DR. SABINE U. O'HARA'S INAUGURATION SPEECH

Pathways to Prominence
Dr. O’Hara’s inaugural remarks as presented on Oct. 14, 2004

Thank you so much… this is such a glorious day, and the campus looks absolutely beautiful. I know this has been a real team effort – thank you! Particularly, I want to recognize the inaugural steering committee: Stephanie Garst, Teresa Gereaux, Kathleen O’Malley and Beth Cross.

I have titled my remarks “Pathways to Prominence.” For one, I really like the image of the pathway – the road that stretches out before us and that connects our future with our past. As I look out and see all of you gathered here this morning, I can hardly think of a more fitting image. It seems that indeed the pathways I have traveled have led me right here, and all the different stations along the way have merged here this morning.

My parents are here, my good college friend Gabriele Arndt-Sandrock;
friends, mentors and collaborators from upstate New York, Vermont and
Minnesota; representatives from municipalities, community organizations and the private sector who have influenced my economic development ideas; my husband Phil and our three sons who have been guideposts and companions along this road; Phil’s mother and sister; all of you who represent the academy at large that has been so much part of my identity as an educator and scholar; Norm and Jo
Fintel and David and Susan Gring, my two predecessors and their spouses; and you, the members of the Roanoke College community – students, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni and friends. Your warm welcome, your spirit and your support have been absolutely wonderful, and Phil, Dennis and I already feel at home here! This is a wonderful meeting of the pathways of my own life and of Roanoke College’s. What a privilege it is to be here, and what a joy it is to be serving this college and this community! Thank you for your presence here today,
for your confidence and support.

But the title, “Pathways to Prominence” carries more than the imagery of a road or a pathway. The idea for this title comes also from my summer reading. You see, I immersed myself in Roanoke’s history – books, William Eisenberg’s “The First Hundred Years,” Mark Miller’s “Dear Old Roanoke,” and a draft of the latest one, Dr. George Keller’s “Prologue to Prominence.” This latest book is due out early
next year, and it chronicles Roanoke’s steady and tenacious climb from a small college with meager resources but much spirit and vision to the nationally ranked liberal arts college. Roanoke’s faculty and administration sure had vision and not just that, it took guts to send in that first application for sheltering a Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1952; and it sure took tenacity to take this request all the way to
2003 when we were granted a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.

So I am not simply talking about any type of pathway this morning. I am talking about pathways to prominence. You might say, the prologue is over, and we who are part of Roanoke College today are now in the privileged, exciting and humbling position to be writing the chapter about Roanoke’s prominence. What an awesome task!

So what are these pathways to prominence for us as a liberal arts college founded by two German Lutheran pastors in 1842? Let me suggest three pathways. These pathways are not so much specific initiatives – those we will work on together in our strategic planning process. The pathways I am suggesting are rather overarching commitments that will guide us toward prominence and distinction.
And these pathways also connect our future with our past; they point us to the future with authenticity.

So three pathways to prominence.
1. A commitment to discourse
2. A commitment to service and
3. A commitment to innovation

1. A commitment to discourse

As many of you know, my research in economic development has focused on discourse strategies and stakeholder processes. This first pathway is one that I have explored in my own work, and we enjoyed a very stimulating lecture on discourse by Grant Cornwell and Eve Stodder on Tuesday afternoon at our faculty forum. The more I have talked with faculty, staff, students, trustees and alumni during these past 10 weeks, the more I have become convinced that this is indeed one of our pathways to prominence and may be a serendipitous fit between Roanoke and my own experience. So what does it mean to be a community committed to discourse or to dialogue?

A commitment to discourse is a commitment to intellectual and civic nurture! This is really what being a liberal arts college is all about. We must nurture our students’ and our own intellectual and civic curiosities and passions.

A community committed to discourse is willing to help its members develop and communicate their own insights and positions, willing to engage with others, to listen and learn, and willing to be transformed by the exchange as we seek understanding. You see, this is our calling as academics: to seek understanding and to contribute to the search for truth and meaning; it is our calling to be transformed by the mysteries we discover again and again and by the insight that there is always more to know; it is our calling to invite our students and indeed the larger community into this discovery process and to make learning infectious.

This is what makes working at a college so rewarding. You students are what motivates us. When we see that spark, see the transformation, it really excites us. And you know that our faculty are committed to being such a community where ideas are formed, articulated and transformed. I hear again and again from students and alumni how much the close interaction with faculty has meant for them.

So what does it take for us to be a community committed to discourse? It takes rigorous expectations. Without that, there cannot be any intellectual nurture. Discourse requires solid skills that are transferable to any career and that last for a lifetime of pursuits. More than ever, this includes effective communication skills, both oral and written. It includes quantitative reasoning skills and analytical skills. It includes the ability to develop and organize ideas and the ability to critically evaluate the vast amount of information now available to us.

