State of the University Address 2006

At Convocation each year, we welcome freshmen and other new students to the University community. You’re arriving at a very special time, as we celebrate UMBC’s 40th anniversary. Not only were many of you not born when the campus opened its doors in 1966, but many of our faculty and staff also were not yet born. In the short time since, we have become a leader among the nation’s universities. What makes this such a special place is that we have been able to attract thousands of superb thinkers – faculty, staff, and most important today, you, our new students.

In 1966, I was a freshman in college and recall the Convocation speaker saying to us, “Look to your left; look to your right; one of you will not graduate.” At UMBC, we say, “Look to your left; look to your right; our goal is to make sure that all of you graduate.” As we work to support you, I also encourage you to support and learn from one another. Throughout your college career, you can play a major role in each other’s success – as study partners; as collaborators in the lab, in performances, and on projects; as partners in civic engagement; as teammates on the athletic field; or simply as friends.

This past week, we held our annual university retreat for campus leaders, including SGA President Jordan Hadfield, who just spoke, and Carrie Mann, our Vice President. They make a dynamic team. It’s significant that Jordan is the first UMBC student ever to chair the University Steering Committee, made up of the leaders of our faculty, staff, and student Senates. It’s quite an honor for Jordan and reflects both his leadership abilities and the healthy community we’ve created here.

At the retreat, we reaffirmed our commitment to the University’s twin goals of providing you with a superb liberal arts education and seeking the truth through research across a variety of disciplines – research often involving students working side-by-side with faculty, focusing together on some of the key issues and challenges of the emerging century.

Following the retreat, during my annual State of the University Address to the campus community, I recommended Daniel Pink’s new book, A Whole New Mind, about society “moving from the information age to the conceptual age.” I strongly recommend it to you because it focuses on the new era in which you’ll spend much of your lives. Pink writes that,

Ours has been the [information] age of the “knowledge worker,”…but that is changing…
We are entering a new [conceptual] age…animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life… Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is sequential, logical, and analytical. The right hemisphere is nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic… Today, the defining skills of the previous era – the “left-brain” capabilities that powered the information age – are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the...“right-brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning…increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders… [P]rofessional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.”

What’s so exciting for you is that this new age is dawning just as you’re beginning your journey and liberal education. Your education will allow you to develop a “whole new mind” and become a whole person – someone balanced and able to think critically and solve problems on the one hand, and to be compassionate and creative on the other.

What exactly do we mean by “liberal education”? The word “liberal” comes from the Latin adjective “liber,” meaning “free.” The word “education” comes from both the Latin verb “duco,” meaning “to lead,” and the prefix “e,” which means “out of.” Defined literally, then, “liberal education” means “the free act of leading out of.” Most often, “liberal education” has been associated with free people, who, unlike slaves or indentured servants, had time to cultivate the intellect. Another interpretation of “liberal education” is education for its own sake – much like climbing a mountain because the mountain is there – and freedom to think and explore ideas in any direction. This freedom is the greatest opportunity you will find here, and we will help you capitalize on it by connecting you with faculty and staff – through courses and experiences that promote student engagement, leadership, study groups, research opportunities, mentoring, advising, co-curricular experiences, exposure to diversity, and community service.

As you begin your UMBC experience, we hope you will become passionate about your education. You will feel the enthusiasm of the faculty – from psychology professor Anne Brodsky’s work on women’s rights in Afghanistan and philosophy professor Sue Dwyer’s exploration of ethical issues involving pornography, free speech, and abortion, to theatre professor Wendy Salkind’s work with students on movement and stage acting, and chemist Michael Summers’ cutting-edge research on the HIV virus.

I often talk about Samuel Beckett’s novel, Molloy , in which the main character is enraptured by what he sees when he observes the dancing behavior of bees. Molloy says, “Here’s something I could study all my life and never understand.” The lesson from Beckett is that none of us ever reaches the end of our education – the more we learn, the more we appreciate how much more there is to know. I am convinced that the keys to a rich life are maintaining a passion for learning and being part of a community through meaningful relationships.

