Thanking the Faculty Who Shape Minds and Spirits

At this point in my life I have heard and read many commencement speeches. They tend to have common themes: this day is not an end but a beginning; your generation has the opportunity to succeed on problems that my generation has failed to solve; you are our hope of building a better world, etc.

These are all good thoughts and I must force myself to remember that most graduates don’t hear them as often as I do. They might seem much fresher to them than to me.

Most speakers also note that the students could not have succeeded without the support of their parents and extended families. In fact, some note that, for each graduate, this day is a celebration of a whole network’s success. This note is absolutely true, and often leads to an opportunity for the graduates to warmly thank their parents and family members. This is good.

It’s noticeable to me, however, over the years, that few speakers make similar remarks about the faculty. By implication, but I believe, completely unintentionally, one can get the impression that with the families and students’ work, sufficient resources exist to produce the graduates’ success.

From inside the academy, however, that picture of higher education becomes quite inadequate.

The faculty are the diagnosticians of impediments to clear thinking. We see them work with individual students to discern what cognitive blocks prevent understanding material in a course. We see them return draft papers filled with constructive comments on ways for more effective verbal expression. We see them push students to think more deeply about readings, to extract successively more sophisticated understanding of text, to discern the layered meanings of works. The faculty nurture the day-by-day intellectual growth of the students.

The faculty breed the facility of comprehending alternative viewpoints on the same “facts.” We see them lead discussions of students with diverse backgrounds. They use the inherently different perspectives among classmates to help the students teach each other. While the faculty are focused on conveying facts and current knowledge of a field, they are also teaching how to acquire and assess new perspectives on a problem. Exploiting the diversity within the students in the class, they are simultaneously teaching all how to foster effective dialogue in a complicated, diverse world. When they succeed, the students are more effective collaborators in joint work in their work lives.

The faculty are guides to the skills of self-teaching. By providing introductions to students to original inquiry (through group projects, written papers, etc.), they pass on skills of immersing oneself in a new domain of knowledge. When they succeed,d they have helped shape a mind that is resilient to the rapidly changing terrain of knowledge.

They are the counselors of synthesis. They, in quiet meetings in their offices, address the puzzle each student faces of how to integrate their new knowledge into a life’s work compatible with their own spirit. They help the student see alternative ways forward and give trusted assessments of the student’s area of strengths. They sometimes energize an alumni network that lands the start of a work career.

So, while the commencement appropriately focuses on the graduates and their family support, it’s important to remember the role of faculty in their achieving that success. They are the lifeblood feeding successive generations of women and men for others.