It also takes willingness to work together across departments and across disciplines. To engage each other, we must become transparent as an organization and open up the silos so that our goals and our assumptions become visible rather than assuming that everyone knows them anyway.

A college, like any other good-sized organization, is messy and complex; as a matter of fact, our world is messy and complex. In order to be relevant we must be effective at addressing our complex relationships as an organization and as part of the larger world around us. We can’t do that if we simply stay in our own confines. New findings in the sciences and medicine, new discoveries in history, cultural studies and business are no longer the result of individual work alone. More often than not, they are the result of interdisciplinary work and collaboration.

Here is also where the civic nurture part comes into focus. A commitment to discourse means that we address issues that are relevant to our society and to our world: social issues, religious issues, economic, political and ethical issues, issues of technology, medicine and the role of the arts. One of the core commitments of U.S. liberal arts colleges has always been to prepare students to be citizens and to nurture not just intellectual skills and passions but civic skills and passions as well. In today’s world this means preparing students to be global citizens, citizens who are prepared to take leadership roles in increasingly diverse communities and workplaces. It is no empty phrase that our world is moving ever closer together.

Discourse requires that we invite, yes, even seek, a diverse chorus of voices and that we hear from different cultures, different religions and different views of the world. Each perspective gives us a particular lens through which we see the world. As many scholars have pointed out, reducing the diversity of voices leads to reduced knowledge, to selective knowledge and to the loss of valuable information.

We have long practiced this kind of civic nurture in our Fowler lecture series, in our multicultural affairs office, in international education, and we must do more of it. Why? Because civil discourse has unfortunately become a lost art in our society. Instead of engaging each other in open civil dialogue, we put each other in boxes, beat each other up and put each other down. And yet if you ask employers, if you ask civic leaders, if you ask our alumni – the message is clear: We need leaders who know how to articulate a position, who know how to engage with others and work in teams, who are strong communicators, open to learning not just once, but again and again and again. In other words, we owe it to this society to be a community committed to discourse and to model civil discourse.

To quote President Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and what never will be.”

The second pathway I suggest is one that moves to “doing” and gives concrete form to our orientation toward others.

2. A commitment to serve

This pathway speaks to our commitment to be motivated not simply by individual goals and agendas but by the desire to serve others and to advance the common good. Too often we reduce what we look for in an education to our own individual goals. Don’t misunderstand me, as educators we must ask ourselves what skills our students need to succeed in today’s competitive workplace and in tomorrow’s fast- changing world. But we also must ask ourselves what our students need today and tomorrow to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives.

This is precisely what many of our alumni have told me has made the difference for them. Their Roanoke experience did not simply give them the skills they needed to get that first job, or even the skills to succeed in subsequent careers. Their Roanoke experience prepared them to lead more meaningful lives, to make a difference in their communities.

The danger of adopting an individualism attitude applies to us as academics, too. Too many of our research centers develop their agenda based on the individual interests of the faculty members and administrators who run them rather than being responsive to the needs of the communities in which we live. Roanoke College has long been known as the college of the Roanoke Valley. It moved here in 1847 and will continue to be the college of the valley. That’s an important expression of our commitment to service and to our very roots as a church-related college. We step outside the boundaries of our campus to be of service to this community. We do so during the very first week of student orientation, and we continue to be active in service projects throughout a student’s career here.

Yet a commitment to service must go beyond that. It is a commitment to service not simply to or for others but service with others. Liberation theology has taught us that difference. That means that service must be part of our very fabric as an educational institution, that we incorporate it in service learning, and that we engage in service for social change. Service is not simply about helping, it is about improving the quality of life in this valley, in this commonwealth and in this world. This is the difference between feeding fish, teaching to fish, and learning whether spinner fishing, net fishing or fly fishing might work best in a particular community. In other words, service requires that we become immersed in and knowledgeable about the context in which we live. And service requires accountability!

Serving our students must mean formulating goals and measuring our progress toward them; serving our communities must mean engaging with them in formulating goals and measuring them. Maybe fishing is not at all where it’s at because the lake is drying up and we need to find a better way to provide for the future. This kind of accountability is no small task. Measuring complex outcomes, particularly long-term outcomes, is difficult. And yet, if we want to be credible in our service, we must also be willing to assess what we do and how we do it.

3. A Commitment to Innovation

Innovation implies curiosity; it implies knowing that there is always more to know.

