Turning Toward Each Other:
The Renewed Commitment of the Land Grant Research University

594^th Faculty Senate
September 20, 2001, Address
Marcellette G. Williams, Chancellor

Over the past week, one of the questions most often heard across the country has been, what can I do to help? What can I do to help? Some have answered that question by giving blood; many by praying; others by comforting the distressed or raising flags in memoriam of the terror and the tragedy.

What can I do to help...? This is also a question each of us can ask ourselves at this time, in our own capacities as researchers, scholars, and teachers. It is a time when we, as a university, can ask ourselves, what is our role in preventing violence and building hope in America, and in the world?

For one, we can affirm our care and support for the extended University family, for the families and friends of those people we have lost. By now you have heard that the attacks have claimed the lives of an OIT staff member, Christoffer Carstanjen, and four alums (sadly) to date. Those are the direct losses; the number of people who know someone, by blood or acquaintance, who was killed on September 11, is staggering.

In some way, we have all been touched by the tragedy. Some of us lived anxious moments on Tuesday when it was unclear whether our own family members were aboard the hijacked planes or in the targeted buildings. Those moments were long enough for us to appreciate that there are no words to make sense of precious lives lost–no words to explain, no words to comfort.

Yet we need to acknowledge the pain, the anger, in order to heal together. Your understanding, your compassion for the impact this loss has had on our students and on each other is commendable. This community has shown its best face in the last week, coming together to share words of support and prayers for peace. We have felt the need to turn toward–rather than away from--each other, and we have held each other closely, in our arms and in our hearts.

As we have looked around our dinner tables, and our meeting tables, we see each other with greater tenderness today, connected in sorrow for those we have lost; connected in gratitude that we are among the living.

In the coming days, as we continue to remember, we also have an obligation to insert new questions into public conversation, on this campus and in our nation. As you know so well, good scholarship reveals hidden connections–across cultures, across time, across disciplines–connections that illuminate patterns not obviously visible on the surface. While connections have been drawn between last Tuesday’s attacks and those on Pearl Harbor, we have seen little public conversation about their relationship with the unhealed wounds of the Vietnam era, or their potential relationship with prior U.S. involvements in the Gulf and in central Asia; about our global economic policies; or about the challenge of non-violent social change.

The media coverage of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath has featured a great number of government officials and agency representatives, but relatively few academics. Perhaps we’re not very good at producing soundbites. (A skill we didn’t learn in grad school!) Or perhaps we have not come forward in a way that speaks to the public.

I am reminded of the distinction Jack Miles makes (in a recent CrossCurrents article) between the academic and the intellectual. Whereas the academic disciplines his or her curiosity to remain within narrow bounds and seeks an audience of professional colleagues, the intellectual is concerned with questions that cross-disciplinary boundaries and seeks conversation with other interested citizens in a rich and accessible idiom.

These times call for us to be public intellectuals in the best sense, scholars who seek to connect our work in the library and laboratory with public dialogue on matters of shared concern. As the faculty of a land-grant research university, we have the special responsibility to raise questions and to provide insights that move us beyond simple dichotomies of good and evil, of civilization vs. barbarism. The public has entrusted us–not to do their thinking for them–but to think out loud, to enrich public conversation and to enable a larger and more diverse set of voices to join the dialogue. We do well, I believe, when our ideas enable others to speak; we do well, when we listen, and allow ourselves to be changed by the conversation.

We appear to be entering a vastly complex period that many people will seek to simplify and paint in broad-brush strokes. It will be a challenge to affirm the complexity of issues and the need for multiple perspectives to inform our decisions, especially regarding military action. It will be a challenge to call for deliberation and reflection amid the heated desire and calls for retribution. But as public intellectuals, we have some responsibility, I believe, for leadership in the conversation that may define our era and the lives of our students for years to come.

As a beginning, we need to practice conversing with each other, with patience and with civility, across disciplines, to find ground on which we can stand in council together.

Even within this University, in our conversations about what matters to us, to our nation, and to our world--how can we turn toward each other?

The terrible events of the past days–and the events we foresee on the horizon–call us to have courage and persistence in moving to the fore of social deliberation and cross-cultural engagement. It is a position that the University has traditionally relished. In 1977, UMass was among the leaders in American higher education in divesting from South Africa. We remain at the fore of the movement toward pro-active, grass-roots multicultural change on campus, with teams from each area of the University assessing our efforts related to community, diversity, and social justice–a model which has attracted attention from institutions nationwide.

