My remarks at Inauguration…

Thank you Chairman Goldberg. Thank you for your leadership and for leading the Board of Trustees in support of our college. I am deeply grateful for the honor of this appointment and the opportunity to serve as Evergreen’s sixth president.

We gather today to celebrate this great college, the many people who established and sustained it, and those who now comprise and support it – our trustees and governors, legislators, faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends.

Our ceremony today celebrates the collective efforts of The Evergreen State College faculty, staff and administrators – past and present – who through their commitment and passion have inspired generations of students and who have given form and energy to our campus community. And as I have visited with many of you and others over the past seven months, there clearly is much about Evergreen to celebrate.

I have devoted most of this past year to listening and learning. My intentions have been  to learn and understand the organization and culture of our college, but this was also an opportunity to learn about you…your hopes and dreams for Evergreen and for your roles here.

You have impressed me deeply with your dedication to the college’s mission and with your passion for meeting our commitments to our students. I have observed you teaching, maintaining our facilities, managing our residential programs, recruiting new people to campus, preserving our many resources, raising funds for scholarships and other needs, and keeping and caring for our grounds. Your energy and commitment to your work and to Evergreen inspire me. For all that you do, I thank you.

I am particularly pleased that Governor Dan Evans, who signed the enabling legislation to create the college and then served courageously as its second president, has joined us here today. Dan, thank you for all that you have contributed to Evergreen. This institution is, in a way, a thriving tribute to your leadership of our state. And to Nancy Evans: we know that the two of you are team. You also played a critical role in ensuring Evergreen’s success just as you have at your own alma mater, Whitman College.

Two questions guide my remarks this afternoon. I want us to reflect on these questions as we celebrate Evergreen and contemplate its future. They bear upon our understanding of the college, its contributions to our communities and state and what each of our roles will be in shaping its future.

The first is:

• As we approach Evergreen’s 50^th year, what has the college achieved in transforming and benefitting the lives of our students?

The second is:

• What are our hopes for Evergreen in terms of how it serves future generations of students?

Our college, established in 1967, was the state’s fourth regional college and shaped by the visionary thinking of its founders. These extraordinary visionaries abandoned the routine trappings and requirements that circumscribe academic programs at traditional colleges and universities. More than anything, the founders sought to affirm the value of learning in a synthesized fashion, from teams of faculty drawn from different academic disciplines. Our founders’ must have foreseen the global challenges of today’s new millennium: our immensely complex problems cannot be understood, explained or solved from the perspective of a single academic discipline. And many public intellectuals and educators agree.  Learning of precisely this sort is the only form of education that adequately prepares individuals to grasp and unravel the problems our society and world now face.

For this, we can thank our founders who:

• Encouraged a model of teaching and learning that promotes creativity and curiosity over rote compliance with academic requirements.

• Committed to an educational experience that gives primacy to personal relationships between faculty and students.

• Championed a process that inspires lives and careers…ones that are motivated by intellectual passions rather than the necessities of employment or career trajectories

• Nurtured an institutional culture and mission dedicated to advancing social justice and the betterment of the community and in our society.

• And recruited and retained generations of faculty to embrace and carry on this unique vision passion, and pedagogy..

This is our foundation. It is unique, it is inspiring, and it is something we should be very proud of.

It is an unparalleled approach that brings about unparalleled results. Now, we ask in what ways does Evergreen shape and transform the lives of our students?

The ways are legion. I will name a few.

• Evergreen leads in welcoming and supporting students who are the first in their families to attend college and who come from backgrounds of great financial hardship.

• We serve the highest percentage of military veterans as full-time students of any college or university in our state.

• Our commitment to community-based learning projects and internships enables a high percentage of our students to translate theory into practice in direct service of those much less fortunate

• Evergreen students engage in and produce creative projects and scholarly research that advance many forms of new knowledge. They have hands-on access to some of the most advanced equipment in video production, animation and the natural and life sciences available on any college campus in the country.

• Our students are fully prepared to pursue post-graduate study. Remarkably, during the decade ending in 2009, fully one-third Washington graduates who earned PhDs were Evergreen grads.

• Our graduates, several of whom are here today, are leaders in the arts, technology, medicine, science, education, law, environmental protection and sustainability, and government – they are recognized leaders in their professions, nationally and internationally.

• Fully one half of our students graduate with no debt and of those who have debt, the average amount is less than $19,000. We are continuously deemed a “best value” in all of higher education and a national leader in educational innovation.

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our graduates report that their experience at Evergreen was inspiring, life changing and enabled them to enjoy fulfilling careers and lives.

These are just a few examples of how Evergreen serves our students, our state and our country– examples about which we all should be very proud.

