Blog Archive » 2006 » October

My heart goes out to my friend King Jordan this morning. Front Page Headline in the Washington Post: "Gallaudet Students Arrested" with the subhead "President Ordered Halt to 3-Day Demonstration" Ugh.

The last thing any college president ever wants to do is issue arrest orders for students. Such an agonizing decision usually comes only after exhausting every other possible solution.

Presidents are responsible for the welfare of each and every student as well as for the health of the academic community. In normal times on a college campus, those twin responsibilities work synergistically as students derive considerable individual benefits from a healthy academic environment, which includes tolerating and even inciting a broad range of free expression and lively debate. On rare occasions, however, these responsibilities become antagonistic demands as conflicting points of view freely expressed devolve into debilitating chaos.

The scene at Gallaudet is like an ancient Greek tragedy. Plato warned of the devolution of democracy into anarchy, the ultimate tyranny of the mob. Order can only be restored through forceful action. When protests over the appointment of Dr. Jane Fernandes as the next Gallaudet President reached the point of shutting down the university for three days, President Jordan faced the ultimate tragic imperative: to restore enough order to the academic community at Gallaudet so that classes could resume, he had to order the arrest of individuals including students and faculty who were blockading the entrances to the campus.

Certainly, I don't know enough about the internal disputes at Gallaudet to have an opinion on those issues. But as a college president myself, I know that the nightmare scenario is chaos on campus, leading to the need to take adversarial action against students. All of us who choose to work in academe do so because, in that quiet place in our souls that motivates us to keep going each day, we cherish our students and the life of the mind we share with them. Disruptions that shatter the essential orderliness of the intellectual life of the campus cause harm to the college's sense of mission that can take years to repair. A president's stewardship of the university's most precious asset, its intellectual integrity, is put to its harshest test when the free expression of some impairs the ability of others to learn.

King Jordan and I have shared much in the 17+ years we've both been presidents of neighboring institutions that have in common a primary mission to serve students with particular characteristics — deaf students at Gallaudet, women at Trinity. We know that universities with special missions are frequently misunderstood or even marginalized in a world that sees big state university campuses as normative. We have to be passionate, sometimes even extreme, in our advocacy for our mission and our students. The world has learned a lot this week about the necessary passion that sustains the great work of Gallaudet. That passion has flared beyond control this week, and the very person responsible to keep that flame alive for two decades now must tamp down the fire. How painful! I pray that President Jordan and the Gallaudet community will find their way back to the peaceful and productive expressions of passionate education for the deaf that have been their world-renowned characteristics.

Before dawn in Nickel Mines today, bulldozers demolished the schoolhouse where a madman's murder and mayhem brought unfathomable sorrow to the Amish community last week. Earlier this week, schools in Montgomery County, Culpeper County and Arlington endured various alerts as a result of threats to student safety. Meanwhile, President Bush and education officials gathered in a special summit to talk about the problem of violence in schools. No amount of talk will stop the madmen with guns and grudges. The schools are not violent, the culture is violent.

Universities are places where smart people supposedly think about solutions to social problems. Higher education generally has been remarkably silent on the issue of violence in society and in schools. Instead, higher education today seems beseiged in a very different way, consumed with its own internal problems and disputes, dissipating its considerable resources in defense of misconduct by presidents or athletes, lost in the arcane quagmire of regulatory excess and competitive angst. We academics seem to have lost our voices at a time when this society could use some clear public expressions of new directions to that Good Society the sociologists love to describe.

I'm thinking about the seige of our schools this morning as I read about the protesters shutting down a great University, Gallaudet. I have no doubt that there are legitimate issues fueling this protest, and those must be addressed. But, somehow, it strikes me as perverse that a university community cannot find a way to manage its disagreements without shutting down the teaching and learning environment. Free expression is the essential fuel of a university, yes, but expressions of freedom that repress the rights of others to learn is as authoritarian as any administrative directive.

I hope the Gallaudet community finds its way back to a rational solution to its dispute soon. Gallaudet is a remarkable institution, and the world needs Gallaudet University and all universities to be places that model healthy debate and effective solutions, not more dysfunction. All of us in higher education need to think more deeply about our responsibility to contribute to an end to the seige of our schools, so that the real work of education in forming a better society can proceed more quickly.

What are your ideas about what Trinity could do to address the issue violence in schools and in our culture? Please reply by clicking on the envelope below, or write ot me at president@trinitydc.edu

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Seems like I hit a nerve with my talk during Cap & Gown Convocation. My remarks asked the rhetorical question, "What's up with her outburst?" paraphrasing several situations in which women who spoke up got put down with comments about their "outbursts." Several students came up to me after the ceremony to tell me that they definitely have had experiences — usually at work — in which their attempts to make a strong statement have been disparaged, while male colleagues making similar statements have been praised as good leaders.

