Opening Academic Convocation Remarks Jeff Jeske
"Being Here"
I’d like to begin by taking you back a few years, although geographically we’re only taking a few steps away to the Moon Room, which is just around the corner here in Dana. It’s the room where at 1:30 today, we held a memorial service for Caitlin Lee, who died in an automobile accident a little over a month ago. Had it not been for that, she would be sitting among us right now.
But my story takes place years earlier. It was a Sunday afternoon college meeting for worship—which as you probably know is a gathering usually led by a member of the community, whether student, faculty, or staff; it’s organized by Max. The speaker that day was Meredith, a graduating senior. She was one of G’s highest-achieving students, an honors double-major in English and biology. And for the preceding two years she’d been editor-in-chief of The Guilfordian, which is why I knew her very well.
Not as well as I thought, though. To be sure, when she spoke to us she acknowledged her achievements, told us about much she had accomplished and how super-organized she is. But then she surprised us all by taking a sharp turn, diving deep and sharing a profound unhappiness. Throughout her four years, she told us, she had had a deep longing, a longing to connect meaningfully with other people here. She would’ve traded all her external achievements, she said, for that closeness. She said she wished that she had taken more advantage of all that Guilford has to offer in that regard, during her time of being here at the college.
What Meredith was acknowledging was that fundamental difference between our two selves. There’s the public self, right, the one that other people see and interact with, and the then there’s the private self, deep deep down, where we are most authentically ourselves. I am aware of the discrepancy between the two of them every day of my life, even now as I stand up here in front of you
Anyway, what I’d like to do is to invite you to share that space with me for a few minutes, that space of your private self, that space, behind the public masks that we wear, where the authentic you is.
It is, after all, the place where your highest aspirations live, and those, your highest aspirations, seem a particularly appropriate subject today.
We are linked there, you and me, in the private deep down space, for that’s also the site of my highest aspirations—being the best professor I can be at this special teaching place and the best guide to you as pursue your own goals.
I don’t have to tell those of you who are new that this is a huge transition from where you were before Guilford. The choices you make now, unlike most of those you made in high school, will directly affect the rest of your life. I had an advisee, Tim, who would get paralyzed when it came time to register for classes—I can see him in my mind’s eye, sitting on my couch across from me in my Archdale office—he was afraid that his choices would predispose him to directions that he wasn’t totally sure that he wanted to commit to; they were locking him into a particular path. I hasten to point out that Tim is the only advisee I’ve encountered who has had that kind of response. Generally, we have such a cornucopia of cool stuff to offer that registration should be an exciting time.
Given this transition, I think it’s a good idea to inventory your aspirations, now and also with your academic advisor. One book I read this summer is this one, Happier, which is based on the most highly attended course at Harvard—where Kent teaches. Approximately 20 % of all Harvard graduates take it. The course is in the relatively new subfield called positive psychology, or the psychology of happiness.
The book offers a visual for managing your aspirations, one that looks like this:
Here’s what you should do—imagine a circle (these are concentric circles)
what you can do
- this circle captures the possibilities available to you
what you want to do
- now dig deeper
what you really want to do
- better yet, right? We’re getting to paydirt now.
what I really, really want to do
- pursuing what’s in this circle should make you feel most real and authentic. These are the things that will make you happiest and which you should seek to do.
One caveat: be open to discoveries, to new ideas, as you live your Guilford experience, even if what you really really want to do seems clear now.
I offer the example of my daughter Colleen, who just graduated from Duke in May. Colleen went to Duke to become an engineer. But the summer after her first year, she had a pair of transforming internships in South Carolina, one working with victims of domestic violence, the other with victims of child sexual abuse. The experiences transformed her utterly. When she went back to Duke, she left engineering and transferred into public policy, so that she could help people, both one on one and via changing the policies that affected their lives.
Now, even as I speak, she’s in Philadelphia, working for Project HOME, an organization that coordinates services for the homeless. She’s going up underneath the bridges that as an engineer she might have designed, in order to bring food and water to the little clusters of people living up underneath there.
I predict that at least 45 % of you will change your major at least once. Be open to it.
To help, let me give you a threefold template for measuring possible changes of that sort:
meaning/pleasure/strengths
meaning: what do you find most meaningful in life: solving problems, writing, working with children, engaging in political activism, music
pleasure: what do you most enjoy
strengths: critical thinking, sense of humor, ability to relate to others.
I read another book recently called Flow, by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. In it, he studies self-actualizing people, the sort atop Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people who have achieved their entelechy, or perhaps the fulfillment of their DNA, working in careers that engage them at their highest level of ability and challenge. There, they have reached maximum fulfillment.
This all has been on my mind lately because I have another daughter, Kiersten, who is just starting at Carolina, down the road.
I’ve been thinking about her a lot … hoping that she’ll make the choices that are really really best for her
By the way, the reason that she isn’t sitting among us, a Guilford first-year, is that my wife and I home-schooled her for a while, and my shift with her took place on a blanket beneath the oaks outside of Archdale, tutoring her in history and language arts. She had the run of the college, got to know everyone. Guilford became very familiar to her.
She needs her own grand adventure now, situated elsewhere
And you need your own, here at Guilford. So let’s get back to that.
One of my dear colleagues in the English dept., Cynthia teaches a travel writing course. It gets rave reviews
Let’s think about it in that way. Let’s be anthropologists of educational travel.
