James White Provost

James C. White, II
Interim Provost

download pdf

On behalf of the Gettysburg College faculty, I am delighted to receive and to extend a warm welcome to the class of 2013 and, for that matter, to all students who are new to Gettysburg.  We, who are your faculty-your future professors, advisors, mentors (those sitting in hot black robes on either side of you)-welcome you with joy into our community of scholars. While you will naturally come to know us in our classrooms, our studios, and our laboratories, you will also have conversation with us in our offices. You will share meals and exchange ideas with us in the Dining Center. You will sit next to us at lectures, sporting events, and artistic performances. You will dine with us in our homes. You will join us in our scholarly and creative endeavors. During your four years here, you will grow and mature with us, and, as time passes, our community will come to be one in which you feel at home.

But that is probably not the way it feels now. You are enveloped in the experiences and anxiety and anticipation of your move to Gettysburg. The notion of study and intellectual pursuits is likely not one that occupies you at the present. You're concerned about new roommates, communal living, sharing bathrooms daily with folks who are now complete strangers, and learning to navigate a residential liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania. Let me assure, you, however, that this place will soon come to feel comfortable and your constant engagement with ideas will become sweetly routine.

I address you this afternoon in my official capacity as the College's Interim Provost-and, should you ask, "What's a Provost"? let me say this is the person responsible for overseeing and nurturing the College's academic program-but I am also a physics professor here and, like other members of the faculty, someone for whom the liberal arts is a way of experiencing the world. And, indeed, for you, too, the spirit of the liberal arts will be manifest in everything touching you in the next four years.

What awaits you is an intellectual experience framed within a structure made of a powerful, broad curriculum, opportunity for scholarly and creative work with your professors, an atmosphere of trust, and a life outside the classroom where you are permitted-no, compelled-to consider your academic work in the context of being a citizen engaged by your surrounding community. The curriculum comprises hundreds of courses and is constructed around four broad learning objectives that your faculty has for you. By the time you depart Gettysburg College, you will be able to consider ideas from multiple disciplinary perspectives in a sophisticated, critical fashion. You will be exercised to think in a manner that permits you to integrate ideas and information. You will continually work on the means by which you write and speak and express yourself. And, again, you will face the concept of citizenship-on local and global scales-and come to ask yourself, if not already, what it means to engage and be engaged by one's community.

You are probably detecting two broad themes in my remarks: intellectual engagement and community.  The first is perhaps easiest for you to conceive, yet it is the second that is perhaps the more important, for our learning community here is simultaneously a social community...and the one in which all your terrific learning will occur. Indeed, even though thousands of individuals applied to be a part of our community at Gettysburg College, only a select few were invited to join us. And you are among that select group.

What you bring to the community is something we members of the faculty and staff and administration are eager to see. Oh, we know of some of your accomplishments, yet we are curious about how your intrinsic qualities-your sense of exploration, your desire for humor and/or drama, your means of interrogating and capturing the world around you-how such qualities will enrich our community. And believe me, much as we will affect and change you, your vibrant presence will forever change us.

One thing on which you can depend during your time at Gettysburg is that we who constitute our community conduct ourselves in an honorable fashion and demonstrate integrity and honesty in our actions and behavior. We value differences among us, and, even though we thrive on debate and spirited discussion, we remain forthright and respectful in those interactions.

Your recitation of the Gettysburg Pledge later in this ceremony is a public demonstration of your willingness to assume this responsibility of honor and integrity.

Your time here is to be a period of great challenge and growth. The courses you choose are designed to present you with ideas critical to your intellectual maturation-and the process is going to be difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible. The reason: learning something well and to such an extent that you can actually use it and see connection with it and all other "somethings," well, learning as we will expect of you is going to require great work. Yet, in four years, you will leave this college and depart for the world as a superbly educated person who can meet challenge, can think deeply and intentionally, and can continually enrich and enliven whatever community in which you live.

In five days your formal courses will begin. But your education as college students has already begun. The faculty and staff, for the most part, have yet to meet you, but your transition into your role as a Gettysburg student is being facilitated by a marvelous group of individuals who work with Dean Julie Ramsey. Their support will continue, too, because that "superbly educated person" I mentioned earlier depends on a union of effort among all of us here-your professors, your mentors, your residence assistants. All of us dedicated to your education.

I welcome you to our community of scholars, and, at this time, I ask that the faculty and staff stand, if able, and join me in that welcome.