The following remarks were given by Dr. Katherine Fell at her presidential inauguration ceremony Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.

Back to the Future  

Dr. Katherine Fell addresses the audience at the presidential inauguration ceremony Oct. 1.

Dr. Beckett, Dr. Freed, trustees, and all of you who love and support The University of Findlay, thank you for inviting me to serve as your president. 

You and those who have gone before you have built a stellar university, and I take the stewardship of this great legacy as a profound responsibility.

Delegates of colleges and universities throughout the region and even as far south as Louisiana, welcome. You honor us with your presence.  

Like the wonderful institutions that you represent, The University of Findlay is a place set apart, a place of higher learning—to many of us who believe we are called to serve here, a sacred place.  

Before you is Old Main, our first building. It once housed Findlay College in its entirety—classrooms, offices, the library, the chapel, the gymnasium—all of it.

The theme of this weekend’s homecoming celebration is Back to the Future, a theme that reminds us to learn from our past as we plan our future.

As historian Dr. Richard Kern makes clear in his work, Findlay College: The First Hundred Years, the establishment of the college demanded faith, vision and sacrifice from our predecessors. In the 1880s, the Church of God, our founding denomination, believed the establishment of a college to be essential for the training of clergy and laity, and Easterners, in particular, considered colleges on the frontier to be, in their words, “ a bulwark against barbarism” (8).

The Findlay city leaders also believed a college would be a strong economic and civilizing force.  Keep in mind that Findlay has always been a progressive city.  In fact, it became the county seat before there was a county (Kearn, 21)!  One of its earliest downtown banners stated proudly, “Women split no wood in Findlay!” (Historic Hancock County, 31) In a progressive city in Louisiana, the equivalent slogan might have been, “Southern women don’t tote.”

As soon as forward-thinking Findlay heard of the Church of God’s interest in building a college, the campaigning began. The city’s leaders were excellent promoters. They described for the church elders many fine attributes in Findlay, in these words: “We have broad streets well lighted with gas by night and finely shaded by day. Our sewerage system is complete and perfect. In point of morality our town is far in advance of any [other] town in northern Ohio.”  

Public-minded citizens came together, and several committees of business leaders were appointed to get the job done. “Wide-awake” was the term they used to describe themselves, and they proved it to be a fitting description.

Findlay won the day. On January 25, 1882, the executive board of the General Eldership of the Church of God formally established Findlay College. Thus, you have before you Old Main as a telling symbol of the gritty, wide-awake optimism of early city, church and academic leaders.  

One hundred twenty-eight years later, we are called upon to persevere in the mission of equipping students for meaningful lives and productive careers. 

It is clear to me that our city and church remain strong partners with us as we prepare our students to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st Century.

The city that founded us encircles and sustains us still, partnering with the University in ways the founders of Findlay College could not have imagined. City and regional leaders provide financial support, serve as advisers and trustees, attend our events, mentor our students, organize fundraisers and offer a wide variety of internships and employment opportunities to our students. 

It is no surprise that America’s Promise Alliance has for the fourth time named Findlay-Hancock County as one of America’s 100 Best Communities for Young People.

Indeed, throughout the city every night of the year, you can see the inviting glow of candles in windows of homes and businesses. Once I learned that the owners had not simply forgotten to take down last year’s Christmas decorations but in fact kept them there intentionally, I began to see them for what they are — a symbol of a city that cares—in season and out — about neighbors and visitors who may need a cheerful light on a dark night.   

The church’s continuing presence in the life of the University is evident by the ecclesiastical buildings to the south and north of campus. We are flanked by pastoral care, and we are grateful. 

To the south, to your left, is our partner institution, Winebrenner Seminary.  The 1952 Findlay College newspaper, The Lampost, described Winebrenner as “the school across the street,” where “Theologues pace the halls, listen to lectures, peruse books, attend morning prayers, and appraise things in general” (end of quotation).

In recent years, this school across the street has allowed us into its new building to appraise some amazing things. Had you been in Winebrenner just three weeks ago, on September 11, you would have heard a call for global partnerships in education delivered by the governor of the Japanese prefecture, Saitama, to which Ohio is a sister state and with which The University of Findlay has a long-standing student exchange program.

To the north of Old Main, on your right, is the beautiful College First Church, one of the great congregations of the Churches of God, General Conference.

For the Flannery O’Connor fans in the audience, and I hope there are many of you, let me assure you that this is not the backwater Church a Gawd that O’Connor depicted in her brilliant stories of the rural South. In fact, the pastor of College First Church serves as a member of the University’s Board of Trustees. 

Should you attend a Sunday morning service, you are highly likely to hear prayers of blessings for the University, and you may hear an announcement of a spaghetti-lunch fundraiser in our behalf.  If it’s a really good Sunday you may even be invited to a breakfast feast the church has prepared to welcome back to campus one of the mighty Oiler teams. 

Although grits will be noticeably absent, you will find overwhelming evidence that people north of the Mason-Dixon line are seriously good cooks. Established and nourished by city and church, our academy stands tall in this, the 2010-2011 academic year.  

