Greetings to the President From the Faculty and Staff

James W. Hood '79
Associate Professor of English
Associate Academic Dean

It is my great honor and privilege to bring welcome to Kent John Chabotar from the faculty and staff of Guilford College. I'll begin with a story.

I met one on one with Kent Chabotar for the first time last summer in my library office. He perched in one of the straight-back chairs usually occupied by a student fretting over academic probation, and our main topic was college planning. I outlined the operational and strategic work performed over the previous three years, giving my take on what had been done and left undone. Kent was, as ever, thoughtful, attentive, direct, charming, ebullient. When the conversation modulated, as such talks often do when we're learning a new person, from the more serious to the less so, Kent let me in on a not-so-secret passion of his. We were talking about New York, and he mentioned his penchant for dancing. As he put it: "I love to go clubbing."

And there it was, a glimpse of the man beneath the interview mask, the sniff of something just on the cusp of irreverence. Under the MBA-ish resume; the managerial finesse; the crisp, laundered Polo shirt; the Harvard pedigree and the holstered cell phone, here was the real Kent, the super-hero behind the mild-mannered reporter, the inner child. I thought, "Dude, this is righteous. The guy likes to party."

Now as any of you know who have been the lucky recipients-Might I go so far as to say victims?-of Kent's exceedingly gracious hospitality, he does dish up quite a spread. And he is the host extraordinaire, who adores the role of the arranger, the gallant of the gala event. Many of us have been blessed to play Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire.

But as I've thought more about Kent's comment, I've realized that his love of going footloose runs much deeper than mere panache or childish delight. His confession to me betrayed his fundamental desire to be young, to be thrilling at the center of action and change, as if "dancing next to the band," like Annie Dillard says in speaking of the kind of writing that exhilarates. From my vantage point, that springs from the teacher in him. Those who teach our children well do so, in part, because they love their subject matter. But they also love their subject students, whose eyes and hearts face them each day wondering what new thing will emerge from the crucible of that classroom. We teach because we're infatuated with the future and what new generations will wring from it. Kent has shown himself to be a consummate teacher, whether in the open seminar on financing he taught last fall; in his weekly office hours; in trustee functions; or with the vice presidents and deans. He manifests expertly the teacher's fundamental passion for asking the right questions, for pushing or cajoling when necessary, and for loving his students at the same time he sets clear limits. He entertains as he informs, and he has the intellectual's passion for fact, eschewing hyperbole and the disaster of assumption.

Though you come to us as president, Kent, I want to welcome you primarily as teacher, as one who, like the staff and faculty with whom you serve, is all heart for students. Quakers founded Guilford in 1837 upon our now centuries-old testimony that the revelation of truth continues, believing intensely in the transforming power of education. In your role as first teacher among equals, you now take a place in the line of distinguished Guilford educators whose very names will loose vibrant memories among those gathered here: Dorothy Gilbert, Algie Newlin, Eva Campbell, Garness Purdom, Mildred Marlette, Ed Burrows, J.R. Boyd, Ed Lowe, Sheridan Simon. Characters all, these women and men influenced the life of this institution, our nation and the world beyond it, by engaging in, as Amy Clampitt's poem puts it, the "hazardous / redefinition of structures / no one has yet looked at." Welcome to their honorable company.