Uncovering the Heart of Higher Education

With Richard S. Nodell, Consultant
Delivered Sunday, February 25, 2007

To begin, I’d like to invite you to take a minute to look around the room … notice who’s still here (we hearty souls), recall interactions you’ve had with people you see. Recall moments you’ve experienced in this room, this space – moments of inspiration, playfulness, insight, learning, wonder. Notice the residues of energy that are still here.

And I’d also like us to take one more moment to appreciate the people who made all of this possible – who imagined this remarkable gathering, mobilized a network of networks, and conjured an evocative collection of voices that none of us will soon forget. The call they issued tapped something very deep -- a yearning and a hunger in the many hundreds who made their way here, and the many thousands more we serve or represent.

I was in and out of the planning, as others did the heavy lifting – the Fetzer Institute (especially Mark Nepo), and the CIIS (especially Joe Subbiondo) – great kudos to them – and to the co-sponsors who brought the imprimatur of their organizations to legitimate these proceedings. This broadened coalition is part of what has made this occasion so memorable. I’m sure you share my gratitude to the conference organizers for having created this opportunity for us to participate in the evolution of the movement we’ve been witnessing – and growing forward – in our time here.

Following the initial planning conference at the Fetzer Institute -- in December 2004 -- I was invited to deliver the closing keynote. I knew then that this would be a weighty responsibility -- the task of sending you forth from an exciting, exhilarating (and probably exhausting) four days with a sense of possibility and hope. I had no way of imagining then the tiger I’d have by the tail.

I did have in mind that we would want to try to weave together some threads, as we concluded the conference, just as we hope our students will weave a coherent educational experience before they collect their diplomas. I also had in mind that all of us would have arrived here from different places. For me, the journey began in 1998 with a conference we hosted. It was organized by Wellesley’s prophetic dean of religious and spiritual life, Victor Kazanjian, who is here. Victor spent about two years planning that event, imagining a small gathering of a few brave souls ready to speak publicly about “religious pluralism, spirituality, and a new vision for higher education in America.” He was astonished -- and so were we all -- when over 800 guests arrived on our campus that October, from 250 educational institutions.

To accommodate such a crowd, we pitched a tent on the chapel lawn, in the heart of the campus, and I confess to some feelings of trepidation (rooky president that I was), as I saw faculty pass by on their way to the library, and sensed that they were wondering what sort of revival meeting we were hosting there. That was a common reaction then, not to be taken lightly – a boundary many faculty were holding (and many continue to hold) one worthy of the respectful engagement Parker extended to our critics.

Much has happened since that Wellesley conference. Our work is, if anything, more urgent than it was then. The world we are passing on to future generations, sadly, is far more fragile than we imagined it might be – even a mere decade ago. Intense and sobering questions daily press on our awareness now in new and alarming forms: environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, absolute poverty and a terrible gap between rich and poor, wars in the name of the sacred all around the globe, and here at home, the erosion of vital boundaries between church and state, and a military-industrial complex that has run amok.

The recent shift in political tides in the United States, ironically, has brought into sharper focus how far we have wandered, as a people and a nation hell-bent on accumulating wealth, from a core commitment to the mutual obligations that a generous reading of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was intended to stir.

Last year, as a prelude to this national conference, at the encouragement and with the support of the Fetzer Institute, we hosted another gathering at Wellesley, a small group of college and university presidents, each of whom brought a trusted colleague, to explore contemporary challenges to our leadership. Parker Palmer, Richard Nodell, David Blinder, and I designed and facilitated that evening and day together. We opened it by asking ourselves where we as educators feel confident that our institutions are serving our students well, and where we are letting them down. And that, of course, is the question that brings us all here to San Francisco.

It’s probably not an accident – although it wasn’t deliberate either – that this assignment I drew some two years ago has taken on new personal meaning with changes in the context of my life and work – my decision last April to step down from the Wellesley presidency at the end of the current academic year, after 14 years on the job. I’ve been trying to live this final year at Wellesley -- in a role and at an institution I have dearly loved -- as an opportunity, for me and the college, to pause and reflect on the journey: where it has led, what it has taught, what it has meant, and what it has opened for further expansion. I’ve hoped that we’ll be poised at the end – both I and my college -- to go our separate ways on paths of self-renewal of the kind described by John Gardner in his book of the same name: "an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our potentialities and the claims of life - not only the claims we encounter but the claims we invent."

