Guest Column: The Long View
On a recent weekend night I watched a DVD of the movie ‘Good Night and Good Luck,’ a Hollywood-independent production. It was good to see the story of heroic reporter Edward R. Murrow in his later television incarnation, fighting corporate timidity in order to report news as he saw it. Carefully shot and, at its worst, a didactic piece of filmmaking, it is interspersed with some great jazz riffs by Dianne Reeves and quotes from Murrow. In a free society, he asserts, it is our obligation to offer dissenting views, which also places a great responsibility on the part of those who report them.
I thought of these ideas in relation to the recent critiques buzzing in our independent campus newspaper about the performance of our chancellor, Nancy Cantor. In these pieces, the chancellor’s performance has variously been linked, inconceivably, with another university president and with campus unrest at a variety of levels. The arguments are also couched in assumptions about the chancellor’s goals and character, which seem wholly removed from fact. These assertions, including those about vast student and faculty unrest, are delivered as commonly held truths, creating a false basis for other claims.
As a dean and member of the faculty, any such groundswell has not been felt. Rather, I see a university that is emboldened to try innovative approaches both in and out of the classroom. I see a chancellor who has described and begun to implement a mission for the university that is so clear and rational that it has garnered greater recognition for Syracuse University, greater numbers of applications for admission and also greater funding support. It has also begun to raise the academic profile of the university, which makes it more attractive to the best faculty, who are now drawn to our university with regularity.
It has famously been said that all politics are local. We care most, and most unflinchingly, about what happens closest to home and our interests. It is understandable to see the success of an endeavor only at the points that it intersects with us. The goal of an education, however, is to make us grapple more fully with the rounded dynamic of any situation, an empathy that enables us to understand the complex social and institutional sphere that we occupy as individuals.
It would be condescending to suggest that these student writers are alone in the limits of their view of the institution. We are all limited to some extent by where we sit. One may not be aware of the increases in funding, the improvement in the statistics of the university, the rigorous rebuilding and planning of new physical facilities, the ongoing development of programs to assist students with aid at all levels and increased support to faculty as well. Nor are the activities that enhance our lives here at school always visible – the meetings, both across the country and internationally, with governmental agencies, academic institutions and creators of new programs.
It is a fact of modern life that we need to be critical consumers of media at the local and national level. Education endeavors to replace biases and assumptions with critical thinking, the power of each individual to arrive at his or her own point of view. On campus, in whose interest is it to suggest failure where it is insupportable in substance? There are those who are constitutionally resistant to change and the unfamiliar course. But experimentation is at the core of what a university does. If it cannot adapt or innovate, it cannot hope to prepare its students for the rapid flux of the world they will enter.
The remarkable commitment of our chancellor to the realm of ideas and the power of an active intellectual community has already been felt both on an off the Hill. We will all be better for that determination and direction. Our job is to make the best use of these opportunities and our responsibility is to encourage an honest appraisal of where we succeed and fall short. We strive for the wisdom of the longer view in representing the times in which we live across all media – art, film, literature and journalism – ultimately a tougher, but more lasting good.