Brief Reflections on the Institute's 20th Anniversary

This is surely one of the more unique columns I have had to write during my tenure with the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance (VTIPG) as its publication commemorates a very special milestone in our organization’s life: our 20^th anniversary. That turn is singular not only because unique to us now but also because many academic units here at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, whatever their focus, have not survived to celebrate such an event. Beyond these facts, one must still decide how to convey the meaning of this very special day.

        As I have reflected on how to do so, I have wondered if I should provide a list of singular moments across these years. Such an accounting might include, for example, the following, which came quickly to mind:

• The confidence that federal, state and local government offices and agencies as well as a variety of nonprofit organizations, including foundations, have placed in us across these two decades as we have worked together with them to address an array of challenges in the fields of mental health, disability rights and care, leadership development, drug addiction, prison reentry, foster care structures, programs and policies, refugee rights, policies and programming, humanitarian relief organization and service delivery, international development and education and much more.
• The special privilege of hosting a Nobel Prize winner (who proved gracious, sensitive and deeply insightful).
• The like honor of hosting two Ghandi Peace Prize winners (on separate occasions—who were each strikingly talented and humble).
• The opportunity to honor a brave, gifted, dedicated and now 93-year-old teacher, Ms. Dorothy DeBerry Venable, with the Institute’s initial annual award for moral imagination and courage for her devotion to her students during the Jim Crow era at a historically black school in Pulaski, Virginia.
• Our “Institute bookshelf,” replete with copies of many published volumes, reflecting a share of our work.
• The dozens of PhD and master’s students with whom we have had the privilege of working on projects and scholarship and/or as chairs or members of their advisory committees and whose intelligence, drive, commitment and passion have been a source of constant joy and intellectual renewal.
• The many faculty and staff from all nine of the university’s colleges and our graduate school with whom we have had the honor to work across our existence as we have sought to address policy and governance challenges confronting the vulnerable groups on whom we have elected principally to focus.

        And yet, even I as I compiled this list, I realized, as I had feared I might, that no such inventory, even one so broadly framed as that just above, could capture the array of activities, the intellectual initiative and acumen and the imaginative efforts of the faculty, staff and students that have comprised and partnered with VTIPG across these years. So, as I have reflected, it has occurred to me that it may make more sense instead to think of this special anniversary metaphorically as a point along a journey, which itself constitutes a story whose many elements have themselves proven dynamic and unpredictable.

        That is, it may be what has been important is our faculty and staff’s deep devotion to democratic principles and possibility, an abiding belief that those tenets can be realized ever more perfectly (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, arguably our nation’s greatest president) via devotion to the common good and to public service in its name and a conviction that ideas and research matter. The perspective that underpins these premises, our shared view here at the Institute across these years, that ideas matter for their own sake and can ever inform knowledge has also animated the academy across its history. Unfortunately, and for just as long that idea has also been the target of opprobrium and loathing by some. Sadly, we are now experiencing another high water mark of that ill-informed attitude in our culture.

        Notwithstanding that fact, and, by definition, universities exist to explore the uncharted and to plumb the mysteries of human behavior and of Nature broadly understood and so matters should remain. Any less lofty an aspiration would both demean humanity’s possible reach and imperil its potential progress. Similarly, research centers of the educational institutions that embody that possibility, whatever their stripe and focus, must aspire to the same. We have sought at VTIPG to stay true to the broad injunction such a lofty ideal implies; to remain curious, to open our hearts and minds as capaciously as we could to possibilities and to do so in a fashion that dignifies and serves our university’s mission, our stakeholders and our own aims and principles.

        This has proven an admirable, and even noble calling in my view, but it demands that those who adopt it persevere against contrary social, political, economic or institutional headwinds in the name of that orientation as they pursue their work. Accordingly, we have sought to adapt to our changing environment to realize our goals of research, service and scholarship and to do so without at the same time losing our way in the name of individual or collective ambition or hubris, or money, specific techniques or fads or any other shiny bauble that may be popular at any moment. This orientation suggests that the Institute has required thoughtful and dedicated faculty and staff and we have been fortunate to attract just such individuals across our history. In fact, two of our faculty members have worked with me to lead VTIPG across all, or nearly all, its history. No doubt, we have been deeply blessed in such terms.

        Beyond shared values, abiding openness to learning and willingness to tolerate ambiguity, our faculty and staff have retained an enduring passion for engaging and thoughtfully and artfully applying ideas. I believe that this orientation has played a signal role in our success to date as well. As Albert Einstein famously remarked, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution” and in that, as in so much else, he was spot on in our institutional experience.¹

        In all, it seems easy to observe but saying so obscures the difficulties of realizing it across time, that our longevity has rested squarely in persistent efforts to ensure shared values, working to establish and maintain genuine and honest relationships among ourselves and with our stakeholders and remaining open individually and collectively to the Muse that the gift of the life of the mind, that is, of academic life, represents. I know I speak for my colleagues when I note that to have this continuing opportunity to pursue ideas, to imagine possibilities, and to place that knowledge, learning and experience in the service of other scholars and those directly involved in democratic self-governance has been, and remains, a very special privilege.

        As we look forward, I hope we can maintain a forward-looking orientation and be animated, as Caroline Walker Bynum remarked in her American Historical Association Presidential Address in 1997, by a shared sense of wonder; understood as careful attention to all we research and undertake and founded on a companion, and abiding, humility:

Our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding, when fear that we may appropriate the ‘other’ leads us not so much to writing about ourselves and our fears as to crafting our stories with attentive, wondering care…. Not only as scholars, then, but also as teachers, we must astonish and be astonished. For the flat, generalizing, presentist view of the past encapsulates it and makes it boring, whereas amazement yearns toward an understanding, a significance, that is always just a little beyond both our theories and our fears. Every view of things that is not wonderful is false.²

        A very happy 20th anniversary to the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance and may it enjoy many more!

Notes

¹ Einstein, Albert. October 26, 1929, “What Life Means to Einstein:” An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck, The Saturday Evening Post, 17, Quote Page 117, Column 1.  

² Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Wonder,” American Historical Association Presidential Address, The American Historical Review 102 (1), (Feb.1997), 1-17 at 17.