Shifting the Margins

“Let’s face it, nobody is going to give you tenure for having engaged the community in dialogue.  So, why do it?  It’s suicide on a university campus.” 

“Yes, if you work on the margin, you’ll remain on the margin.”

“True, and yet that’s where the real work is.  That’s where the differences need to be made.  And this is where I want to be and what I want to be doing—what we need to be doing to stay relevant.”

“So then, isn’t the question how we can make this kind of work central to what we do in the academy, vital to the work of our institutions?”

“Perhaps, but will that ever happen?”

This is the dialogue that repeats over and over again in my head—a piece of a conversation I was included in at Clark’s Inviting Dialogue conference—and one to which I am trying to hear an answer.  I want to hear a response that says, “Yes, it is what needs to happen and what those of us in higher education need as our mission.”   The renewal of the deep purposes of our universities and colleges—engagement with the world to address the serious issues of our time—was powerfully articulated by Liz Coleman, the President of Bennington College.  She said:

This orientation to the world—what Pat Romney aptly called “a culture of dialogue”—is difficult to achieve under any circumstances; it is particularly difficult, even unimaginable, in a world where the expert is the only model of intellectual seriousness, where depth is severed from breadth… Hence, the educational establishment where these structures and assumptions are the coin of the realm—the place in which dialogue is especially critical and uniquely possible—has become a place where it often seems least likely to occur.

And yet, this is where I am, working to bridge the differences, bring unheard voices into the center, and engage the whole human in connecting with the whole of humanity.  Though the trends have been toward greater division and higher barriers to connection, I see a small shift happening. This gathering is a kind of centripetal force pulling us back toward the center.  And I take courage from President Coleman’s closing remarks:

"It is unthinkable that such an education can occur absent a multiplicity of perspectives, an ethos of evidence, and the multiple uses of dialogue. Is such an education possible? That, I think, is up to us."

John R. Sarrouf, Assistant Director, Difficult Dialogues Initiative
Higgins School of the Humanities
Clark University

April 7, 2010