Now, of course, our ceremony has all the appropriate solemnity and dignity, but I think what I love most about it is the personal quality and genuine affection that is evident at every moment. (I can’t recall exactly what Alex Grobman and I had said to each other just before this shot was snapped, but I love this picture for capturing the joy of the moment — a joy shared with every student who crosses the platform.)

Dr. Vivian Pinn

Dr. Vivian Pinn,  former director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health, gave the Commencement address: her topic was “Embracing New Horizons.” Dr. Pinn, who was the only woman and only African-American in her medical school class, reflected on the expanded opportunities available to young women today.

“When you wisely selected Sweet Briar as the institution to prepare you for your future careers and lives, you knew that this college has as its mission to prepare young women to excel in the modern world. Today, you will be going forward to do just that — in a world that has expanded far beyond horizons that the founders of this college could even have imagined 100 years ago,” she said.

Senior Class President and Presidential Medalist Alex St. Pierre offered inspiring remarks, connecting her academic experience with the love of Star Wars she shared with her grandfather.

“When we assume that we know a group, an ideal or a person, we lose the ability to inquire and investigate,” she said. “Be confident in the knowledge you have worked hard to accrue, but never assume that you know something or someone in their entirety. Never cease to inquire, to investigate, to be curious and to be adventurous. Refuse to settle for what you think you understand and continually seek a new perspective … May you always bear the rose after conquering its thorns and may the Force be with you, always.”

One of the highlights of each spring, this banquet is when Sweet Briar honors its athletes for they ways they represent the values of Sweet  Briar and of NCAA Division III.

Here’s a brief excerpt from my opening remarks:

2012 Student Athlete Advisory Committee

Certainly, both academics and athletics teach you to be unafraid to compete – to put your performance out there on the line and to accept that sometimes you will succeed and sometimes you won’t. And at those times when you don’t succeed, both athletics and academics teach resilience; you learn to bounce back, to stay in the game, to regain your composure and focus. Both athletics and academics demand patience with yourself: skills simply don’t develop in a day and it can take quite some time for training or study to pay off. Both require foresight and planning, strategizing how you’ll play a match or negotiate a meet, looking a few steps ahead for where an argument or a data point might take you. And both require a sense of honor and teamwork: respecting the rules, building on the contributions of others, putting fair play and success for the endeavor above ego or impulse.

Perhaps the most uplifting aspect of the evening was watching the student athletes interact with each other. As award winners were called forward, as teams posed for group pictures, the powerful affection, respect, and mutual support Sweet Briar women develop with their teammates and fellow athletes were evident, and inspiring. Holla Holla, Vixen athletes and alumnae!

I do hope that you’ll take a few minutes to read the report from the April 2012 meeting of Sweet Briar’s Board. Several important issues were on the agenda, including the progress we’re making on the Plan for Sustainable Excellence.

Sustainable Excellence, approved by the Board a year ago, calls for enrollment growth and a review of curriculum undertaken with the goal of achieving a student:faculty ratio of 10:1. (10:1 was selected as the goal because it will allow Sweet Briar to remain among the smallest and most personal of colleges while increasing the financial sustainability of the academic program.) At the April meeting, I presented the College’s plan to achieve that goal within two years.

The plan carefully balances our mission of providing a full range of excellent liberal arts majors and a strong general education program, our desire to preserve tenure and tenure-track positions and retain outstanding faculty, and our need to make adjustments to overall levels of instructional staffing.

In coming months, you will be reading more about this plan — in the Sweet Briar Magazine, in our e-newsletters, on sbc.edu, and in other communications from the College. In the mean time, here’s an excerpt from the community report:

“Sweet Briar, like every institution of its size and type, faces challenges that can be addressed only by making difficult decisions . . . given the reality of our circumstances, we can be very proud of the way we have chosen to meet them – directly, frankly, collegially, and thoughtfully.”

Preserving excellence, increasing sustainability, so that Sweet Briar will be as distinguished for the next hundred years as it has been through the last century. That‘s the plan.

Work in progress -- photo by Megan Salazar

At this time of year it’s literally impossible to keep up with all the wonderful academic events on the calendar. This week we’ve had multiple senior thesis presentations, the spring dance concert, the Pannell Scholars fair, an exhibit of African Art related to a religion class, and countless other displays of the scholarly achievements of Sweet Briar students. If only I had the time to blog them all! Take my word for it: every single day in April brings new evidence of what students accomplish under the guidance of their faculty mentors.

Today I’ll share just one of the many impressive projects I’ve been learning about this week. It’s from Professor Tracy Hamilton’s Land as Art class. The students are creating a work of “land art” inspired by Native American earthworks and land sculptures. Which is cool enough in itself — giving students an opportunity to better understand the achievement of another culture’s artists by creating something similar with their own imaginations and hands is the best kind of experiential learning. A few other points make this project even more remarkable.

First, in order to accomplish it, students have had to reach across the curriculum.

