Hutchinson advises freshmen on challenges ahead

Welcome to Rice!
Hutchinson
advises freshmen on challenges ahead

…………………………………………………………………

Orientation Week
Faculty Address
by John Hutchinson
Professor of Chemistry
Aug. 20, 2002

I would like
to say a few words, and here they are: nitwit, blubber,
oddment, tweak. Thank you.

I’ve been
planning that all summer. How many of you recognized those
words of a wise man? Right, Albus Dumbledore from “Harry
Potter.”

Today is a day
of great challenges, for you and for me. My challenge is
this address … and it is a challenge! Because today
is a great day — your first full day of academic activities
at Rice, and I am supposed to say something sufficiently
profound and inspirational to match the importance of this
moment in your lives. Since the day last April when [student
director of O-Week] Mike Bader first asked me if I would
give this address, I promise you that I’ve thought
about this challenge every single day, planning, organizing
thoughts, gathering pithy phrases. I have to say that, at
the end of all of this thinking, planning and organizing,
the temptation is very strong to simply quote Albus Dumbledore
and leave it at that.

But I want to
emphasize this point: I chose to accept this challenge.
As hard as it has been to prepare and as uncertain as I
am that I will succeed, I accepted this challenge. Fairly
often, I have had to remind myself: I chose this challenge.
What was I thinking? I’ve got nothing to say! They’re
going to be bored out of their minds! What if I forget my
speech and can’t remember what I wanted to say? I chose
this challenge.

Why? I did so
for a simple reason: What makes Rice University uniquely
excellent and what inspires my love in Rice is not the scholarship
of the faculty, nor the talented staff, nor the beautiful
facilities, nor the elegant campus, nor even our unique
college system, which undoubtedly attracted many of you
here. Rather, what makes this university great is the extraordinary
quality of the people who come here to study and to live,
people like your advisers, fellows and mentors, people like
those seated around you, people like you. I chose to seize
this opportunity, because here at Rice I am granted the
personal freedom to decide how I would respond.

You have already
accepted an even greater challenge, by choosing to come
to Rice, to tackle the curriculum here, to work in this
community, to invest your hopes and dreams into these years.
Remember the day you visited Rice, the day you applied to
Rice, the day you heard that you were accepted, the day
you decided to come here, the day you began receiving information
from Dr. Camacho, your college masters, your college advisers,
the registrar, academic advising. Remember those feelings
as we discuss a few of the challenges you will face in your
years at Rice. I will discuss, in broad terms, three. As
we discuss them, I want you to keep in mind: You chose to
accept these challenges, and you have the personal freedom
to decide how you will respond. You chose to be here.

First, the most
obvious challenge of Rice is the classes you will take.
Based on my experience as a master at Wiess College, I expect
that many if not most of you are questioning yourselves
this week as to whether you will survive here. You’ve
heard about how rigorous the curriculum is. You’ve
heard rumors about weed-out courses and about endless weeks
of all-nighters. And you’ve been told how smart everyone
is who goes to Rice. [Will Rice senior] Matt Haynie made
this point very well last night. But Matt followed that
point with an even more important point, one worth emphasizing
again today: Every one of you here today has the capability
for academic success at Rice. You have the intellectual
ability, and you have the work ethic; you could not have
come this far, and you could not be here now if you did
not.

The challenge
then is in believing that truth about yourself. Because
many, if not most, of you will find yourselves struggling
in the next few months in ways that are unfamiliar to you.
The homework will be more abstract and less direct, the
exams will seem more obscure, almost obtuse, and somehow
unrelated to the homework. Your professors’ assessments
of your work will seem harsher, and your grades … well,
let’s just say that I’ve known an awful lot of
students, both at Wiess College and in my own chemistry
class, who are more than a little disappointed by their
first exam grades.

So why do students
so often struggle in their first semesters at Rice? I can
assure you that it is not because the faculty are uncaring
or unfair. The opposite is true: Your instructors will want
you to succeed and will make every effort to help you.

The reason for
such difficulty is something different altogether: The skills
you brought with you from high school and which served you
so well there are not the skills you will need at Rice.
Think back carefully about what your high school taught
you, and two primary skills come to mind: how to consume
information and how to solve problems. These are valuable
skills, and you are all very talented at them; that’s
what got you here, of course. But at Rice, our goals are
different: We seek not so much to change what you know but
rather how you know. By doing so, we hope to liberate you
to choose for yourself what to think and how to think. We
want you to think critically, analytically, creatively,
expansively. We want you to learn to construct knowledge
for yourself.

This is clearly
a worthy challenge, and although it might not be the challenge
you expected, remember that you chose to be here. So how
will you respond?

