MC president and dean kick off 2023-24 academic year at Maryville College Convocation ceremony
Aug. 24, 2023
The Maryville College Convocation for the 2023-24 academic year was held at 11:15 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 24, in the Clayton Center for the Arts. Below are remarks from both Dr. Bryan Coker, president of MC, and Dr. Dan Klingensmith, vice president and dean of the College.
Dr. Bryan Coker’s Convocation Address
Good morning! Welcome everyone, to our Opening Convocation for the 2023 academic year – our 204th year as a college. Convocation, this ceremony, is where we convene – where we come together, as a college community, to mark and to celebrate the beginning of a new academic year.
To our new students, I have so enjoyed getting to know all of you in recent months, and we’re so honored to now have you here with us officially, as the newest members of this very special community.
To our returning students, welcome back – I hope you all had enjoyable and productive summers, and that you are ready to successfully tackle this new school year.
To our dedicated faculty and staff, thank you so much for all your efforts in recent weeks to get us prepared for yet another year – from sorting residence hall keys to preparing course syllabi, we couldn’t do all that we do here without you.
This is my fourth Convocation speech as President, and my prior speeches had some themes – one speech was focused on us being “One Community,” and another speech was themed, “We are all connected.” Today, we’re going to generally stick with that whole “connection” theme, but come at things a little bit differently, by expanding our thinking of connection beyond our physical campus … because those connections matter.
Most of you likely noticed the banners which appeared on campus last Thursday, with the words, “Welcome to College Hill.” That was likely intriguing if not puzzling for many of you. If you have been around here awhile, “College Hill” is the name of the beautiful historic neighborhood next to campus, just on the other side of Court Street.
But there was a time when this beautiful place we call our campus was all known as “College Hill.” And here’s how I personally learned about that …
The College is currently in the process of establishing the Maryville College Downtown Center in a historic downtown building, at the corner of Church and Court Streets. For the earlier part of the building’s life, it served as the “J&K Super Store” – it was a grocery and general supply store. Amy Lundell, our College archivist, found copies of our student newspaper, The Highland Echo, from the 1940s and 1950s, and the paper featured advertisements for the J&K Super Store. The ads made many references to our campus here as “College Hill,” and the ads encouraged students to get their snacks and supplies at J&K before going back to “the Hill.” The College and Downtown Maryville were deeply intertwined and connected at that time, with constant student traffic back and forth between the two locations. And if you don’t know, our original college campus, in the early 1800s, was actually in Downtown Maryville, before we moved across the way here, to “College Hill.”
At some point, the “College Hill” terminology fell by the wayside – as did many of our connections with Downtown Maryville. A local shopping mall and many local strip malls pulled businesses and people away from downtown. The J&K Super Store literally sat vacant for decades – and Highway 321, known as Lamar Alexander Parkway, further dissected and disconnected our campus from Downtown. And that was unfortunate, because those connections mattered.
Our first-year students may not realize that there’s actually a pedestrian bridge which connects our campus and downtown – you’ve probably seen the bridge when driving down Lamar Alexander Parkway, but perhaps you have no idea how to actually get to that bridge. And don’t feel bad, if that’s the case – because I was here for many months before I figured out how to get there. But, since we’re talking about it, you turn left out here on the Clayton Center Plaza, go down the steps, go across Lamar Street into the steam plant parking lot, and then you’ll (hopefully) see the bridge entrance up on the right. The bridge takes you over the highway and then sets you out in a rather underwhelming area of downtown, between a private residence and a non-descript office building. However, if you walk straight ahead two blocks, a mecca awaits, because Vienna Coffee will be on your right. Go two blocks left of Vienna, and you’ll be at the former J&K Super Store – soon to be the Maryville College Downtown Center.
But why is a connection to Downtown Maryville important for the College…? Why is there value in us again being “College Hill…?”
My previous Convocation speeches about “One Community” and “We are all connected” focused on how we, here on campus, needed to connect with one another, especially in the wake of a global pandemic that necessitated unprecedented isolation. But today, in this Convocation speech, I’d like for us to consider connectivity – not just with one another here in our campus community (although that’s still really important), but also our connections beyond the campus, as well. As I’ve said, those connections matter.
As I so often state, we are located in one of the world’s greatest learning laboratories – in one of the planet’s most biodiverse environments, at the edge of the nation’s most visited National Park. I’ve often spoken of us being a college “of and for the region,” connecting and serving as a resource for this opportune area. And this message has been resonating in many ways – and, I think this message will ultimately lead us to funding and building a Center for Environmental Education and the Sciences, focused on preserving and protecting this region for future generations – and that is so exciting.
