Remarks to the Community Wilson Hall, Vermont Campus

Thanks to all of you for being here. I can’t tell you how much Wendy and I have been looking forward to this day. How grateful we are to be joining the Middlebury family. And how much I’m looking forward to everything we are about to begin doing together. I’ll be making a lot of speeches over the coming years. It comes with the job. But I want to spend less time at a podium and more time with you, getting to know you, learning your names, who you are, and who we can be together.

So, I’ll be brief. I mainly want to share a few thoughts about the two things I’ve already mentioned: gratitude and what it means to start thinking about who we are and what brings us together. 

Let me start with gratitude. The single most important thing you need to know about me is how lucky I am to be married to Wendy. Some of you have already met her. She is my North Star. We started dating in college, in a study abroad program in London, studying poetry. This summer we’ll have been married for 36 years. You’re going to love her almost as much as I do. We have six kids. The youngest, Tristan, is 15. He’ll be moving with us. Our oldest, Gabriel, is 30. They are an incredible and very different bunch. And we are very much a blended family, built through biology and adoption. Our kids are white and South Asian and Latinx. They are straight and queer, moderate conservative, liberal and left activist. “They” and “she” and “he” and “they.” We love them and we’re grateful for them, mainly because they’re our kids but also because they’ve helped us become a family. Getting to live together, the incredible diversity of who we are as a people, not by design, just through the happy accidents of love. I’m looking forward to your meeting them because they’re our kids, but also because, for our students in particular, I want you to know that when I see Gabriel and Leah, Kiran and Ellie, Psalms and Camden and Tristan, I see you. And when I see you, I see them. And while my bond with our children is unique, I hope to be for you every bit as much as I am for them.

As complex and wide-ranging as the president’s job is, at its heart it’s very simple: I’m here for you.

One more biographical touchpoint. As you may know, I grew up in South Africa, where my parents worked as missionaries running adult literacy courses for mineworkers. During the brutal height of the Apartheid years, my mom and dad gave me a lot of things including their gift of faith. And they gave me the gift of growing up in a country that went through what seemed like an impossible transition into democracy. That has left its mark on me in a lot of ways. It’s given me a spirit of profound historical optimism. And it’s given me a lived understanding of how vital the work of education is to the transformation of individual lives and to the possibility of our democratic life together.

And that leads to the second thing I want to touch on, the joy of the work we are about to begin together, the joy of starting to think about who we are, what brings us together, and what, together, we are, and can be “for.”I’ve been thinking about that question a lot, ever since a good friend, the South African historian Premesh Lalu, wrote an essay with that question as its title: “What is the University For?” It’s been ringing in my head as I’ve been getting ready to come join you. Who are we? What are we for? The College. And the schools. And the Institute. All of us, together.

What are we for? What is Middlebury for? There are a lot of ways of getting at that question, and we are going to spend a lot of time thinking it through together, What are we for enduringly? What are we for currently and urgently? What must we be for tomorrow—newly, imaginatively, unwaveringly? I’m really looking forward to hearing what you think as we start building the next stage of our future together.

We’ll get that conversation started in earnest this fall. But since I’m here I thought I’d wrap up by sharing a few thoughts and principles I bring to the question and the conversations we’re going to be having. 

Just to help key things up, What are we for? Many things. The advance of knowledge. And the flourishing of young lives key among them. Here are a few more. We are for freedom of expression. And academic freedom, across all our fields of study, all our fields of research, in all our classrooms. We are for the power of reason, evidence, science, and art. The power of persuading and being persuaded. We are for the truth that knowledge matters, not just as a general idea. But that poetry matters, and philosophy matters, and dance matters, and computational biology matters. We are for the truth that it’s worth dedicating our lives to the study of chemistry, artificial intelligence, and economics, international studies, condensed matter physics, and ancient literature, Medieval history, Black studies, and gender studies. We are for the truth that all those pursuits add up to something essential without which our public life cannot thrive.

We are for the conviction that the unlimited freedom of students and faculty to pursue knowledge across all these domains is key to the living possibility and unfinished business of democratic life. We are for the realization that democracy needs colleges and universities if it is to thrive. We are for the understanding that as we model and advance that democratic project we will not always agree with one another. And we will not demand agreement. We are for the determination, instead, that we will argue, debate, and seek to persuade. That we will return to the conversation after its hardest—a day or a week or a month later, to pick it up again, to listen to one another again, and learn from one another again. Choosing grace over judgment, friendship over partisanship. I might change my mind, you might change yours—let’s hang in together because we all belong to this place.

And we’re in it together for the long haul. We are for the long haul. We are for the wisdom, in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, that the arc of the moral universe is long and that it bends toward justice. We are for the conviction that the arc of knowledge is equally long and that it bends toward the truth. We are for the knowledge that the time of the College is more enduring, more resilient, more filled with possibility than the time of politics and the time of the news. It always has been, and it always will be. We are for the knowledge that in the end truth always prevails. It always has, and it always will. We are for all these truths, everywhere. 

Here, at Middlebury, we are for some others that have made me fall in love with you. We are for this town, where we were founded. For this community, where we live. We are for the vibrant hum of the world’s languages. We are for the cosmopolitanism of the globe, brought together in a small new England town, a campus in California, and our schools abroad. We are for the world-making power of writing. And all the arts. We are for the belief that the fate of our climate-changed planet pivots everywhere, that it pivots where you and I stand, that we must be part of that pivot and do everything we can to bend our planet’s climate arc.

We are for the expansion of inclusion, for being ever more diverse, and open, and plural in who we are. We are for the truth that diversity is strength, and difference is energy, and energy, in the words of the poet William Blake, is delight. We are for the delight that our Middlebury family is Black and white and Asian, straight and trans and queer, first-gen and multi-gen, conservative and liberal, moderate and radical, religious and agnostic. And filled with a capacity to listen to—and even love one another—through our differences as all families do. We are for “we.” And we are for “you.”

Let me end with that, with “we” and with “you,” and with one last thing that I am for. I am for the commitment that I am not coming to Middlebury to be “the” president, I am coming to be “your” president. I am coming to be your president. On sweet days and hard days, days of snow and days of spring, days of leaves falling and days of waves tumbling, days of summer nights settling on the hills of New England, days of the currents surging on the shores of the Pacific, days of Middlebury’s calendar spread across those coasts and around the world, days of Middlebury in Yaoundé, Rabat, Madrid, Beijing, Bread Loaf, Monterey, Montevideo, in cities and nations across the Global South and North, East and West—as the Town’s College becomes ever more the world’s college and the planet’s college.

On all those days, Wendy and I and our family are coming to join this family and join our lives with you. Which takes me back to gratitude. Thank you for welcoming us. Thank you for adopting us. Thank you for allowing us to share this place. Thank you for the gift of this new home. Thank you.