So the process of preparing this transitional session – a keynote we are now calling not a “closing” but a “threshold”-- parallels the process I’ve been living back home these past ten months. For here, too, in San Francisco, we find ourselves in conversation with competing claims on our gifts and passions – claims that are calling to us, claims we may want to fend off, or conjure up. As my task for this closing was becoming clearer, I decided to enlist the help of my friend and colleague, Richard Nodell, who has worked closely, as an organizational consultant, with me and my leadership team for a dozen years at Wellesley. With Dick’s expert guidance, we’ve developed practices and disciplines there to excavate and mine the deeper meanings of our work. Some of those are alluded to in my essay entitled Trustworthy Leadership, the pamphlet you received in your conference bag.

We carve out time to think about the dynamic systems we’re leading. We read the responses to our efforts to implement change, and pay special attention to pressures on our partnerships. We interpret the many signals that emanate from the system, including our internal reactions to rapidly moving events. We use ourselves as barometers of organizational weather fronts, learn to distinguish our own “stuff” from the constant projections and expectations that leaders inevitably face. We take an appreciative stance with ourselves and others, looking for signs of health, rather than pathology, treating ourselves – our strengths, struggles, and growing edges – with the same gentle patience and understanding that we know our students need if they are to summon the courage to learn and grow.

We’ve learned, over time and with practice, to recognize the force fields around us in our leadership -- how powerful the systemic forces are, and how they can lay traps that divert us into acting out scripts that the organization has unconsciously written for us to play. We’ve learned to recognize and manage the inner mechanisms and self-doubts that make us susceptible to being ensnared in those traps. This work has helped me become more intimate with who I’ve come to know myself to be, to attend to inner stirrings that are intuitive, inchoate, and laden with meaning. It has help me authorize my differences -- my own distinctive way of being and of leading -- and to call my own seeing into being, in a role that constantly asks that I look through others’ eyes.

We’ve evolved and applied these disciplines not only to make sense of the big challenges and crises, when they occur, but also to stay alert to the day-to-day unfolding of the college’s future – the smaller setbacks, joys, and struggles that can so easily be pulverized in the pressure-cooker we call organizational life. I’ve learned that if I look away from the darkness or the light and just soldier on (as all the currents in the organization push me to do), I gradually erode the key partnerships on which my effectiveness depends, undermine the teamwork we rely on for success, and sap my own energy and spirit, leaving my work lifeless and dull. This business of mining the meanings in order to live our values is serious stuff, not for the faint hearted or those who would just as soon sleepwalk through life.

The more we thought about how to close this unusual conference, the more appealing – and ultimately correct – it seemed to think of ourselves – all of us – as a transitory organization emerging from a collective experience that we want to be sure to capture, in its fullness, before we disperse back to our separate worlds. And so we decided we would pay careful attention during the conference not only to the intellectual content and the many intriguing and novel ideas -- the models, theories, data, insights and questions that arose in the sessions –- but also (at the same time) to the emergent history of the conference as an organic whole – as a group.

We’ve been tracking these processes with a team of volunteer “story catchers” and – with great thanks to them -- what Dick and I want to offer you now is an opportunity to locate your personal stories in the larger narrative -- perhaps to ask yourselves what the meaning is for you of the experience you’ve had here –- for you individually (at least for now), and for all of us as a group, in the context of the larger story of this gathering of diverse and now interconnected colleagues, inquirers and fellow travelers. Does that sound OK? Are you game? (I hope so, because if you’re not, Dick and I are in trouble up here.)

