The first pharmacogenomics program at a pharmacy school in the entire country. A Grammy Award winner on our own faculty. The coveted AACSB accreditation for our Harry F. Byrd, Jr. School of Business. The only nurse midwifery program in the Commonwealth of Virginia. An alumnus starring in “Jersey Boys” on Broadway. And, a current student starring in the movie “Hairspray.” A football team that has finally beaten Bridgewater – the first time since 1932.
An approach to global citizenship that actually pays for students to travel abroad. An 8-to-1 student to faculty ratio, among the lowest student-to-faculty ratios in the entire country. An environmental studies program that is working in partnership to clean up Abrams Creek and to protect the Shenandoah River. And, hundreds of talented, inspiring faculty paired with thousands of promising, incredibly creative students. This place called Shenandoah is truly full of magic.
My dear family and friends, mentors from years of old, fellow presidents and delegates, trustees and community members, distinguished alumni – whether you carried our banner during the Dayton years or the Winchester years or whether you’re from Leesburg campus – you honor me and you honor all Shenandoah faculty, staff and students today with your presence. Thank you for being here.
Inaugurations are designed to celebrate the magic of an institution and to imagine what the future holds for that institution. When each of us tries to imagine the future, we each get inspiration from different sources. Some of us daydream, some of us pray, some analyze our dreams, and some of us flip a coin. Some of us turn to fortune cookies. Or at least we used to.
Because, at one time, fortune cookies actually held fortunes. As we cracked open those little cookies, out slipped a magical white piece of paper foretelling what would happen at some future time. Things like, “Someone from your past will appear again soon” or “Tomorrow will be a very important day for you.” Not anymore.
If fortune cookies are any indicator, societal norms and expectations have taken a disturbing turn. Now fortune cookies hold not fortunes but platitudes. Feel good, let-me-reinforce-how-wonderful-you-are shallow statements of fact, humor or praise. Things like, “You are kind and friendly,” “Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure,” “You get what you want through your brains and charm” or, a recent favorite of mine, “Smile if you like this fortune cookie.” Have we really become a society that eschews fortunes in favor of flattery?
It is our educational system that is called to lead us away from such self-gratification, such platitudes; to lead us away from the empty life to the inspired life: a life of substance and intellectual rigor, creativity and service.
For 15 months, people have asked about my vision for Shenandoah University. Well, my vision is sort of like music and, as Warren Benson, a professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music, said, “Music lives in three tenses at once: developing what comes before it in the past, it engages us in the present, and it inspires our hopes for the future”
Our past has been a good one. I stand on the shoulders of giants: the past presidents, the faculty and staff and alumni who have worked so hard on behalf of this institution. In recognition of those presidents, who spent countless hours building this institution, I have had the Chain of Office slightly altered. It now includes the names and years of service of all 15 past presidents of Shenandoah University, so I can carry our history from college to college and conservatory to the university on me. And, for anyone who might wonder if [immediate past president] James Davis is still going to be connected to the university, let me assure you, Jim. Davis is right here perched on my shoulder.
When I go to the beach, I put my academic materials away, and I enjoy some easy, light reading. I love Pat Conroy. In one book he wrote, “Imagination is knowing what you want and where to go to find it.” Well, to that end, I organized a university-wide – actually a community-wide – strategic planning process. Shenandoah is strong enough now that we have the luxury – we have the mandate – of stopping to hear what everyone thinks we should be doing. So we talked to faculty and staff and students. We talked to trustees and community leaders. We heard from alumni and parents about what they want and, to paraphrase Pat Conroy, for Shenandoah, imagination is knowing what we, collectively, want, and it is our job to know where to go to find it.
This is culminating in a five-year plan we will launch next week, and I’m eager to share the details. But today I’m just going to touch on some highlights.
Academic excellence will come first at Shenandoah. We will increase our commitment to an investment in student learning, in faculty scholarship and teaching and performance and service and in staff development. We will increase opportunities for faculty and staff and students to travel, to perform, to do research and clinical work. We will implement a new advising proposal that came forward from the faculty senate. And, in the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges who said, “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library,” we will increase and broaden our electronic and print library holdings.
Shenandoah, as the faculty desires, will have a center for teaching excellence to support them, to support you, in their drive to be better teachers and more multi-faceted teachers. While face-to-face classes and Winchester will always be the core – will always be the heart of Shenandoah – we will expand our offerings in Loudoun County, and we will make sure academic excellence is accessible to people with varying needs through hybrid and non-traditional delivery systems.
We have grown strong, we have built buildings and enrollment over the last many years, and I will care for that well. Will we grind to a halt? No. Not even in this challenging economy. But, we will pause briefly to catch our breath. We will pause briefly to appreciate what we have and to build on our strengths. We cannot be all things to all peoples. I look forward to limited growth that will be strategic and by design, assuring first we have the infrastructure and the human capital necessary to give each and every student the best educational experience possible.
