Acceptance Speech
Thank you, Senate colleagues, for your inexplicable and humbling decision to give me the Westling and Shared Governance awards. Personal thanks to Bruce Blonigen and Hal Sadofsky, who, I understand, nominated me and from whom I’ve taken so many lessons in leadership and service. I assured Bill I would only speak once today, so I’ll gather my thoughts and my thanks for both awards into one remark now.
It’s hard to stand in front of a room of people who invest so much time and thought in your Senate duties and who also attend fully to your scholarship and creative work, teaching and advising, and to governance and community in your own units. The work you’re recognizing me for feels like part of my job as a divisional dean, while your leadership and service go well beyond your position descriptions. So, I’m doubly grateful for your service and for the fact that you would want to recognize mine.
As I learned more about these awards and read about the impressive contributions of past recipients, I began to wonder where my commitment to service got its start and how that impulse might have been tied up for me with the values you’re acknowledging today: trust, honesty, openness, shared decision-making, inclusiveness, and respect. That question took me back to the Viet Nam War just after the Kent State killings when, young and ignorant as I was, I felt something even in my small world had to be done, something that involved education, information, disagreement, protest, and respect for the differences that drive disagreement.
In the week that followed, a few of us managed to take over the school for a whole day that we called Peace Day. I can’t remember—and certainly can’t imagine—why the principal let us, but we suspended the regular schedule and devoted classes in philosophy, literature, and social studies to topics related to war, social protest, and peace; other classes were given over to creating art and literature in response to the war; in writing classes, we composed letters to our representatives and senators; we staged a debate in the assembly hall; and, at the end of the day, we held a memorial on the lawn. The day was devoted to mutual understanding, honesty, inclusiveness, and respect, and the afternoon debate exemplified this by bringing together members of the US Air Force from a local military base and anti-war activists from the university. The Air Force people showed a recruitment film, the activists laid out their case against US involvement in Viet Nam, and we somehow conducted a volatile, illuminating discussion with hundreds of earnest students.
The debate was a large-scale reenactment of my own conversations at home, where I had begun to learn the rudiments of reasoned inquiry and tolerance—not by practicing them myself but by talking to my father. He was well informed and open minded, and still he disagreed with me about the war.
Because he listened respectfully to me and tried to understand my ideas, I thought I valued dissent and disagreement. I had a lot to learn. Those anti-war activists in the debate turned out to be members of the Weathermen, and I had brought them into our home a few nights earlier for a planning session. My father was a retired Army officer; at the time, he was still working for the military, ironically enough, in communications and intelligence. When the FBI showed up grimly at our house the night of Peace Day to investigate why the Weathermen had convened there, I realized that I was not just in way over my head but that I had put my father in an impossible position. He resolved our FBI trouble somehow, and we never discussed it again.
But we continued to argue about the war—he was a decorated World War II veteran, and I was a belligerent pacifist, completely one-minded and unwilling to brook any real debate or admit any complexity about war and peace. Over our fireplace had always hung a set of finely wrought swords given to my father as a sign of respect and honor by officers he had captured. One day, after insisting to my father that there was never any justification for war, I walked into the living room and saw that he had taken down the swords that had symbolized his service in a very different war. Though we never discussed the removal of the swords, the bare bricks told me that I had made some huge mistake by means of caricature, simplification, self-righteousness, condemnation, and the assumption of knowledge when I knew so little. It’s still hard for me to contemplate how much I must have hurt him, but what stays with me even more is how much respect he gave me despite that, and how much he must have trusted that I would eventually align my ideals with subtler, more considered values that would give my ideals better purpose and force.
I mention this because Peace Day was my first foray into service, and my father was my first model of openness, trust, participatory understanding, dialogue, and respect. When I reflect on the work you do in the Senate and the efforts we all make in our various spots on campus to uphold the values these awards embody, I think how important it is, especially in the US right now, to combat caricature and self-righteousness—to answer disagreement with openness, curiosity, dialogue, and collaboration, all in a spirit of inclusiveness and respect. This is how you ratified the Academic Continuity Plan, new ways to evaluate teaching, the revised multicultural requirement, and how you’re helping to reform core education. The Westling Award encourages us to take the time and make the effort to govern our university for the good of the whole campus community. The Senate Trust award proposes how best to do that: together, openly and honestly, and in good faith.
I’m moved and honored that you think I deserve these awards. Thank you.