Text of Dr. Brazil's Inaugural Address




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Updated 3-17-00 by Office of Public Relations

The Inaugural Address

"We must design and deliver an education
that satisfies both our students' need to make
a living and their need to live a life rich in
purpose and permeated with meaning. We
must do this based on the understanding that
these are not separate needs separately
satisfied. They are integral, inseparable
parts of a larger need that can only be fully
addressed by an integrated, interanimating
attention to both."
Dr. John Brazil delivers inaugural
address during installation ceremony
in Laurie Auditorium.

The Inauguration Ceremony
John R. Brazil
17th President of Trinity University
February 12, 2000

"The Road Less Traveled"
Members of the Board, distinguished speakers and guests, esteemed colleagues and friends of Trinity University, ladies and gentlemen:
To Mr. Dicke's words of welcome I would like to add my own. All those who care about this great University are deeply grateful for your presence, for the support it symbolizes, and for the luster it adds to this ceremony.
On behalf of the Trustees, Mr. Dicke has committed to my stewardship Trinity's mace and medallion. He has also given me the Board's charge, expressing its expectations for my service as Trinity's seventeenth president. I am profoundly honored to accept these symbols of office and moved by the trust implicit in their conferral. I am, as well, humbled by the scope of the duties and by the weight of the responsibilities that now devolve upon me. Before all those here assembled, I pledge to fulfill faithfully these duties and to discharge conscientiously these responsibilities, employing to the fullest whatever abilities I may possess and expending to the last full measure the energies I can summon.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that the greatest reward in life is to work at something worth doing. It has been my good fortune to have been rewarded in this way several times, and I count the opportunity to labor on behalf of Trinity University among the greatest. I would not be here, however, nor would I have enjoyed the many blessings of my life without the love, companionship, and unqualified support of my wife, Janice, and without the love and inspiration of our children, Adrian and Morgan. The debt I owe my parents for their continuing guidance and encouragement is almost unimaginable, as is the debt I owe my brother and my sisters for their stimulus and example. My family is all here, and while it may embarrass them, I ask that they stand so that you might meet them.
During its long life, Trinity University has also been blessed by good fortune, but its present stature is attributable much less to luck than to the wisdom and industry of many extraordinary individuals.
It is altogether fitting and proper on an occasion such as this that we express our profound gratitude and salute those individuals--from those who took up hammer and saw in the hamlet of Tehuacana when Trinity was founded in 1869, to those who led the University and supported it in its second home, the town of Waxahachie, to those who have done so much to raise it to national prominence here in the great city of San Antonio.
It is an honor to pay tribute to members of Trinity's Board of Trustees, past and present, who are represented by the talented and devoted Trustees on this platform; to faculty and staff, past and present, who are represented by their gifted colleagues who are participating in this ceremony; and to earlier University leaders who are represented, I'm delighted to say, by past Presidents Dr. Ron Calgaard, Dr. Bruce Thomas, Dr. Duncan Wimpress, and the daughter of Dr. James Laurie, Mrs. Sally Laurie Drake. Please join me in saluting these remarkable people one and all.
Not surprisingly, preparing this inaugural address prompted me to reflect on the paths that have lead to this day as well as the paths Trinity may follow in the years ahead. While engaged in such reflection, I felt, as I occasionally do, a sense of regret. Privileged as I am to serve as the President of Trinity University, I am also a professor of English, and seldom does the first role allow time for the second. Despite the fact I teach a course each year, truth be told, for all the pleasure and satisfaction I continue to derive from my work, once in a while I miss the professorial life from which my career path has diverged.
Prompted by this feeling of regret, by the metaphor of diverging paths with which I sought to give the feeling intellectual form, and by the training of my first, now more distant, calling, I thought of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken." A wonderfully wrought, richly suggestive piece, "The Road Not Taken" has been misconstrued by countless readers. Perhaps seduced by its conversational rhythms and simple diction, the unwary see the essence of the poem in its conclusion:
      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
      I took the one less traveled by,
      And that has made all the difference.
These lines invite readers to believe the poem is a straightforward affirmation of the byway over the highway, of the unusual and the uncommon path, the road less traveled. But the more attentive discover something quite different--an ambiguous, complex poem about choice, consequences, loss and gain, self-understanding, and self-dramatization.
The enjoyment of experiencing this discovery and the rigors of the poem itself, I will leave to those of you who have not experienced them. (The more adventuresome among you might even consider enrolling in my class next fall.) The importance for us of "The Road Not Taken" is that its principle image--divergent roads--and its organizing subject--choice--are essential to understanding the Trinity of today. They are, in fact, the dominant, defining characteristics of Trinity's historic journey.
Unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne (another New Englander with whom Frost has far more in common than is generally recognized), I have never thought numerology has a legitimate place in metaphysics. I have, nevertheless, found it impossible to study Trinity's history without being impressed by the omnipresence of the number three. To begin with, there are the Holy Trinity embraced by the faith of our Presbyterian founders, the three predecessor colleges that led to the creation of Trinity, and, as you have heard, the three different cities in which Trinity has been located.
