At a recent alumni reunion, I met up with three members of the class of 1987 who were veterans of the very first First-Year Studies seminar I taught as a newly-minted member of the College faculty (at the time, “Freshman Studies”). We had a wonderful time reminiscing, and the details and intensities of our shared memories were striking. They asked if they could visit my office, still in a basement corner of the Dudley Lawrence building; when I unlocked the door for them, I apologized for the clutter of room, and they chuckled, “This is just how we remember it … ” They all wanted to know, somewhat anxiously and a little skeptically, about what the student body was like nowadays, and how the College had changed.
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I was happy to be able to respond to these reunion attendees’ curiosity and concern with a wholehearted assurance that Sarah Lawrence is doing as well as it’s ever done, as long as I’ve been here, with the things that matter most to us and that distinguish us from the other excellent liberal arts colleges in this country: the dynamics of the seminar conversation at the round table, the Socratic friendship that develops over the months and years and lifetimes between donnees and dons, and the pedagogical apprenticeship and collaboration that unfolds between a single faculty member and a single student doing conference work together.
Every college offers a distinctive community and a distinctive culture, and different cultures, as we know, fashion different kinds of character. No first-year student arrives at Sarah Lawrence as a “pre-fab” member of our company. It is the experience of living and learning at the College that shapes Sarah Lawrence students—makes us all, indeed, into the works in progress that we are: resourceful, creative, reflective, flexible, self-disciplined, original, exploratory, tolerant—and makes us ultimately proud to recognize and value it, and to value the College and its people for what it’s made of us.
My colleague Charlotte Doyle describes a moment in the pedagogical arc of Sarah Lawrence students’ college careers that she calls “The Great Transformation”: the occasion when students discover their own intellectual and creative potential, and choose to claim it and activate it, the occasion when they burst into their own, trust it, and let it—with the support and guidance of their faculty and other students—lead them into the highest order of human creative and intellectual activity, that the visionary poet William Blake calls “Eden.”
I’ve known what Charlotte is talking about with “The Great Transformation,” and have never found a better phrase than hers to typify it. I love—and think that most Sarah Lawrence faculty love—the spirit of experimentation, collaboration, tolerance, and mutual attention that motivates our classes when they’re filled with people who have made “The Great Transformation” and recognize and respect and cultivate it in one another. I love the moments of anticipation and discovery, and the intellectual courage, willingness to listen, and eagerness to build something together in class or on one’s own in conference, to think something that perhaps has never quite been thought.
Often we hear students talking about how teachers at Sarah Lawrence have impacted and transformed their lives. Well, it also goes the other way: any of us who teach here can tell of the transforming effect of Sarah Lawrence students—and the Sarah Lawrence education—on us, the faculty, from the very first classes we’ve taught to the students we are working with this term, this week, today, and tomorrow.
I’m writing to you, at the beginning of this new academic year, to communicate the gratitude of faculty, staff, and students to you for support you’ve already given to the College and its priceless commitment to a liberal arts education like no other. We believe deeply in its value and potency, and that is why we are here, and our students are here, giving it everything they’ve got.
We could not maintain this heritage of individualized, wide-ranging intellectual exploration without funding from our donors. So I am also writing to ask you to continue to give what you can, as an expression of the deep and ongoing relationship that you’ve already fashioned with this place and with the people who make it what it is. Please be sure that what you choose to give will be a blessing and a benefit to us, and a gift to the generations of students, staff, and faculty to come.
With thanks and good wishes,
William Shullenberger
Faculty in Literature (Chair 1995-98, 2012-15)
Joseph Campbell Chair in the Humanities (2005-08)
P.S. May I please encourage you to make a donation to The Fund for Sarah Lawrence today, to ensure that this singular institution continues to thrive for years to come? Thanks so much.