Faced with this
challenge, many students begin to suffer extreme doubts
about their abilities, their intellect and their chances
of survival. These doubts are made worse by the feeling
that you are the only one struggling. But you are not alone,
not really. Most everyone struggles during their first year
or even two. It’s just that no one talks about it.

My advice to
you is threefold. First and foremost, be patient with yourself.
Remember that you are developing a new skill, a new way
of thinking, a deeper way of analyzing and understanding.
Give yourself time to adjust. My experience is that students
who have difficulty early on do very well at Rice in the
long run. I have observed a transition in my students that
occurs as they develop these new skills. That transition
will come for you too. Be patient. Second, talk about the
challenges you face and the difficulties you have. Go to
see your professors, ask for assistance and insight. Talk
with your college masters and resident associates. Recall
that I said that the greatest asset at Rice is our students.
Take advantage of the Peer Counseling Program in your college.
Talk to each other, form study groups, work together, share
your experiences. Third, believe in yourself. Don’t
judge yourself on the basis of your early exam scores. Many
students are all too quick to conclude that a low test grade
or two is an indicator both of lack of ability and of lack
of a successful future at Rice. This isn’t true. With
time, I assure you, your grades will rise and you will make
it. Again, most importantly, be patient with yourself. You
chose to be here: You can do this.

Challenge No.
2 is the new freedom and independence that you now possess
and which you will explore this week and in the months to
come. Now, freedom may not seem like a challenge. It seems
more like a gift. And it is a generous gift, from those
who founded our country in proclaiming our endowed liberties,
from William Marsh Rice and Edgar Odell Lovett in founding
this university, and from your families in making it possible
for you to come here. But exercising your freedom wisely
and responsibly is a tremendous challenge.

You now have
the freedom to define your own values, to speak your own
words and to question all aspects of the world around you
and virtually everything that you have been taught. And
I strongly encourage all of you to exercise that freedom
to its fullest in your time at Rice. I hope that you chose
to come to college specifically to exercise those freedoms.
One of my favorite attributes of college students is their
irreverence. Now, I am not in any way referring to irreverence
towards faith. I am instead referring to irreverence toward
traditions and institutions, toward anything that you regard
as pretentious or hypocritical, of anything that you find
poorly conceived or ill-advised. Students in college, and
at Rice in particular, will find fault in most anything
and will find very creative ways to laugh at it.

Personally,
I really like this. One of the highlights of my time as
a student at The University of Texas was our election of
absurdist candidates to lead our Student Association, whose
only agenda for the year was to replace the words on the
main library from “Ye Shall Know the Truth and the
Truth Shall Set You Free” to “Money Talks.”
One of the finest pieces of satire in last year’s Thresher
was a commentary on the new university parking plan, including
a depiction of the Humanities Building with a guard and
a gate across the entrance, suggesting that the users of
the building should pay for its usage. I love not only this
humor, but also the ability to see the world with a clear
eye. I find that I laugh the hardest, and not coincidentally
learn the most, when I am in the company of my students.
Life ought to be fun, particularly in college, and since
we are fallible people, we ought to be able to laugh at
our foibles and fumbles and even at our disagreements.

I seem to have
strayed far from the idea of a challenge. However, it is
important to apply this freedom of irreverence judiciously.
It is one thing to laugh at an institution; it is quite
another to laugh at an individual. When dealing with people,
it is only a very short step from irreverent bemusement
to insensitive ridicule. The line in between is very poorly
defined, and only a wise person, more wise than I, can stay
on the proper side without fail. I challenge each of you
individually to find that wisdom, to choose wisely how to
exercise your freedom.

Nevertheless,
the free exchange of ideas must be the foundation of our
great university. I was struck when I heard the words of
Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, who said in an opinion earlier
this year that “The right to think is the beginning
of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government
because speech is the beginning of thought.” Similarly,
President Gillis repeated just last night something I have
heard him say before: “We take as our mission not to
make ideas safe for you, but rather to make you safe for
ideas.” I’ve always been intrigued by and admired
that phrasing, as I think it conveys that we should neither
fear nor silence those ideas that offend our sensibilities.

But it is the nature of life, indeed, the nature of these
very freedoms, that we will disagree on this issue. In your
years at Rice, I can assure you from experience that the
greatest controversies will arise over the conflict between
our need to protect the open exchange of ideas and our need
to maintain an environment in which that exchange can occur.
The conflict between these goals was captured famously by
Lord Chief Justice Halisham, who told us “the only
freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other
people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding
freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called
liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted
against others who claim that if such things are to be allowed,
their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened.”

