[Last Monday and
Tuesday I had the honor of being invited to attend Rice University’s De Lange Conference IX as a Social Media Fellow, helping to create
conversations about and around the conference theme (“Teaching in the
University of Tomorrow”) and talks. It was a wonderful experience, and I wanted
to follow it up this week with posts on a number of the issues and ideas I
encountered there. Whether you attended as well, followed on
Twitter, or just have thoughts on any of these topics, I’d love to hear
from you!]
On two vital
conference contributions from the most inspiring keynote speaker.
As I’ll note in
tomorrow’s post, each of the conference’s
speakers offered provocative contributions to our ongoing conversations;
but one presentation definitely stood out, to me and it seemed to many of the
attendees: Thursday’s pre-lunch keynote address by Dr. Ruth
Simmons. I’ll admit that my initial knowledge of Simmons was based mostly
on one problematic fact: that during her long and successful tenure as
President of Brown University, she vocally opposed the efforts of Brown’s
graduate students to unionize. While it’s certainly important not to forget
those kinds of labor issues and realities—as the conference speakers too often
did, on which more later this week—Simmons is of course defined by much more
than that fact; and in her keynote address, she used a couple other complex aspects
of her life and story to add crucial contributions to our conversations.
For one thing,
Simmons connected the conference to our Houston setting in potent and
provocative ways. Like most elite private universities, Rice exists in many
ways separate from the city in which it is located, or at least it is easy to
perceive the two settings as separate. Yet as Simmons talked about her
experiences growing up in and then subsequently returning to Houston’s segregrated
Fifth Ward—known, for obvious but still complex historical and social reasons,
as the
“bloody Fifth” or “bloody nickel”—she reminded us, forcefully, not only of
the presence and interconnection of multiple communities within any American
city and space, but also of the vital need to consider our more impoverished
and threatened communities in any conversations about higher education,
education in general, and the American future. For example, Simmons remarked on
a painful perception of hers as she returned to the Fifth Ward in recent years—that
not only do its young people have no more options (educational or otherwise)
than did she and her peers half a century ago, but in many ways they seem to have
fewer such possible paths.
Such significant,
sobering perspectives were not all that Simmons contributed to our
conversations, however. She also made the case for higher education’s
transformative potential, its ability in particular to broader and deepen our
perspectives (individual and communal) of other communities and cultures, other
stories and histories, our fellow citizens of America and the world. And she
did so in inspiring ways through her
own story—of her arrival at New Orleans’ Dillard University as a young
woman defined in part by both understandable anger and a concurrent, circumscribed
worldview (both natural results of a childhood
in the segregrated South); and of the ways in which her educational
experiences, beginning with those undergraduate years and continuing into her
graduate studies at Harvard University and the rest of her academic career,
effected sea-changes in those perspectives. Simmons used current events such as
those in Ferguson, Missouri to make
an entirely convincing case that it is education—and perhaps only education—which
can help change our historical, cultural, and communal understandings, just as
it broadened and strengthened her own. I can’t think of a more important goal
for the future of American higher education.
Next follow up
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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