Good afternoon colleagues.
Thank you, President Mason and Senator Gill for your updates. I want to welcome our new Senators, as well, to their role on University Senate. As someone who has long served on the University Senate at a number of different institutions, I know how rewarding it can be and how much time it takes; so, thank you.
Throughout this long and difficult summer, I have returned again and again to a sentence in Hannah Arendt’s essay, Understanding and Politics, in which she describes understanding as “an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.”
In my efforts to come to terms with the realities of the budget situation here at the University of Oregon this summer, I sought to cultivate as best I could the habits of this unending and changing activity of understanding in my engagement with my colleagues, faculty and administrators alike.
And while I know that for some of you here on the University Senate, my efforts to create opportunities for meaningful consultation fell short, they were rooted in a deep belief in shared governance, limited by intense time constraints, and animated by a commitment to cultivate habits of dialogue and deliberation, even in the face of very challenging decisions.
Although I do not believe that we could have reached the final decisions we made without going through the process we undertook, I recognize the pain and anger and frustration it caused. As we gather today as a University Senate for the first time since the President and I announced those decisions, my hope is that, even as we continue to process what unfolded this summer, we will also focus our attention on how we can create together the conditions for meaningful engagement about the realities the university faces.
The budget remains extremely limited, our expenses continue to outstrip our revenues, and the research and teaching mission of this university and of institutions across higher education in the United States remain under attack. We will need to chart a path forward together. And from my perspective, that pathway should be rooted in the core habits of a liberal arts education, which include attentive listening, critical discernment, and ethical imagination.
How can we create the conditions for these habits to take root and grow across the university; for the quiet attention that allows what is said to be heard, for the unending activity of understanding that allows us to come to terms with the complex realities we face, and for the capacity to envision and articulate together a future worthy of our highest aspirations as a university community? If my first year as Provost has taught me anything, it is that this place, this community, despite and perhaps because of all we have been through, is well positioned to create the conditions for meaningful dialogue about the most difficult issues that press upon us as a university community.
I am not so idealistic to believe that we will always reach consensus. But, even when we may ultimately disagree, we will at least have heard and understood one another; thoughtfully, honestly, and constructively.
As Arendt reminds us, understanding, in constant change and variation, empowers us to come to terms with reality so we can learn to be at home in the world. Perhaps that is what a liberal arts education is all about — learning together to be at home in the world.
If we commit to practicing the kind of understanding that makes such a homecoming possible — patient, critical, open, and vulnerable to one another — then perhaps our efforts to respond to the challenges we face will themselves be the pathway to the renewal we seek.
This, I believe, is the work that lies before us this year, and I am eager to undertake it with all of you.
Thank you.