Below are remarks that Dean Kathleen Roberts Skerrett made this afternoon at Colloquy:
I am honored to join this university as the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. I share your desire to create a learning environment unlike any other in higher education, a model institution for the twenty-first century. With liberal arts at its heart, our unique suite of schools enables students to gain skills for discovery, analysis and creation, while preparing them for citizenship and enterprise. This mix appeals to students and to families that have various expectations of a college graduate, and allows us to welcome a diverse generation and to join their families to this school.
The generation we are teaching will reach maturity in a world that is deeply wounded and precarious. The apocalypse proceeds for the diversity of species at a terrible rate, and the waters rise to engulf the lands of the poorest of the poor. We do not know what the new normal will be for the world economy, or how economic collapse will deepen ecological degradation. We do not know how religious or political forces will respond to crises of sickness and scarcity; or how technology and communications will interact with basic human need. Yet the students in our classrooms today must meet these global contingencies tomorrow.
Any of us who saw Tyler Hicks’ photograph of a starving Somali child, published on the front page of the New York Times on August 2nd, stopped in our tracks. Many scholars here could provide commentary: images of severely emaciated African children have a history in American media. Yet the photograph nonetheless incites our visceral knowledge that a person can suffer the most hideous anguish. If there is any hope to foster communities of nurture and justice for the future, it will fall to the ingenuity and compassion of this generation we are teaching.
There is no obligation in our professional lives more pressing: to practice our disciplines of discovery and creation so as to devise the most effective pedagogies we can. And we have a task that is peculiar for highly trained teachers—we must teach our students how to learn what we are unable to learn, and how to do what we are unable to do. I have high expectations of the intellectual and practical capabilities that our students must gain.
Yet, when people ask me what is the point of a liberal arts education, I say: to form people capable of resilience and joy. Because resilience they will need in inexhaustible supply to meet crises that challenge their hope, and joy to share, in a groaning world, that still gives such beauty in abundance.
I have high expectations for us as well, for pedagogical innovation and scholarly productivity, for administrative tact and wise resource management. But innovation and productivity are just work, dear colleagues, if they are not grounded in a community of virtue. So let us be together a community worthy of academic freedom. I said to our new faculty on Monday, do not wait until you are tenured or promoted or retired to practice courage. Because if you do not practice courage when you are insecure, you will not suddenly have it when you are safe. Courage never feels like fearlessness or confidence or conviction; it feels like struggling to do the next right thing in the face of uncertainty and stress. For this reason, we need also practice mutual kindness. In a community of severely intelligent people, who have long opportunities to observe each other’s sins, and who build our careers on critical acumen—mutual kindness is a condition of our freedom together. So be brave in the moment, and kind for the long haul. An Augustinian scholar, James Wetzel, observes that time becomes incarnate in us as habit. Therefore, let the time we share in this next year as faculty and staff of the University of Richmond become in us habits of courage and kindness.
I am delighted to be counted among the faculty of the School of Arts & Sciences. Thank you for having me.
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I am honored to join this university as the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. I share your desire to create a learning environment unlike any other in higher education, a model institution for the twenty-first century. With liberal arts at its heart, our unique suite of schools enables students to gain skills for discovery, analysis and creation, while preparing them for citizenship and enterprise. This mix appeals to students and to families that have various expectations of a college graduate, and allows us to welcome a diverse generation and to join their families to this school.
The generation we are teaching will reach maturity in a world that is deeply wounded and precarious. The apocalypse proceeds for the diversity of species at a terrible rate, and the waters rise to engulf the lands of the poorest of the poor. We do not know what the new normal will be for the world economy, or how economic collapse will deepen ecological degradation. We do not know how religious or political forces will respond to crises of sickness and scarcity; or how technology and communications will interact with basic human need. Yet the students in our classrooms today must meet these global contingencies tomorrow.
Any of us who saw Tyler Hicks’ photograph of a starving Somali child, published on the front page of the New York Times on August 2nd, stopped in our tracks. Many scholars here could provide commentary: images of severely emaciated African children have a history in American media. Yet the photograph nonetheless incites our visceral knowledge that a person can suffer the most hideous anguish. If there is any hope to foster communities of nurture and justice for the future, it will fall to the ingenuity and compassion of this generation we are teaching.
There is no obligation in our professional lives more pressing: to practice our disciplines of discovery and creation so as to devise the most effective pedagogies we can. And we have a task that is peculiar for highly trained teachers—we must teach our students how to learn what we are unable to learn, and how to do what we are unable to do. I have high expectations of the intellectual and practical capabilities that our students must gain.
Yet, when people ask me what is the point of a liberal arts education, I say: to form people capable of resilience and joy. Because resilience they will need in inexhaustible supply to meet crises that challenge their hope, and joy to share, in a groaning world, that still gives such beauty in abundance.
I have high expectations for us as well, for pedagogical innovation and scholarly productivity, for administrative tact and wise resource management. But innovation and productivity are just work, dear colleagues, if they are not grounded in a community of virtue. So let us be together a community worthy of academic freedom. I said to our new faculty on Monday, do not wait until you are tenured or promoted or retired to practice courage. Because if you do not practice courage when you are insecure, you will not suddenly have it when you are safe. Courage never feels like fearlessness or confidence or conviction; it feels like struggling to do the next right thing in the face of uncertainty and stress. For this reason, we need also practice mutual kindness. In a community of severely intelligent people, who have long opportunities to observe each other’s sins, and who build our careers on critical acumen—mutual kindness is a condition of our freedom together. So be brave in the moment, and kind for the long haul. An Augustinian scholar, James Wetzel, observes that time becomes incarnate in us as habit. Therefore, let the time we share in this next year as faculty and staff of the University of Richmond become in us habits of courage and kindness.
I am delighted to be counted among the faculty of the School of Arts & Sciences. Thank you for having me.
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