Return and Renewal: Special Experiences of Journey and Place
The Inaugural Address of Chancellor J. Keith Motley1
University of Massachusetts Boston
November 9, 2007
Thank you, Governor Patrick, Mayor Menino, President Wilson, Chair Tocco, trustees and members of the university community, chancellor colleagues, former chancellors, Dr. Brian Johnson, distinguished guests, my presidential mentor Dr. Carter, President Jackie Jenkins-Scott (my sister, colleague, and friend), my coach, Jim Calhoun, dear friends and supporters of the University of Massachusetts Boston.
And last, but definitely not least, my family, who came from near and far to be here today, including my brother and sisters, especially my loving wife Angela, my best friend and source of strength and inspiration; my children, a constant source of pride; my ancestors, including my dad, John W. Motley, for modeling work with youth and for our many conversations during my developmental years; and my grandmother, Willie Holman, who, when one of my sisters told her that she wanted to become an engineer, asked me, “Why is that girl going to go all the way up there to college to learn how to drive trains?” (Imagine if I had to explain to her what a chancellor is!—don’t worry, Grandma, I will explain all of this fuss to you one day.) And my mother, Cornelia Williams, without whose drive for education-and-growth I would not be standing here today. She truly gave me my wings and continues to encourage me to soar.
It is with enormous pride and deep humility that I am installed today as the eighth chancellor of this wonderful institution that is the University of Massachusetts Boston.
I pledge to do everything in my power to be worthy of the trust you have placed in me.
I have chosen the theme of return and renewal as my point of departure, to share some of my thoughts about the University of Massachusetts Boston and my sense of its future.
I begin, in that sharing, with T.S. Eliot’s meditation in his fourth Quartet, “Little Gidding“: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”2
In life, there are many “returns” that one can experience, both in reality and metaphorically: a return to one’s native land; a return of an identity; a return to good health from illness; and a return to home, however one defines that.
As with Odysseus in Homer’s great epic, implicit in every return is the sense of having journeyed away from—and then back to—home.
For me, today, the return about which I speak is personal, contextual, institutional, and conceptual.
On a personal level, my arrival at the chancellorship speaks volumes about return and renewal. It’s a homecoming—to a campus I love.
Thirty-four years ago, I came to Boston for the first time from the neighborhoods of August Wilson and the playing fields of Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell. My immediate neighborhood was a lively mixture of Italian, Jewish, Polish, and black. I grew up playing baseball, football, basketball, bocce, and spin-the-dreidel.
I had violin lessons, acting lessons, Boy Scouts, and church. My mother, prior to even working in the Pittsburgh schools, was the driving force behind my education. I can’t remember a time before I could read. Even when she sent me up to bed, she knew full well I’d be reading by moonlight. She had, after all, made sure to put books in my hands and allowed a supply of books to grow under my bed.
By having me participate in the Upward Bound program at the University of Pittsburgh, my mother gave me the greatest gift, by making sure I’d be prepared to further my education and have the confidence to leave home and the comfort of my caring neighborhood.
Picture my arriving in Boston in 1973 as a Northeastern freshman, head full of hair flowing all over my head. That may surprise some of you.
However, this may surprise you even more, given Boston’s reputation back then as cold and inhospitable—I found the city, the Northeastern campus, my new community, and faculty who were to become lifelong mentors, warm and welcoming. My arrival here actually seemed like a homecoming. Boston had the feel of Pittsburgh. It comforted me and reinforced my sense of self.
No doubt, part of that feeling of return came from the collaborative spirit I discovered in that caring neighborhood. I constantly marvel at the importance of collaboration to individual success and how much the concept itself is rooted in the image of neighborhoods, in which people could not survive without being neighborly. And what is that neighborliness? Collaboration for mutual help. Contrary to the myth of rugged individualism, neighborhoods, societies, and great universities succeed by being collaborative at all levels.
Institutions (as well as individuals) return. Institutions return to their founders’ visions, to their core values, to their fundamental selves.
And so now I ask you to return with me—to the world of 1964, to the time of our founding. It was a time of uncertainty and promise.
With the Tonkin Gulf resolution, the Vietnam war was rapidly escalating. China tested an atomic bomb. At home, the long night of racial injustice saw those who sought racial equality beaten and murdered. Congress, after lengthy debate, passed the Civil Rights Act. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize, and President Lyndon Johnson gave voice to the Great Society.