RSN: Introduction and Brahms violin concerto

DCW: Setting the stage: We began converging on San Francisco early in the week (was it this week? this year? the tricks of time). We came from near and far, bearing stories of every kind of travel indignity – car problems, weather delays, emergency landings … other travails. We spent the first few days marveling that we had made it – so many of us (over 600) from 260 institutions and many different roles: faculty from across the curriculum, student life professionals, chaplains, deans and provosts, presidents and vice presidents, students, young alumnae, community activists, clergy, administrators across the spectrum … others too (one monk).

We kept remarking on our numbers and the richness of the program, wondering what forces we might be unleashing, as so many streams were converging: religion, peace, contemplation, justice, ecology, dialogue, diversity, service, community, vocation, spirituality, forgiveness, love – a mighty river flowing to an uncertain destination. Everywhere we turned, people were making and remaking connections: We met at Naropa, or Fetzer, or CIIS or UCLA. I taught at your place; you spoke at mine. I was told to look you up; you e-mailed me. I haven’t seen you in years. I’m so glad we’re meeting at last.

Reflection: I’d like to invite you to take a minute now, turn to a person near you and exchange impressions briefly about what that arriving was like for you during those first few hours and days – making or renewing connections, reaching out eagerly, feeling a bit overwhelmed, or isolated?

RSN: The first movement: a heroic call to arms.

DCW: Parker’s passion of a physicist and precision of a poet was paradox (and tongue-twister) enough to send us off to bed that first night (some of us still jet lagged, all of us stirred awake by his rousing words). The next day, we heard from two brilliant psychologists – as different as they could have been -- introduced (you guessed it) by a physicist and a poet, passionately, of course, and with utter precision. Our speakers were grounding our heroes’ call for us, walking us through the stages of development, calling us back to our educational task, making real the concepts of love and forgiveness, embodying both a scholarship and a leadership of “elegance, grace, and dignity.”

We ran ourselves a bit ragged through that first full day – as our students so often do -- trying to make good selections among a daunting surfeit of enticing choices. By the end of the day, we were picking up a variety of reactions to the forms of conversation: were the structures too traditional? too academic? too linear? Where were the spaces between the notes? Were we practicing what we preach? We had started to hear stories about fleeing the academy – stories from those who left years ago for work that they knew would bring them more joy, and painful stories from others who are wrestling with decisions to stay or go.

Reflection: Where do you stand in your relationship with the academy? Have you worked in colleges or universities? Could you? Do you work there now? If so, do you wonder about jumping ship?

RSN: Second movement: Planting the seeds.

DCW: We began to notice the conversations that weren’t engaged because they were too charged: Is the yearning for personal wholeness eclipsing larger, planetary concerns? How can we expect our students to conduct democratic dialogue when they’ve never had any models anywhere – not in school, not in college, not in the public sphere? Students described how hard it is to hold a dialogue and not slip into debate, trying to persuade one another. In an interesting role reversal, professors asked student panelists for advice on how to overcome the organizational resistance to initiating a contemplation program back home.

Reflection: Were there moments for you (in plenary or concurrent sessions, or outside the meetings themselves) when you couldn’t get your differences into the room, felt that you were not being seen for who you were and what you brought? Were there silences that you found silencing?

RSN: Third movement: Taking up the conversation.

DCW: Now we started to notice conversations that were being joined. We encountered inspiring messengers who integrated spirit and science, poetry and power, art and heart. They spoke out of profound life experiences, brought fires and set fires that demonstrated vividly (and in a variety of ways) how transformation always comes through a center – how it passes through the heart.
Those were small group sessions and this large space became very still – and very much alive – yesterday morning in an encounter across the generations and the genders -- the young woman philosophy professor, and then the young male student, whose provocative questions pointed us toward the future.

Reflection: Were there incidents or moments (in or out of sessions) when the differences you brought to the mix – your unique contributions -- were being seen and appreciated?

RSN: Fourth movement: Questions we carry with us.

In Conclusion: My Story

In closing, I want to take a few minutes to trace my personal story as it has been evolving – the intellectual journey that has brought me to this intriguing encounter with all of you. I confess that all the plugs I’ve been getting in these plenary sessions (intended, I suspect, to hold you to the bitter end) have been upping the ante for me, as you might imagine. So as I tell my story, I invite you to be tracing your own, to hear mine as background music for your reverie, as though you were at the symphony allowing the music to transport you gently to another plane.