Since the college’s founding, however, the external landscape of public higher education in Washington State and nationally has shifted dramatically. Our government’s support for public higher education over the past many decades has been unpredictable – although there has been recent reinvestment this biennium for which we are very grateful.

You may also know that– in-state competition for capable students has increased, and public leaders continue to question the value of the liberal arts as a primary focus of undergraduate study.

The life circumstances of our students have also changed dramatically. Those who attend Evergreen now bring academic abilities, intellectual interests, and personal circumstances that are different from those of previous generations. An increasing number are recent immigrants to our country or the children of immigrants who might not be as familiar with the American system of education and its many layers, branches and options. Others may be the first in their families to attend college, and some might have attended schools prior to Evergreen that didn’t prepare them adequately for college. Many have demanding jobs outside of school and families to support; some are single parents. And many lack the financial resources that all full-time students require for success.

As this landscape has shifted, our work in higher education has become much more challenging. As a result, our work in strengthening and advancing Evergreen has becomes urgent. The competition among colleges and universities for talented faculty, staff and students has grown fierce. In the years ahead it will grow even fiercer. The cost of a four-year college education has escalated to a level that is beyond the reach of the majority of American families. We cannot expect the state of Washington to foot the bill. And many people here in the Northwest don’t grasp just how demanding and valuable an Evergreen education can be.

Where does this leave us?

Evergreen’s future is ours to shape. We must not wait. Each one of us has a critical role to play in shaping the colleges future — in the quality and rigor of the programs and courses we teach, in the staff work we provide, in our support of this spectacular campus and its facilities.

The level to which Evergreen will rise and thrive will be directly proportionate to the ideas and effort we all invest today.

What do we hope for Evergreen in how it will serve future generations of students?

I envision an Evergreen that thrives on innovation; offers greater support for our faculty and staff; new and more robust, personal experiences for our students; greater financial support for our students and our college; and a compelling new narrative about Evergreen that proclaims and promotes its excellence.

I envision a future for Evergreen that adapts to critical changes in higher education, evolves with changes the backgrounds and life stories of our students, and changes thoughtfully while preserving its great virtues of engaged interdisciplinary teaching and learning.

I envision our students persisting and graduating at rates equal to or higher than the other four year colleges and universities in Washington State. They can and they must.

I envision a future where Evergreen is among the top choices for college of the most talented students in our region.

But envisioning and actually realizing these futures are quite different. We must seize this moment to catalyze our energy and passion for our students and their success. Inspired by a commitment to innovation, we must ensure that Evergreen sizzles with new ideas and approaches to all aspects of teaching and learning.

• Reinvesting in faculty development is imperative. We must increase opportunities for faculty to develop and learn about the critical needs of our students and how we can best address them. In doing so we must take full advantage of our Washington Center and our Masters in Teaching Program, embracing the expertise of people in these programs and integrating them fully into initiatives that advance our uses of new knowledge about increasing students success.

• Rethinking our academic curriculum and how we plan and administer it is critical. We must reengage our planning units, empowering them and expecting from them a curriculum that is as flexible and agile as it is innovative, adapting to the backgrounds, interests and expectations of the students we admit. At a minimum, our curricular offerings must be more predictable over time. In areas where enrollment demand is consistently heavy, we must meet the demand promptly and completely. Accordingly, our planning unit coordinators must have the time and institutional support needed to devote to this important work.

• Affording faculty more opportunities to pursue their creative and scholarly interests with each other and especially with students. Evergreen faculty members are the heart of our institution. We must feed their souls and simultaneously enrich the curriculum by enabling students to more fully participate in creative performance and the production of new knowledge. These experiences dramatically elevate the impact of students work on their lifelong successes.

I digress for a moment to describe one individual in our country’s history whose path through college having had the types of experiences I just described would profoundly influence the health and well-being of almost everyone in here today. This student was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, a first generation American and the first in his family to attend college. I’ll refer to him as Edward. Born in New York in 1914, he excelled in schooling even though he faced countless instances of anti-Semitism and flagrant discrimination. He was blocked from studying at Ivy League schools given the explicit quotas they maintained at the time to minimize enrollment of Jewish students. He studied instead at the City College of New York, then a school that welcomed first generation Americans.

Like many of Evergreen graduates and our students today, Edward arrived at college interested initially in things he described in his own words as “human, that is, in aspects of human nature and in helping human kind.” He explored many fields in college but ultimately ended up studying the sciences and chemistry became his passion. By all accounts, he spent hours in the labs performing experiments by himself and with his faculty mentors. This work led in later years to critical scientific discoveries that affect us all. I’ll return to these discoveries in a short while.

Irish poet William Butler Yeats noted that “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” The best colleges and universities ignite and fuel this type of fire by delivering rich inclusive experiences that guarantee student success.