I’ve referred to Guilford a couple of times as a special place. Let me say why, as we stay together in that special deep space, where we seek to know what for each of us really, really matters.
Let me give you a glimpse of being here at Guilford
Most obviously, there’s the academic program. And that should be a major aspiration for you. Getting a college degree. Wonderful!
Most of you will take a minimum of 32 courses while you’re here. Why, what are they supposed to do for you in your process of discerning?
To guide you we have a map, a set of General education requirements. They’re distributed through your four years, and what we’ve named the categories tells you what we have in mind for you.
Foundations: tools and critical thinking courses that will serve you through the rest of the curriculum.
Breadth requirements: arts, humanities, social science, natural science and mathematics, business and policy studies. A set of lenses enabling you to think, research, explore, and communicate like an artist, a scientist, the rest. They also may reveal possibilities you perhaps hadn’t been aware of, possibilities that will reach out and seize you. There was nothing in Colleen’s high school experience to prepare her for public policy as a career,
Critical Perspectives: our signature requirements. Diversity in the U.S., intercultural, social justice & environmental responsibility.
And finally, as a senior capstone, IDS 400, where the cymbals clash, and you get to work together with people having different majors and disciplinary perspectives, whose lenses you share, training you for a workplace that is becoming increasingly team-oriented.
There’s nothing magical, I should point out, about this structure. Back 10 years ago, we considered lots of alternatives, including no requirements
Let me tell you something subversive. While we were working on the curriculum, I read a book called The Handbook of the Undergrad Curriculum. It was a meta-study, that is a study of the studies done on what works and what doesn’t in college teaching. The most surprising thing I found there was that it doesn’t matter at all what system of requirements a school has—whether one has no requirements or many. What matters most is the experience of the individual student with a faculty member in the context of a subject matter. We’re talking hotness here, dynamic experiences. The goal should be 32 of these.
Thus my second facilitating suggestion: look closely at our inventory of courses. Talk to people especially your advisor. And remember: meaning, pleasure, strength.
Guilford is more than just the academic program, of course. Our goal is to cultivate the whole person. That is why we pay such attention to the para-curricular:
And it has gotten progressively richer. I wish Meredith was here to do it all over again.
We have a truly vibrant campus life office under the leadership of Aaron Fetrow, a division of the college that offers you a bevy of fine services and programming
We have 50 clubs and the opportunity to create your own.
There are many ways to get involved and to forge the relationships Meredith was seeking.
And stitching this together are our core values, which are printed on this program, expressed throughout what we do here, whether it’s PPS or even in the plays that the theatre studies dept. chooses to perform in any given year.
We are an intentional community and we have embraced our values and we labor ceaselessly to put them into practice. We are not perfect at this. Our goal of creating independent thinkers and change agents necessarily pulls against the needs of community, and our great diversity of backgrounds sometimes works against our professed acceptance of and equal respect for all individuals. We are as a community at best in a perpetual state of becoming. But we are a family and we have our core values. They guide us as we engage in our main activity here: seeking the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or the truths underlying a political campaign, here in the year of perhaps the most important presidential election of my lifetime.
You know, of course, that no single individual has a sole purchase on the truth. We each have a shard of it. And when we gather, in the classroom say, we assemble these into a collective truth that we could not have otherwise known. Each of you as individuals, is vitally important, because we need your shard. We seek everyone’s, no matter how far from the center; in fact often the farther from the center, the better. What is it that Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas—give me the stone that the builders rejected …. that will be the cornerstone. Join us in this valuable enterprise.
Okay, I’ve sketched out for the new folks what being here at Guilford means. Let me now say something to the seniors—although I’m still addressing the new members of our community because you’re on your way to becoming seniors, and we’ll be addressing you as such when you attend your final convocation. I’m also addressing everyone else in this room.
Here it is: seniors, I hope that you are well on your way to achieving your goals. You’re getting close to graduation. And of course you should keep yourself focused on what’s to happen next, pursuing your interests and what you really, really want to do.
But instead of keeping yourself exclusively focused on that, I want to propose an alternative model. Be a bodhisattva!
If you’ve taken a course with Eric Mortensen, my good friend and an outstanding teacher in the religious studies dept., you may know this term. If not here it is. A bodhisattava, in Buddhist thought, is a person who already has a considerable degree of enlightenment and could enter nirvana, the blowing out that is at the word’s etymological core, but who instead turns their back on that and instead selflessly seeks to use their wisdom to help other human beings to become liberated themselves
We already have a lot of bodhisattvas in our community. There’s your faculty, for example, humanists who have come to Guilford not to sail off into the oblivion of personal research, but to put their knowledge, their wisdom, at your disposal. They’re not the only ones, though. You too have much to share. You too can be a bodhisattva. Join us.
That’s where we draw our strength—from our mutual willingness to put aside selfishness and bureaucracy and hierarchy to create a loving community that expresses the college’s core values, the Quaker testimonies on which they are based, and the need that we all have—like Meredith—to exist in community, a very special community based on love and generosity and compassion. I know this personally, as a recipient, in recent months. It is when we are at our best.
So I encourage everyone in this auditorium, faculty and students and staff, to strive for this high standard.
Be a bodhisattva, a compassionate one. It’s what being here at Guilford should and must be.
Sept. 3, 2008