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KU chancellor opens academic year with annual convocation address
LAWRENCE — The following are University of Kansas Chancellor Robert E. Hemenway’s prepared remarks for KU’s 143rd opening convocation, held Aug. 20.
It is my annual privilege, as chancellor of the University of Kansas, to welcome you to this remarkable city on a hill, Mount Oread.
By your presence here tonight you express a noble faith —the university’s faith in you and your faith in yourself.
For you this is a new experience, one which you share with fellow Jayhawks. For chancellors it is old hat. For 143 years, the KU chancellor has greeted the new freshmen class and wished you Godspeed as you embark upon your college career. In 1866, in the first class, there were only 40 of you, and the chancellor was skeptical about whether the first freshman class was ready for college. One of the reasons was that none of the 40 had graduated from high school. (On the other hand, there were no high schools from which to graduate, so maybe it wasn’t as important as it seemed.)
Today, we don’t worry about your preparation. You have already proven yourself worthy. By all the ways that we judge a freshman class — grade point average, standardized test scores, a vigorous high school curriculum, the amazing digital dexterity which results from hundreds of hours of playing video games, your collective success at text messaging and your intimate understanding of social networks — all of these accomplishments make you stand out as one of the best qualified, most nimble group of students who have ever entered KU.
You are especially important to KU for a formal, educational reason. Your presence validates the idea on which a university is founded.
Any university is only as good as the quality of thought and intellect, character and integrity of its incoming students. You are the key actors in the ritual of renewal that lies at the very center of a great university. Each year there is a new class— you — and each year the new class knows a little bit more than their predecessors.
A central part of this yearly ritual of renewal is for us to ease your path into the university, to orient you so that you know the physical landscape, where the classrooms are, how the bus system works, etc. This is what Hawk Week is all about. The process has already enabled you to discover that there seem to be more cars than parking spaces on the KU campus. I have no idea what you do about this, but I trust you to figure it out.
What I can do is share with you five ways that KU defines itself. We want KU to be:
— a place for champions
— a diverse university
— a research university
— a marketplace of ideas
— a community of scholars
What does it mean to be “a place for champions”?
KU believes in competition, and there are hundreds of ways that competition will manifest itself while you attend KU. People will compete for grades, because it is a measure of learning. Honors of all kinds will be sought. If you thought the Olympics were competitive, wait until you see KU. But don’t let this bother you. The search for victory grows out of a desire to be the best. You should not avoid such a competition. KU’s story is a competitive story. KU graduates know that they have been prepared to match challenges from anywhere in the world.
There is nothing wrong with this so long as you are fair and honest in the competition. Because we are KU, we will model a lot of competitive behavior. If you watch closely you can learn much about the right way to compete.
You may remember the KU basketball team won the national championship this year. Or you may think about the victory of the Jayhawk football team in the Orange Bowl last year. The basketball team was invited to the White House to receive congratulations from President Bush. After the team left the president in his Oval Office, the team was invited to the Supreme Court building where Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Thomas greeted them and talked about the Supreme Court.
The team learned many things. One thing they learned is that there is a basketball court on the top floor of the Supreme Court building. The justices refer to it as the highest court in the land.
A diverse university
KU is a large university that prides itself on being a hospitable, welcoming environment for men and women of all colors, all cultures, all lifestyles, all faiths and all nationalities. Two women students were part of that first KU class in 1866. The first African-American student enrolled in 1870, four years after KU began. Today, KU students come from over 120 different countries, all 50 states and every county in Kansas. Over 800 students are African-American, over 1,000 are Asian-American and 800 are Hispanic-American. 1,800 or so are not American, having come to KU from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, before she retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, articulated well the philosophy that drives KU to open its arms to a diverse student body. As she said, “The benefits of diversity are important and tangible because classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited and simply more enlightening and interesting when the students have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.”
What does it mean to be “a research university?"
One of the things you will realize about KU is that we are very serious about being a research university.
Faculty at KU are recognized the world over for their knowledge and the truths they discover and share with their students. They will go to great lengths to add new knowledge to the world’s wisdom.
I had the opportunity this summer to travel to Greenland, to the Greenland Ice Sheet, to see first hand how KU scientists were participating in an international research expedition to drill down into the Greenland ice core to discover how the world’s climate has changed, both 100,000 years ago, as well as in the last decade. In temperatures below zero, on Greenland’s ice shelf, KU faculty were on the scene, doing research.
Let’s talk about “a marketplace of ideas”
This is one of the university’s most strongly held beliefs. What we really mean when we use this phrase is that KU inevitably stimulates a multitude of views, a panorama of opinions. The university works hard at offering a model of informed debate, which presumes that you research your position and present it with civility. But no matter what your opinion, you will have the right to speak at the University of Kansas. The First Amendment is alive and well at KU, and you may feel sometimes it is too alive and too often used.
KU prides itself in being a laboratory of democracy. But we can’t serve as a laboratory of democracy without free speech, even if the views expressed sometimes make us uncomfortable.
In the end, KU as a marketplace of ideas means simply that your mind will be engaged, and you will have the opportunity to test many different theories in your next four years, and you will change your mind in some ways and solidify your views in other ways. We hope any change occurs because of the quality of argument and insight that you encounter. If it sometimes seems that you are in the middle of the marketplace, with a cacophony of opinions bombarding you, don’t worry about it. Clarity will emerge. You will see your way, and you will discover — because your ideas have been tested — what you truly believe.
A community of scholars
What does this mean? The dictionary offers various definitions of community. The one I like is based on ecology.
In ecology, a community is a group of “animal and plant species living together and having close interaction, especially through food relationships.”
This last definition probably comes closest to defining the university, especially if you define “food relationships” as a nearly universal appetite for pizza.
We hope you are already, because of Hawk Week, beginning to see yourself as part of a community of shared interests and shared values.
Scholarship does draw us together into a community. We are all, faculty and students alike, focused on the need to learn, the desire to know, the impulse to study the world and understand why it works the way it does. You should ask that every day.
As faculty, we don’t talk about it much, because we are afraid people might think it hokey, but we consider teaching to be a kind of calling. We have dedicated our life to the search for truth, and we have dedicated our energy to sharing our vision of that truth with you students. We don’t usually express this in abstractions. Our truth becomes, understanding why Faulkner is a great novelist, how evolutionary history is represented in the diversity of organisms or how plate tectonics explain why the Rocky Mountains loom over western Kansas.
Because KU is a research university, we believe in a particular methodology for discovering such truths. I once heard it explained that there are moments of great revelation, when truth seems to rise up quickly and suddenly like a whale surfacing beside your kayak. But whales don’t rise to the surface every day. More often, truth slowly announces itself, incrementally, after a careful process of study and research, a process that educates the scholar about how truly complex most of life turns out to be.
We invite you to be a part of this community of searchers, this group of animal and plant species who inhabit the intellectual preserve we call the University of Kansas. The key to this community is exchange. You don’t learn in isolation. A community presumes that your ideas are open for testing. As Frank Rhodes, former president of Cornell once put it, “Without community, personal discovery is limited … private knowledge is knowledge lost.”
Congratulations, Jayhawks. You have restored the university once again. Watch out for the whales.
The University of Kansas is a major comprehensive research and teaching university. University Relations is the central public relations office for KU's Lawrence campus.
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