Incredibly to me, I have noticed that the fall term arrives in just one week.
I don’t know who stole the summer, but it’s gone. For most academics the summer offers a chance to advance their scholarship, finish up grant proposals and articles, draft the next chapter on “the book,” gather critical data that they can analyze during the academic year, and redesign courses they will teach next year. It’s an important time for a university, far from the image of it falling asleep for three months. Instead it is more like a gathering of new raw materials, of leaps ahead in knowledge acquisition and research discoveries, which are necessary for continued improvement.
Washington, I’ve found, has its own cycle. The August pace seems different, with traffic and tourists noticeably down in volume.
Next week I welcome newly-hired faculty to campus, and work with my colleagues to orient them to the Georgetown culture. They are looking forward to interacting with students, launching new courses, and advancing their scholarship. Most will be new to a Catholic and Jesuit university and curious about what it will mean to their day-to-day lives. They will be enthusiastic and ready to jump into their new positions.
The campus is getting ready for the entering freshman class. The wonderful staff for New Student Orientation who work to welcome the class (and their parents) are readying the campus. The facilities staff is finishing up last minute sprucing up of dormitories and buildings. The food service workers are getting ready for the rush of hungry young people.
We’ll have the New Student Convocation, an event rich with symbols of freshman and transfer students joining an intellectual family on the Hilltop. I’ll meet with graduate students hitting the campus for the first time, and try to convey how graduate education is different from the undergraduate education they’ve experienced.
The Mass of the Holy Spirit helps define a start of the term. A community service day on one of the first Saturdays helps reinforce what Georgetown means in “men and women in the service of others.” The Marino Workshop will host Vaddey Ratner, the author of a novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan, that entering students all read and reflected upon prior to coming to the campus.
Classes will soon start, with all of the fresh resolutions of studiousness and renewed performance anxieties. The teaching, research, and service activities of Georgetown will resume their rhythm.
At the same time, similar events are taking place at Georgetown’s campus in Qatar — the Hilltop has a far reach.
So all of this is happening soon, much too soon, from my perspective. I look over the tasks I so wanted to complete by this time, and realize, for the millionth time in my life, that my appetite for identifying important things to accomplish has bested my ability to complete them. Human failings, ever present.
But the excitement of seeing students enter their campus for the first time is one of the sweet rewards in this profession. Their hopes and dreams, so fresh, so visible, are one of the things that makes all the work worthwhile.