
Perhaps it is in our sense of surety, founded or unfounded, that we find comfort.
Here's an illustration of what I mean. Passing through an airport I noticed
in a shop a miniature glass globe, a biosphere, containing a half-dozen live red
shrimp and a stalk of an underwater plant. This air-tight, water-filled container
creates a perfect, self-contained environment: the seaweed produces oxygen for
the shrimp, which in turn produce carbon-dioxide for the plant and "groom" it by
eating microalgae off it. These biospheres require nothing further -- no need to
add water, air, food, plants, or anything else. You can put it on your desk and
forget about it.
Most of us have encountered persons or communities who would like to
exist in a similar kind of "bubble." Sure, they go about life in the real world of work
and play, but they would prefer not to have to upset the perfectly comfortable
balance of thought in their mental framework. They would prefer that no new
ideas enter their self-consistent belief system, and that no new mental (or moral)
energy be required of them. Presumably, this is the "foolish consistency" about
which Emerson warned us.
In more modern parlance, people who exercise such foolish consistency
could be described as "fundamentalists," (exercising comfortable self-consistent
fundamentalism) except that that term tends to have a particularly religious
connotation for many of us these days. But fundamentalisms come in various
stripes.
Consider the political fundamentalist. A study published by Emory
Professor of Psychology Drew Westen, who will talk on one of the panels here
today, demonstrates that after voters make up their mind about a political
candidate, rational activity stops. The brain processes new information in a way
that reinforces positive emotions toward a preferred candidate, while tuning out
information that threatens this positive response. In other words, we resist being
disturbed by facts from outside our bubbles. "My mind is made up -- don't confuse
me with the facts."
Indeed, the characteristics we normally find in religious fundamentalism --
rigidity of belief, intolerance of alternative practices, and personal derogation of
those who are different -- some would say apply to American political life as well.
A fundamentalist mindset leads to the dangers of excluding and even demonizing
those who disagree with us. I could name examples on either end of the political
spectrum and in almost all areas of intellectual endeavor (science, philosophy,
law, business, even health and healing, but you know them as well as I do.
Universities have sometimes been accused of practicing our own form of
fundamentalism. They have not always offered a welcome place for wrestling
with religious faith, for example. On the one extreme - At some colleges and
universities, faculty and students must toe a certain line defined by dogma-so
that scholarship is not so much informed by faith as determined by it. At the other
extreme - At most research universities, I'm afraid, faith is set aside as a
charming anachronism, and religion is viewed through the lens of dispassionate
objectivity, if it is permitted to be discussed at all.
Both of these models ignore the capacity of human intelligence to believe
one thing while passionately examining its opposite. Both also diminish the vital
need for persons of differing perspectives to understand each other's intellectual
constructs.
Given our human tendencies to grasp tenaciously to our opinions and to
seek the comfort of foolish consistency, one begins to appreciate more clearly
the essential and distinctive role of the university to create habitats where we are
safe, but where it is also impossible for us merely to exist like shrimp in a bubble,
instead of truly living where it is impossible merely to exist without being
challenged also to live. The business of a university is to set us free from our
self-centered universe, to enable us to perceive the world from others'
perspectives, and to empower us to make a positive impact on society. Let me
repeat. The true purpose of the university is to lead us out of our self-centered
universes to a place where we can gain insight, not merely information; The
university mission is as much about gaining wisdom as about gaining knowledge.
But how does the exercise of that mission get carried on a university
campus? Well, for Emory, consider what Booker Prize-winning novelist Salman
Rushdie, the Dalai Lama, and former President Jimmy Carter have in commonbesides,
as you may have heard, their acceptance of faculty appointments to
teach Emory students. Beside their Emory connections, the other thing they
share is a commitment to precipitating and engaging in what some have called
impossible conversations. By "impossible conversations" I mean those
conversations people tend NOT to engage in because of the discomfort caused
by political differences, religious dogmatism, or the deep-seated prejudices that
attach to race, gender, and s~xuality, because such conversations risk scratching
the glass bubbles of our self-contained, self-consistent belief systems. It's easier
to cut off conversation than to cut through the knottiness of some issues. It's
certainly easier to walk away than to walk beside someone whose views we
violently oppose.