What additional steps must we take to ensure success at Evergreen? I offer five steps that I believe will profoundly improve our students experiences here, beyond measures I’ve identified related to our curriculum and students work with faculty. These are not intended as a criticism of the important work we have underway. Rather, they serve to underscore the very importance of this work and our commitment to it.

• Our support in advising, mentoring and tutoring must reach and meets the needs of every student. In addition, our first-year programs should seek to establish networks of lasting relationships among new students that enhance their sense of belonging.

• Every student must have active, working relationships with our advisers, student mentors and the faculty and staff with whom they routinely interact. We cannot expect students to come to us – we must routinely reach out and go to them.

• Academic success extends beyond the classroom. Every student must have the opportunity for an internship, research assistantship, or community-based project that expands their learning beyond their academic programs and courses.

In the next few years we will embark on major reconfiguration and construction of our students’ living environments. We must seize this rare and important opportunity to dramatically improve our living spaces in ways that connect students with one another and with the college’s network of supports.

In my few months here I have also felt across our college a deep hunger for greater community at Evergreen. This is not just hunger for unity in spirit and purpose. It is that and much more. Many on our campus hunger for a shared spirit of mutual trust, respect and belonging.

• We must develop and pursue innovative strategies to serve and sustain a much more diverse and vital campus community. As the composition of the general population changes so should the composition of Evergreen’s population change. And as our the composition of our campus changes, we must learn, practice and institutionalize cultural competence so that each of us is more aware, empathetic and understanding of persons from backgrounds or with identities different than our own. A more diverse and culturally competent community will provide a richer and more inclusive experience for our every person at Evergreen.

• To this end we have just established the College’s Equity and Diversity Standing Council – a representative permanent body of faculty, staff and students to lead our work on equity and inclusion. Among the Council’s first project is to lead the search for Evergreen’s first Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion. In addition, the Council will work to develop an action plan for advancing equity and inclusion at Evergreen for improving the cultural climate on our campus. This plan will identify and address inequities at the college while also expanding opportunities for traditionally underrepresented groups to have greater voice in major decisions that affect their experiences, education and work. Our goal is to ensure that all campus members feel welcome, empowered, safe and fully capable of succeeding.

• As we seek to strengthen our shared sense of community, we must begin to publicly recognize, celebrate and thank those whose accomplishments contribute significantly to Evergreen’s successes. In doing so, we reaffirm our shared commitment to the college’s mission, we acknowledge the important roles that individuals play and recognize specific achievements by our colleagues and co-workers that inspire our Evergreen pride.

• We have great support in our partner communities of Olympia and Tacoma. We must develop new ways of serving these communities better by creating activities and events that routinely engage and welcome local residents to our Olympia and Tacoma locations. Similarly, each of us as individuals, as members of these communities should be serving as volunteers, interns, board members or active participants in the many also actively publicizing our many lectures and performances in local media

• Finally, we already are investing in telling a new Evergreen story, one that highlights our many successes and our identity as a leader in post-secondary education. Our new story will focus on Evergreen’s amazing people and their achievements. Our faculty are accomplished scholars and passionate educators. Our students are talented, curious, creative and, to our delight, eager to engage difficult questions, particularly those for which there aren’t answers, and, regardless of the answers. Our graduates are among the most talented and accomplished individuals in their professions and communities. They are creative problem solvers, inventors and leaders. These are just a few parts of the new Evergreen story. And our work in sharing it is just beginning.

In closing, I return to the story of the young immigrant student—Edward–who has had a profound impact on all of our lives. How did this intellectually passionate and curious, Evergreen-like young man help us and many generations of others?

His studies led him to medical school, and an interest in research on infectious diseases. He was a dreamer who sought to serve others through ground-breaking research on viruses and how to prevent their devastating effects on the lives of millions.

At the time, just after WWII, one virus was annually killing 3,000 Americans and leaving another 20,000 paralyzed, most of whom were children. When I was a child, polio was our country’s greatest fear apart from that of the atomic bomb. My sister and I were among the first cohorts of school children inoculated with vaccine developed by this Evergreen-like individual. His name was Jonas Edward Salk.

Salk had a dream and the courage to pursue it even when many leading scientists believed no vaccine was possible.  But Salk’s inspiration and courage to pursue his dream offer an inspiration for us all. Toward the end of his career, he made the following statement that is fitting for this day here:

 “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.” [1]

We all have dreams that Evergreen can and will become much more than it is now. Let us have the courage to dare to make our dreams for the college and for the generations of present and future graduates a bold and everlasting reality.

Thank you.

[1] Address on receiving the Nehru Award (10 January 1977)