Written for Chancellor Diermeier’s investiture by Major Jackson, professor of English and director of creative writing; Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities
Let’s admit: today we wish for a different noise,
in the stands perhaps, staring at a diamond field
with our phones cheering on The Vandy Boys
but this high occasion as shall be revealed
claims us to mark a newish era in Kirkland
with the same solemnity Achilles passed his shield
to a young Patroclus, hence the grand
meters, hence, Dante’s terza rima form
which is its own armor and classical brand
though Alighieri’s likely not postered in Tolman dorm,
for walls are preserved for heroes, Mendeleev’s training
table and Bob Marley whose Rasta love I call forth
to this eminent platform. It is the ingredient I deign
argue Commodore Cornelius had in mind
when he sought to “strengthen ties” on the day
the cornerstone was laid, when the choir sang in
Wesley Hall in 1880: “Science and revelation here
in perfect harmony appear,” and thus installed,
from the Gilded Age, Vandy’s superpower, prescription & prayer,
virtues I invoke now as wishful pillars in the semesters
ahead, along with, say, a personal tour of West End Tower.
Thus, today, our pomp is recommitment as the news festers,
as our fingers scroll the missiled cities of Ukraine
on little screens, and while their children seek shelter
on the borders of Central Europe, we return to the painful
yet divine battle for human dignity, whether trans,
whether African, whether a woman seeking sovereign
control over her body. We walk again toward
the idea of a “perfect harmony.” Let research
and art repair what Twitter has torn asunder.
Let’s model in our fight for an earth undisturbed
by human hunger, alas, a carbon free campus,
and where we disagree, we hold firm to the church
of civil talk: the classroom, imagine, where we discuss,
not block, others’ opinions, nor cancel, one Billy Shakespeare
whose Shylock is not a barrier to belonging but pushes
us to confront entrenched hatreds hard to unhear.
We are the happiest campus in the nation;
our trees are happy, our chancellor, our squirrels,
all happy, not because we avoid confrontation
but that our labs seek solutions, our stories
connection, and our monographs profound relations
of lyric feeling. Frankly, our happiness should be
patented, for we dream the dream of a more perfect
freedom, and go beyond talking points, beyond conspiracies
to fact-based, data-driven, soulful truths.
NATO and Putin should know an office is not a throne,
but a magical transport of service, a Phantom Tollbooth
of epistemophilic zeal where a mind roams
and discovers what it feels with others on deck,
traveling as one seminar, building new homes
of insight hopefully devoid of Swedish furniture -- stylish, sleek,
yet, at times, a little cold. War is a Loveless Café
and power is merely symbolic, Thus sayeth Zizek,
and though our pockets wish today
for cheaper gas we can at least, for now, celebrate
the confirmation of a Ketanji Brown
Jackson as Supreme Court Judge, her blessed fate.
Yoga keeps us flexible and Spotify ever ready
with song but we’d do ourselves even greater
service if we led with Rev. Lawson’s lessons and story
always at hand, if, in our quest, we seeded
the courage of his students in harmony
with their times at a counter on 5th, if we heeded
the voices of tomorrow. Freedom abhors
suppression, and Diane Nash is what is needed
to remind us of the potential of a Commodore.
Thus, we rely on the stewards of academic exchange
to embrace dissent or, further like A. Gore,
to sound the call on inconvenient truths. Stated plain:
“we encourage when we refuse to use the moral
weight of [our] office to speak out,” sayeth Rev. C.T. Vivian.
Leading means at times stepping out of our lane and quarreling
with the world, which according to the Irish Yeats,
is rhetoric but wasn’t John Lewis’s poetry Good Trouble?
In short, the circle is love from whence I write,
aware of our fragility. Let’s incubate reason
and curiosity, then take our stand in honor of the light
that anchors us in the value of a university
with a passion for the arts, a music that Blairs
from Broadway to Row, in perfect harmony.