The lasting contribution of the university tradition lies in its dedication to
fostering -- indeed, to requiring -- such "impossible conversations." -- a
requirement along with the thirst for intellectual diversity that allows us to view
the world from other's perspectives. Now, engaging in impossible conversations
does not mean that we have to find resolution to every problem; but it does mean
that we do have to engage. Such engagement rarely happens outside of
universities. As we have discussed already, it cannot happen on certain TV
programs and AM radio shows. It does not happen, except by accident, in the
well of the U.S. House or Senate, or in the halls of the United Nations, or in any
other political venue where rhetoric is employed instrumentally, for political ends,
and where what passes for debate is not genuine debate, and when the rules
often are invoked to stop debate rather than enhance it. It often does not happen
in our religious communities, which more frequently take the path of schism than
resolution. Such impossible conversations sometimes do not even happen
among some married couples or in some families.
Only the university is required by its mission to take pains to set the stage
and define the rules for fair and honest engagement over issues of great
moment. Only at a university can discussion be moderated so that all sides have
an opportunity to be heard. Perhaps it is owing to this reputation and expectation
for inquiry and objectivity that our presidential debates in America are held on
university campuses. Universities also insist on non-violence - that those who
wish to speak leave aside hate speech and ad hominem attacks, and couch their
ideas in language that assures that people will want to listen - that even deeply
offensive ideas can be discussed without offending people.
This sounds like a noble aim and it is at the root of the distinction between
academic freedom and freedom of speech, but the process can be messy and
unpleasant. And sometimes it opens universities to public scorn. Think of the
barrage of protest launched at universities in the 1980s and 1990s when they
tried to establish codes by which to define civil discourse. Hate speech, carefully
defined, was to be avoided; threats against persons on the basis of race, gender,
ethnicity, or religion were ruled out of bounds. The aim was to promote the kind
of community where people could trust that they could in fact articulate
outrageous ideas without suggesting that their opponents should die, and could
in fact be protected from such threat~ themselves.
Critics of both the left and the right came down hard on these universities,
denouncing as "PC" the kind of self-definition that these communities attempted.
What these critics missed was that universities are in fact engaged in a worthy
kind of PC -- not the "political correctness" that has been the bogeyman of so
many commentators, but rather, PC as a kind of "passionate civility." Universities
must have the courage to EN-courage their faculty members and students to
engage passionately with the ideas that excite them, but to do so civilly -- with
respect for the persons who espouse those ideas.
One of the prouder, recent moments at Emory occurred in February, when
the University community gathered in our Glenn Auditorium to talk about
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, President Jimmy Carter's controversial book.
(For those of you who may not be aware of or have read the former president's
book, it presents an argument -- as an attorney might -- assembling and
connecting facts and events, which conclude that the principal barrier to the
peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians lies with the policies and
practices of the Israeli state. As you can imagine, this conclusion has been
offensive to some.) President Carter's talk, however, was an exercise in
passionate civility and a commitment to begin holding one of those impossible
conversations. Some members of the Emory community felt the need to hold
one of their own community members accountable. Carter, in turn, wanted to
explain his position more fUlly within the University family. The intense but civil
and courteous discourse that ensued was a model for what our universities and
indeed our civilization should seek. The audience of students, faculty, and staff
members -- many of whom disagreed violently with Carter's perspective -- did
what a university (and perhaps only a university) does best: it practiced a
passionate but nonviolent way of engaging respectfully, honestly, and
purposefully while trying to understand complex truth.
I do not know whether anyone's opinions were changed on that day by
President Carter's words. But I do believe that some minds were changed by
participating in the process. They were made stronger, more open, more nimble,
more capable of understanding, through the practice of impossible
conversations. And that particular conversation continues at Emory, bringing into
the conversation voices from on-campus and off with various perspectives.
