GREETINGS FROM THE ACADEMY
Diana Chapman Walsh,
Wellesley College, President

I am honored to be participating at this historic moment in the life of Trinity College – one of the nation’s oldest and finest liberal arts colleges -- and to have the opportunity to bring the greetings of academia to the inauguration of James F. Jones, Jr. as your twenty-first president.

You have found a winner in Jimmy Jones, I know, and by now I’m sure you know it too. I’m certain you have been discovering with delight his many talents and wide-ranging interests, and appreciating, perhaps above all else, the heartful and eager engagement he brings -- to people and places and purposes. (I thought I’d string together some P’s to balance the unbroken chain of J’s in the Jones family line-up of names).  We can add that he has perfect pitch.

With the track record President Jones brings to this distinguished institution, we don’t have to initiate him in the secrets of survival in a college presidency. He already knows that the way presidents handle the stress of multiple and conflicting demands is by learning to live without sleep, giving up on having a personal life, putting their friendships on hold, and counting on forbearing families to cut them a lot of slack. A college president, it has been said, is someone who lives in a big house, walks to work, and begs for a living.

The literature on how to be a college president is laced through with jocular warnings about the hazards of the job. This is an administrative post that is infamous for eating its incumbents alive. Bart Giamatti, when he was at Yale, wrote of the presidency that it is "no way for an adult to earn a living. Which is why so few adults actually attempt to do it." A University of Texas president characterized the role more cynically (and we hope incorrectly) as one whose occupant "pleases none of the people none of the time."

Others have described the job as one in which friends come and go, while enemies accumulate. As you take up the position, you have a bank account with a finite balance. The rules are that you can't make any deposits and everyone else can make withdrawals at will. When the account is depleted, you leave.

These comments are faintly evocative of views of the American Presidency: Thomas Jefferson’s that "No man will ever bring out of [it] the reputation which he carries into it." Harry Truman’s that within the first few months he “discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. [You have] to keep on riding or be swallowed."

Riding a tiger sounds at least more invigorating than another curious occupation with which the college presidency is often equated: a cemetery proprietor. You have a lot of people under you, but nobody is listening.

President Jones knows all of those pitfalls, joins you with open eyes, with on open heart and mind, and with ample evidence that he is more than equal to the task. Trinity is fortunate to have found him, and he Trinity. It promises to be a good match, a powerful alignment of person, place, and purpose.
 
And never was such an alignment needed more than it is now, in these challenging times – for liberal arts colleges, for higher education, for our nation, and our world. We face security threats that are ubiquitous and nebulous, and deep and divisive questions about what our obligations are, as the world’s sole remaining superpower, to the future of human life on the planet.

The ideal of a liberal education is that probing the assumptions behind ideological debates, subjecting them to informed examination, speaking one’s own truth and really hearing the truth of others, practicing the art of honing, defending, and revising sustained and serious arguments based on the best available evidence is the only satisfactory method for resolving high-stakes disputes.

The “play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes,” as the late John Gardner wrote, “is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise and a noisy one, not for the faint-hearted or the tidy-minded.” You have found a new president for Trinity College who is neither faint-hearted nor tidy-minded.

This work you are doing, then, and will be doing together, is the work of the world.  And much is at stake, not only because of the volatility of the current geopolitical situation, but also because so few places now, outside of educational institutions, countenance these conversations honestly and respectfully seeking truth.

So I ask you to take good care of this new president you inaugurate today. May you collaborate with him, celebrate his gifts, make full use of his talents, acknowledge his human limitations, and do all you can to sustain his spirits as he leads Trinity College into a future that will need all the wisdom, all the energy, and all the compassion that this historic and robust college community can muster. I wish you every success in the years ahead. Congratulations Trinity. Congratulations President Jimmy Jones.