Remarks

It is a very special privilege for me to join with all of you in celebrating the inauguration of Daniel Weiss as the 16th president of Lafayette. This is a most auspicious occasion, not just for Dan and his family, and not just for Lafayette, but for all of higher education. I say that because I am supremely confident that if the Lafayette family does its part— as I am sure you will— President Weiss' leadership will set a standard for liberal arts colleges, and for liberal education, that will have a lasting impact far beyond Lafayette. Those words are, let me assure you, carefully chosen. And, lest you regard me as only an outsider, here to pontificate without direct knowledge of this very special college, let me note that my daughter-in-law is a proud Lafayette graduate with an abiding interest in books; moreover, I have a leopard painted on the roof of my house in southern New Jersey (alongside, to be sure, a Denison buzzard, a purple cow for Williams, a Princeton Tiger, and a Yale bulldog, all schools with which our family has been associated).

In preparing these remarks I could not help but think back on my own days as the inhabitant of a president's office for 16 years. I have often been asked if I learned anything— anything at all— over the course of those years. My short answer is, "Yes, I learned two things: to acknowledge my errors sooner, and to fix them faster." Another frequently asked question was: "How did you land this job at such a young age?" My stock answer was: "Through a combination of bad luck and bad judgment, but I won't say whose bad luck or whose bad judgment." In truth, it was a tremendously rewarding experience, and I wish President Weiss the same good fortune and the same kinds of wonderful colleagues who made such a difference to me. There is nothing quite like working very hard, with good people, for something in which you believe profoundly.

In confronting difficult issues of every kind, I also learned a more general lesson that will serve as my theme today: while it may be tempting to believe in absolutes and in finding clear-cut answers to complex problems, that mindset can be very dangerous. I have become more and more persuaded, over the years, of the critical importance of searching always for that elusive attribute which I can only call "the right balance."

One widely discussed context in which everyone agrees on the need to find the right balance is the emphasis to be placed on teaching and on research. Both are important and, ideally, they are mutually reinforcing. Similarly, it will be widely agreed that it is important, especially in a residential setting such as this one, to find the right balance between academics and other aspects of campus life from which there is also much to be learned. In college sports, there is the right balance to be struck between the emphasis given to competitive goals— winning— and to encouraging broad participation, including participation by students who are interested in more than just finding the end zone. And you will quickly think of innumerable other aspects of the educational experience that demand a search for balance, including never-ending debates over breadth vs. depth in the curricular structure. Providing undergraduates with a broad intellectual framework within which to pursue special interests is essential to a liberal arts education. I remember well the admonition of one of my most learned professors in graduate school, who warned against turning out narrowly-gauged academic progeny who were "trufflehounds"—finely trained for a single small purpose and not much good for any other.

In the last half dozen years, I have been particularly interested in another kind of balance that I believe to be enormously important to American society. I am thinking of the need to blend our traditional pursuit of excellence in academic achievement with the pursuit of greater opportunity for promising students from underrepresented racial minorities and from modest family backgrounds. More than ever before in this country and for that matter all over the world, a young person's life chances depend on his or her educational attainment. Yet access to educational opportunity is conditioned heavily on how one grew up: specifically, on family wealth and parental education, which together are so influential in providing both preparation for college and motivation. In some recent work, my colleagues and I found that students from the bottom income quartile are only one-sixth as likely as students from the top income quartile to be in what we define as the credible pool of candidates to academically selective colleges and universities; students who lack a parent with some experience of college are one-seventh as likely as other students to be in the credible pool. These are enormous disparities, which can be eroded over time only by determined efforts to improve pre-collegiate preparation and by related efforts to improve health and environmental conditions that also affect educational opportunities. The challenge is enormous, and it would be naíve in the extreme to expect major improvements in the near term.

Meanwhile, I believe that colleges and universities should redouble their efforts to enroll and graduate as large a share as possible of the modest numbers of promising candidates who do, in one way or another, make their way into the applicant pool in spite of the disadvantages they have had to overcome along the way. The realities of race and class as determinants of opportunity remain staggering, even as we should also take pride in the progress that has been made in reducing at least some of these disparities. This is not, let me emphasize, an instance in which we need to be talking about a zero-sum game. If pursued correctly, the pursuit of excellence and the pursuit of equity are powerfully complementary, not at all at odds with one another. I have argued in other settings that one of the greatest dangers to the continuing excellence of American higher education writ large, compared with educational systems in other countries, is the difficulty we are experiencing today in educating enough individuals from every strata of society. This is a large subject, for another day. But perhaps I can take just another moment to suggest that the U.S. is highly unlikely, over time, to benefit in as large a measure as it has in recent years, from the importation of exceedingly well-educated individuals from other countries, especially in the sciences and engineering. If we want to retain our preeminence in a knowledge-driven world, there is no choice, I think, but to do a better job of educating more of our own citizens, including those who come from lower socio-economic strata, to make up for some constriction in the flow of highly qualified students and post-doctoral candidates from abroad.

