President's Blog

Yesterday was Senior Toast for the class of 2013!

When new students arrive at Sweet Briar, I welcome them to Sweet Briar House for “pizza with Parker.” And just before they graduate, I welcome them to the House again for a toast to their bright futures. (We serve champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries, which are wildly popular.)

I love this event. The frenzy of commencement hasn’t yet actually begun; it’s a chance for me to say a few words to the students before their parents and friends arrive and the busy round of ceremonies starts in earnest.

Just moving across the front porch, chatting with graduating seniors, I talked with one who is headed to med school, one who is marrying and moving to Alaska, one who has a job in product engineering, one who is starting vet school in August, and several who are going to grad school. Every one seemed equally excited about moving toward the future and nostalgic about leaving Sweet Briar.

More than they might appreciate, the class of 2013 is very special to me — they will always be the first class I’ve seen through all four years of their Sweet Briar experience. We were freshman together, sophomores together, and juniors and seniors together. It would be very hard to see them graduate and move on without me, except that I know they will become active and engaged alumnae — and regular visitors to campus! There’s no way we’re losing touch.

A hearty Holla Holla to 2013!

Maddie, our hostess Pat, and Elizabeth (seated)

Yesterday I took two student leaders, both about to graduate, to tea. (Pat Hutto, a devoted former Sweet Briar employee, opened a tea room in Lynchburg as a “retirement” project. It’s quite successful and a lovely place to spend an afternoon in conversation.)

Maddie is completing a term as SGA President and planning on travel and an internship after graduation. Elizabeth, this year’s Presidential Medalist, will be beginning a management training program in banking. They, like their classmates, are the first students that I’ve watched move through the whole Sweet Briar experience — since this is my senior year too: we all arrived here together four years ago!

Here are some of the things we talked about:

What strange meteorological events have marked their time here! Their first year was marked by torrential downpours and paralyzing snowfalls. They’ve seen a derecho and experienced an earthquake, and will be graduating just as the 17-year locusts emerge.

Why do people seem to think about architecture and city planning so different in different parts of the country?

Tatoos (of which my son, for example, has many): why has the culture changed so quickly with regard to tatoos? What are young people today thinking in terms of tatoos and piercings — what’s regarded as “normal,” where’s the line between just enough and too much?

There’s nothing like an internship or two to help you figure out what you really want to do in the working world.

How do you figure out how you want to present yourself in the post-college world? How do people both seize the opportunity to move into a new stage of life while holding on to what’s most important to them?

After a long conversation

Is it more scary or more exciting to be graduating? Has college seemed like a whole lifetime or has it passed in the blink of an eye? (The answer to both questions is BOTH.)

Maddie and Elizabeth are wonderful young women, and all the more wonderful for representing so many of their classmates. Thank you to them, and to all members of the class of 2013, for sharing your undergraduate years with us.

Holla Holla 2013!

Friday was Spring Honors Convocation — a new tradition at which both college and departmental honors are awarded and Sweet Briar’s strongest students recognized.

As each was called to the stage to receive her award and be recognized, the sense of shared pride and celebration was inspiring. It’s a great thing to receive a certificate, to have your name  engraved on a plaque, or to accept a prize. But what we were celebrating was actually something much more important. As I said in my closing remarks,

“I promise today’s recipients that in a few years, you won’t remember your certificates or plaques or loving cups nearly as well as you remember the tough problem you solved or the essay you were really proud of or the hours and hours you worked to get a translation right. You will remember late night in the lab when a result finally became clear or how you felt on stage when a gesture made the audience gasp. If today is about anything, it is about moments like those. They are what, I hope, you will remember about Sweet Briar, and it is certainly what Sweet Briar will remember about you.”

Students gave as well as received prizes: SGA awards for excellence in service and teaching were presented by student leaders. Director of Residence Life Annie Jones was selected to receive the Outstanding Excellence in Service award, and Professor Eric Casey was honored with the Outstanding Excellence in Teaching award.

Announcing SGA Awards

(Student academic committee chair Izzy Begej is to be especially commended for a very witty citation, full of word play drawn from Professor Casey’s field of Classics.)

Every year, I have the special honor of awarding the Presidential Medal. This year’s recipient, Elizabeth Hansbrough, received a prolonged and enthusiastic round of applause from students and faculty alike — although in absentia. As one of our leading riders, and in fact Old Dominion Athletic Conference Scholar Athlete of 2013, she was away from campus representing Sweet Briar in competition. She will of course be recognized at graduation as well! You can read about her many accomplishments in our press release.

(And, yes, of course, there so many jewels in Sweet Briar’s crown!)

Visiting with JYF students in Paris

A couple of recent events have reminded me of what a great treasure Sweet Briar’s Junior Year programs are, and how influential they have been in higher education.

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by the vice-chancellor of NYU’s campus in Shanghai, began with these words:

“I believe very strongly in the value of a transnational education. Indeed, I would not be surprised if my colleagues use words like “zealot” and “fanatic” when I am out of earshot. My strong belief is, perhaps not surprisingly, rooted in personal experience: my year of study in the Sweet Briar College Junior Year in France.”

After explaining some of the specific experiences that were most meaningful to him, the writer (Jeffrey S. Lehman) concludes with a clear statement of why, finally, what he calls “transnational” study is so crucially important: “Ever since . . . I have believed that an enormous amount of unnecessary conflict and destruction in the world derives from monocultural ignorance.  We misinterpret others’ motives because we mistakenly assume that their speech and actions are grounded in the same set of normative expectations as our own.”