A young alumna, Ria Leilani Baldevia '05, writes from Hawaii where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Economics: (She gave me permission to quote her comments) "I love the article concerning the outburst and the voice of women in higher education. I value and appreciate the environment of Trinity more than ever now. My graduate group consists of 8 people, 4 women and 4 men (I will take my comprehensive exams in Economics this May 2007). It's been a tricky balancing act since I've arrived. At the East West Center, the student fellows participate in the weekly Wednesday night seminar which is composed of a presentation and a Q&A section. And of course, those asking questions comprise mostly of men. And when women do ask questions, it's with a soft tone voicing gentle issues that are far from rocking the boat. I am aware of the scenario, I hear the grumblings from my female colleagues, and now I am regaining my voice in the whole group. I was guilty of being quiet and observing too much without acting, when I know I am capable to do so. And I also have the Trinity background to remind me exactly how it was for your voice to be valued and how it WAS EXPECTED that you speak up. Cultivating opinions and expressing them in a contentious, aggressive manner was found to be admirable by my male colleagues. It was surprising to know that the gentleman across the table, who tore my argument apart (and vice versa), would come up to me and thank me for our conversation and exchange of ideas. It's very refreshing to know that my student fellows find it refreshing and wholeheartedly appreciate the skills I garnered at Trinity."

How about you? What is your experience with standing up and speaking out for the ideas and causes that are important to you? Please send me your comments by clicking on the envelope below, or send me a message at president@trinitydc.edu

I came to Washington when I was 17 because I wanted to get involved in politics. I had heard about the Congressional Page program when I was in high school, and thought it sounded so exciting, but it was not a realistic option for me. Instead, I came to Trinity to study Political Science; I dreamed of becoming a staffer to a Congressman on Senator, or even running for office. I never did get around to working on the Hill, turning to the study of law rather than the practice of politics. But I remain intensely interested in politics, and in the ways in which young citizens can learn the ropes of political engagement. I'm so proud of all Trinity students and alumnae who participate across the political spectrum in the great work of advancing democracy through political action.

I first met Congressional pages when I was running the Street Law program at Georgetown University Law Center, a program in which law students taught courses about law and the legal system to high school students. We had a Street Law course at the Congressional Page School, high up in the dome of the Library of Congress. At long last, I got a chance to go to the Page School! I was there as a supervisor of the law student instructors. The pages were some of the brightest, most interesting young people I ever met (next to my own Trinity classmates), and I always looked forward to the days when I would visit the Page School for my supervisory duties.

The Page Program is one way that young citizens can learn about the federal political system, how Congress works, and perhaps even more important, how the people who make our federal laws really work — not just the civics "How a Bill Becomes a Law" textbook education, but the real wheeling-and-dealing of lawmaking. There's nothing wrong with learning how to wheel-and-deal; it's the stuff of political life in this country. Good for the young citizens who earnestly want to learn about the political process through the Page Program or Close-up or Presidential Classroom or any one of the numerous other programs that help our young citizens learn how to become the next generation of political leaders for the nation.

Sadly, we now come to Foley's Follies. Congressman Mark Foley clearly was living a lie, masquerading as a conservative member of Congress when he was hiding his personal secrets. His deception about his identity as a gay man is one thing, a matter of personal choice. He could be forgiven that; even a public figure has some right of privacy. But his shameful, sick, exploitation of the youngsters in the Page Program is unforgiveable. This story has cascaded across the news this week as reams of lurid emails and instant messages between Foley and various former pages become public. The shameful details are readily available elsewhere, no need to repeat them here.

The fact that members of the House Leadership might have known about Rep. Foley's bad behavior but did nothing to stop him is equally shameful. How many times, over how many years, do we have to hear about men in power looking the other way while their clearly disturbed colleagues engage in the sexual exploitation of children? The scandal of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church should have been a powerful enough lesson for all others in positions of supervisory authority. But there always seem to be powerful people who assume that the rules are different for them. Some people never learn anything from the crises of others.

Foley's follies are NOT about the Page Program, rather, they are about the intoxication of power and the dysfunctional conduct of an individual, and the spinelessness of those who looked the other way. Congress should not damage the Page Program by imposing "fixes" that are unrelated to the problem. It's the abuse of power among members of Congress and the leadership, not the Page Program, that needs fixing.

See Foley,Pages

I drove across the back roads of Paradise today.

Returning from a meeting in Philadelphia, I followed a route I often favor to avoid I-95, to savor the country roads. Today those roads seemed different. The brownish-gray fog of a late afternoon harvest dust oppressed the landscape as if all of nature took on the cloak of mourning for the Amish girls lost in a madman's frenzy. Scenes along the way: cornfields brown and flat, stubble reaching to the sky; the dying of the fall, the dead already here. Children in bonnets and straw hats, wearing severe blue-and-black garb, trudging along the side of the road, school books dangling; an older girl reaches back to keep the trailing little ones close. Motel and diner signs punctuate the Route 30 view: AARP discounts, free Internet access, homemade apple pies, buy pumpkins now, pray for the children. Words of comfort and solidarity for neighbors in Nickel Mines, the small town where the unthinkable is now the news.

Cormac McCarthy's new work The Road is a meditation on the end of civilization. Critics have assumed that the scorched-to-bedrock landscape of his nightmare is the result of nuclear annihilation, but I found his tale to be an allegory of the power of human destruction in many forms. The cannibalism McCarthy portrays so bleakly is not some distant imagining but a graphic metaphor for the insatiable evil of humans preying upon the weakest among us.

In The Road a father and son trudge through the landscape of the apocalypse, clinging to the idea that they are "the good guys" while they seek refuge from "the bad guys" who are the mad remnants of the human race. Through intense suffering and even terror, hope remains alive.

Hope remains alive through the great sorrow in Paradise and Nickel Mines and the Amish community in southern Pennsylvania. In the Amish tradition, even as the community prepares to bury the young victims, words of forgiveness echo across the fields. Such is the power of great faith.