I should also add that the Red Sox that year finished in eighth place, twenty-seven games behind the Yankees, and ended the season with some of the smallest home crowds in their history. It was a different time!
Against this backdrop, the legislature in 1964 established the University of Massachusetts Boston. As I indicated in September in my first Convocation address, when I spoke about the student-centered, urban public university of the new century, returning to the time of our founding helps us to know who we are and who we should become.
The founders sought to have this university offer its students an education equal in quality to that provided by the best private liberal arts colleges and universities anywhere. They also urged that, as an urban university, we should, “stand with the city,” serving and leading “where the battle is.” 3
Our merger with Boston State College, which had its origins in a Girls High and Normal School and in providing educational opportunities to underserved populations, gives further expression to standing with the city and what we have come to call the “urban mission.”
Back in 1964, the city of Boston was ninety percent white, about nine percent African-American, and just one percent Asian and others. In 2007, Boston is more than fifty percent people of color. The younger generation is even more racially and culturally diverse. New immigrants have been our sole source of growth. More than twenty-five percent of Bostonians are foreign-born.
Proudly, as the first person of color to lead our beloved campus, I tell you today that the University of Massachusetts Boston has embraced this changing world.
We are a multicultural institution, the most ethnically diverse public university in New England. Students of color are a third of our student body, and over half our undergraduates are first-generation college students, many from recent immigrant households. They come from 140 countries, and at home they speak over 90 different languages.
For most of our students, commitment to this community doesn’t stop with graduation. Greater Boston is their home, and they choose to stay here to work, raise families, create businesses, and give back to the community in myriad ways.
Since 1964, our faculty has grown dramatically, in size, depth, and range of scholarship.
We recently ranked fifth in the nation among small research universities, based on publications as well as grants and honors of faculty members. And, committed as they are to excellence in research, our faculty are equally committed to teaching and mentoring the next generation.
Our new doctoral programs, and our lifelong learning, continuing education, and on-line programs, have all expanded the University of Massachusetts Boston’s reach and impact. We now have over thirty institutes and centers actively involved in major policy studies.
The distance we have travelled is vast indeed. At the same time as I reflect on our rich history and how far we have come, I look ahead to new challenges with fresh eyes and renewed vigor. In returning, even after a short absence, I am mindful that things are never the same.
For the past two years, as vice president, I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with President Wilson, the Board of Trustees, the President’s Office staff, chancellors, and campus leadership.
I want to thank President Wilson not only for making the phone call to ask me to serve as interim chancellor but also for following through on his vision for my leadership development through exposure to initiatives on academic and student affairs, advancement, economic development, communications, marketing, the investment portfolio, and athletics. Because of your trust and support Jack, I have been able to see our campus from a different vantage, and this, I assure you, will inform my role as chancellor.
Fulfilling our urban mission involves both return and renewal, and I return with both missionary zeal and thoughtful reflection. The urban mission of our founders endures, but must be viewed through a prism of challenges and opportunities they may never have considered just 40 years ago.
Just one example: Today we play a leading role in the ongoing Boston Harbor cleanup through our growing research capabilities in measuring environmental hazards, advancing remediation strategies, and establishing marine monitoring systems. It is very much a part of our urban mission today but was not even on the radar in 1964.
For more than a year, the faculty and administration have been working hard on a strategic plan to determine how best to develop and apply the intellectual resources of a research university in a diverse, learner-centered culture. This work is a personal priority, and I plan to make a presentation on it to the Board of Trustees next month.
We're working on strategies for:
- increasing student access, engagement, and success;
- attracting, developing, and sustaining highly effective, world-class faculty;
- creating a physical environment that supports teaching, learning, and research; and
- enhancing campus-community engagement through improved organizational structures, with community understood as local, national, and global.
We want to increase enrollment to 15,000 students by 2010, while maintaining our diversity and providing increased financial aid to meet a greater percentage of student need.
We want to embrace research and development as a cornerstone of our urban mission and to help us sustain our region’s economic competitiveness and quality of life.
We want to increase hands-on research opportunities for our undergraduate and master’s degree students and nurture our doctoral programs in such critical areas as nursing, gerontology, chemistry, biology, computer science, environmental sciences, public policy, psychology, and education.
We intend to strengthen our existing academic programs and invest in new, high-quality undergraduate and graduate programs with strong research components and the promise of expanding and enriching our curricular offerings, faculty and student development, and the academic and professional reputation of the university.
When I began the telling of this journey of return and renewal, I said there were personal, contextual, institutional, and conceptual aspects. The conceptual offers up sweeping themes.