And here is another example, made all the more current and necessary by
the recent flap over Don Imus. For the past two years, and for the next three
years as well, Emory is engaged in something we call the Transforming
Community Project -- an effort to engage everyone in our university community,
from faculty and students to administrative assistants and groundskeepers and
alumni and lab technicians, in probing conversations about race in our institution.
Like every other university founded in the South before the Civil War, Emory has
slavery in its past. Like every other institution in America, Emory is made up of
people who often have a difficult time talking frankly with each other about race,
especially across racial lines. Emory is one of only several dozen colleges and
universities in the country -- out of more than 700 that applied -- to be awarded
grants by the Ford Foundation through its Difficult Dialogues program to carry out
this project. In fact we at Emory believe so much in the necessity and likely
positive outcome of the project, that we are investing more than $2 million of our
own funds in seeing it through. We want to transform our community, and in the
process we hope to model the way for other American communities to be
transformed. We want this so much that we are willing to risk failure in the
attempt. And risk, after all, is the necessary dark side of courage.
This particular notion of institutional courage can be deepened and
extended, though. There's a special courage required to continue as a university
"family," so-called. Although the bonds of the biological family don't exist, the
courageous university community adopts the practices of healthy families -- at
least in the following way. The faculty members who vehemently dispute each
other's arguments -- as several of Emory's professors have disputed President
Carter's -- are willing to engage passionately in the debate while remaining in
community with each other. Just as Emory will not sever its ties with the Carter
Center, as some have urged, neither will Carter's fiercest faculty critics sever
their own ties with Emory -- aggrieved as they may be. To me this is the special
quality of universities, and the particular reason why we can and must have
courage. We must give harbor to the unpopular but well-argued, the marginal but
potentially fruitful believing that in the fullness of time, some of those unlikely or
unwelcome ideas, just one or two of those uncomfortable critics, may be the very
ones in whom we find new meaning and hope.
Now I can hear your skepticism: Sure, you say, this is easy in a university
"family" After all, tenured professors can to go at each other hammer-and-tongs
in the safety of their cloistered campuses, where nothing much is at stake, and
where the work of Classics scholars, lab-rat feeders, and sentence diagrammers
in freshman English courses has little or no impact on the lives of long-haul
truckers, low-income single mothers, Wall Streeters, or our fellow human beings
who suffer misery, war, and environmental degradation in places like Darfur,
Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Come on, I hear you say, what courage is necessary
when your job is guaranteed except in the event of proven malfeasance, moral
turpitude, or failure to show up?
It may be that our image of the academy is still informed too much by
stereotypic images of the sixties: long-haired philosophers in bell-bottoms and
denim vests seeking to appear relevant to their young charges in the SOS.
Let me offer another image a counter-image, a real image, in fact: It is the
image of a middle-aged historian in a business suit, lecturing to a packed hall of
250 with the Internet transmitting his every syllable to a dozen other campuses
around the country, recounting with considerable detail and passion why he has
broken with a former U.S. President, a friend and colleague of a quarter-century's
standing, over the critical differences in their shared devotion to the achievement
of peace in the Middle East. That image, of course, is of Professor of History Ken
Stein, earlier this month at Emory, continuing the riveting "impossible
conversation" that has engaged so many on our campus since President Carter's
publication of his controversial book. This is courage -- to continue the
conversation, to stay involved, to talk but also to listen, to respond.
The Great Seal of the State of Georgia, which Emory of course calls
home, displays the state's motto: "Wisdom, Justice, Moderation." Interestingly,
these are three of the four cardinal virtues identified by Aristotle, three of the four
great virtues on which all the rest of moral life depends. What's the fourth virtue,
the one missing from the seal? Well actually, it is the one that Aristotle identified
as the first and it is a virtue to which we have referred several times: Courage.