Having just proposed pushing egalitarian aims harder than some may be inclined to push them in crafting a class, let me now mention what I perceive as an opposite danger, at the faculty level, especially in the setting of liberal arts colleges that pride themselves on being highly collegial. Here there is a different kind of balance to be struck. Yes, we want to respect and reward the contributions that every faculty member can make, and we recognize that some faculty will be stronger in one area of contribution and some will be stronger in other areas. But this altogether commendable emphasis on treating everyone nicely and "fairly" can lead to a reluctance to make distinctions and an unwillingness to provide special rewards for truly outstanding performance. I would hope we can agree that treating everyone fairly does not mean treating everyone alike.

We should also be able to agree that it is possible to be effective teachers and good communicators without imposing more academic apparatus on our students (or on our innocent colleagues) than the topic at hand justifies. Professor Weiss has heard me extol on another occasion the wisdom of Jacob Viner, arguably the most learned academic of his day and one of my greatest teachers. Professor Viner was forever warning anyone in the academy who would listen against the danger of what Jeremy Bentham once called "nonsense on stilts," [which Viner described as] " a type of sophisticated nonsense, of ignorant learning, which only [the well] educated are capable of perpetrating." Viner believed that scholarship, vital as it was, needed to be kept in its place. He loved to tell this story: "A woman in a shop asked for a drinking bowl for her dog. When the clerk replied that he had no drinking bowls especially for dogs, the woman said that any drinking bowl would do. The clerk, having found one for her, then suggested that he have the word 'dog' painted on it. 'No thanks,' said the woman. 'It is not necessary. My husband doesn't drink water [from a bowl] and my dog can't read.'" Viner's conclusion: "Learning should be kept in its place."

Let me now shift gears and ask us to consider a very different, more abstract, manifestation of the need for the right balance. I begin with what I have always regarded as a wonderful juxtaposition of images from Henry James' vivid description of Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady. James had an acute sense of the powerful possibilities created by the exercise of freedom and individuality, yet he was equally aware of the dangers attendant on a lack of "training" or discipline. Here is part of James' description of Isabel's upbringing in her grandmother's house:

We see here a setting with relatively few constraints and in James' later descriptions of Isabel we see the effects on a young person of having been allowed to avoid the fixed regime of the schoolhouse for the romantic, unstructured riches of her grandmother's home. No "bills to be paid," no reality; only gardens, peaches, freedom. Isabel ends fatally, misperceiving— perhaps for lack of "training" and experience— the reality of the man she marries, as well as the suitors she rejects. Finding the right balance between the invigorating freedom of the garden and the necessary discipline of the schoolhouse is a never-ending challenge for colleges, their faculties, and their students.

There is also a balance to be struck between the idealism and even other-worldliness that bucolic campus settings can offer and the need to keep one foot, at least some of the time, on the ground. President Weiss will have ample opportunities to congratulate Lafayette graduates on their achievements following commencements and to contemplate with them what the future holds; perhaps this post-commencement story will illustrate my point about the virtues of focusing on today as well as being visionary. When one young man came through the receiving line at Princeton following his graduation, I asked him what he planned to do next. His reply: "Well, I thought I might go back to my room."

On a loftier plane, one of the more difficult balances to get right, at least in my experience, is the balance between passion, perhaps even righteous indignation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a more reasoned, even dispassionate, perspective. Certainly the Vietnam years taught many of us on campuses how easy it is to become so convinced of the validity of a certain point of view that we just have no patience with any other perspective. It sometimes takes more courage to insist on balancing conflicting considerations than it does to speak out passionately for a good cause.

Sartre once said that: "The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful." Isaiah Berlin's famous book of essays, Russian Thinkers, is full of examples of the moral dilemmas faced by nineteenth-century Russian writers as many of them sought to balance a yearning for absolutes with the complex visions that they simply could not push from their minds— and to do so in a terribly troubled time. Berlin writes with special empathy about Alexander Hertzen and others, "who see, and cannot help seeing, many sides of a case, as well as those who perceive that a humane cause promoted by means that are too ruthless is in danger of turning into its opposite. The middle ground," he wrote, "is a notoriously exposed, dangerous, and ungrateful position." What a profound and relevant observation for those of us who live today in a polarized society and a world of sound bites. I hope some of you will remember Berlin's words if there comes a time when President Weiss is reluctant to identify strongly and unequivocally with a position that seems more straightforward to you than it does to him. As Einstein once put it, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not more so."

The next juxtaposition I would like to consider is the need to honor what Lafayette has been and has accomplished, most recently under the able leadership of Arthur Rothkopf, and the need to look ahead with fresh eyes at a new day. The harmful consequences, in the abstract, of getting this balance wrong will be evident to all of us. Yet, it can be all to easy to stick resolutely to policies and practices that have no doubt served the College well over a long period, even though circumstances and options may have changed markedly, or, at the other extreme, to plunge ahead with vigor and enthusiasm but no capacity to benefit from what one of my colleagues used to refer to as the "healthy weight of the past." This is a tension that all living institutions face, and I was struck just last evening, when I was at Centre College in Kentucky, by how well the chairman of its board of trustees, David Grissom, articulated his way of thinking about the question. Here is what he said: "Like many others, I have great memories from my student days at Centre College. But we must never allow our memories— wonderful as they are— to be greater than our dreams for Center's future."

