For a guy with his accomplishments Alivasatos is surprisingly youthful in demeanour. He seemed a little nervous and said he was excited about half a dozen times. I hope he will take to making impromptu appearances among students in their usual haunts around campus. Being a grad of the College himself may make this easier and more natural for him than it was for his predecessors.
I liked very much not only his stated devotion to the Core as one of the truly defining things about the College but the particular ways he characterized his two pillars of free speech and inclusiveness. They were free of cliche or the sense of an implied “but” putting those values in tension with one another. His remarks were aspirational and general, but they were strong.
Boyer made a couple of historical observations that I had not previously thought of. The first of these was in connection with the origin and purpose of the Core, which he said was specifically developed during the thirties as a response to the “big 'isms” then sweeping the world. Hutchins’s idea was that students should be given the tools to think about and critique those 'isms, not take them as gospel truths, not passively succumb to them. Resistance to Received Wisdoms is at the heart of the Chicago educational mission.
This objective is associated with the worldview and reforms of Robert Maynard Hutchins. But those reforms built on the initial commitment to undergraduate education made at the very founding of the University by its first great President, William Rainey Harper. The University of Chicago was conceived to be a great research university, but Harper believed that that mission was also wedded inextricably to its mission of undergraduate education.
As he made these remarks on the quad on a blustery Chicago day Boyer asked the new class to look around at the gray walls and spires rising on all sides and to think of the cathedral schools of the 12th century. You, he said, are part of a long tradition and are linked to all who have gone before you. That was a stirring thought.
The usual things were said by Nondorf and the alum representative. The students were congratulated, the parents were congratulated, the choir sang, the pipers piped, and all processed. The hard work of learning begins.