Aristotle, in some ways the "Father of Ethics," points out that "Courage is the first
of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees the others." Wisdom
and justice--even the discipline of moderation necessary to avoid the extremes
of passion--will not last without courage. As you observe the progress and
achievements of Emory, and other research universities, we do of course want
you to be cognizant of our achievements -- our Nobels and Pulitzers and Rhodes
scholarships, our grants and contracts, our patents and cures. But also look at us
through the frame of PC -- of passionate civility. Are we passionate -- do we
care? Do we care deeply and profoundly about the antagonisms and needs of
our world? And do we care civilly - with respect for persons, with nonviolent
debate at a time of violent disagreement? Are we hosting and even insisting
upon impossible conversation over such matters a Palestinian - Israeli conflict,
about race and difference, about campus security, about stem cell research,
about religions and the human spirit, about shifting political tectonics, about the
future and affordability of health care. If so, that is the PC test -- the test that
shows whether we have not only passionate civility but the practical courage --
that you have every right to expect of Emory, and of every university worthy of
the name.
Thank you very much.
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A Time for Courageous Universities
James W. Wagner
Emory University
Address to the National Press Club
25 April 2007
Good morning to all of you, and thank you for joining us on this first "Emory Day
at the National Press Club." I must say -- not only to the Emory alumni who are
present but also to those of you in the Fourth Estate -- that my colleagues on the
faculty and in the administration who have traveled here to be part of the panel
discussions later in the morning are among the most committed, the most
passionate, indeed, the most courageous scholars and teachers in the country.
Whether their vocation is to forge a new and more deeply humane understanding
of the many "voices of Islam," or to extend health care to the millions of
uninsured, or to expand the political franchise and rights of minorities and
women -- these are distinguished scholars whose work will repay your attention.
I'm very proud to be able to share this day with them.
Of course all of us come to a discussion of higher education still very
much affected by the events of last week in Blacksburg, Virginia. Our prayers
and thoughts continue to be with the families of those who died and with the
community of Virginia Tech.
If we needed a reminder that the university is not an ivory tower, nothing could
have demonstrated that fact more terribly, more horrifically, than those hours on
the Virginia Tech campus, when the university as a microcosm of our society was
on display. I want to say more about this in a few minutes. But first let me say
something about our purpose for being here.
We have come here, in part, to dispel a myth or two about Emory. A
university that does not play Division I basketball or football finds it hard to be
noticed in our infotainment culture.
Although Emory is known in many quarters as "Coca-Cola U" -- and although we
remain indelibly proud of the cola-generated Candler and Woodruff legacies that
have been so momentous for us -- Emory now competes on a national, and
indeed, a global stage for talent and resources. Our admissions program is
among the most selective in the country, admitting only one-quarter of all
applicants this year, to the celebration and sometimes consternation of many a
loyal friend and alumnus; our degree programs rank internationally among the
best, elevating the stature of the whole as the parts become stronger and
stronger.
Among the aspirations to which we call ourselves in our vision statement
is the call for Emory to become a destination university. Supporting that
aspiration is that fact that our home city is a flourishing base, a destination itself
growing (in the last a'years) faster than any other metro area in the country, and
offering strong partnerships and collaborations with the likes of CARE, the
American Cancer Society, and the CDC. All of these things provide benchmarks
by which we can track the progress that Emory has made in the past three
decades to find its place among the top twenty universities in America.
In addition to getting the facts straight about Emory, we have come here,
in part also, to show off this constellation of stars -- just a dozen who will have to
stand today for many hundreds of others. We have left behind wonderful
scholars who have made great impact -- people like Dennis Liotta who is
committed to drug discovery and was the co-inventor (along with his colleague
Ray Schinazi) of the most widely-prescribed retroviral drug to control the ravages
of HIV/AIDS. And people like Frans de Waal, who, owing to his work on nonprimate
behavior, Time Magazine has just identified as one of America's top 100
interesting people. Or people like Harriet Robinson, who is leading human trials
of a potential HIV vaccine. Or people Like Natasha Trethewey who just last
week was awarded a Pulitzer prize for her poetry. But the faculty that are here
will give you a good flavor of the caliber of engaged scholarship that is so evident
on Emory's campus.