From its creation to today, Trinity has been dedicated to developing students in mind, spirit, and body. Trinity came to San Antonio through the combined efforts of the Synod of the Sun, the Methodists of South Texas, and the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, which was led in its efforts by Robert Witt, C.W. Miller, and James Calvert. And perhaps most importantly, in the course of its evolution, Trinity has chosen three different, three divergent roads, inventing itself, as it were, three different times.
In its earliest years, like the majority of America's private colleges, it was small, sectarian, intent on producing ministers and providing students with an education, as our first catalogue put it, "free from the temptations of vice abounding in the...towns of the country."
Later, in what we can think of as its second incarnation, it sought the financial support and enrollments of larger cities, apparently planning to grow and reap the benefits that come with greater size. In this, it was not unlike the early versions of the universities that have in our time become cities in themselves. Trinity hoped, in short, to be many things to many people.
And then, when providence and historical circumstance asked it to chose again, to chose between divergent destinies, it chose a less traveled road, and that has made all the difference. This is the road we follow today, the road that has made of Trinity something truly exceptional.
Trinity University is neither a single nor, as yet, a singular traveler. There are others following the same or closely parallel courses. They are few in number, however, and there are fewer still who have come so far and who are so near to realizing the vision that set them first upon this path. Trinity University, in character and quality, is now a distinctive institution rivaled by very, very few. Even more exciting, its potential is limited only by the limits of our aspirations for it and by the intensity of the effort with which we are willing to pursue these aspirations.
The agenda we must pursue is not change in direction, but progress, progress toward a worthy, well-chosen destination. This judgement has already become a familiar refrain to a few of you, but it cannot be repeated too often or emphasized too much. In its essential aspects, Trinity will remain the Trinity with which you are familiar. It will be about the same size--small enough to be a genuine academic community with a curricular coherence and an attentive concern for the individual that does not exist at our sprawling multiversities. But it will also be large enough to offer significant choices among programs of study and an abundant array of enriching experiences outside the classroom. It will continue to be a predominantly residential, undergraduate University in the modern tradition of the liberal arts and sciences. It will have a small but vital number of professional and graduate courses of study, and it will maintain its commitment to the highest quality teaching supported by the highest quality research and creative activity.
To put it aphoristically, tomorrow as today, Trinity will be Trinity, but it will be a better and better Trinity. To achieve its full potential, to achieve and sustain the level of institutional stature to which we ought to aspire, we must together make it ever better in degree rather than different in kind.
We must, for example, develop a more distinctive, a more compelling academic signature. The curriculum of a University is a plan for learning, not a survey of disciplines, nor what it has become at so many institutions, a poorly laid out buffet of courses. The curriculum is also the embodiment of a university's educational values in that it is a corpus of decisions about what matters most. Paraphrasing Plato, what is honored in a place will be cultivated there. We must be clear and consistent in what educational values we honor, so that what we cultivate will be what we value most highly. As the well-known apologue would have it, we are working not merely to square the stone, for we know that individual courses are the building blocks of a curricular architecture, the end of which is an edifice of learning.
To construct our curriculum of the future, we will ask ourselves fundamental educational questions, questions that overlay an implicit set of complexly interrelated subsidiary issues. What should it mean to have a Trinity education? Or put another way, what should the very best imaginable education entail? Or again, how best can we fulfill the mandate of Trinity's mission statement that pledges us to enable students "to achieve the full potential of their abilities and exercise their responsibilities to society?"
(1) What qualities of mind, what elements of character, what dimensions of spirit should we seek to foster in our undergraduates; (2) What intellectual and other skills should our students master; (3) How best can we take maximum advantage of our unique combination of liberal arts and professional programs--how can we amplify their synergistic interaction so that each is richer than it could be if isolated unto itself; and finally (4) How can our general education curriculum differentiate us from the would be's and almost are's among the nation's colleges and universities, moving us in the new millenium to the front rank as their acknowledged leader?
There is considerable empirical and anecdotal evidence that the integration of liberal education and professional programs provides the best preparation for life. Translated from its root words, "liberal arts" means "work befitting a free person." In one sense, liberal learning has a societal value. It is a protection against the danger Alexis deTocqueville warned about when he wrote that the greatest threat to democracy is a people who so enjoy their liberties that they neglect to maintain the society that provides those liberties.