Shenandoah will be a mid-sized university to retain the intimacy and the personal touch so many students have told me they value. To be much bigger, frankly, would be a disservice to the local community. Shenandoah University would become the 400-pound elephant in the community instead of the cultural and creative and intellectual leader it is and always should be. Certainly there will be growth of the physical plant. We have many needs still across the institution but, and there is a “but,” new buildings cannot take precedence over building the endowment and lowering our debt servicing. We need to do both to ensure the long-term financial strength of Shenandoah, to continue the beautiful legacy built by Jim Davis, past presidents and our faculty and staff, and to ensure that the value of a Shenandoah degree continues to compound over time for each of our alumni.
I will continue to teach one course a year, because teaching keeps me in touch with our students are, what our faculty is doing and, frankly, teaching is what I most love to do.
Over the years, most of my teaching has been related to democracy, or processes to get to democracy. When I graduated from Princeton, I went on a Rotary International graduate scholarship to Chile. For a student of politics, I could not have arrived in Chile at a better time: witnessing the first presidential election in 19 years in Chile, being present for the rebirth of a democracy and growing to know and love the people of Chile who were hungry to return to an open political system. As we got closer to the elections, when it became clear the military would indeed accept the outcome no matter what it was, it was clear democracy was again coming to Chile, a country which prides itself in being a model of democracy throughout Latin America.
There was a Chinese restaurant I loved in the town where I lived. As the election approached, I knew there was a sense of certainty because of the fortune cookies they served. Fortunes like, “Democracy will rise again,” or “Chileans will take back the great boulevards of the country,” which is of course a reference to former President [Salvador] Allende’s final radio address in 1973 before he died. Or, “Never again will this happen.” The latter is a reference to how committed people were in the country to ensure an authoritarian regime would never rise again. Even toward the end of the dictatorship the impression was palpable.
As an American student, there were challenges finding people who were willing to be interviewed on the record about the authoritarian regime. There were challenges going to the national library archives, spending hours to find the right document or book I was looking for only to find the whole chapter I needed had been torn out or had been blacked out with the censorship of the regime. I was so hungry to hear from my professors and fellow students, but they had long ago learned to be careful about what they said.
People in many parts of Latin America lived for years in fear that a fellow student, a professor, a sibling, a parent or a child might report them for being against an authoritarian or totalitarian regime and then they might not be here tomorrow. So the class discussions were stilted. All of the ways we look to be good citizens in a democracy being informed, being active, engaged were constrained or outlawed. And, you can imagine the great appreciation that gave me for living in a democracy.
Because citizenship is central to Shenandoah’s mission statement, the second fortune I offer is that Shenandoah will be seen as a leader in inspiring students to become good local and global citizens. We take that as a broad approach. We want our students and alumni to be active, contributing members of their many, many communities. For us it also means the university itself needs to be a good citizen in the way we offer things to ourselves and our community. We will expand the Global Citizenship Project. We will increase the number of international students studying at Shenandoah University and the number of Shenandoah University students studying abroad.
We will be a strong partner for Winchester and all the surrounding counties – for the local school systems and health system, places of worship and the many orgs and companies that keeps us a vibrant and welcoming place to live. We will do more than our part to call and prepare and send future leaders of the church and of the community, and we will do so while welcoming and embracing all faiths and a diversity of peoples, an ideal that is very strong within the United Methodist Church. Our affiliation, of course, is very strong with the church. And we will get students to activate their citizenship by voting. This past August, I worked with the SGA to announce an initiative to get every sing eligible student, faculty and staff member to vote. At least to register. We don’t care who they vote for, we just want them to voice their opinions, to let themselves be heard, to get into the habit of voting now. A habit that should never end.
It’s amazing how controversial that turns out to be. I’ve heard people say “Oh, Virginia’s a swing state, and Shenandoah is trying to get the students to vote. Students usually vote to the left.” I’ve also heard people say, “Oh, she must have a faculty member in line to run for public office.” I guarantee you, this is not true. We are not trying to enter into local politics, and we are not taking any political stances outside of perhaps issues related to education here. It is simply the deep value of being able to vote.
The best education demands all sorts of things that are, in fact, endemic to a democracy. An open exchange of ideas, unbridled creative energies, an untethered intellect and a collective sense of truth and memory – something we frequently take for granted. I want to take you back to many parts of Latin America – it could be El Salvador, it could be Chile or Guatemala in the 1970s and ’80s, when you weren’t allowed to meet in groups. Certainly not groups that would talk about political or social issues. Except for women, who don’t seem so threatening. They frequently were able to fly under the radar in Latin America in women’s cooking groups or women’s sewing cooperatives. They were just sewing, and chatting. “So, how is your family.” “Great, great.” “Having fun?” “Yes.” “How is your son?” “Oh…he’s fine.” “Really? I haven’t seen him around much.” “Well, actually, I’m not really sure where he is. I’m sure he’s off traveling in the south or something. He’ll come back, but I don’t really know where he is.” And, then the woman across the circle says, “My husband’s been gone for two days, and I know it’s not because of another woman.” Then, the stories start coming out about the people who are missing in the community, and one quiet little voice says, “I know it sounds crazy, but I swear I thought I saw a body floating down the river last week.” “I’m sure it was just a log.” And another woman looks down while she’s sewing and says, “I saw it, too.”