Innovation is how Martin Luther, the German reformer and namesake of the Lutheran church, defined the role of education itself. For Luther, education sets us free; it drives out blind surrender to old powers that hold us back; it explores the new and “knock(s) a hole” (BTW, 715) and “wreak(s) havoc”(BTW, 723) in the devil's kingdom, to quote Luther. Yet there are also countervailing images in Luther’s writings. Luther calls for stability, for tradition. He calls education “the sacred ark” in which the holy tablets are held (BTW, 715).

And is this not the very struggle we find ourselves in – innovators and preservationists at the same time? Innovation is at the core of the academic endeavor and yet how tough it is to be innovators when it comes to our own curriculum, to our own organizational structures, to our own procedures. To live in this tension is what it means to be a church-affiliated college as opposed to a church college. We must honor our traditions, yet we must never allow them to turn into lifeless icons that hold us back. Maybe, particularly as Lutherans, we must never let the side that turns traditions into icons win out over the innovation side.

Alan Guskin, Co-Director and Senior Scholar of the “Project on the Future of Higher Education” and President and Chancellor Emeritus of Antioch University, stated that the key innovation challenge for today’s colleges and universities is to (a) meet the learning goals students need to succeed in today’s world, (b) improve the quality of the work lives of faculty and staff and (c) operate in an increasingly resource constrained environment where higher education funding is in decline. It is easy to meet two of these three; it is very difficult to meet all three. That takes innovation; it takes a mindset that wants to solve tough problems, that thinks outside of the box, and that keeps at it.

Yes, a commitment to innovation takes resources. It requires competitive salaries; it requires support for staff and faculty development so that we can be up to date in our fields. And we are indeed blessed with a community that responds as we seek to continue to build such support.

I am delighted to announce the establishment of an endowment that supports a new professorship – the Leonhardt Cassullo Professorship in Art History. This is a wonderful gift to our students and to this college community that was made possible through Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, class of ’78, and the generosity of the Leonhardt Foundation, which was established by Joanne’s mother, Dorothea L. Leonhardt. On behalf of all of us gathered here and of all the other members of our community, I am truly privileged and pleased to accept this gift and to convey our most sincere thanks and appreciation to you, Joanne, for your dedication and love for Roanoke College. This gift will strengthen the arts at Roanoke and will bring the joy and wonder of art history to Roanoke students today and in the future.

And I am pleased to also announce the establishment of an undergraduate research program at Roanoke College. This program will provide stipends to 10 especially talented first year students to work as undergraduate assistants with and for faculty members on faculty research. Our existing summer scholars program has been a great success. Students whose projects have been selected as summer scholars projects have told me what a difference it has made for them to work closely with a faculty member on a research project. This new program will be a companion piece that offers longer-term research support to our faculty members for research they define.

Financial support to undergird our work is most certainly part of what it means to improve the quality of our work lives and to balance that tricky triad Alan Guskin posed. Yet it takes more than that.

Innovation also requires teamwork – that was certainly the way Homer Bast, Dean Kendig and Dr. Charley approached that first Phi Beta Kappa application; it takes collaboration between departments, between the curriculum and the co-curriculum, it takes bold dreaming, and it never simply happens at the top. Innovation has never come about by someone thinking about how you could do your job better; it has never come about by doing things the way they have always been done before, and it has never come about by doing things the way everyone else does them. This is precisely why it is so important for me to hear your ideas.

So, most importantly, innovation takes passion. We can’t be lukewarm about what we do… whether as teachers, scholars, administrators, housekeepers, maintenance staff, and clerical staff. We must be passionate about our work, passionate about our students, passionate about the communities we serve, and yes, passionate about being Roanoke College. It is this passion we share about this college of the valley that is our biggest asset, and it is this passion that compels us to seek to renew and improve what we do time and time again. That’s innovation.

This is also what you students help us with. Your energy keeps us moving; you inspire us to renew our own vision, and you challenge us to keep revising what we do. That’s what keeps us young, too. I love the energy you bring to this campus, and every year there is a whole new class of 18/19-year-olds so it gives me the wonderful illusion that I simply don’t get older either. Just like our students.

So there you have it – three pathways to prominence. To quote one of Roanoke College’s most famous alumni, Henry Folwer:

“How fitting – instead of looking back with satisfaction – to look forward with anticipation, to dream boldly as our Roanoke College founders once did.”

Why would we want to dream boldly? Why would we aim for prominence? Why would we want to be nationally outstanding? The answer is really quite simple. We owe it to those who have come before us and to those who will come after us that we will not be satisfied with simply being good and with simply being known. Laura, you referred to the challenge we pose to students to perform above the bottom line. I pledge to you that we will strive to be above the bottom line. We will strive for prominence so that those who receive a Roanoke College degree will indeed be prepared to continue a proud tradition of “high standards of scholarship” and to quote our mission statement, a commitment to prepare students “for responsible lives of learning, service and leadership.”