It was in my first week at college – at Wellesley, in 1962 – that I decided to become an English major. We all took freshman English then and my professor was new that year. He sat cross-legged on the desk at the front of the classroom and told us why he loved the study of literature, why it was his life’s passion. Literature opened, he said, the best doorway he had ever found to the mysteries of the human condition. I was hooked. This was what college was supposed to be.

I devoured and loved the great literary works, took a lot of philosophy and political science too. In many ways those encounters showed me who I would be: a dweller and a digger in the garden of words and ideas for the rest of my life. I loved that place and that pursuit; love it, and always will. And my life has been greatly enriched by it, of that I am certain. I learned that the humanities disciplines share common interpretive modes and angles of vision, and yet see from various vantage points, that they cherish the principle of perspective, and hence of a multiplicity of perspectives. I saw how the humanities preserve time-honored traditions and make innumerable connections, how they search for the highest values by which we can live. Most fundamentally, what I found was the value of human dignity, humane order, an inquisitive rationality, and a reverence for language and beauty. I’m grateful to the humanists who remain determined to guard these values -- at a time when many forces seem to be putting them at risk: commercialism, credentialism, professionalism, globalization, polarization, and shrill and circular debates over meaning and truth.
As much as I loved those texts and was shaped by them, something was missing. The world was at arm’s length. I graduated and went to work for the dean of students at Barnard College while my new husband pursued his Ph.D. in the life sciences at Rockefeller University. And here I must pause to note that for the last 40 years I have witnessed, from the sidelines, but in a front row seat, the unfolding of the modern biological revolution. I’ve seen first hand the extraordinarily connected community scientists have, the great dedication, passion, and (yes) reverence that animates their questions, and the profound satisfaction of unlocking, piece- by-piece, the mysteries of life and the universe. There are elements as transcendent there in the world of empirical reductionism, as compelling and inspiring -- and ethically-alert -- as there is in any religion I have yet to find.

Across the street from Barnard, the anti-war movement was gaining momentum at Columbia, which was under siege. Students, occupying buildings, were leaning out the windows, wearing red arm bands and brandishing megaphones. I’ll never forget the day the police moved in on horseback, thrashing through the crowd with heavy wooden clubs. The genteel intellectual world from which I had just graduated felt like a distant vestige of an era that would never return. The academy was ground zero, held hostage and put at risk; our alumnae from those years of tumult still often remark to me that their educational experience was diminished and compromised by the profound disruptions that roiled their college years.

War and resistance, justice and the abuse of power, inequality, racism, sexism, poverty and the arrogance of large institutions – all of these urgent questions were swirling in the air. The humanities were no longer pointing to answers, at least not to my satisfaction. I tried journalism briefly -- thinking I might put my words to work for the betterment of the world – but found no traction there.

And then I vectored off into the social sciences, drawn to Peter Berger’s vision of a humanistic sociology – a kind of “art form,” in Robert Nisbet’s term -- that would attend closely to rules of procedure and evidence (and teach me those) – but also to elegance of expression – and would capture profound essences of communal life by collecting and interpreting data, inventing memorable concepts, and producing heartful narratives of the layered meanings of social reality. I based my doctoral dissertation on qualitative research, worrying all the while that I lacked an adequate answer (for myself first of all) to the question of how well (and how) I really knew that what I was seeing and writing was actually true. I’m not sure that it was, despite the awards it won.

That led me deeper into more systematic research. I led a ten-year quantitative study – a randomized controlled trial -- of alternative treatments for alcohol abuse. We collected highly structured data, and analyzed them using advanced bio-statistical techniques. We bored deeper and deeper into our sharply-framed question, as good science inevitably must, at least for a time. The modern world has been shaped by the methods of natural science – breaking complex problems into elements; building them up again to discover how they work – an iterative process of reduction and synthesis. As we lament the objectivism, reductionism, and fragmentation that advances modern science, we must also grant its enormous power to explain and unify.

