Message from the Provost
Below are remarks delivered by Provost Thomas Rosenbaum during graduate student orientation on September 21, 2010.
Commencement speeches, claimed cartoonist Garry Trudeau, “were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated” [1]. For many of you coming directly to grad school from college, this was a recent experience. For others of you, it has been a number of years. At my own college graduation, Paris Review founder and author, George Plimpton, urged the 1977 seniors to refuse to graduate: “Stop now,” he cried. “Tell them you won’t go. Go back to your rooms. Unpack!” [1] Plimpton was harking to the idyllic life of a college student at remove from the world, a life where classes were programmed for you, various and for the choosing, meals were provided, guidance was freely dispensed, and the vicissitudes of life were modulated by the rhythm of the academic calendar.
It is my great pleasure to welcome you today to the start of your graduate school experience at the University of Chicago. I shall attempt to avoid sedating you, but most of all I want to convince you: “Don’t Go Back!” You are entering into an experience that is rare in the pleasures that it can provide and astounding in its potential. It will demand of you years of concentrated effort, but largely on your own terms and divorced from the constraints of calendar that have dominated your academic experience to date. You will dive deeply into the canon and write new chapters in human knowledge, contemplating insights that you will be the first ever to comprehend. You will emerge from this experience with new friends – often lifelong – and with your teachers becoming your colleagues.
This experience will take place at an institution that has defined what it means to be a research university in the modern era. From its founding 118 years ago, the University of Chicago has been committed to the creation of knowledge across the spectrum of the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the professions. The first president of the university, William Rainey Harper, “dreamed of great graduate schools in which original investigation should be pursued in many departments of knowledge, and which should do great service to mankind” [2]. Our graduate schools continue to pursue this ideal. As the chief academic officer of the university, I am privileged to observe the individual parts as well as the whole. The local cultures of the university are varied and distinct. Cases for faculty appointments come to me from the Divinity School accompanied by a personal letter of evaluation from each and every faculty member, and from the Biological Sciences Division with a numerical ranking parsed to three significant digits. But we all – students and faculty and staff alike – across the Divisions and Schools of the University, share a profound belief in the power of informed argument and a deep commitment to advancing knowledge through rigorous inquiry.
There is an old adage that prognostications from the elderly of what is to come are of limited use to the young as they only can provide wisdom, while what youth needs to face the future is courage. I should like to highlight two qualities of your life as graduate students that will be different from your undergraduate days, two aspects that can be major reasons to celebrate the continuation of your intellectual journey, but also areas where you will need courage to succeed.
The first of these regards time and the calendar. Dean of the College and historian of the University, John Boyer, notes that “equally revolutionary” to the structure of the University of Chicago, “were the general regulations that would manage the pace and flow of academic work” [3]. We are organized in quarters that span the calendar year, with four separate convocation ceremonies, designed to permit students to start and complete their degree programs at a pace determined not by the turn of the hands of the clock but by the imperatives of their studies. Even more so at the graduate level. Once you are finished with course work, your research – in the library, in the laboratory, at home, abroad – will detach from those academic rhythms that you have spent 16 years of school so assiduously assimilating. It is a heady experience to be free of the tyranny of the calendar and to immerse yourself fully in the discovery of knowledge. It is also a time where extraordinary discipline is required to sustain focus and to maintain momentum on your thesis. It will take courage to know when to seek help, when and if to switch gears, when you are ready to defend your scholarship and move to the next stage of your career.
The second challenge that I should like to place before you involves what it means to earn a graduate degree from the University of Chicago. You will delve deeply into a subject that will become your own. Necessarily that will require a mastery of specialized knowledge and a scope that can be contained within the pages of a thesis. It will be all too tempting to earn a PhD in the regulation of larval serum protein synthesis in Drosophila rather than a PhD in Biology, to earn a PhD in the rise of complex society in Andean South America, rather than a PhD in Anthropology. It will take courage for you to insist on continued exposure to the great ideas of your discipline, to take time away from your specialty to make sure that you can represent the seminal concepts and practices of your field.
Successfully approaching the most important problems demands both depth and breadth. There is the story of the physicist and the philosopher who were both sentenced to death. Each was given one last wish. The physicist thought for a good while and asked to give a final seminar on “quantum chromodynamics, supersymmetry, and the Higgs boson.” The jailer agreed to this request. He then turned to the philosopher for her last request. She replied quickly: “I should like to be executed before the seminar.” Do not become that philosopher! Rather, move beyond the practical and the comfortable. Have the courage to take advantage of the extraordinary intellectual resources across this great University.
In closing, I wish you years of magic. The former provost and president of the University of Chicago, and Attorney General of the United States, Edward H. Levi, spoke to the conditions that yield intellectual magic in a 1967 talk entitled The University and the Modern Condition: “I recall the late Leo Szilard, puckish great scientist, describing the uncertain quality which made for a great laboratory. He could tell, he said, all the danger signals that indicated when things were not going well. But he could not say what made for a good or great laboratory. He only knew, he said, there was a sense of wholeness when this occurred. It was, he said in the most matter of fact way, a kind of magic.”
Levi then turned to the institution as a whole: “The University of Chicago in all probability could not be created today. The task would be too great and beyond reach. But the university can be refounded and recreated, as is the necessity for all institutions if they are to endure. The challenge to the university and its friends is to carry forward for our time this extraordinary tradition and instrument, which began all at once, assumed a unique combination of research, teaching, and professional training, and over its history has departed very little from the values it seeks. Perhaps this is why it carries also that magical sense of wholeness” [4].
The future of the university depends on you to capture that magical sense of wholeness through wisdom and courage. Don’t go back.
References
- [1] “Commencement Address, the Genre,” Harvard Magazine, Jul-Aug 2000.
- [2] Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed, The Story of the University of Chicago: 1890-1925 (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1925), p. 205.
- [3] John W. Boyer, “Broad and Christian in the Fullest Sense: William Rainey Harper and the University of Chicago,” in Occasional Papers on Higher Education, vol. 15 (The College of the University of Chicago, Chicago, 2005), p. 91-92.
- [4] Edward H. Levi, “The University and the Modern Condition,” in Point of View: Talks on Education (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1969), p. 19.