As were our predecessors, we are called to faith, vision, and sacrifice on behalf of this venerable institution.  

Behind and beyond Old Main are the classrooms, residence halls, art galleries, athletics facilities, nature preserves, laboratories, equestrian centers, and pathways of a vibrant university—six colleges and more than 60 majors strong.   

Every part of our campus is designed for teaching and learning. We even have a horse named Fhilosopher. 

In the sleek, white building to your right, the Croy Physical Education Center, four of our 23 varsity teams practice, compete and learn from the discipline of fitness and teamwork and about life in the balance between sports and academics.    

Croy’s twin, the sleek white building to your left, is the Shafer Library, where we make available group and individual study spaces, thousands of resources for research, and caffeine 24 hours a day.

If you have an afternoon to spend in Shafer, I recommend a couple of short pieces of reading: Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” They address the most profound issues of higher learning, relevant in every century: What is real?  Who are we?  and Why are we here? All that, in one afternoon.

Plato asks us to imagine this scene: An entire community of people has lived in a deep cave since birth. The members of this community are shackled so that they cannot turn their heads to either side or behind them. They can look only straight ahead. They do not know that behind them is a partial wall and that behind and above that wall is a fire.

On top of the wall to their backs are statues being manipulated by another group of people on the other side of the wall. The fire causes the moving statues to cast shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners, of course, believe that the shadows they see are real. They believe them to be real people with real lives — their own version of daytime TV. They don’t know even that they themselves are prisoners—until one of them is set free. 

Much to his dismay, he sees the fire, the rear wall and the moving objects. He is astounded to learn that it is merely the play of fire and object that has shaped his view of reality since birth. He sees the shadows for what they are — imitations. As much as the prisoner has learned, however, his lesson is not complete. He is taken out of the cave altogether and exposed to the blinding brightness of the world beyond. 

Once his eyes adjust, he sees that there are trees and flowers and people, not just statues or shadows of statues, but real objects and real people.  Finally, he turns his eyes toward the source of light, the sun itself, in a painful, exhilarating first look, and a life of ever higher learning begins for him.

Likewise, in Flannery O’ Connor’s short story, “Revelation,” Ruby Turpin is a prisoner unaware, in her case shackled by her own self-righteousness, certain that her property and position are evidence of God’s recognition of her worth. Her comfortable world is shaken, however, when, in the waiting room of her doctor’s office, she encounters a very disturbing college student, who is reading a textbook entitled Human Psychology.

The rude and unkempt young woman seems to recognize Ruby in a very strange way. After listening to several strings of conversation in which Ruby makes clear her disdain for everyone in the room not like her, the student thrusts her textbook at Ruby, striking her just over her left eye.  She then grabs for Ruby’s neck but is pulled away. 

As Ruby looks into the “fierce brilliant eyes” of her attacker, O’Connor tells us, “there was no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition.”

As is often the case in O’Connor fiction, the most grotesque character serves as an agent of grace. Thus, this beastly young woman in Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks is named Mary Grace. She sees Ruby as a hideous creature, and in fact calls her a warthog. Ruby is shocked. After all, she herself wears nice black leather pumps, owns land and home and keeps everything clean, even her pigpen. 

What shakes Ruby is the sense that Mary Grace has opened to her a new way of seeing herself as she really is. A few hours later, standing near her very clean pigpen, Ruby’s rage overwhelms her. She lifts a fist to the heavens and shouts, “Who do you think you are?” Then, O’Connor describes a mystical light: “The color of everything. Field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity.” Echoed back to Ruby from the wood surrounding her tidy farm is the same question, “Who do you think you are?” 

O’Connor describes Ruby’s moment of insight in these lines:  “A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw. . . a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. . . And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” 

As with Plato’s prisoner, Ruby’s opportunity for higher learning has begun. What can we learn from these visionaries of the past—Plato and O’Connor — as we prepare for our future? The task of all of us in higher education — in the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and humanities — remains constant:  to help each of our students find answers to the same three questions Plato and O’Connor pose: What is real? Who am I? and Why am I here?    

As the 21st century moves into its adolescence, the need of a place set apart for higher learning is greater than ever, set apart for preparing our students to become fully engaged in their professions and their communities throughout the world.  

The world wants to know whether the students to whom we grant degrees are indeed educated. It is a fair question. We must ask ourselves, “What really happens in our classrooms, chatrooms and labs?” We hope our students learn to examine what they see, touch and hear. We hope they begin to understand the connections among mind, body and spirit. We hope they discover values that will guide them into a vocation of service to great causes beyond themselves. Only then, will The University of Findlay and all of higher education live up to our charge to be a “bulwark against barbarism.”

Behind you is the Griffith Memorial Arch, through which we welcome our first-year students each fall and through which, each winter and spring, we send our graduates into the world. At The University of Findlay, we renew our pledge to nurture our students’ imaginations, to inspire them to the highest standards of excellence and to stand in awe with them in the face of the inexplicable. They, and the world, deserve no less.