For a wider context while I was dong the alcohol study I had another lens as a professor of public health, a discipline with a systems perspective on populations and a progressive impulse that defines the field. Here was academic work I felt was worth all I could bring to it – applying careful research to alleviate suffering and pain.

But then I won a Kellogg National Fellowship, to study leadership and social change for three years, hone my leadership skills, travel the globe – and quite unexpectedly – to venture (at first hesitantly and with great unease and vigilance) on an interior journey far more discomfiting than any of the travels we took in those years to remote places. I’d been a regular runner all my adult life, a discipline that aligned mind and body for me, stabilized my emotions, and released my imagination, but now I added a meditation practice and went on stealth retreats with a “spirituality group,” a slippery word I couldn’t define and found embarrassing.

As a junior at Wellesley I had met the great novelist, Eudora Welty, when she visited campus, and I was discovering all those years later the wisdom in her observation that “all serious daring starts from within.” As surely as I came to appreciate that this inward journey was where I belonged, I had no way to reconcile it at the time with my academic work, no thought of even trying to force such a fit. I considered it private work I needed to be doing on my own to address what I thought were personal deficiencies that were mine to solve.

In short, the passion I had for finding integration was still largely confined to the cognitive realm. In the department I chaired at the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the great ambitions we had for our program in “society and health” was to try to move through levels of organization (from the micro-biological to the macro-social) and find specific causal connections that linked different levels of organization so as gradually to build an integrative model. It was years later, reading E.O. Wilson’s magisterial 1998 work, Consilience, that I was reminded of both the excitement of this premature dream of ours and its enormous complexity, bordering on hubris. Our protean project was far grander than we, in our innocence, had dreamed at the time.

So perhaps it was providential when, in 1992, my alma mater came to call with the proposition that I consider taking on the presidency, an all-consuming role that is impossible to imagine without simply wading in and hoping for the best. If ever there was a leap of faith, this was it for me.

Wellesley College is a large and complex organization, with a long and proud history, powerful networks of support, an exceptionally strong faculty, smart and engaged women students, generous resources, and a deeply rooted culture that has served the college well. As I prepare to complete the third-longest presidency in the history of the college, I’m conscious of the multiplicity of story lines we’ve lived:

• all the ways in which we strengthened the college and positioned it well for the future, with the wind strongly at our backs much of the time;
• all the ways in which the future remains a mystery to us, how little we truly understand of the accelerating forces of change;
• all the things we did and learned, the problems we solved, the messes we fixed -- the messes we made;
• all the questions we saw and lived with tenacity, courage and heart – and the ones we simply couldn’t bring ourselves to face;
• our successes and our failures, our triumphs and our sorrows, our moments of beauty, courage, transcendence, and the shame and confusion and pain that, of course, we didn’t escape.

At the end of it all, I think we can say we helped position the college to be a more flexible learning organization, oriented toward the future, building on its core strengths, more interconnected, more honest and open, more insightful and energetic. At least I hope so. And yet, I stand with utter humility before the bulwarks of the status quo.

As much as we accomplished, I’m conscious as I prepare to leave that we could have done more – more to evolve subtler conceptions of successful outcomes for an excellent liberal education, with the quality of our students’ educational experiences at the heart of it, their engagement with it, the "aliveness" of it, the authenticity, depth, and power of the learning we offer them.

We could have done more to pursue those themes without fearing we would jeopardize the perception or the reality of challenge and excellence. We could have been more creative in finding ways to encompass rigor, structure, and coherence, combined with freedom and joy, in a broader curricular and pedagogic vision uniquely our own. We could have done more to prepare our students well for citizenship, and for life, in the 21st century, with all they will have to confront.

And so, when all is said and done, I take four general lessons from this story I’ve just told you (and discovered for myself in the telling of it to you). First and foremost, I acquired as a student, and have carried through my adult life, a bedrock commitment to intellectual integrity that has been both salvation and curse. And I ardently hope that our students today are internalizing -- on their own terms and for their own times -- an equally ferocious appreciation that a great education confers a lifelong obligation on all its graduates to be not only consumers of knowledge but also vigilant and vocal preservers and protectors of critical thinking, whatever else they do. If they are not learning this, we are failing them, and we are jeopardizing our future.

