Dear Nazareth faculty and staff;
As August approaches, marking the end of my first month here at Nazareth, I reflect on how grateful I am for your warm welcome and for the opportunity to work with each and every one of you to advance Nazareth and our world.
I am seeing us enter this new academic year with the sense of purpose and ingenuity that I'm learning defines our community. We are all focused on the many here-and-now details so we can ensure a healthy and safe learning environment for continuing Nazareth's vital mission. The focus on near-term needs is important and appropriate.
On the heels of this focus on the here and now, it will be important to turn our attention to defining how we will emerge from this time in such a powerful era of possibility. And so this fall we will work together to envision and define our next strategies for living Nazareth’s mission —our thinking beyond. It is a collaboration I very much look forward to as we help each other balance our short- and longer-term thinking.
As I was transitioning to Nazareth, I asked you to reflect on Nazareth’s essence — the compelling meaning and spirit of Nazareth that will help us emerge from current crises with strength and positive impact. I heard several powerful themes that showed a unified unshakable commitment to our students and an extraordinary synchronicity of thought and intention. Among these: a strong sense of community; passion for our mission and values; dedication and responsibility to be problem-solvers and partners in systemic social change for social justice; intergenerational search for new knowledge and deeper wisdom; willingness to ask the big and hard questions; and adaptability, creativity, responsibility, and action-orientation.
In May I wrote, “What is inspiring to me about Nazareth is that I believe what we need to move beyond this crisis is already deep within us. Our founding commitments, asserted on the heels of the pandemic of 1918, define and propel us now as we shape Nazareth’s and society’s emergence from the pandemic 100 years hence.” What I heard from you about Nazareth’s essence, and what I am learning every day about Nazareth College – then and now – deepens this belief.
And so I ask additional questions now to gain your perspective and steer the work of our thinking beyond.
We are in the midst of a momentous future-defining time. Humanity is being challenged by several interconnected crises to transform and transcend, providing a pivotal opportunity for us all to emerge into a healthier and more just world. It is a time for which we are uniquely prepared:Nazareth was formed to integrate academic excellence, holistic education and social justice for real world impact.
How is Nazareth’s mission being called forward by this time?
What are the differences we are being prompted to make?
What are the impacts to which we must strive?
With and for whom?
Your thoughts and reflections on these questions will be the beginning inspiration for our work together of future visioning and planning. Let Nazareth’s founding and inherent commitments light our path forward as together, we undertake this exciting and important work in service to our community and a world in need.
With gratitude,
Beth Paul
I think you are absolutely right that now is a time for tending to the here and now. And yet we cannot forget to look forward at the same time, as there will always be here-and-now details that will try to draw our attention away from long-term thinking and planning. One way that I believe we are being called forward is to be leaders in climate/environmental sustainability. We have worked hard on this issue in the past and have picked off much of the "low-hanging fruit", or the relatively easy changes we can make. I believe that we must not let this pandemic divert us from working toward the higher fruit, as well! In fact, I have seen some evidence to suggest that the pandemic has given our planet a little bit of breathing room. For example, many of us are driving far less; that is a step we could not have envisioned easily happening before March. The world is operating completely differently now. I fervently hope that, in our rush to "get back to normal", that we not forget to place caring for our Earth home as a top priority!
ReplyDeleteI just realized I didn't sign my name to this! It's from Melissa Johnson in the CSD Department and co-chair of the Sustainability Task Force.
DeleteI think our world needs exactly what I've witnessed in generations of Nazareth students, alumni, faculty, administration and staff: thoughtful kindness. We know how to think through our actions and to greet everyone we meet with kindness. It's in the simplest interactions that we can begin to heal our traumatized world and empower our communities to start to move forward again.
ReplyDeleteKaren M. Sangmeister, Ed.D. , Alumna and Adjunct Instructor
These are important questions to pose and for the College community to consider. Thank you for raising these questions and for inviting our multiple and diverse perspectives on them.
ReplyDeleteOne founding and recurring theme of Nazareth College’s mission has been to strive to be “. . . a community that seeks to define itself both as a model for human interaction and as an advocate of human values.” In this sense, the College joined a long tradition in the history of education in seeking to become an ideal community worthy of emulation by the larger world. What a marvelous and ambitious undertaking! What could be more profound than to ask as a community: How should people in our community (and by extension in our larger world) treat each other? What human values should guide our educational policies and practices? How do we define ourselves as a learning community in a world frequently at odds with basic respect and decency and mostly antagonistic to the values of equality, democracy, and humanistic education? And how do we best organize and govern ourselves to reflect and advance these values in our work?
This aspect of our inherited mission seems especially relevant and urgent today. In most basic terms the contagion has given us the opportunity to model how to behave toward each other to stop its spread. Quite literally, the virus is demanding we model basic forms of interaction and behavior to keep our community healthy and thriving. Our ability to minimize the spread of this contagion on our campus might serve as a model for other organizations. Clearly, this is a fundamental lesson in community health the College might learn and teach during this pandemic.
There are, of course, other lessons urgent for us to learn and teach. For one, an insidious authoritarianism and narcissism (and affiliated anti-moral emotions, e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) have come to prevail in so many aspects of our social life, thwarting the democratic impulse everywhere one turns. In his tribute to John Lewis in yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie (https://nyti.ms/39Hc9Dz) made the case for Lewis’s understanding that democracy wasn’t a static set of rules housed in particular institutions, but rather a fundamental way of human association and becoming. “Democracy is not a state,” Bouie quoted Lewis. “It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” Lewis believed that democracy had to be created and strengthened by each generation. Lewis understood that democracy needed to be taught and modeled in order to support a form of human association that could cultivate each person’s full human potential.
How might Nazareth College both teach and model the spirit of democracy, which is so much under attack today? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that a democratic culture requires a liberally educated population. Liberal education, especially as it is manifested in the arts and humanities, has the potential to humanize us, to make us more fully human. It does so, according to Nussbaum, by encouraging the development of an empathetic “narrative imagination” as an antidote to rampant narcissism. Nazareth College has long been noted for its strengths in liberal education. How can we support and celebrate this foundational part of our curricula? What is our shared understanding of what it means to integrate liberal education and professional preparation today? Finally, how can we organize ourselves as a College community to truly practice the democratic act? Nazareth College was founded as a self-governing learning community, the philosophy of which is expressed in the principles of shared governance still enshrined in our faculty manual. Nazareth College once served, in its own peculiar way, as an incubator for preparing people to come together to democratically address their problems. Can we reclaim and revitalize this democratic spirit and model it for our students and the larger world?
I believe that we must prepare students for a world that will look very different than the one they expected to enter as college graduates and it will remain different for the foreseeable future. We must train students to adapt, not mourn, because I believe that this time is the most ripe for creative problem solving for most disciplines. No matter if it's science, business, art/music, theater, healthcare, writing--adaptation is required. There is so much opportunity to reach people, we are no longer constrained by the past. Let's look forward and bring our skills to meet the needs of society. Sue O'Brien
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