Friday, September 5, 2008--Good Work

Several years ago, I gave a talk at the start of the academic year that reflected on work and leisure. I had been reading A. Bartlett Giamatti’s Take Time for Paradise and several other texts that seemed to send a single message: that we need to slow down and recognize the need for unstructured time, for “retirements” and “holidays” and games—for leisure.

And yet I knew that we were revving up—as we are again now—for the academic year and for a new strategic plan, and that I needed to ask each of you to join me in giving a significant part of your time and energy to keep Stonehill on the trajectory that we have set for the future. I concluded that with focus, good will, good humor, and authentic community we can enjoy the hard work we do.

Looking back at that talk after attending yesterday's Faculty Senate-sponsored wine and cheese party, I still believe we should think more intentionally about the fact that we have good work—work that, unlike so much of the world’s work, is about more than just survival. We have far more choice in our work than people do in other professions—choice about content and method and schedule. The rhythms of faculty work are quite humane: we get to start over each semester—we have summers and sabbaticals and other opportunities for change and renewal. And the rewards are potentially so high: there are few professions where one might hear even once that one had changed another person’s life—and yet I read that regularly in your course evaluations, in nominations for the Hegarty Award, and in evaluations of students’ SURE experiences.

And that’s where Bart Giamatti’s, Take Time for Paradise becomes relevant. As some of you may know, Giamatti was a renowned scholar of Renaissance Literature who served as President of Yale University from 1977-86. He left academia to become President of the National League and eventually, the 7th Commissioner of Baseball. He served as Commissioner for less than a year—until a heart attack claimed his life. But he obviously spent a great part of his life reflecting on baseball as leisure—on baseball as a perfect geometric space, a search for home, a metaphor for America.

Some of his thoughts on what he calls “America and her games” are actually reflections on the importance of ritual, of the sacred, of freedom—and they may help us to sort out the priorities to which we give our time and our energy. He recalls that the Greek word for leisure is scholē, the root of school, and argues that for the Greeks (and the Romans, and the educated Renaissance-era person) leisure and education had the same essential purpose; the humanities and the liberal arts “were to be pursued because in the pursuit the muscle that is the mind was disciplined and toughened and thereby made more free, to pursue new knowledge, and just as that freedom in the mind became a freedom for the mind, which freedom is the guardian of political and social freedom . . . so was the pursuit of these studies undertaken in, and meant to perpetuate, a condition of leisure.”

This isn’t to suggest that our work is play—or that we can forego other forms of leisure because we get the liberal arts on the job! But it is to remind us, as we return to our work together, that it’s pretty good work to have, and that we should be happy in it. I want to thank each of you for dedicating yourselves to teaching and mentoring students and to the kind of contemplation that results in new knowledge and new practice—new scholarship. You will need to discover your own balance in these activities—a balance that must benefit both you and Stonehill.

Some of you will accomplish your teaching and scholarly goals and lead departments in conversations about best practices that will ensure Stonehill students learn and grow in the best curricular structures, in the most beneficial laboratory and classroom environments, and in the most helpful experiential and applied opportunities. Some of you will do this and assist your colleagues who look to change teaching methodologies or to reinvent scholarly projects that have lain dormant. Some of you will accomplish these goals while taking leadership in College governance. And some of you (dare I say “some of us?”) who are serving as administrators—and truly we are “of you”—will continue to seek ways to support your work and to set the direction for what we can be as an institution. I think we can all work (and play!) together, and I believe we have a very bright future.

Some of you may ask why we should continue the push to move forward when it’s obviously such hard work. Think about the new faculty members who were introduced yesterday. They are our future—and they came to us with expectations that we are in the process of becoming something better and better, improving yet again on what the rest of us who have been here longer have created and continually improved.

Joe Favazza and I spoke with new faculty members during the interview process, and we talked about Stonehill’s trajectory in the hopes of inspiring them to join us and our common enterprise. We made promises, promises of new science facilities, improved research prospects, and expanded opportunities for challenging students to reach more ambitious goals. I want to fulfill those promises because with enhanced resources I’m convinced that an inspired faculty who are doing faculty work and doing it well is the single most important factor in improving the programs and the reputation of Stonehill.

As Giamatti says about sports—and even about those who participate only as fans—“when people win together, the joy is more intense than when any of us wins alone, because part of any true pleasure is sharing that pleasure.” Giamatti characterizes a “win” as “the actual realization of what is essentially an imaginative surge.” He says, “The spectator, seeing something he had only imagined, or, more astonishingly, had not yet or would never have imagined possible . . . is privy to the realized act of imagination and assents, is mastered, and in that instant, bettered. ‘Winning’ for player or spectator is not simply outscoring; it is a way of talking about betterment, about making oneself, one’s fellows, one’s city, one’s adherents, more noble because of a temporary engagement on a higher human plane of existence.”

I know that your imagination, craft, and—most importantly—your engagement will result in the betterment of Stonehill. Let’s all participate in an imaginative surge for Stonehill’s future, and we may very well accomplish our own betterment in the process.

Best regards,

Katie