Second, as I moved out into the world and encountered much that was new, equipped with a natural receptivity that I have come to know as both strength and weakness, I began to struggle with the varieties of worldviews that seemed to set up redoubts in my mind and wage endless wars there. I was learning that academic disciplines – and other competing systems of thought – are worlds unto themselves, worlds composed of words. Some are inquiring systems with rules of procedure and standards of validity and truth, but also – and most fundamentally – they are language games. These self-contained language games evolve their own internal logic and internal consistency, as well as fetishes and blinders, pitfalls and traps. They have checks and balances that are available to those who approach them from a critical stance, but they can be highly seductive to those who would surrender their independent judgment.

Third, to make my life even more confusing – but probably in search of peace – I found myself at midlife falling into a foreign world of heart, soul and spirit that seemed utterly at odds with the neat cognitive scaffolding I had been struggling to construct. Now I was wrestling with demons, and writing poetry, fearful of being swallowed by waves of sadness and grief. It was in the desolation of coming to terms with suffering, though, that the possibilities of beauty, hope and joy became more vivid to me. I came in time to see that my efforts to map and repair the world had been a subtle device to hold its pain at bay. I embraced the shadow and set out to explore the complementary paths of science and spirit, knowing, at last, that critical thinking emanates from the mind and heart, and needs a community to be true to itself.

Fourth, when I assumed a positional leadership role, I had no choice but to deploy myself – all that I had to bring – as an instrument in the service of the work I wanted to do. Everyone was watching my every move, and imagining what I was thinking and feeling. They were hyper-reactive to me and I had to learn to hold my reactions and also to understand that everything I said or did – whether intended or not – was an intervention into the system.

It became increasingly clear (from the work I described earlier) that the rigor in this new role would grow out of the interactions between ideas and experiences and across realms of knowledge and experience. The president is the only person in a college or university who inhabits all the worlds, traversing the boundaries while translating the language games.

A trustworthy translator brings curiosity, receptivity, respect for the dignity of those who are other, alien or consigned to the margins. A trustworthy translator starts in humility and yet never fails to ask how we know what we know. The new resources and reserves I needed to manage the complexities of this demanding role required a new alignment of separate domains of knowing – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual.

As I look back now, what is increasingly clear is that the integration I had been wishing for our Wellesley students from the early days of my presidency (an echo my earlier days as a student) has slowly come to me as I have led my college. I thought I was seeking for myself -- and wanting for our students -- a unity of knowledge that would make the world more whole. Instead, I’ve found a state I’ll call a unity of self, knowing – an alignment across domains of knowledge and experience, all held to provisional and emerging tests of consistency and plausibility -- rigorously, relentlessly, and, above all, humbly.

It’s taken me a lifetime to assemble all those tools, and I am so heartened by the possibility we’re incubating here that we might be able to help our students develop their full capacities as human beings without having to wander in the wilderness quite so long.

But my story doesn’t end there. It ends on the ramparts of the status quo, surveying all those casualties on the field – all we could have done for our students, and didn’t. And why didn’t we? What stood in the way? My years as a positional leader have impressed deeply on me the difference between generating good ideas and seeing them through to reality.

As challenging as it surely is for a faculty committee to conduct a thorough review of the curriculum and recommend a program of change (as a Harvard Task Force on General Education has just done brilliantly, and as my own wonderful faculty did very successfully a decade ago), it is infinitely more challenging to mobilize systems of faculty self-governance and mutual-accountability so that they can work through the details and implement a program of change.

So if I were looking for an explanation of why the academy is so resistant to the kinds of changes we’ve been extolling for the past few days, the easiest way out would be to pin it on the faculty (not the ones who are here, of course, not we enlightened ones, but all those benighted legions who stayed away). Mine are brilliant scholars, devoted teachers, radical individualists, and stubborn skeptics who treasure autonomy, resist authority, distrust power – and love their college, love our college.

