A Greeting,

It is my honor to extend greetings to colleagues and students at Trinity College, and especially, to President Jones, from all your friends at Harvard.

We at Harvard owe our survival to Connecticut and to Trinity’s forebears. In the 1640’s, in days when there was but one college in New England, it was supported, and, our history says, “cheerfully embraced,” by the good citizens of Hartford and its environs.  It was in this city in 1644 that the Commissioners of the United Colonies approved a petition to find “some way of comfortable maintenance for that Schoole of the Prophets that now is”, with each family contributing annually a peck of wheat or a shilling to that minor college to your northeast.  This “Colledg Corne,” as it was known, quite literally fed our entire faculty.  So let me say, rather belatedly: Thank you. (I’m afraid I have a rather hungrier faculty these days, but I’m not here to ask for more.)

Our region, our country, and our world are the richer for the fact that we now have an abundance of great centers of teaching and learning.  Trinity College is one such, very special place.  In an age of ever-greater pressures for specialization and professionalization, Trinity’s enduring; indeed strengthening commitment to a liberal education in the arts and sciences is a model for us all.

And now Harvard has much to learn from you, as we rethink our own curriculum in the arts and sciences, and make a new commitment to internationalization.  In contrast to Trinity, Harvard was a place not known for sending students abroad.  Indeed, when I became dean, it occurred to me that the only American institutions of higher learning that sent fewer students abroad than Harvard were West Point and Annapolis. (And those students all go later!) Today, American students need an education not only of the world, but also in the world; they need the capacity to converse with others, in languages other than our own; and they need the ability to see this country as others see it.

In this and other realms, Trinity is already a leader.  In my friend Jimmy Jones, whom I’ve had the honor for knowing for over two decades; it is gaining a college president for an international century.  He is a man of local know-how and global expertise.  As a historian, I should not predict the future, but somehow I can already foresee the day when every Trinity graduate speaks perfect French, indeed a French made only more eloquent-and more international-because of that musical, typically Jonesian lilt, that mellifluously Georgian cadence.

Jimmy, Harvard is honored to join Williams and Wellesley in welcoming you to New England and in saluting Trinity on this day of your Inauguration.