Having lived through moments of dramatic— and controversial— change at both Denison (where the president and trustees bravely confronted a problem with fraternities that had gotten out of control) and at Princeton (where the president and trustees confronted many issues having to do with the university's need to retain its openness to ideas of every kind), and having seen so many other colleges and universities succeed and fail in the constant efforts to blend the new and the old, I can only urge those of you at Lafayette to be conscious of the importance of doing everything in your power to get this tricky balance right. There is no substitute for approaching each sensitive issue on its merits, taking the long view. I will never forget a moment of high drama in the discussion at Princeton of the move to coeducation— a decision that in retrospect seems so obvious that it is hard today to understand the strong feelings that it evoked when it was made. At the trustee meeting where the key vote was to be taken, Laurance Rockefeller, a passionate advocate of coeducation, looked around the room at his fellow trustees and said: "It is clear that whatever we do, some people are going to be very angry with us. So," he said, "my suggestion is that we just do the right thing." Laurance was also a great believe in backing up words with deeds, and it certainly helped that he was ready and willing to pay for the construction of new residential space that was essential to achieving coeducation— a building complex that he asked the university to name in honor of his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, an early and generous supporter of educational opportunities for black women.

I could go on and give you many other examples from my own experience, some heartening and some dispiriting, but I'm not sure they would be that instructive. Suffice it to say that I keep on my desk in New York an alabaster calendar given to me decades ago by Frank Stanton, former head of CBS. Inscribed on its side are these words from Burroughs: "New times always. Old time we cannot keep."

Controversies over change, and its pace, often shade over into debates about another kind of balance, one that is somewhat more subtle, and perhaps even more important than the balance between old and new. I refer to the ever present need to balance criticism, and its capacity to prevent foolishness and even wrong decisions, against the need for at least a modicum of steady support for the leadership of the College— the need to give the president and the trustees at least some benefit of the doubt. This is one respect in which a president who comes from the outside can be at a serious disadvantage, as I could illustrate in painful detail if there were more time and less risk of offending innocent people. Suffice it to say that someone who has been around an institution for a long time, and who has developed a certain number of enduring friendships, can turn to a faculty colleague, as I once did, and say simply, "Stan, this is what you have to say, at tomorrow's meeting. There is no time to explain now; I will explain later." A new person is unlikely to enjoy that inherited reservoir of support, and the faculty and the trustees must therefore take special pains to be understanding and to provide backing when it is needed (assuming it is deserved!), especially in early days.

Again, memories cascade down upon me. In the first year that I was president of Princeton, there was a reception for alumni. That was a period, at the start of the 1970s, when there was considerable turmoil, with some number of alumni displeased with what they perceived as the radical politics of the faculty, the aggressive recruitment of minority students, and so on. An elderly alumnus, tapping his cane on the floor of Maclean House, made a bee line for me, and I said to myself, "Get ready" [for what could be a tough conversation]. This gentleman, whose name was Milton King, did have a message for me: "Young man," he said [with an emphasis on "young"], "there is nothing you can do to disaffect me!" Needless to say, I was reassured and touched by Mr. King's clearly unshakable commitment to an institution that he valued highly. The moral of the story is that great institutions live beyond presidents, who come and go. But these institutions are more likely grow from strength to strength if they enjoy some stability of leadership.

What I am advocating, as I hope is clear, is certainly not unquestioning support for any proposal that may emanate from the president's office or from a faculty meeting. Hard testing of ideas is essential, and I remember so many occasions when a spirited debate at a meeting of faculty or trustees improved immeasurably my understanding of an issue. The trick is to balance tough scrutiny and constructive disagreement with a willingness to listen and learn, and, at the end of the day, the need for a little trust in the good will as well as the good sense of those ultimately responsible for making decisions. John Gardner, who got so many things right, got this one right too when at the time of Vietnam, he said that colleges need to be spared both "uncritical lovers and unloving critics."

In concluding these remarks, I hope you will allow me to suggest a final balance we need to seek, which in its nature almost defies articulation. Colleges love words and sometimes believe that knowing the right thing to say will suffice. If you're taking a test, I guess it will. But "education" and "life" are about more than taking tests, and we need to balance respect for clear communication with an understanding that it is not always easy, and sometimes not even possible, to verbalize the most important things. Adlai Stevenson spoke to the members of the Princeton graduating class of 1954 in the spring of their senior year, and I think he surprised them when he began by explaining the limits of his ability to instruct them:

One of the great joys of being part of a true community of learning, as you are here at Lafayette, guided by a marvelous presidents and served by a dedicated faculty and staff, is that each of you has the opportunity to continue to learn new things, in new ways, even when it is difficult to put into words exactly what you have learned. You are on a voyage of discovery, where the journey is as important as the destination, where you can always look forward to entering (in Cavafy's phrase) "harbors seen for the first time."

President Weiss: Godspeed.