In returning, I have gained an even clearer view of the impact we at the University of Massachusetts Boston can—and must—have on future generations. The great issues facing our community, issues on which we must help lead the battle, are issues shared with other communities, other peoples, in the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world. Many of these challenges center around disparities, be they in education or enlightenment, in healthcare, in income, in due regard for the elderly or children, or in environmental quality.
Return and renewal are intertwined with issues of living in harmony with a sustainable world and returning to deep respect for nature, nature within which civilization is rooted, out of which human culture has flowered, and from whose influence we have all our artistic and scientific achievements. It means going back to the root value of conservation. 4
Here at the university, our faculty is in the business of conserving—and extending—our intellectual capital. But returning to the core value of conservation also means using our sciences and philosophy to conserve the viability of the very earth we inhabit.
I dedicate myself to supporting our programs on the environment at the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels.
We are proud to be the first in the world to have created a PhD program in green chemistry, one that focuses on an ecologically sustainable view of chemical research, development, and manufacture. From tackling the negative impact of chemicals on our health and environment to renewable energies and other programs, we aim to help shape a future where longstanding environmental problems are finally solved.
Return and renewal reside in the study and protection of our elders, who are growing in numbers and of whom our culture has been regrettably dismissive. It was not always that way—earlier generations of Americans understood.And while we may not return precisely to the structure of extended families around which our neighborhoods were organized, our gerontology program, one of the nation’s best, can help us renew that commitment.
The benefits of this respectful protection are many, including the strengthening of our social capital, about which I spoke at Convocation. Erik Erikson’s work on the stages of human psycho-social development bids us to remember that caring is not a zero-sum game. In the tug of war between isolation and intimacy, one must not be so fearful of losing oneself in another as to hold back from helping others to develop. 5
We return to and reaffirm our urban mission not only in our stellar gerontology, nursing, clinical psychology, and sociology programs, in our commendable humanities programs, and in our business studies, but also in our new capabilities in epidemiology, bio-statistics, and other areas for fruitful health-outcomes research.
The work being done in our new GoKids Boston youth research and fitness center, as well as our planned focus on early childhood studies, will add to this university’s ability to fulfill its intergenerational responsibilities to the young as well.
I think you can see that return is an invitation to compare what was, what is and what should be.
It helps us understand that we renew our urban mission when we respond to competitive challenges in the global economy, by being less parochial in our approach to the world around us, by making global linkages, benchmarking ourselves against the best practices anywhere, and by investing in our intellectual capital as a regional security imperative.
Symbolically, in both physical and mindset changes, we have taken steps to orient our natural setting outward. Our architecture itself, in its most recent expression, turns from an inward focus to look out on this beautiful harbor and beyond. Standing on this peninsula, we see ourselves as the capital of the Atlantic Rim, but we are not limited by coastlines or other geographical definitions. Indeed, the Atlantic Rim is “a body of water surrounded by a state of mind.”6
It begins here and reaches out worldwide.
We are eager to work with Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, our entire congressional delegation, the business community, and all of you to help give greater richness, breadth, and vigor to the concept of International Boston and, in doing so, also broaden our focus on global studies.
In 1964, the University of Massachusetts Boston consisted of one building on Arlington Street. The campus where we gather today did not become a reality until ten years later. Over the years, we have struggled with our infrastructure and other needs. Our hard-working staff knows that all too well.
We have had many winters of budget cuts, crumbling infrastructure, cold encounters with cold shoulders.
But today I remember Percy Bysshe Shelley’s optimistic question: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”7 I look around at all the friends who gather here—the mayor of the city, a leading proponent of the schools and a strong supporter of this campus; the governor of the Commonwealth, whose emphasis on education in general, and support for this campus in particular, has been heartwarming; and others—leaders in Congress, the City Council, and from the community—who have been with us over the years.
Our Board of Trustees and President Wilson have been unstinting in their backing. Spring, my friends and colleagues, is not far behind.
We need to make repairs and build first-class, new academic buildings if we are to create a physical environment to support great teaching, learning, and research.
Poised with a new master plan, we take heart from Governor Patrick’s inclusion of a new academic building and important capital improvements in his higher education bond bill. Thank you for your support, Governor. May the legislature be as wise in seeing the value of this investment.
While bricks and mortar are a concrete and necessary part of renewal, as you can tell by now the concepts of return and renewal on this campus mean so much more.
