Convocation - the formal opening of the academic year - was this afternoon. The many officers of the university (most of them not academic) share the stage of Tishman Auditorium with the winners of the Distinguished University Teaching Award (this year instructors in fashion retailing, journalism, psychology and nonprofit management), and the faculty member invited to deliver the year's "Aims of Education" address (this year a historian of dance). Music is provided by students from the Mannes School of Music and the Jazz program. It's a rare opportunity to see the University as a whole - for the university to see itself - and it never fails to fill me with a somewhat amazed pride at the range of things we do. This year was no exception - indeed, it was the most inspiring Aims of Education address in many a year, and (not because!) delivered by one of my best friends.Before I tell you about her talk, I need to say that the other thing this Convocation made plain as day was how out of place in all of this our lame duck president is. To say he was an embarrassment yesterday would be to put it kindly; it verged on scandal. I'm not sure which would be worse: if his inopportune remarks were spur of the moment, or spur of some earlier moment. He began by telling us he'd just come back from Ted Kennedy's funeral, and that someone somewhere had once remarked that convocations were like funerals, because of the way they gather people or for some other obscure reason. Say what? (It's your funeral, I thought to myself, though his point must at some more or less unconscious level have been that rumors of his death are exaggerated.) There followed an attempt to say something about knowledge which foundered on a wobbly contrast of vertical and horizontal which nobody I know could follow (he lost me at the idea that surface knowledge is vertical). At Convocation's end, he told us something someone had said in one of the speeches reminded him of someone who works in his office, a Bangladeshi-American who was sent to Bangladesh by her parents for an arranged marriage but refused. I thought he was going to praise her independence, but the point he wanted to make was that he and the provost are sort of in an arranged marriage, too. Ha ha. This sort of black humored naming of elephants in the room may have played well during his career in the senate, but was completely out of place here. Can the audience be blamed for hoping for a quick divorce? Isn't he at some level hoping for it too, a funeral he won't have to attend?
But the highlight of the event was Julia Foulkes' Aims of Education address. Her argument was that college is a site for reinvention, and she framed this with just enough autobiographical information ("I am on my fourth career," she began) to make clear that every insight was earned and owned. As she spoke of people whose dreams or plans fail and need to start anew, discover some new things which turns them around, or just want to try something new, she conjured up a sense of what colleges provide which was refreshingly different from that usually offered by us academic lifers. College in her talk wasn't preprofessional, the place where you find and find entry into the single career which will fill and hopefully also fulfill your life, but a resource throughout your life as you reinvent yourself - and help reinvent the world around you.
As students at The New School, I believe the point of your education here is not that you will be what you study – a jazz musician, a political scientist, or an interior designer. The point is you may not. The hours spent practicing arias, writing papers, and designing websites are not wasted, though. It is about the formation of a catalogue of ideas, some rote today but perhaps not tomorrow. And it is also about the creation and practice of habits of inquiry, persistence, and critique. “The mind is a muscle,” the dancer Yvonne Rainer proclaimed. It needs strengthening, stretching, and rest, all of which this university provides in shared communion. The ideas you learn and the habits you develop here will prod you to lead life as “a continual beginning afresh” [a reference to John Dewey's argument that education is necessary because "conscious life is a continual beginning afresh"]...
Julia teaches in the adult division - most of her students are returning to college after interruptions, variously chosen and unchosen - but her message came through loud and clear to my more conventional college-age students, too (I told the Seminar Fellows to come, and saw them after). They're here for resources for reinvention and a lifelong relationship with learning, too. They heard her, heard that she was talking to them, and eagerly quoted from her talk in our discussion.
This account of the aims of education would have been plenty, but Julia also argued that our school has a particular affinity for this understanding of these aims. The New School is a reinvention too: "of the university itself." It was founded to conduct and teach socially relevant knowledge (the arts soon joining the offerings) without awarding degrees, which were seen as instrumental. Besides, education should be lifelong, and an institution of education should be open to anyone who wanted to learn. The New School has kept reinventing itself ever since, she remarked, sometimes too quickly and even sometimes unnecessarily: occasionally we "reinvent the wheel, and call it a new kind of circle." But as long as faculty and administration alike "put student learning at the center of all we do," we'll continue to be the kind of site for reinvention we've always aspired to be.
The talk was inspiring, perfectly attuned to audience and occasion. It was also courageous. Not everyone on the stage with her thinks as much about student learning as they should, let alone in the context of the Deweyan ideals which shaped the school's first years. And not everyone is comfortable admitting that her life involved the need for reinvention. Brava! In its ideals, in its criticisms, and in its honesty her talk articulated one of the things I most value about our school's traditions - since learning never ends, the line between student and teacher is less clear or final than in more conventional schools. As she ended her speech:
I believe that education matters to the reinvention of the world. I believe in the reinvention of this university. And I believe in yours. Let us begin.
