Good Afternoon, Friends.

I'd like to thank you all for coming on this spectacular day to celebrate Haverford College - our traditions and history; our aspirations and future. I am honored by your presence and the College is sustained by the participation of so many dedicated people.

I'd also like to thank each of the speakers for their kind words as well as their perceptive (and occasionally impertinent) observations. These friends represent the many threads that weave this community into a single fabric. In fact, community is the overarching theme that has worked its way this past week through all of the activities celebrating creativity and the human spirit. I'd like to explain how we arrived at that theme and what I think it means, both to me personally and to Haverford College...

I have always been intrigued and uplifted by the idea of the indomitable human spirit, the astonishing ability of people to accomplish great deeds, to come through under extreme duress, and to accomplish things no one thought possible. Others on the inaugural committee talked with passion about human creativity, about inventiveness, and about our species' ability to imagine. In this way, then, was born our theme for the week: Creativity and the Human Spirit.

This is, of course, a vast subject and intentionally so. It is meant to encompass all that we do here so that together we can display, discuss, debate, explore, research, teach, and celebrate the creative spirit of the entire Haverford community. And that very word - community - underscores the foundation of our creative and spirited lives together.

First and foremost, we are an intellectual community.

The College was founded in 1833 to promote "a liberal education in the ancient and modern literature and the mathematical and natural sciences under the care of competent instructors." While we might wish a more enthusiastic description of faculty than merely "competent", little more need be said about our educational aspirations.

We take scholarship seriously. The most important thing we can give our students is the ability and the inclination to intersect life and its many challenges as a scholar: with hard questions in hand; with an open mind to what the answers might be; with an insistence that assertions and conclusions must be backed up by evidence, not merely opinion; with a desire not just to advance our progress toward solutions, but to make those solutions public and to subject them to the bracing reality of open debate...

My view is that in a truly intellectual community, no subjects are off limits. We cannot be afraid to challenge cherished notions or to be wary of being unpopular for insisting on bright illumination of risky topics. I do not underestimate or minimize the importance of diplomacy and courtesy and civility in our discourse. These attributes in fact are vital. However, I also think that an unwillingness to be direct with each other or a hesitation to engage in real debate, can layer a thick and impenetrable crust over our attempts at betterment.

Thus, in this intellectual community we heed the words of the Ibo proverb: "Taking thought is strength."

Second, Haverford is an intentional community.

Things do not often happen to us by accident. We do not have to be subject to the vicissitudes of vagary. We chart our own future. We make choices that define who we are and what we want to accomplish.

For example, we have chosen throughout our 164-year history to be a liberal arts college. There were and are other forms we could assume, especially in areas of the curriculum that deal with professional disciplines like health care, business, social work, architecture, engineering and journalism, among many others. These are worthy pursuits, and surely the world needs good people to pursue them as many Haverford alumni have, but I believe that the training one attains in these areas and the contributions one makes as a practitioner can be no better than the liberal education on which they rest. This is why we have intentionally chosen to keep our focus sharp and to define at our core a commitment to broad-based and rigorous liberal arts.

We have also intentionally chosen to be small. We are mindful that there are certain advantages to largeness: economies of scale in operating the institution; the ability to offer more choices in the curriculum; the presence of critical masses of scholars in selected areas of emphasis. In a very real sense, we do not need to give up these advantages because of our thriving collaborations with Bryn Mawr College, with Swarthmore College, and with the University of Pennsylvania. We have therefore chosen on purpose to remain small to retain the personal; to sustain the close interaction among students; to promote the easy accessibility of faculty; to enable the opportunity to know everyone on campus; to have the ability to realize a human rather than a production-line scale of place...

Although I personally may not know all the answers to the questions the College is facing, we as a community do. Together, we will explore the questions, refine them, dissect and reshape them, and create answers to them. Much of what we already do will remain; some will be new; all of it will be truly ours. This is how a community remains an intentional one.

Third, we are a principled community.