Drawing by Prof. Brinkman's class

Creating earthen land art requires understanding how soil works, what forces need to be balanced to create stability, and how to assess geology so as to identify an appropriate and feasible site. So Art History and Engineering joined forces to address these questions. Professor Bethany Brinkman and her students provided essential expertise.

A Rock Circle from Chelsea Kane's Blog

And Professor Hamilton, while exploring an ancient artistic technology with her students, has encouraged them to capture what they’re learning in up to the minute digital technologies — such as tumblr blogs. Here, and here, and here, and here you can see some of the images and thoughts that students working on this project have been collecting.

What could better tie together the central academic strengths that our strategic plan emphasizes? This is a “learning on the land” project if there ever was one, combining experiential learning with digitally sophisticated documentation, and engaging students in contemplating the artistic achievements of another culture. I can’t wait to visit the work, and to come back to it again and again as the passage of time deepens its associations.

Education Professors Jeff Frank and Jim Alouf

This week, the fifth and final Diversity Symposium was held at Sweet Briar House. Professor Jeff Frank, of the Education Department, spoke on James Baldwin‘s analysis of the moral and epistemic costs of racism and the impact that reading Baldwin had on his own understanding of racial issues.

(Previous symposia included Professor Steve Bragaw on economic bubbles and inequality, Professor Bill Kershner on anti-Semitism in Shakespeare, Professor John Casteen on travel study and social privilege, and Professor Cathy Gutierrez on spiritualism and women’s roles.)

Each and every one of these presentations was stimulating and eye-opening for me and, I believe, for others who attended. The symposia were intentionally kept small and designed to bring together students and faculty members from various departments in an environment that would encourage conversation.

Students enjoying tea before the presentation

Marvelous as Professor Frank’s paper was — and it was marvelous; I’m thinking of ways to share it with a broader audience — what made the evening really special was the conversation that followed. A classicist, two scholars of education, a poet, a writer of creative non-fiction, a dean and a college president, some first-year students and a sophomore sat in a parlor and talked about such questions as:

• what do Baldwin’s ideas imply for educators?
• is racial justice a moral issue? a political one? or is it “simply” pragmatic?
• what is the role of education in developing the capacity for empathy?
• what is the relationship between empathy and self-awareness?
• what do people of the professorial generation need to know about how first-year college students see these issues?

Dean Amy

Nothing is more genuinely satisfying to me than to have such discussions taking place in the home of Sweet Briar’s founders. Nothing could be a more suitable celebration of their legacy!

(And by the way: clicking on some of the links above will take you to videos in which professors who participated in this series talk about why they love teaching at Sweet Briar.)

Professor Diana Robin, '57

Friday evening the festivities began with this year’s Gerhard Masur Lecture — a very special one because this year’s lecturer was Diana  Maury Robin, member of the formidably distinguished Sweet Briar Class of 1957 and internationally recognized scholar. I had the privilege of having dinner with Professor Robin before her talk. Our conversation was as interesting as it was wide-ranging, from the implications of American spiritualism for women’s public status to the novels of Hilary Mantel (we discovered we are both great fans) to how influential teachers shape their student’s paths through life.

Her topic was “Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of Italian Women Writers in England, 1500-1820.” She spoke to a crowded room about how much information about Italian women writers has been available to English researchers since the mid-nineteenth century and, most interestingly to me, about how it came to be available.

Her story was one of an individual collector, who for whatever reason accumulated an enormous catalog of works by early modern Italian women and whose collection found its way into the British Museum after being purchased by George III. I found myself reflecting on the idiosyncrasies of history. Would we know about these women today if this collector had had different tastes? If George III had preferred to spend his resources elsewhere? What amazing information have we lost over time because the stars did not align and, for accidental and arbitrary reasons, it was not preserved?

Students from the row behind me

Professor Robin was thoughtful, detailed, precise, scholarly, and generous; everything a liberally educated researcher should be. Students, faculty, staff, and friends of the college lined up at the end of her talk to ask questions. It was one of those evenings that reminds me of what a privilege it is — and how much fun it is — to live and work in an academic community.

I stopped by to welcome them — well, to welcome them, and to enjoy being outside on a gorgeous spring afternoon with a group of charming 4 and 5 year olds! I kept it brief, since I was standing between them and a garden full of brightly colored eggs, and then I enjoyed the chance to chat with their parents.

Having neighbors visit campus and enjoy our wonderful grounds is a great pleasure. Sweet Briar is an enormous asset to Amherst and the greater Lynchburg area generally, and we’re glad when members of the community are able to take advantage of everything Sweet Briar has to offer. Colleges and the communities in which they operate rely on each other in many ways and have the potential to greatly enrich each other.

Whether it’s Mrs. Tomlin’s class, or a corporation booking a conference at the Inn, or families coming out to hike the trails, or the high school using our facilities for prom, or birdwatchers staking out the Observatory field, or the historical society visiting our museum, or local families attending theater performances, visitors remind us of the community with which we are inextricably connected and remind the community of why the region is better because Sweet Briar is here.

Friday was a glorious day, one of those spring days when everyone’s just looking for reasons to spend time outside.