As a research university we work at the usual things that all American
universities are up to -- expanding the frontiers of knowledge, slaying ignorance,
discovering cures for disease, and, of course, finding places for people to park.
With the exception of finding parking space, perhaps, all of these other things,
related to academic achievement, are in some ways the easiest things we do.
But although academic enrichment is a very important part of the work of a
leading university, our world needs universities that can playa still more critical
role. That role is to provide a forum where people who disagree violently can do
so without actually resorting to violence. That role is one that requires courage,
because the more fully we embrace it, the more profoundly we are opened to
internal dissension and external criticism. It is a role not being played adequately
by any other insUtution in our increasingly fractious society. And it is about that
role -- that risky role that requires such courage -- that I wish to commit the
remainder of my remarks.
You here today don't need me to tell you what kind of world we live in.
Those of you in the media report on it every day. And the rest of us -- who rely on
you professionals to give us fuller insight into our world -- also know first-hand
that American civic life has grown harsh. It's not quite the Hobbesian state of
nature, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." But we may
sometimes fear that we're devolving to that. We probably can't (and mustn't)
blame it on the Internet, television, talk radio. No, most of these are, in the truest
sense, mere media -- conduits -- for ideas and movements that would find other
means of expression even if electronic communications did not exist. It's simply
that we live in a contentious and often polarized world. Many who work as
researchers and teachers in universities are prone to vilification or worse, from
true believers of the left and right -- from those who oppose the use of animals to
test new drugs or vaccines, no matter how many years of human life they might
redeem from pain or death; from those who oppose research-driven state
policies requiring the use of seatbelts or the use of vaccines to prevent diseases
in children; or for that matter, from those who contest the teaching of evolutionary
theory, a foundation stone of the modern life sciences. The list could go on and
on in considerable detail, reminding us all of the unexpected way, at this late date
in the history of the West, that science and reason themselves have become
subjects of controversy. If you have former friends who now keep a distance
because of political disagreement, changes in religious belief or practice,
or contention over the way to raise children -- well, you can count yourselves part
of what seems to be a growing club.
All of us are familiar with the famous line attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald,
that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in
mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Less famously,
Conor Cruise O'Brien (contributing editor to The Atlantic magazine) described an
intellectual as "someone who is prepared to admit when another has made a
point in a debate."
On both counts it's fair to wonder whether our society has lost some of its
capacity for instilling -- or at least requiring -- this kind of intellectual
capaciousness, this (perhaps uniquely human but too often underemployed)
ability to experience or understand life from another person's perspective. Can
you imagine the talking heads on some of the cable TV channels and AM radio
stations pausing in the middle of their heated exchanges and saying, "You know,
Bill, or you know Sean, or you know, Tim -- I think you have a point there." It
doesn't happen, or at least it doesn't happen often. We are a society
increasingly trained to hold on like bulldogs to a narrow way of viewing things.
Perhaps it is in our sense of surety, founded or unfounded, that we find comfort.
Here's an illustration of what I mean. Passing through an airport I noticed
in a shop a miniature glass globe, a biosphere, containing a half-dozen live red
shrimp and a stalk of an underwater plant. This air-tight, water-filled container
creates a perfect, self-contained environment: the seaweed produces oxygen for
the shrimp, which in turn produce carbon-dioxide for the plant and "groom" it by
eating microalgae off it. These biospheres require nothing further -- no need to
add water, air, food, plants, or anything else. You can put it on your desk and
forget about it.
Most of us have encountered persons or communities who would like to
exist in a similar kind of "bubble." Sure, they go about life in the real world of work
and play, but they would prefer not to have to upset the perfectly comfortable
balance of thought in their mental framework. They would prefer that no new
ideas enter their self-consistent belief system, and that no new mental (or moral)
energy be required of them. Presumably, this is the "foolish consistency" about
which Emerson warned us.
