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Pomona College President David W. Oxtoby
Welcome to the opening Convocation in the one hundred twentieth year of
instruction at Pomona College. On this occasion I am pleased to welcome the
Class of 2010 to our community, and to greet the returning students from the
College, our faculty, staff, and members of the Board of Trustees, led by Board
Chair Stewart Smith of the Class of 1968. It is also a pleasure to recognize
Pomona’s seventh President, David Alexander, and his wife Catharine.
The purpose of today’s Convocation is to celebrate beginnings and to join
together to explore the goals of a Pomona education. For those of you entering
as first-years, this exploration will last through your four years on campus
and, I hope, throughout your lifetimes, since education does not end with the
granting of a degree. I will use my remarks to open a conversation on campus on
a subject of critical importance in the years ahead: sustainability.
Let me begin with a simple anecdote. I recently went to purchase safety razor
blades; for some time I have used a “Trak II” razor, with two blades. But of
course the rest of the country has moved on to bigger and better cartridges:
first “Mach 3” with three blades (1998), then “Quattro” with four (2003), and
now the latest and most heavily advertised is “Fusion” with “the power of five.”
Obviously, if two blades are better than one, five are better than four. A rough
extrapolation suggests that when all of you return in 2060 for your fiftieth
reunion, the product of choice will have 47 blades, because clearly that is
better than the previous year’s model with only 46.
I give this rather trivial example not to parody the excesses of American
advertising and consumerism: that would be an entirely different talk. Rather, I
use it to pose a number of questions: When is enough enough? Is growth in and of
itself desirable? Are there limits to growth? Can we begin an urgently needed
dialog on the move toward a sustainable world?
The most immediate context for sustainability is of course the environment. As
natural resources are used up we must urgently recognize that the supply of
materials we have taken for granted (ranging from pure water to oil to minerals)
is not unlimited. Moreover, the impact of our waste materials on our
surroundings is growing. We see that locally here in the Los Angeles basin with
its largely unplanned growth, and globally in the impact of emitted carbon
dioxide on the earth’s climate. Jared Diamond has recently written a powerful
book, "Collapse", in which he discusses the fates of different societies, from
Easter Island through modern-day California. Some such societies learned to live
with their local resources and have persisted to the present day, while others
drove themselves into extinction. Diamond’s message is that in a connected world
we need to work together to assure our future.
But sustainability goes beyond environmental policy to virtually every area that
we study at this College. Can economics look toward a future where growth of new
markets is replaced by a steady state? Of course, with a major fraction of the
world still in poverty now, this is a distant goal, but perhaps one we should
begin to think about. Can we use sociology to understand what makes a community
sustainable through many generations? And what about the stability of democratic
political systems in the world? This year’s first-year book, “The Future of
Freedom” by Fareed Zakaria, asks about the factors that have caused so many
countries in the world to slip back from promising democratic beginnings into
illiberal states that suppress citizens’ rights.
Earlier this summer, I took part in a conference in Strasbourg hosted by the
Council of Europe on the subject of “Higher Education and Democratic Culture”
which explored the linked questions of human rights and sustainability
throughout the world. Presidents came together to talk about the specific role
of colleges and universities in building democratic culture. Interestingly,
Western European countries were largely represented by government bureaucrats at
the meeting, but a substantial number of rectors from universities in Eastern
Europe discussed with presidents of American liberal arts colleges how to build
sustainable democratic institutions in their newly liberated countries. In one
of the most powerful addresses to the group, the Minister of Education of the
new Republic of Macedonia talked about the role of the University in his country
in breaking down barriers between Macedonian and Albanian speaking peoples and
building governmental structures to give his country a strong foundation.
Another speaker brought the question of sustainability even closer to home for
the American participants. Marvalene Hughes, the President of Dillard
University, a historically black liberal arts college in New Orleans, talked
about the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on her college and on the city
of New Orleans. She reminded all of us that building sustainable cities and
democratic institutions is a critical need in this country as well. As we
approach the first anniversary of this event, and recognize that similar events
(from hurricanes to tsunamis to earthquakes) can and will occur throughout the
world in the future, the urgency of building a sustainable society that can
respond effectively to natural disasters is apparent.
I look forward to exploring with all of you in the year ahead how Pomona College
can become a leader in educating students for a sustainable world. |
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