In another sense, liberal learning has a more personal value. It is the source of the most profound of our individual freedoms: it emancipates us from the thralldom of ignorance, superstition, and incapacity by enfranchising the intellect, the spirit, and the imagination. Liberal education is the best avenue to discovering information about our world and ourselves and to transforming that information first into knowledge or truth and then into wisdom.
Professional courses of study enhance that process, anchoring the liberal arts in the real world, demanding of the liberal arts intimate connection with the lives we actually lead, putting these assumptions, methods, and conclusions to the experiential and empirical test. And at their best, professional courses of study fit us to contribute to the well being of our world. They enable us to make our talents and our freedom useful to others and to advance the condition of humankind.
The integration of liberal learning and professional study is important in yet another way. Liberal learning enhances students' preparation for the professions by developing in them the intellectual flexibility so necessary in a world in which change is the only constant. It gives them breadth and context, sharpening vital intellectual skills, the most valuable of which is learning how to learn. Put bluntly, study of the liberal arts and sciences is quintessentially utilitarian. It maximizes students' ability to function in society, to get jobs, and to sustain careers.
The benefit of liberal learning obviously goes beyond its functionality. There is both mastery and mystery in knowledge. Knowledge is both instrumental and an end in itself. Its first value in our society is its utility, but it is more than a tool that enables us to deal with our world and to profit from life's material possibilities. Knowledge and virtue--as the Greeks understood virtue--are the stuff that give life substance and texture, that enrich its emotional, spiritual and aesthetic possibilities. Real education--as distinct from training or the mere accumulation of information--grounds us outside ourselves and gives life its greatest value. As Alfred North Whitehead concluded, "There can be no adequate technical [that is, professional] education which is not liberal, and no liberal education which is not technical [or professional]: That is, no education which does not impart both technique and intellectual vision."
Here then is the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity along the less traveled road Trinity has chosen. We must design and deliver an education that satisfies both our students' need to make a living and their need to live a life rich in purpose and permeated with meaning. We must do this based on the understanding that these are not separate needs separately satisfied. They are integral, inseparable parts of a larger need that can only be fully addressed by an integrated, interanimating attention to both.
Crucial non-curricular issues will occupy us in the years ahead as well. We must recruit individuals to fill key leadership positions, individuals who have comparable abilities and in whose heart in time will burn the same passion for Trinity that has burned in their predecessors. We must cast a finer, wider net as we recruit the Trinity students of tomorrow, attracting an ever more talented and diverse student body from around the country and around the world. We will have to compete with America's finest universities for the very best faculty and staff. If not the sole factor determining academic quality and the stature of a university, the quality of the faculty is the most important. Today, Trinity's faculty is superb, equal or better to that found in virtually all universities of our kind. We must be sure this is always the case.
Two other areas where we must put relatively greater emphasis in coming years are technology and international programs--for reasons all of you understand. This is fast becoming a world in which the technologically illiterate will have little hope of functioning, let alone competing successfully. It is also a small and shrinking globe. In the future, virtually every field of human endeavor will have significant international dimensions. Trinity students must be prepared for leadership in a world in which international imperatives are as consequential as national preferences. They will be unable to do so if their knowledge and interest stop at our national borders.
There is much more before us: enhancing opportunities for undergraduates to engage in meaningful original research; expanding internship programs that tie the classroom to the world of work; interconnecting more tightly curricular and co-curricular programs so Trinity graduates have coherent lives, so that for them, living and learning are part of the same whole; and far from least, sustaining this magnificent campus.
Inevitably for a private university--especially for a private university with aspirations as large as Trinity's--we must also expand the University's resource base. The hard reality is that our commitments are costly. We are committed to access (some 70% of our students receive financial aid and tuition covers only about half of the full cost of a Trinity education). We are committed to an intimate learning environment rather than to educational mass production. We are committed to retaining and attracting the very best faculty and to providing them with the very best equipment, facilities, and support. Our substantial investment in technology is a commitment that we have no choice but increase, as we must our commitment to exceptional educational support services, including a remarkable library that needs to remain remarkable.
To keep these commitments and to achieve for Trinity University the destiny we all wish, we will look to our alumni and friends to help us on our journey along a less traveled road, a road whose course is demarcated not by aspirations for higher standards of excellence, but for the highest standards; aspirations not for continued eminence, but for sustained preeminence; aspirations not for maintaining our current place among the best, but for a position of leadership in which we are the best.
With apologies to Henry David Thoreau, if we will but advance together confidently in the direction of our dreams for this great University, endeavoring to create for it what we imagine, we will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

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