Throughout your college experience, you will learn not only about relationships, but also about diversity of people. In this area, especially, I urge you to push yourselves to move beyond your comfort zones. UMBC is a microcosm of the nation and world, with students and faculty from every state and over 120 countries, representing a variety of backgrounds in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, politics, sexual orientation, and culture. In the process of getting to know others, not only do we come to appreciate our differences, but we also learn about those characteristics that make us so much the same – our fears, hopes, and dreams.

We want you to dream – and to develop the skills and values that will empower you to achieve your dreams. We want you to ask the “big” questions. As I read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go , this year’s book selection for new students, I found myself with an increasingly uneasy sense that, in many ways, and not unlike most of us as we mature, the students in the book – Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy – didn’t seem to understand fully their ultimate purpose in life and its consequences. The book pushes us to think about both our relationships with others and how well we understand ourselves. And I couldn’t help but think that, just as we see these students accepting their fate and the assumptions about their future, human beings too often fail to take the time to question what has always been the case – what we take for granted.

We want you to be inspired by your story and the stories of others. A few years before my freshman year in college, I had the privilege of being a child leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, Alabama. I went to jail with Martin Luther King and learned one very important lesson – that even children can make important choices that affect not only their own lives, but the lives of others. Because of that experience, I know that each of you has the potential to be a leader in our society – not 20 years from now, but now.
To live and lead outside your comfort zone, you’ll need to embrace the world around you. To do that, you’ll need to develop the skills and values of a liberal education; be passionate about your life and what you do; value your relationships with people; and see your education and your life as a journey. You’re beginning the next important stage of your journey here at UMBC.

This past year, we awarded an honorary degree to Duke University President Richard Brodhead, who served the decade before as the Yale Dean. Each year at Yale, he addressed new freshmen, many of whom for the first time were away from home for an extended period. In one of his talks, he explored the meaning of “home,” commenting that it is a place where people typically feel safe and protected. He cautioned, however, that “this impulse toward self-protection [is] also devastating to the project of education, and that the way to get the good of this place is to stretch yourself, to expose yourself to what you don’t already know and aren’t already good at.” He also quoted poet Emily Dickinson, who as a college freshman in 1850 wrote to a college friend that, “The shore is safer,…but I love to buffet the sea.” In other words, she didn’t want to settle simply for the safe way; she was determined, instead, to struggle with the unknown and the difficult questions of life.

The good news is that here, at UMBC, you are at home, which means that you are safe enough – and have sufficient freedom – to explore the sticky issues, from cloning and stem cell research, to the troublesome gaps between poor and advantaged people, to the appropriate role of America as the most powerful country in the world.

You also have more freedom than ever to make choices that will affect both you and those around you. For example, it should bother us all that 1,400 college students die each year from binge drinking – that’s more than 100 deaths each month, more than three deaths each day. We want you to use your freedom responsibly – in ways that will help you grow and develop intellectually and as a person. I often say that character has everything to do with who you are, what you say, and how you act – not only when others see you, but, even more important, when others cannot see you. We at UMBC believe deeply in the importance of academic and personal integrity. Your education here is about character, integrity, the excitement of learning, knowing oneself, serving others, and learning how to make good decisions.

During the next few years, I will often give you the following challenge:

Watch your thoughts; they become your words.
Watch your words; they become your actions.
Watch your actions; they become your habits.
Watch your habits; they become your character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

--Anonymous

Welcome home, and best wishes on your journey.

^1. Pink, Daniel H., A Whole New mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Riverhead Press, New York, 2005, pp. 2-3.
^2. Beckett, Samuel, Molloy, Grove Press Inc., 1955.
^3. Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go: A Novel, Vintage Books, New York, 2005.
^4. Brodhead, Richard H., The Good of This Place: Values and Challenges in College Education, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003, p. 5.
^5. Dickinson, Emily, 1850 letter to a college friend, in Brodhead, Ibid., p.5.

CONVOCATION ADDRESS