In more modern parlance, people who exercise such foolish consistency
could be described as "fundamentalists," (exercising comfortable self-consistent
fundamentalism) except that that term tends to have a particularly religious
connotation for many of us these days. But fundamentalisms come in various
stripes.
Consider the political fundamentalist. A study published by Emory
Professor of Psychology Drew Westen, who will talk on one of the panels here
today, demonstrates that after voters make up their mind about a political
candidate, rational activity stops. The brain processes new information in a way
that reinforces positive emotions toward a preferred candidate, while tuning out
information that threatens this positive response. In other words, we resist being
disturbed by facts from outside our bubbles. "My mind is made up -- don't confuse
me with the facts."
Indeed, the characteristics we normally find in religious fundamentalism --
rigidity of belief, intolerance of alternative practices, and personal derogation of
those who are different -- some would say apply to American political life as well.
A fundamentalist mindset leads to the dangers of excluding and even demonizing
those who disagree with us. I could name examples on either end of the political
spectrum and in almost all areas of intellectual endeavor (science, philosophy,
law, business, even health and healing, but you know them as well as I do.
Universities have sometimes been accused of practicing our own form of
fundamentalism. They have not always offered a welcome place for wrestling
with religious faith, for example. On the one extreme - At some colleges and
universities, faculty and students must toe a certain line defined by dogma-so
that scholarship is not so much informed by faith as determined by it. At the other
extreme - At most research universities, I'm afraid, faith is set aside as a
charming anachronism, and religion is viewed through the lens of dispassionate
objectivity, if it is permitted to be discussed at all.
Both of these models ignore the capacity of human intelligence to believe
one thing while passionately examining its opposite. Both also diminish the vital
need for persons of differing perspectives to understand each other's intellectual
constructs.
Given our human tendencies to grasp tenaciously to our opinions and to
seek the comfort of foolish consistency, one begins to appreciate more clearly
the essential and distinctive role of the university to create habitats where we are
safe, but where it is also impossible for us merely to exist like shrimp in a bubble,
instead of truly living where it is impossible merely to exist without being
challenged also to live. The business of a university is to set us free from our
self-centered universe, to enable us to perceive the world from others'
perspectives, and to empower us to make a positive impact on society. Let me
repeat. The true purpose of the university is to lead us out of our self-centered
universes to a place where we can gain insight, not merely information; The
university mission is as much about gaining wisdom as about gaining knowledge.
But how does the exercise of that mission get carried on a university
campus? Well, for Emory, consider what Booker Prize-winning novelist Salman
Rushdie, the Dalai Lama, and former President Jimmy Carter have in commonbesides,
as you may have heard, their acceptance of faculty appointments to
teach Emory students. Beside their Emory connections, the other thing they
share is a commitment to precipitating and engaging in what some have called
impossible conversations. By "impossible conversations" I mean those
conversations people tend NOT to engage in because of the discomfort caused
by political differences, religious dogmatism, or the deep-seated prejudices that
attach to race, gender, and s~xuality, because such conversations risk scratching
the glass bubbles of our self-contained, self-consistent belief systems. It's easier
to cut off conversation than to cut through the knottiness of some issues. It's
certainly easier to walk away than to walk beside someone whose views we
violently oppose.
The lasting contribution of the university tradition lies in its dedication to
fostering -- indeed, to requiring -- such "impossible conversations." -- a
requirement along with the thirst for intellectual diversity that allows us to view
the world from other's perspectives. Now, engaging in impossible conversations
does not mean that we have to find resolution to every problem; but it does mean
that we do have to engage. Such engagement rarely happens outside of
universities. As we have discussed already, it cannot happen on certain TV
programs and AM radio shows. It does not happen, except by accident, in the
well of the U.S. House or Senate, or in the halls of the United Nations, or in any
other political venue where rhetoric is employed instrumentally, for political ends,
and where what passes for debate is not genuine debate, and when the rules
often are invoked to stop debate rather than enhance it. It often does not happen
in our religious communities, which more frequently take the path of schism than
resolution. Such impossible conversations sometimes do not even happen
among some married couples or in some families.