Most organizations&emdash;including colleges and universities, businesses, governments, and other institutions large and small&emdash;will say they have a set of ethical and moral principles. Some will even have a written statement of values or a code of conduct or some other visible manifestation of their value system. At Haverford, we don't worry so much about writing it down; instead, we act it out.

How is this manifest? First and foremost in the people who choose to come here. Students like Kevin Joseph, faculty like Anne McGÏÏuire, and staff like Gail Seldon recognize in Haverford College a place that is simpatico to their particular quest. Do we sometimes fall short of our ideals? Yes. Do we make mistakes? Yes. Are there problems here? Yes. But the people at Haverford are not problem avoiders; I believe we are problem seekers. And when we find a problem needing work, we begin deliberations with an earnest respect for each other. Then we follow through by listening to each other, encouraging each other, caring about each other. This is what a principled community does.

I have also seen in my short time here that this community proceeds with integrity. Even on those matters where there is deep disagreement&emdash;and there are such&emdash;Haverford folk are characterized by fair-mindedness in appraising each other's viewpoint and straightforwardness in expressing our own thoughts. We can speak our minds, confident that what we say will be received as an honest and sincere expression of deeply held and carefully considered beliefs, not as a direct or personal confrontation. We remember the words of the Nigerian proverb: "a big head is a big load."

College presidents are often asked to identify the major challenges facing higher education. I suppose you get used to questions like that. There are many good and reasonable answers (probably at least as many answers as there are college presidents). Some of these are obvious and include: creating a dynamic curriculum; controlling our costs so education can be accessible to all who seek it; harnessing technology to further our purpose; creating a climate of public opinion that celebrates higher learning rather than viewing it with suspicion. The list is endless, and all are important subjects and worthy answers to the question about major challenges.

My own answer is that the most fundamental challenge is to ensure that principled values are intertwined with scholarship. At Haverford we not only teach a course in ethics, we bind ethics into every course we offer. We not only invite visitors to campus who have done deeds of high conscience, we display personal character in our individual daily lives and in our professions. We not only study the uplifting accomplishments of historical and contemporary figures, we strive to act with grace and charity in all our own dealings.

As a scientist given to hypothesis I would offer the following: The time one spends in life doing good is not subtracted from the total time one is allotted on earth. From this conjecture it follows that nothing is lost from leading a principled life and, in fact, much is gained. I ask this community to join me in testing the hypothesis...

I hereby publicly confess that I am by nature an optimist, and I know that my assessment of the Haverford College community is a strongly positive one. Luckily, although optimistic, I am not naive, at least not so naive as to be unaware that we face many problems and challenges in the years ahead, and I have alluded to some of these in my remarks. However, the strength of an intellectual, intentional, and principled community is that we can face our obstacles. We can do so because there is another type of community that overlays and sustains these three. I refer to the type of community we have celebrated all week. We are a creative community that calls upon the vast capacity of humans to imagine.

I am not talking about creativity in the sense in which it is usually discussed: as individual accomplishment. I refer instead to what we can spawn together, larger than any of us alone. I am reminded of Bill Rogers, a famous marathoner who was asked once why Kenyans are so much better than Americans as distance runners. His response: "Kenyans train together, Americans by themselves."

It is not the easy path to be a creative community. We are like Kenyan runners and all athletes: constantly raising the bar; expecting more of ourselves on each outing; consistently trying to improve our performance, testing our level of endurance in a quest to reach new levels; improvising on the fly to discover fresh approaches...

I would like us now to acknowledge and display the Haverford community of which I speak. Would the members of the Board of Managers and Corporation please stand. The delegates. The faculty. The students. Members of the staff and administration. The alumni. Other friends and Friends. My family.

This is our community. We stand here representing Haverford College and all those who could not be present today. I ask us to dream together about what it means to be an intellectual community, an intentional community, a principled community. Then together we shall go forth and celebrate this creative community and our irrepressible human spirit.