This University has, from its founding, understood itself as having a global outreach mission. Not long after then Massachusetts Agricultural College admitted its first class in 1867, it hosted international students from Brazil, Chile, and Japan. In 1876, the President of the College, William Smith Clark, traveled to Hokkaido, a northern island of Japan, to help establish the Sapporo Agricultural College at the request of the Japanese government. Concerned with the application of research for practical purposes as well as the development of character, Clark once told his Japanese students "Your calling is to improve the world." After resigning as President of Massachusetts Agricultural College, Clark devoted himself to plans for a "floating college," a ship that would carry scholars, students, and citizens around the world on an expedition of learning. Although his dream of a "floating college" never materialized, Clark’s legacy is a University of global span that connects people and ideas across continents.

The challenges we now face in this country call for us to continue the work of connecting--across the uncertainties of difference. We must continue doing well what we have long done, teaching our students the skills of critical thinking, of cross-cultural communication, of civil and reflective engagement with unfamiliar ideological, philosophical, and religious views. In performing our core mission well, we also enrich public conversation, in that the dialogues occurring in classrooms ripple across campus and into families and communities around the country.

And our challenge is to continue strengthening pedagogical approaches we know to be at the cornerstone of a more cohesive and caring society. I speak here of service learning, learning communities, and other strategies which join community engagement, community leadership, and concern for the public good with disciplinary mastery. The university, perhaps more than most other social institutions, can enable students to practice the arts of collaborative learning and participatory decision-making–the public arts of turning toward each other for consultation that stand at the heart of our democratic tradition.

Many of you, I’m sure, have given portions of your class periods over to discussion of the attacks and their aftermath. I encourage you to continue making space, whenever appropriate, in classes or departmental gatherings, for students to express their concerns and deepen the complexity of their understanding of these events. By facilitating reflective dialogue, you model for students the kind of role they can practice in their families and communities.

I have been inspired over the past week by the strong leadership our students have taken in helping each other mourn and thus enabling us, as a community, to reflect on this tragedy together. They have proven how much they are capable of doing when their energies are united and focused on productive action. Their work invites us to ask: how can we continue to support students, now that they have turned toward each other? How can we reach out to students who want to participate in discussions of how we can live and learn together amid the searing animosities we have experienced?

Honoring students’ capacities for leadership and ethical action is another of our own moral responsibilities at this time. Students are ready to work together. They want to work together and contribute something for others–how can we turn toward them, and affirm our shared commitments?

In sum, I believe our challenge now is to live the values to which we have been witness. Our challenge is to speak our scholarship with a public voice, to help this country move beyond fear and hatred, to reasoned deliberation about the origins of hostility toward us, and to deliberations about how we might overcome injustice by working together toward a world livable for all its peoples. Our challenge is to ask ourselves what we, as intellectuals and as an institution, can do…..and turn toward each other to work out the answers.

Here on campus, this moment is an opportunity for us to rise above what divides us, to rise above the resentment or anger we may feel about fiscal or organizational challenges this university may face, to rise above all that would have us turn our backs to each other. The courage and commitment we have seen demonstrated over the past week by firefighters, by police officers, and by thousands of citizens has found resonance in us–we know that such courage, such capacity to care is inside each of us as well. This week reminds me that, just as this country has deep, untapped resources of resilience and collaboration, so too does this institution have deep and often untapped resources of resilience and collaboration. To tap them, we must focus on the larger goals that brought us here, and our shared vision for a better, wiser world.

I am committed to lead this University this year so that we can turn toward each other. I know we can do it, and emerge from any challenge that threatens us with renewed strength.

Doing so requires effort, and there is much to do in the year ahead. On September 25, Chancellor Lazare, with the Search Committee for the Next Chancellor, will present the findings of the Task Force charged by President Bulger and the Trustees to review the campus in preparation for the work of the Search Committee. In general, for us, the work of the coming year will involve shared reflection on our recent past and comprehensive analyses of our present circumstances. Some of that work has already started. Such reflection is vital as we consider together various scenarios and options that will enable us to maintain excellence as the hallmark of this University, in whatever we feel it is most important for us to do, at whatever level of resources we may have. There are many choices before us, but being less than our best, striving for less than excellence is not among them. Our resilience is far stronger than any obstacle that may temporarily stand in our way.

In closing, I want to hearken back to William Smith Clark and the advent of this institution. Clark took office only two months before the first classes were scheduled to begin in the fall of 1867. He quickly recruited professors whose names you all know: Goodell, Stockbridge, Goessman. In a eulogy for Clark, Professor Goodell recalled how he had been recruited by Clark to serve on the new faculty:

Clark’s question asked of the very first faculty, echoes today. At this time, in our world and on our campus, we are asked, Will you come and help?

Turning toward each other, we have already answered.

The mission of this University is as it was in the beginning and as it has evolved its research dimension: We believe the creation of new knowledge and research to be a public trust; we believe the dissemination of that new knowledge and research to our students to be a moral vocation; and we believe the application of that research and new knowledge beyond the boundaries of this campus to the community…to the Commonwealth…to the nation…and to the world…we believe this to be a social responsibility.

Will you come and help? Let us turn toward each other and answer.