Only the university is required by its mission to take pains to set the stage
and define the rules for fair and honest engagement over issues of great
moment. Only at a university can discussion be moderated so that all sides have
an opportunity to be heard. Perhaps it is owing to this reputation and expectation
for inquiry and objectivity that our presidential debates in America are held on
university campuses. Universities also insist on non-violence - that those who
wish to speak leave aside hate speech and ad hominem attacks, and couch their
ideas in language that assures that people will want to listen - that even deeply
offensive ideas can be discussed without offending people.
This sounds like a noble aim and it is at the root of the distinction between
academic freedom and freedom of speech, but the process can be messy and
unpleasant. And sometimes it opens universities to public scorn. Think of the
barrage of protest launched at universities in the 1980s and 1990s when they
tried to establish codes by which to define civil discourse. Hate speech, carefully
defined, was to be avoided; threats against persons on the basis of race, gender,
ethnicity, or religion were ruled out of bounds. The aim was to promote the kind
of community where people could trust that they could in fact articulate
outrageous ideas without suggesting that their opponents should die, and could
in fact be protected from such threat~ themselves.
Critics of both the left and the right came down hard on these universities,
denouncing as "PC" the kind of self-definition that these communities attempted.
What these critics missed was that universities are in fact engaged in a worthy
kind of PC -- not the "political correctness" that has been the bogeyman of so
many commentators, but rather, PC as a kind of "passionate civility." Universities
must have the courage to EN-courage their faculty members and students to
engage passionately with the ideas that excite them, but to do so civilly -- with
respect for the persons who espouse those ideas.
One of the prouder, recent moments at Emory occurred in February, when
the University community gathered in our Glenn Auditorium to talk about
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, President Jimmy Carter's controversial book.
(For those of you who may not be aware of or have read the former president's
book, it presents an argument -- as an attorney might -- assembling and
connecting facts and events, which conclude that the principal barrier to the
peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians lies with the policies and
practices of the Israeli state. As you can imagine, this conclusion has been
offensive to some.) President Carter's talk, however, was an exercise in
passionate civility and a commitment to begin holding one of those impossible
conversations. Some members of the Emory community felt the need to hold
one of their own community members accountable. Carter, in turn, wanted to
explain his position more fUlly within the University family. The intense but civil
and courteous discourse that ensued was a model for what our universities and
indeed our civilization should seek. The audience of students, faculty, and staff
members -- many of whom disagreed violently with Carter's perspective -- did
what a university (and perhaps only a university) does best: it practiced a
passionate but nonviolent way of engaging respectfully, honestly, and
purposefully while trying to understand complex truth.
I do not know whether anyone's opinions were changed on that day by
President Carter's words. But I do believe that some minds were changed by
participating in the process. They were made stronger, more open, more nimble,
more capable of understanding, through the practice of impossible
conversations. And that particular conversation continues at Emory, bringing into
the conversation voices from on-campus and off with various perspectives.
And here is another example, made all the more current and necessary by
the recent flap over Don Imus. For the past two years, and for the next three
years as well, Emory is engaged in something we call the Transforming
Community Project -- an effort to engage everyone in our university community,
from faculty and students to administrative assistants and groundskeepers and
alumni and lab technicians, in probing conversations about race in our institution.
Like every other university founded in the South before the Civil War, Emory has
slavery in its past. Like every other institution in America, Emory is made up of
people who often have a difficult time talking frankly with each other about race,
especially across racial lines. Emory is one of only several dozen colleges and
universities in the country -- out of more than 700 that applied -- to be awarded
grants by the Ford Foundation through its Difficult Dialogues program to carry out
this project. In fact we at Emory believe so much in the necessity and likely
positive outcome of the project, that we are investing more than $2 million of our
own funds in seeing it through. We want to transform our community, and in the
process we hope to model the way for other American communities to be
transformed. We want this so much that we are willing to risk failure in the
attempt. And risk, after all, is the necessary dark side of courage.
