Academic Excellence Overview May 13, 2006 12(noon) - Wright Cafeteria -?q3 It is a great pleasure for me as University Chancellor to welcome you to the Bloomington campus. We think this is a special place, with a special student-oriented culture that has led to many accolades being thrown our way by corporations and the national media. Bloomington is, as you know, a large campus. There are advantages and disadvantages to size. You'll have to decide how you "fit" or might "fit" into this campus or some other like it. Size obviously offers variety, and of all kinds -- diversity in the student body, in cultural and artistic programs, in approaches even to specialized areas in nearly all disciplines, in curricular and extracurricular opportunities, in lectures and debates and visiting scholars; diversity in your semester's choices, in your choices every day. The Hutton Honors College, as some of you know, combines the often bewildering advantages of size with the intimacy, the intellectual challenge, the intensity of small seminars, 1
tutorials, individualized counseling and advising. Honors students experience what it means to be at a large pluralistic public research university at the same time that they experience what it means to be involved in small group instruction of the type traditionally associated with such universities as Oxford or Cambridge in England. We believe that you should know how and in what ways Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others influenced the beginnings of the United States, but also how and in what ways local school boards, city and county councils, affect the quality of life in a community. We believe that you should worry about the viability and efficiacy of ideas expressed in Plato's Republic and works like it, but also worry about the homeless and unemployed in Chicago and New York, Indianapolis and Bloomington, your own home town. It is a big order, this combining, this interweaving, of the big and the small, the historical and the contemporary, the general and the particular, the universal and the local; still, that's our expectation. 2
Currently, IU has four major priorities: information technology, the life sciences, enhancing the internationalization of an already internationalized campus, expanding our historical strengths in the arts and humanities. To give some examples: we're developing a comprehensive program in human biology that includes a bachelor of science in biotechnology; we are enlarging our programs in cognitive science - the study of mind and learning and intelligence; we'll introduce new undergraduate tracks in applied physics and computational bioscience; we have a new Bachelor of Arts in International Studies and a new Global Village Learning Center in the residence halls; we want to vastly increase the international experiences of our undergraduates; our Music School has hired world renowned pianist Andre Watts and world renowned violinist Jamie Laredo; we are planning to make 23 senior appointments and 10 junior appointments in four of the College's top ranked departments - English, Fine Arts, History, and Philosophy; we are funding a new undergraduate degree in 3
American Studies; our excellence in Cybersecurity will grow as we create baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral degrees in the area. When IU (then called Indiana College) was founded, James Monroe was serving as the fifth president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson, a key figure in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, died about the same time the first 40 IU students were being enrolled. Just over 100 years ago, Indiana University graduated its first African-American student, Marcellus Neal. Nearly a half century later, shortly before the D-Day invasion of Normandy, 2 0 th century poet T. S. Eliot expressed a sentiment that would have been as relevant at Neal's commencement as it is as you enter your senior year. "To make an end." Eliot wrote, "Is to make a beginning." When many of your parents were in college, this country was trying to move beyond the Vietnam War and had begun to face the 4
beginnings of the age of the personal computer and the rise of fundamentalist nationalism, first in the Balkans of southern Europe, now in the middle east. When I was your age, Alaska and Hawaii were voting to become part of the United States. Today, we seek to make permanent the new found democracies all over the world; the Cold War, the defining paradigm of my youth and much of my adulthood, ended when you were learning to crawl and talk. We celebrate this century's opportunity to grow a New Economy without daily fear of World War; and yet, we find ourselves still troubled by terrorism, racism, homelessness, violence, in the world at large. Such an historical perspective is one of the reasons why higher education in this state and across the nation takes the future as one of its major responsibilities. Social and economic progress depends in part on short-term, specific programs; but in the long run, the character of the American people depends on how seriously you take your education, on how much you care about 5
the quality of our world. A university such as this one not only has a long and distinguished past; it must also look into what it knows will be a long, and what it hopes will be a distinguished, future. That future and the future of this state and nation could include you. The four years you spend in college will be the freest years of your entire life-you will never again have the options which will be available to you between your freshman and senior years. Often, it will not seem that you have such freedom, as pressures from various sides, voices from elements in your life, seek to persuade you to move in one direction or another. But you will be increasingly in principal control of the identity you must create, the person you will become. One of the most exciting and, at the same time, one of the most frightening aspects of being in college is that you will meet people who, unlike your family and friends, will never have seen you before, will have no historical sense of who you are, no understanding of why you think and act in the ways 6
you do. Some of you, as I was, may be the first in your immediate or extended family to come to college; others may represent long lines of Indiana ties. How are you going to be perceived? How will the perceptions of others compare and contrast with your own conception of yourselves or with the conceptions of those who will have shared your experiences so intimately to that moment in your lives? You will be free, then, in many ways, to shape who you are, who you will become. The faculty and staff in Bloomington, fully aware of such freedom-most especially of its disarming and disturbing aspects-will put before you the accumulated knowledge of centuries of thinkers and doers. Should you elect to join this community, the world as you now know it-if we do our job right-will never be the same-you will care about countries you've never heard of, worry about issues that are at this moment unknown to you, get excited about causes that, once far away, suddenly might affect your lives or those of your children. Most of you, hard as it seems to believe, will change 7
your major at least once. You may have a class with a woman recognized as one of the major literary critics of our time; or with a Chemistry professor who has received all five of the national awards available in the discipline; you may get to know a political science professor whose introduction to Africa is the best-selling text on that subject in the world; or study with a leading researcher in recombinant DNA or with one of the fine instructors of the fifty or so foreign languages we offer; you might be among the first to graduate from our cutting-edge School of Informatics. Many of you will attend our great opera theater and art museum, see our famous basketball team, perhaps enjoy another national soccer championship; almost certainly you will enter the Auditorium and view the newly restored Thomas Hart Benton Murals, among the great works of 20th Century American Art. All of this, and so much more, is part of what it means to be at one of the great universities in the world. 8
If you are with us, we hope to charge you for a lifetime - not only by providing you with skills and techniques to enable you to be employed in the position of your choice, but also by providing you with instruction in vision to enable you to see complexly, recognizing nuances of expression, subtle shades of color, the significance of the touch of a hand, the movement of an eye, the imperceptible shifts of social structures, minute changes in measurement. You need, we believe, good enough vision to see far-far into the past, knowing where we have come from, how we have developed as a people, how our values have been shaped and determined, in what ways we are like and unlike our predecessors and ancestors; you also need good enough vision to see far into the future, to know how to analyze trends and foreshadowings, how to identify and assess the factors, scientific and non-scientific, which will do much to create our future. Our lives, after all, yours and mine, are not isolated spots in timethey make up a series of closely connected endings and 9
beginnings. A fuller context of the T. S. Eliot line I quoted earlier reads like this: What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from... A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments... History is now... We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. I realize that you have decisions to make, opportunities to choose the road less traveled or the one widely traveled. I also realize you have challenges - exciting ones - ahead - new beginnings, not the least. Those of us on the Bloomington campus would treasure 10
sharing all of these with you, guiding as needed, getting out of your way as appropriate, embracing you as necessary. Many thanks for being here today. And, whatever you decide to do, I offer you my best wishes for success and satisfaction. 11