Pretty soon, they start sharing stories of how deeply afraid they were and how nice it is to finally be able to share these stories, because they had been alone for days or weeks harboring this fear that their loved ones were gone and missing and might never come back, that there were bodies floating down the creek or someone seen tortured and left for dead in the streets. In America, we would go to the police. In most communities, we feel like we go to the police and we can do that with safety and security. But if you’re in a society where you fear they may have something to do with these disappearances, you are alone. The empowering movement of these women, they weren’t just sewing, they were creating a common history. They were creating a common memory, a common truth and reaffirming their identity and as Amy Tan says, “Memory feeds imagination.”
The creation of a collective truth and understanding of who we are and the ability to talk about it is very important and, in that spirit, fortune number three for Shenandoah is very simply: Shenandoah will become our name, we will be Shenandoah. Shenandoah University will not just be in the valley, but we will be of this valley. We will protect the culture and the heritage and the environment of this beautiful place. We already enjoy a strong relationship with the city of Winchester and the surrounding counties but we will further demonstrate our commitment to being a good partner in the preservation of valley history, of old town development, of economic and environmental sustainability and yes, even in the protection of Southern culture.
After I was named president, Jim Davis and I sat down and agreed to commit our signatures to American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. We believe it is possible to be a good environmental citizen while also being fiscally responsible, and we will step up our education programs and actions to do our part to help protect this planet. The name itself, Shenandoah, evokes thoughts of nature and beauty and spirituality. We will build the strongest outdoor education and recreational program at a university in the mid-Atlantic region. In fact, we have already begun to do this. Athletic teams went out rafting or canoeing earlier this year. We’ve offered hiking trips, camping trips, rock climbing trips, horseback riding trips.
This winter, our physical therapy students will learn to be adaptive ski instructors. We are working with Outward Bound to integrate their classes with our degree programs with the dream of being able to offer an Outward Bound MBA and an Outward Bound masters in occupational therapy someday.
I hope people will come to think Shenandoah – river, valley, university. Becoming our name and celebrating our Shenandoah roots, gives us a common story grounded in the valley, a strength and set of values to will serve our students well as they flow forth from here, like the river, to the Chesapeake and beyond.
The inauguration theme is fabulous but, when you think about it, “Imagine and Inspire” is most easily realized in a democracy, without constraints attached. At a university, academic freedom is about giving the faculty space to be their most creative and imaginative selves and to allow spaces for dissent as well. Such spaces serve to reinforce the democratic culture, not to undermine it. I’m proud to be a citizen of a country in which, when we’re facing an economic crisis for instance, no one worries the Pentagon will coup and take over the White House. I bet there’s not a person in this room who has thought of that as a possibility. But yet, that is a concern that still afflicts many countries in the world today. We resolve our problems through the voting booth, if you think there are problems, not through the military.
I thank each and every one of you for being part of the magic of Shenandoah and the magic of these last two days, which began with dear Dr. Maya Angelou’s and her wonderful voice saying, “Shenandoah.” I could’ve listened to her say that for hours. Our terrific gala concert last night showcased our talent and we did it again today with a world-class orchestra and an arrangement created by Jay Chattaway just for today. The student center was a rocking last night, and I have to tell you how empowering it is to dance to “I Will Survive” with about 100 women students and faculty and staff. Yesterday we had “This I Believe” with NPR’s Jay Allison as well, which gave us with the opportunity to hear from students and faculty and trustees about what they deeply believe in.
And, because turnaround is fair play, I’m going to end by telling you what I believe. If I had written a “This I Believe” essay, it would’ve gone something like this: As for me, I believe in “Die Hard.” Yep, my favorite movie is that over-the-top, shoot-em-up, full-of-testosterone movie called “Die Hard.” I know it sounds like a bit of a stretch for a strong-willed vegetarian woman with a leaning toward non-violence, but at its heart, that movie and Bruce Willis’s character are all about good conquering evil. Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in that storyline. I also believe every one of us involved in education believes in the storyline, too. We believe we can transform students’ lives, we can work in partnership to improve our communities, we can take steps towards a more peaceful world, and empowering the underdog is a noble adventure. Yippee ki-ay! To Shenandoah students of today and tomorrow, I commit to you that together with the faculty, staff, trustees and alumni of this great university, I will do everything possible to ensure your educational fortune cookie says, “You will imagine, inspire and achieve great things. May the beauty and the magic of the three Shenandoahs – river, valley and university – rest deep within you.
In the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “May Shenandoah inspire each one of us to be the rainbow coming from the clouds, bringing light to a better world.”
– President Tracy Fitzsimmons, Sept. 26, 2008