Return and renewal also signify a journey toward reconciliation—reconciliation between the research and teaching missions of the university.
Some universities are known for their great research; others, for great teaching. We shall be known for both, with our expertise in both areas contributing in an interdisciplinary way to serve our local, national, and global constituencies. We are—and will be—the research university with a teaching soul.
Return and renewal are also central to reconciling the “two cultures” of modernity, the sciences and the humanities. Almost a half century ago, C.P. Snow warned that the communications gulf between the two cultures was a major impediment to solving the world’s problems.8 In order for people to understand themselves and the world in which they live, I want to have strong programs combining the sciences and the humanities that can educate leaders in the interdisciplinary realities of life.
Return and renewal mean a return to public service and civic engagement, not as a passing fancy or hot trend, but as the embodiment of a special, unique, and noble commitment to society. And those who truly embrace this ideal are themselves, by virtue of that embracing, special and noble. It is out of this nobility that we should shape our future citizen leaders.
We must return to the ideals that launch all demanding journeys. For where would we be without ideals, without something beyond material returns to self? What have we, as Bostonians, as Americans, as humans ever done that is worth preserving that was not, at the time of its pursuit, an ideal that was beyond our immediate grasp?
We surely must affirm the inherent dignity of all human beings and promote that dignity through a body of norms we have come to call human rights. My administration will seek to carry on that spirit, in honor of the victims of human rights abuses, in living commemoration of those who founded and have sustained the human rights movement, and in moral and intellectual solidarity with other peoples of the world.
Sooner or later, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advised us, all the peoples of the world will have to learn to live together in a spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.9 I want the McCormack Graduate School to help lead us toward this end.
Our pursuit of knowledge is an ongoing journey. As we continually venture forth in path-breaking scientific, cultural, and ethical explorations, so do we return to stability, our stable core, our founders’ vision, our institutional mission. We return to be renewed, just as Odysseus returned to Ithaca and his beloved wife Penelope after years of tests and travails, storms and diversions that followed the Trojan Wars. Like Odysseus, who committed to a journey and gave many years of his life to it, I am committed to this journey and will not leave it until the lofty goals of the founders, as a sort of returning home, are more fully realized.
All of you have had your journeys. Part of your journey has brought you here. My task is to help join our journeys in the service of our students, faculty, and staff—those who are here now, those who preceded us, those who are yet to come—and the many societies to which we collectively belong.
Massachusetts is home to some of the best private institutions of higher education in the country. Our goal is to make the University of Massachusetts Boston the nation’s most outstanding urban public university. We are poised on the brink of greatness, looking out to the world and deep within ourselves. We have the vision, we have the tools, and collaboratively we must stay focused and committed.
I stand before you as an example of how one can reach from humble beginnings and achieve in ways our parents never imagined. I pledge to our students that they too will have that opportunity. I pledge that the lessons that I’ve learned from others—neighborliness, civility, intergenerational respect, and academic excitement—will be a daily mantra here. I pledge an administration committed to setting and exceeding stretch goals for excellence, innovation, transparency, inclusiveness, and humanity.
A world-class institution is a dynamic institution. A dynamic institution provides access. A dynamic institution is accountable. A dynamic institution is inviting. A dynamic academic institution is welcoming in all parts—teaching, research, and service.
A world-class university is about universal learning. A world-class university is about universal participation. A great university is about building community. That is where you find victory. That is where you find triumph. Triumph comes when we become one.
I’ve come home, with fresh eyes and a renewed commitment. With the help of everyone here and the people of our Commonwealth who support public higher education, we shall move the University of Massachusetts Boston to a great and rewarding future.
Thank you.
Notes
1This is an edited, annotated version of a speech given on November 9, 2007, in the university’s Clark Athletic Center on the occasion of J. Keith Motley’s inauguration as the eighth chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston.
2T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 208.
3The University of Massachusetts Founding Statement of Purpose, 1965.
4See the preamble to “World Charter for Nature,” adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on October 28, 1982, available at www.un.org/documents/ga/res/37/a37r007.htm.
5See Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1982) and Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: International Publishers, 1959).
6James Barron, ”Time for Us to Rediscover the Atlantic Rim,” in The European, (March 16-17, 1994), cited in James H. Barron and Jessica C. McWade, “Towards a New ’New Atlanticism,’” in Parallax: Journal of International Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 2003), p 78.
7See Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which can be found in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 221-223.
8See C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
9See King’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1986), 224-226.