This particular notion of institutional courage can be deepened and
extended, though. There's a special courage required to continue as a university
"family," so-called. Although the bonds of the biological family don't exist, the
courageous university community adopts the practices of healthy families -- at
least in the following way. The faculty members who vehemently dispute each
other's arguments -- as several of Emory's professors have disputed President
Carter's -- are willing to engage passionately in the debate while remaining in
community with each other. Just as Emory will not sever its ties with the Carter
Center, as some have urged, neither will Carter's fiercest faculty critics sever
their own ties with Emory -- aggrieved as they may be. To me this is the special
quality of universities, and the particular reason why we can and must have
courage. We must give harbor to the unpopular but well-argued, the marginal but
potentially fruitful believing that in the fullness of time, some of those unlikely or
unwelcome ideas, just one or two of those uncomfortable critics, may be the very
ones in whom we find new meaning and hope.
Now I can hear your skepticism: Sure, you say, this is easy in a university
"family" After all, tenured professors can to go at each other hammer-and-tongs
in the safety of their cloistered campuses, where nothing much is at stake, and
where the work of Classics scholars, lab-rat feeders, and sentence diagrammers
in freshman English courses has little or no impact on the lives of long-haul
truckers, low-income single mothers, Wall Streeters, or our fellow human beings
who suffer misery, war, and environmental degradation in places like Darfur,
Afghanistan, and Nigeria. Come on, I hear you say, what courage is necessary
when your job is guaranteed except in the event of proven malfeasance, moral
turpitude, or failure to show up?
It may be that our image of the academy is still informed too much by
stereotypic images of the sixties: long-haired philosophers in bell-bottoms and
denim vests seeking to appear relevant to their young charges in the SOS.
Let me offer another image a counter-image, a real image, in fact: It is the
image of a middle-aged historian in a business suit, lecturing to a packed hall of
250 with the Internet transmitting his every syllable to a dozen other campuses
around the country, recounting with considerable detail and passion why he has
broken with a former U.S. President, a friend and colleague of a quarter-century's
standing, over the critical differences in their shared devotion to the achievement
of peace in the Middle East. That image, of course, is of Professor of History Ken
Stein, earlier this month at Emory, continuing the riveting "impossible
conversation" that has engaged so many on our campus since President Carter's
publication of his controversial book. This is courage -- to continue the
conversation, to stay involved, to talk but also to listen, to respond.
The Great Seal of the State of Georgia, which Emory of course calls
home, displays the state's motto: "Wisdom, Justice, Moderation." Interestingly,
these are three of the four cardinal virtues identified by Aristotle, three of the four
great virtues on which all the rest of moral life depends. What's the fourth virtue,
the one missing from the seal? Well actually, it is the one that Aristotle identified
as the first and it is a virtue to which we have referred several times: Courage.
Aristotle, in some ways the "Father of Ethics," points out that "Courage is the first
of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees the others." Wisdom
and justice--even the discipline of moderation necessary to avoid the extremes
of passion--will not last without courage. As you observe the progress and
achievements of Emory, and other research universities, we do of course want
you to be cognizant of our achievements -- our Nobels and Pulitzers and Rhodes
scholarships, our grants and contracts, our patents and cures. But also look at us
through the frame of PC -- of passionate civility. Are we passionate -- do we
care? Do we care deeply and profoundly about the antagonisms and needs of
our world? And do we care civilly - with respect for persons, with nonviolent
debate at a time of violent disagreement? Are we hosting and even insisting
upon impossible conversation over such matters a Palestinian - Israeli conflict,
about race and difference, about campus security, about stem cell research,
about religions and the human spirit, about shifting political tectonics, about the
future and affordability of health care. If so, that is the PC test -- the test that
shows whether we have not only passionate civility but the practical courage --
that you have every right to expect of Emory, and of every university worthy of
the name.
Thank you very much.