Professor Tracy Hamilton and I watch the preparations

So we gave everyone on campus a great reason to be outside — we experimented with creating a “lipdub” video to showcase our campus and our community. Here’s a story from the local TV news about the project.

Approximately 400 people participated in creating lighthearted outdoor scenarios of campus life, all performed to the rhythm of a song composed by an alumna and filmed by Media and Marketing staff from a moving golf cart. There were horses and riders, dancers (one suspended from a tree), chemists performing experiments, athletes kicking goals, readers in comfy chairs, international students in gorgeous costumes, drama students setting off pyrotechnics, seniors releasing balloons in their class colors, and too many other things going on for me to remember them all now! For good measure, we also had a bagpiper, the Amherst High School marching band, Daisy and a camera suspended from a remote control helicopter.

How will we use all the images we captured? Don’t know yet, and we won’t know until we can see what all we’ve got. But did we have a great time? You bet. And the afternoon wrapped up with popsicles for all in the lower quad — one more reason to be outside and among friends on a beautiful afternoon.

Sarah Muth and Molly Harper as Maureen and Mag

Then, Saturday night, I caught a performance of The Beauty Queen of Leenane in Babcock. I was impressed by the bravery of the performances given by our students. Mother and daughter characters  Maureen and Mag are complex and problematic, unappealing and alienating in their frustration, resentment, and dependency. The character of Ray, too, struggles with long-simmering angers. Sarah Muth, Molly Harper, and Caden John Campbell embodied these limited, complex, and embittered characters with insight and compassion, never shrinking from the dark and off-putting truths of the playwright’s vision. So, once again, holla holla to Sweet Briar Theatre for giving its audience something to think about and talk about. . .

Then, today, a large group of excited and enthusiastic admitted students arrived for the first Spring Open House program. As I stood before them in the Chapel a while ago, thinking of what to say about everything Sweet Briar has to offer and why it is so very special, I found myself thinking that if they could just have seen what I saw across campus all weekend they would understand it all!

Here’s a brief excerpt from my remarks:

“Sometimes it’s easy to take your own achievements for granted. But if each of you will reflect for a moment you’ll realize how very much you have accomplished here at Sweet Briar. For example, think back for just a moment on everything you know now that you didn’t know when you first got here. Think about the tough lab that you finally got through, or the hours of grueling rehearsal that paid off in an effortless performance, or the problem you thought you’d never solve but eventually wrestled to the ground, or the translation that finally made sense in both languages, or the essay that showed you (and your professor!) that you knew more about the topic than you thought you did”

At this banquet it is my honor to award the Presidential Medal — Sweet Briar’s top award, given to a student who represents the best of Sweet Briar and the full range of our educational values. (You can read all about Alex St. Pierre’s many accomplishments here.) The recipient receives a smaller replica of the Presidential Medal I received at my inauguration which she is entitled to wear with her academic regalia.

It takes nothing away from Alex, or any other year’s Presidential Medalist, to note that what’s most wonderful about these outstanding young women isn’t how exceptional they are: it’s actually, in a sense, how typical they are. They represent the best in Sweet Briar women: the qualities of talent, discipline, hard work, integrity, competitiveness, and service for which they are honored can be found in many, many of their fellow students.

So, holla holla to 2012 Presidential Medalist Alexandra St. Pierre, and holla holla to all the Sweet Briar women she represents!

The lecturer was Dr. Kenneth Finchem, Resident Director of the Virginia Program at Oxford (on which several Sweet Briar students go each year.) It’s a fabulous program — read this Voice article to get a sense of the opportunities it offers students.

Dr. Finchem’s topic was “”King Charles I, 1625-1649: Tyrant or Scapegoat?” He reviewed various interpretations of events during the reign of Charles I, exploring how political, economic, and religious considerations influenced the ways Charles’ actions and motives were understood and represented.

What emerged, at least in my mind, was a focus on one of the enduring quandary of leadership. Could any individual who was King of England at that moment have succeeded? To what extent did Charles bring his failures upon himself, and to what extent were they ordained by his circumstances? Could a greater king — or maybe just a different one — have changed the course of history? How much do kings shape history and how much does history shape kings?

An English Professor, a librarian, a Chaplain, and a Professor Emeritus

One of the enduring pleasures of life on campus is the opportunity to sit and ponder such questions in the company of faculty members and students. Around me in the Browsing Room were first year students, sophomores, juniors, and seniors — historians of art, historians,  literary scholars, librarians, faculty emeriti, and many others. And of course while we were thinking and talking about events that took place on another continent more than 350 years ago, we were also thinking and talking about ourselves, today. Can we re-capture what it must have been to contemplate regicide in that time and place? How can the study of kings who believed they ruled by divine right shed light on political situations unfolding today? How wonderful to hear people reflecting on these questions, from all their diverse perspectives and positions.

As I left the library after the lecture, I found myself musing on what ancestors of mine who were living in the England of Charles I might have thought about the events we were discussing as they happened.  And I realized I have absolutely no idea. . . but asking the question certainly made me want to more, which is the point . . .