I want us to be careful here, because the faculty are trapped in a system too – a system of governance, structures, assumptions, and rewards that no longer work for them. They’re overworked and overwhelmed, and the more we rail against them, the more we miss the opportunities to build the bridges of collaboration where the shoots of new life are poking up out of the soil – collaborations, first of all, between faculty and the professionals who’ve made their life’s work that precious gift of their attention – their witness and company – as whole students struggle to join their big hearts with their big minds. But other collaborations too -- with other administrators, across academic departments, divisions, disciplines, across institutions and into communities. Faculty can’t do this alone; any more than any of us can. They need the gift of our good holding and attention – the gift of our seeing them.

And if we truly see them, we will come understand that they are holding boundaries we ought not to ignore. I’ll briefly mention just two; you may think of others. First, in their suspicion of initiatives they fear will water down the curriculum, they are upholding standards – standards of excellence in scholarship (and teaching too), and standards of serious intellectual pursuit.

Our students are over-committed (as we all are these days) and over-commitment is undermining their ability to be committed and to engage fully those pursuits that matter most – learning pursuits, in our case, the reason we exist -- to tend the flame of honest inquiry, as we see anti-intellectualism rising all around us. Nothing we do is as urgent – or as important – as student learning is. Student learning must be our top priority. The faculty can hold that value for us, even as we press them to broaden their conceptions of where and how students do learn all the things they need to know – and all the ways they need to know – if they are to become compassionate actors in an interconnected world.

Second, in their suspicion of new models of accountability, assessment, and leadership, junior faculty are holding the reality that we are asking much of them – too much I believe -- ratcheting up our expectations for scholarship, teaching and service and rendering it impossible for them to live their lives whole. Senior faculty, meanwhile, are defending embattled values: democracy, self-reliance, egalitarianism, freedom to disagree, the exploration of differences and the negotiation of conflict.

If we relinquish these values, the dream of integrative education will succumb to ideology. The academy is arguably the last major sector in our society still making a good-faith effort – however halting we may judge it -- to both uphold and enact the view that in a healthy democracy we have obligations to one another. If we cede this belief to the corporate interests (as the U.S. Congress has already done), we may lose the ability to hold the capitalist system to account for the public good. So as we mourn the indifference in our society to the suffering of others, and to the destruction of life on the planet, we can also see – and must try to resist -- the imprint of market forces on the academy.

If we’re serious about wanting to offer our students a more integrated learning experience (and surely we are), then I think we, ourselves, will have to do a better job of modeling the serious engagement of our own differences that all integrative thinking clearly implies and that successful organizational change absolutely necessitates. This was the essential argument in Trustworthy Leadership.

But I’ve ventured a step farther today out onto thin ice and wondered whether we’re thinking deeply enough about trustworthy knowledge. We must not allow this “Whatever …” generation to graduate from college perfectly content to accept that all belief systems are equally valid and true. The stakes are too high. If we leave them unable to know their own minds and hearts, they will stand helpless in a market economy hawking selfish materialism, and hopeless in a world of fundamentalists preying on our young, pushing dangerous shortcuts to the coherence and the meaning that we failed to help them find for themselves.

So I end where I began, believing in the promise of an alliance with science – that most secular arm of the secular academy. We need that partnership to keep us honest as we try to trace the intricate interplay -- in our minds and hearts -- of sense experience, observable fact, intuition, emotion, and logic, and as we pursue the integration that will inform our teaching and learning, and enhance our living and loving.

And I end in the hope that we will always try to uncover our hearts and find the sources of empathy and love we’ve found in abundance here – love for our students in their courage, for our colleagues in their fervor, for our questions in their mystery – love for the fragile human story (all our unfolding stories), and for the academy too.

However flawed and fraught we find it, academic life offers us a refuge for the freedom to live our questions; to follow our causal chains wherever they may lead us; to seek insight through confirmation not thoughtless surrender to authority; to speak truth to power; and to discipline and amplify the domains of human knowing, with their power to expand outward the humanity we imperfect humans owe a wounded world.