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Warren Wilson College
Asheville, NC 28815-9000
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Welcome
Paula K. Garrett
Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College
Welcome first year students of Warren Wilson, peer group leaders, faculty, and guests, welcome to this the first Academic Convocation at the College. My purpose in working toward this gathering is varied: I want you to see the faculty all together, relatively spiffed up-they are an impressive lot; I want you to hear from both a student and a faculty member about academic life at the College; I want you to have the first book-end, paired later, likely four years later, with the other that is commencement-between which you will live a thousand lives in the pages you read, the papers you write, the tests you take, the experiments you conduct; I even want you to hear and begin to learn the alma mater-not just because I don't think you should hear it the first time at your own graduation, but also because I think there is great power in lifting your voices for a common cause-in this case to herald a school you are really only now learning to love-but in the future during a play, in the chorale, in classroom debate, over other voices in Gladfelter, in an effort to right a wrong.
I confess that this first purpose, to introduce you to the faculty, is primary for me. Look at them-look at us-perhaps a little goofy, definitely too smart for our own good, all of us attempting to be cool when the fact is that we are giddy at your arrival. I will tell you a secret about these folks, but only if you promise to treat them gently once you know this about them. Most of them, most of us, are jealous of you. We are jealous of the luxury of learning that you now have. We envy your reading for the first time books we have read dozens of times. We envy the thrill of discovery you will find in the lab. We are jealous that learning is now your job, alongside your work crew and your service learning. Most of us fell so deeply in love with your new lover, College, that we never left, never could leave.
The other secret about these faculty members is that they are rebels-absolute, unapologetic rebels. We know that some of us may not look much like it-our faces worn with worry, our bespectacled eyes straining, our bodies older, a little saggy with age. But, our minds. . . ah, our minds. You can't see them, but you will surely be the better for our rebellious minds. The mind of chemistry professor, Vicki Collins, who, long before it was common for women to enter natural sciences, was rebellious enough to forge her own way. The mind of archeologist Dave Moore, who followed his hunch that the hills not far from here must have been home to Native Americans and, rebelling against a plan for a more predictable dissertation project, chased this idea and now hosts an extensive and impressive dig. The mind of forester Dave Ellum, who rebelled against conventional wisdom that would have kept him on faculty at Yale and came, instead, to live and work in our forest where he has acres and acres of living laboratory. The mind of non-fiction writer Catherine Reid, whose personal work, Coyote, rebels against boundaries between animals and humans, finding similarities between the marginalized coyote and her own life.
I've named only four. There are dozens more, and each day on this campus they teach their hearts out because they hope, they dare to hope, that even just one of you will be intellectually rebellious enough to get to the library to learn things that at least someone would rather you not know, that even just one of you will read the next chapter, the one after the one actually assigned, just because you want to read it, the even just one of you will take your learning, but not yourself, seriously.
When I went off to college, I had pledged allegiance to the words of that great philosopher, John Belushi, who once shouted as he smashed a beer bottle and turned up the music, "we can do anything we want, we're college students." And I did just about what I wanted, bringing home only one A in my first semester, and that was in tennis. Before long, though, the classes I slowly began to understand helped me to rethink Belushi's line. As I learned to write stronger papers, frame better arguments, and absorb new and different perspectives, I began to believe that I could do more and be smarter than I had ever imagined. Before my four (and a half) years of undergrad were complete, I had broadened my sense of self and of what I could achieve. I hope you'll do the same. I hope you'll begin to hear the line a little differently and that you'll believe it, "we can do anything we want. We're college students." Welcome to College.