Whether we’re on campus or off campus, in the greater community, connection matters. We are living in a time of incredible division in our nation and world – it’s easy and even desirable to put our heads in the sand and hope those divisions go away, but it’s our current reality, and at the risk of sounding pessimistic, I don’t see it improving anytime too soon.
I hope we’ll choose to again be “College Hill” – to be an institution that comprehensively connects with – and serves – this amazing region. There are so many opportunities for connections – through our robust Community Engagement programs, through our faith-based connections, through research in the Great Smoky Mountains, and ultimately, through the future Downtown Center. Those connections matter.
To quote spiritual philosopher David Spangler, “Some people think they are in community, but they are only in proximity. True community requires commitment and openness. It is a willingness to extend yourself, to encounter and know the other.”
Once again, welcome to a new year – let’s continue with our theme of connection, but not just on our campus sidewalks, in Pearsons, and in the classrooms and stairwells – let’s seek to connect and serve in the larger community, beyond our campus, as well.
Let’s having an amazing year of connection, here on College Hill, because those connections matter.
Thank you all so much!
Dr. Daniel Klingensmith’s Declaration of the Academic Year
Will you please rise, as you are able, for the Declaration of the Academic Year?
For at least a hundred years, writers, artists and technologists have speculated about machines that would be able to think like human beings, only faster, more comprehensively and more effectively than we can; machines that could make decisions for us, or about us. Since our last Convocation, ordinary people have had to confront the latest version of this anxiety, in the form of Artificial Intelligence platforms like ChatGPT. If it’s true that we humans are chronically uneasy about new technologies, on the other hand recent developments in AI do clearly have the potential, for good and for ill, to revolutionize the way we work, play, learn, love, hate, govern ourselves, even fight wars. It’s a fair point to say that ChatGPT can’t really “think,” per se. But it can mimic, often quite effectively, the products of human thought, and it can do that quickly.
Artificial Intelligence will likely be with us for a long time to come, so part of education will be about learning how to make sure that it serves the needs of ordinary human beings. It indeed promises many benefits for humanity. To my mind, the danger it poses is the possibility that we will come to rely on it uncritically, as a shortcut, without knowing whether it’s giving us good advice or not. That would be a problem. ChatGPT for example sometimes asserts as fact things which are wholly untrue, for reasons even its creators don’t seem to understand; and it can come up with bizarre solutions to the problems which it is asked to solve. Right now they’re often funny. But because AI operates so quickly, it is being used to do things like police human behavior and to design or guide weapons systems. To control it, we will have to be able to judge its products — to know how it functions, how to check its conclusions, and how to do for ourselves the things that it does much faster. We will have to maintain the ability to think for ourselves.
The new power and availability of AI over the past few months is one among several developments that were predicted decades ago, but always seemed comfortably far off. Now they are arriving as a series of earthquakes. 2023 is on track to be the hottest year, globally, in many thousands of years — climate change is here. Our domestic political institutions are being tested as they have not been since perhaps the Great Depression. The international order is changing, unpredictably but surely. There have never been more refugees at one time than now.
A new world is emerging, whether we like it or not. And the day-to-day experience of that is bewildering — in a swirl of change, it can be hard to know WHAT to think.
The value of a liberal arts education is that it addresses that problem by shifting the focus away from TELLING you WHAT to think, to opening windows into the many ways in which one COULD think. We here this morning have convened to dedicate ourselves to exploring and developing our capacity to think — to know, to reason, to empathize, to love, to lead, to help, to persevere. We do this in classes, practices, games, plays, recitals, exhibitions, volunteering, worshipping, organizing and in the myriad small and large personal encounters we share with one another.
What all that means is that, ultimately, we are not after settled CONCLUSIONS, to memorize, or to generate using Artificial Intelligence, but human INTELLIGENCE — intellectual and emotional intelligence — to help us live with one another, with our universe, and with ourselves. I’m a historian, and I enthusiastically agree that the great ideas of the past are most definitely worth engaging with, but in the end, we seek not settled, orthodox THOUGHT, but creative, compassionate THINKING.
But it is WE who must do the thinking. We must guard that privilege and that responsibility — when you don’t know what or how to think, be careful not to let something else do the thinking for you. That applies not only to letting AI think for you, but also to letting the past think for you.
A month or so before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln told Congress:
“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
In a different context these words still ring true. I would only add, “our country and our world.”
And with that, it is my pleasure and honor now to declare, that the 2023-2024 Academic Year has begun.