Lehman’s passion for intercultural experience was echoed by another Sweet Briar Junior Year in France alumnus who recently visited campus.

Reception, Junior Year in Spain

James Reid, author of 16 books, decorated military officer, and multilingual traveler and explorer, presented his work on Peruvian textiles. Reid “argues that textile artists of pre-Hispanic Peru, to a great extent women, were the first to create an iconography which constitutes — at the figurative, pictographic and abstract level — the world’s first “modern art,” to quote our press release on his visit. Reid’s insight could only have been achieved by someone adept at looking across cultural boundaries, both deeply and broadly, and remaining open to unexpected perceptions.

These influential thinkers and writers continue to credit  JYF decades after their time in the program. What a source of pride it is to hear them speak of the lifelong impact they personally experienced.

This evening at 7:30 Eastern time a new play — written by Tearrance Chisholm through the Endstation New Playwright’s Initiative, based on Sweet Briar history — will be read for the first time. If you’re in the area, do come out to hear it! The reading will be in Pannell and is free.

And if you’re not in the area, we’ll be streaming it live so that you can enjoy it from wherever you may be. Last week we streamed Barbara Kingsolver’s lecture (about which I’ll post more soon.) Several alumnae and parents contacted me afterwards to say that the quality was excellent and to ask for more such opportunities to share in the intellectual life of the campus. So here’s another one! Click HERE to access our live stream site, where you can still see the Kingsolver lecture or catch the play reading this evening. (Or log on to http://sbc.edu/live.)

The play’s central character, Diana Singer, is a fictional black female professor — the first African-American to be tenured at Sweet Briar. Here’s a quote from the playwright about her experience: “It’s almost as if the walls, the floors, the very earth, has memory. For whatever reason, [she] has somehow been given access to these memories.”

The script is still a work in progress: after tonight’s debut reading, Chisholm intends to continue to work on the script, which will be both read again and then staged as part of future Endstation seasons. If you don’t catch it this week, you’ll have other chances to hear or see it in future.

This morning’s walk was far too unusual — and too gorgeous! — not to share.

Rick, Coco, and Tazz

Snowy Patio

This week the Lynchburg News-Advance ran a good article about the role Sweet Briar is playing in connecting today’s local community with important aspects of the past. Here’s an excerpt:

Greeting Visitors to the Cabin

“”I’ve always been interested in cemeteries,” said [Lynn] Rainville, who’s been the director of the Tusculum Institute at Sweet Briar College for five years. “I just always thought they were fascinating. I’m also interested in local history and connecting people to that sense of the past.”

One of the ventures she’s focusing on now is researching the Sweet Briar slave cabin, a 170-year-old building used not just for slaves but as a home for some of the early black employees at the college. They lived in it while working to make the bricks needed to construct the school.

“I have a grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, to bring in some experts, about a dozen other people who specialize in slave cabin research,” Rainville said. “We’re putting our heads together and sorting out some of the architectural clues that might tell us how the building has been used.”

We’re not only doing research into historical sites associated with Sweet Briar’s African-American heritage: we’re engaging these issues through the arts as well. On March 27th, we’ll be offering a reading of a new play, a work-in-progress co-sponsored by Sweet Briar and Endstation Theater Company (which, we’re delighted to say, will be performing on campus again this summer!) Here’s what artistic director Geoff Kershner had to say about this new work in a recent blog post:

“We are also heading into 2013 with the news that that our host, Sweet Briar College, will fund the development of a new work by playwright Tearrance Chisholm about the African American history of Sweet Briar College. The play, SWEET REMEMBRANCE, is a theatrical work that originated from Chisholm’s time with the Endstation Playwright’s Initiative and a fellowship with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I am so very excited about this play. During the 2012 Playwright’s Initiative we heard a reading of the first fourth of the piece and it is going to be beautiful, powerful and will truly be a source of conversation and dialogue for our community.”

If you’re on or near campus on March 27th, do join us for the reading!

One of my favorite things about working at Sweet Briar is sitting in on classes, which I’m always happy to do (only when invited, of course!)

Prof. Bakich and Mr. Peck

On Friday, Professor Spencer Bakich invited me to visit his course on How Leaders Decide. He was hosting a terrific guest speaker: Geoffrey Peck is Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats at the CIA (and the father of a Sweet Briar student to boot!)

It was a remarkable opportunity for students to hear from someone working in the field about how intelligence is used in support of decision-making. What was especially valuable, I thought, was to hear an intelligence officer’s reflections on what makes it so very difficult to turn bits of information into a coherent intelligence assessment. In the context of a specific agency’s work, he raised what is really the most fundamental question of any intellectual enterprise: how can we know what we know? And how sure can we be that we know it?

Here are some ideas I took away from listening to the discussion:

• Categorization matters. It’s important to question what categories and assumptions you’re starting out with in any inquiry. If you’re looking for a “war” you might miss non-state-based threats; if you’re looking for a reaction to an assumed cause you might miss recognizing the importance of other factors.
• Scope matters. As you ask more and more detailed questions, it’s natural to begin looking at any problem “through a drinking straw.” Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do — and sometimes you need to look around at the larger context to make sense of what you see through that straw.
• Culture matters. Organizational culture defines the way any group approaches intelligence. This is true in government, business, education, any field — it’s important to recognize the ways in which your cultural practices influence the way you acquire and interpret information and to interact collaboratively with different organizational and knowledge cultures.

These are ideas that are important in national intelligence, of course, but to my mind they are equally important in every profession or field of study. Our students learned something important about U.S. intelligence activities, and also something important about thinking intelligently in any field.