So how should
we respond when these controversies arise? I would direct
you to the famous words of Supreme Court Justice Brandeis,
with Chief Justice Holmes concurring: “[Those who won
our independence] believed freedom to think as you will
and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the
discovery and spread of political truth.” Thus dedicated
to the crucial importance of free speech, Justice Brandeis
guides us to the correct resolution: “If there be time
to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies,
to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy
to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The challenge
to you as individuals then is to express yourselves and
to find a voice for your irreverence, even when your thoughts
are unpopular, but to do so responsibly, with the goal of
encouraging “more speech, not enforced silence.”
The challenge to us as a community is to protect the free
exchange of ideas by rebutting those things that offend
you or with which you disagree. Remember always: You chose
to be here.

The third challenge
is, I think, the most subtle, because its effects on you
might be hard to recognize. It is the challenge of dealing
with your future and the fear that the future creates. Ask
yourself why you came to college, and ask yourself what
you expect to get out of college. Now ask yourself whether
you can disconnect these ideas from the need to get a job
sometime in the future. Is there any one of you who can
genuinely say that you have no anxiety about getting a job
or getting into professional school after college? The pressure
generated by that fear is immense and consuming. And even
more painfully, it is compounded by unrelenting expectations
from parents.

Faced with this
pressure, students often turn their Rice experiences into
vocational educations. When that happens, education becomes
little more than ritual. You take the courses you are told
to take, you read what you are told to read, you solve the
problems you are given to solve. Each course becomes simply
another in a series of hurdles in a long and arduous march
to graduation and the future. There is little sense of accomplishment,
even less sense of satisfaction and no sense of success.
I have seen students terrified to make a B, even on a single
exam. I have seen students terrified to drop courses that
they find painfully unrewarding and uninteresting. All too
many students remain trapped in a course of study and a
major, disinterested and disenchanted with the material,
pursuing a degree they don’t want, all from fear of
an uncertain future and from fear of failing both their
own expectations and the demands of their parents.

Out of fear of
an unhappy future, these students will miss the happiest
of presents.

But remember,
you chose to come here, and how you use your time here is
very much your choice. So how should you respond? I would
like you to share in a dream. One of my favorite movies
is “Field of Dreams.” It came out in 1989, so
I know that many of you have never seen it, and to those
of you I strongly recommend it. If you haven’t seen
it, it is a magical story of a young Iowa corn farmer named
Ray, who plows under his crop to build a dream field where
baseball players from an earlier age can return to play
the game they love.

In my favorite
scene, the great Shoeless Joe Jackson tells Ray, “I
used to wake up in the morning with the smell of the ballpark
in my nose, the cool of the grass on my feet. Have you ever
held a glove to your face just to take in the smell? I would’ve
played this game for food money. To hear the sound of the
crowd, watching them rise as one when a ball is hit deep
… I would’ve played this game for nothing.”
For Joe Jackson, holding a glove to his face was dream enough
for a lifetime. When he held a baseball mitt to his face,
only then was he breathing deeply of the substance of life
itself.

Every time I
watch the movie, I conclude that I have something in common
with Shoeless Joe, a dream so real that it defines my life.
Nineteen eighty-nine, the year “Field of Dreams”
came out, was a year of worldwide revolution, a year in
which the streets of the capitals of the world filled with
people demanding their freedoms. From Tiananmen Square in
Beijing, to the streets of Prague, Gdansk and Budapest,
to the legislature of Lithuania, to the top of the Berlin
Wall, people stood together to demand their common freedom
and a better way of life. In 1989, as I watched these people
on television in headlong and dangerous pursuit of their
dreams, I thought of Joe Jackson, and I thought more deeply
about just exactly what dream these millions of people were
pursuing.

I concluded
that, more than anything else, what they wanted was something
I already had but took for granted: the right to think and
to share my thoughts in free conversation with others. This
is the ultimate dream, and here at Rice University, in this
room and throughout this campus, the dream comes to life.
It is here that we witness the exercise, development and
triumph of the mind; the creativity of a community of artists,
authors, scholars and scientists. It is here in the classroom,
with the energy and excitement that we feel now, that we
can breathe deeply of life.

Here today,
you have entered into a real-life field of dreams. Your
challenge, as the students of Rice, is to bring forth all
of your energy, talent and humanity. Don’t just survive
this place: Dive into it, challenge it, attack it, become
part of it, build it, live it.

You chose to
be here: You can choose to dream. Your challenge at Rice
will be not to miss this chance by failing to dream and
by failing to join in the dreams of others.

So, to each
of you individually, as I welcome you to Rice, I wish for
you the grandest of dreams.