President Michael Bassis' 2004 Convocation Address: What it Means to be an Exemplary Community of Learners

All of us- new freshmen and graduating seniors, junior staff and senior faculty - are coming to a new campus today. Physically you can see the changes: the Emma Eccles Jones Conservatory is now open; ground has been broken for our new Health, Wellness and Athletic facility; our Executive Vice President, Steve Morgan, even said we have more parking spaces than last year. No. Really. He said that. If you don't agree, his direct line is 2141.

But there is more than physical change here. There is, I believe, a change in the way we think about the college. The strategic plan we adopted last year set an ambitious agenda, and we are moving forward with it. The information commons is open; the writing center is operational; the concierge service has gone live; and, on a pilot basis, we are offering new cross disciplinary learning communities.

The Strategic Plan, however, involves more than a series of goals and a list of initiatives. It was designed to create an over-arching attitude about what Westminster aspires to be. The plan articulated a vision for Westminster- it said our goal is to be nationally recognized as "an exemplary community of learners." That phrase has become a central element of our institutional rhetoric- partly, I suspect, because no one, including me, knew precisely what it meant. Now we have to figure that out.

Let me share some thoughts on that issue with you.

Before I became an administrator, and ultimately a college President, I was a faculty member. I remember how I prepared for my classes. I reviewed the assigned material, examined notes I had taken doing research on the topics at hand, I struggled to find ways to use historical and current events to illustrate ideas, and I prepared detailed lecture notes. Oh, I was diligent. I was insightful. I was, at times, close to brilliant.

And I was not happy.

I was not happy because something was missing. I was a specialist in my field, as were almost all of my faculty colleagues. As a consequence, we worked alone, doing our specialized research, teaching our specialized courses, rarely if ever interacting with each other about the larger issues of our discipline, our university or the world beyond. I love to teach but, like my faculty colleagues, I was so busy digging ever deeper into my highly specialized trench that the only students I took the time to know where those few who were willing to jump into my trench with me and start digging.

I wanted more than that. I wanted a community- a diverse array of faculty and students brought together by a desire to work together to advance their understanding of issues that matter.

Eventually I came across a book by Ernest Boyer, then President of the Carnegie Foundation and one of this country's most distinguished educational theorists. Here Boyer argued that the most powerful environments for learning during the college years, in other words the best colleges, were indeed communities of learners. And the best communities of learners, he argued, shared some important characteristics. (He never used the term exemplary but, since that's what he meant, I'll help him out a bit.)

Boyer said an exemplary college must be an open community: one where freedom of expression is prized and arguments are passionate but not personal. He said an exemplary college should be a just community: it should reject prejudice, and seek to serve every member of the community in ways that are both equitable and fair. He said an exemplary college should be a disciplined community: one where rules are rooted in rationality and observed, one where every individual accepts responsibility for themselves and for advancing the common good. He said exemplary colleges should be celebratory communities: they should mark important occasions with rituals that affirm tradition and honor change. And, finally, he said that an exemplary college community should be both distinctive and purposeful.

I believe those characteristics are highly relevant to Westminster's growing understanding of the kind of community we seek to become. But there are, I would submit, three additional attributes we should add to Boyer's list.

First, I believe an exemplary community of learners should be a collaborative community. Quite simply, that means that faculty, staff and students are eager to learn with and from each other - that we encourage each other, we stimulate each other, we challenge each other. Of course there are times we will work alone. But even that work is ultimately designed to connect us to each other. Our library is right behind me. Once libraries were designed to facilitate the solitary search for truth. But look at it now: computer terminals to connect us to the global village and allow us to collaborate with people we never even see; an information commons to encourage the joint pursuit of knowledge and understanding; even a writing center to transform what was once the loneliest of exercises into a shared experience. Collaboration can take many forms but the very act of working with others changes and deepens the dynamics of learning.

Second, I believe an exemplary community of learners must be a diverse community. Yes, I know we are in Utah. I realize that we sometimes measure diversity here by counting how many people in a group have a tan and how many don't. Westminster will work hard to increase its ethnic, racial and cultural diversity, among faculty, staff, and students alike. But as we pursue that goal we can and should take advantaged of the intellectual diversity that already exists here. We all have different experiences, different perspectives, and different approaches to problems. The value of diversity is that it allows us to bring that richness of experience and perspective to bear on a common task. The result can be a deeper understanding, a more complex appreciation of reality.

But that is true only if we work to identify and understand the differences. All too often we are afraid to do so. All too often we seek harmony by relating only to our commonalities. Diversity accepts commonality but also celebrates differences. It is those differences that allow us to learn from each other, to see things from a new perspective, to gain insights that our belief system might not reveal.

Third, I believe an exemplary community of learners should be an academically challenging community. When we were preparing our strategic plan, we asked community leaders and employers what they expected from a college graduate. The answers established a pretty low level of expectation--"someone who can write a coherent memo," "someone who can make decisions based on data." But the people we talked to told us that, all too often, even those minimal expectations were unmet by the typical college graduate.

A central goal of our strategic plan is that everyone who graduates from Westminster College will have achieved well beyond a set of minimal expectations. We are committed to making sure that all Westminster graduates master the skills they need to succeed, not only in the workplace but in all facets of their lives. Those skills have been articulated as college-wide and program specific learning goals. Westminster has high standards for the work of faculty and staff, as well as for students and all of us will work hard to meet them. All of us must help each other to challenge what we think is true; to question concepts we now take for granted; to see old theories from new perspectives. All of us to encourage each other to stretch - to reach higher than we ever thought we could.

Let me tell you a story that, for me, illustrates what an exemplary community of learners is all about. Many years ago the distinguished scientist, Stephen Hawking, working with a group of his colleagues, looked at what they knew about the universe and suggested that all the evidence pointed to the existence of something they called "black holes." Hawking was then the acknowledged expert on black holes. He still is. This past summer, Hawking acknowledged that other scientists had just presented data which convinced him that one portion of his theory was wrong. When asked how being wrong made him feel -- his answer was simple: it made him feel, he said, smarter -- smarter because he had learned something new.

At Westminster we all aspire to become smarter - smarter by virtue of being proven wrong; smarter by virtue of learning about new ideas and testing old ones; smarter by virtue of challenging ourselves and each other to reach higher and farther; smarter by virtue of working collaboratively with all elements of a diverse campus; smarter by being a part of an exemplary community of learners. Or, failing that, at least smart enough to recognize that there is free food nearby and that you should hang around until the recessional is completed and enjoy it.