Photo by Bob Handleman

The pre-Halloween trick nature played on Drew and the rest of the East Coast brought with it dueling emotions: fear for our campus, as branches toppled under an unseasonable snowfall that weighed down the still-leafy trees, and love for all Drew’s forested beauty. When students returned after four days, the landscape looked a little leaner, but Drew’s spectacular autumnal glory held strong.

I’m reminded of what Olin Curtis, an early seminary professor, wrote on the marvels that surround us in The Building of Drew University, a book published in 1938 by Professor Charles Fremont Sitterly. “The first time I ever saw Drew Forest, Doctor Upham, my gracious host, suddenly said: ‘Do you want to see the finest thing we have here?’ Before we came to the library, the doctor stopped, backed away from the path, and, with a quick flourish of his entire arm, as if trying to sweep the whole campus into the spot in front of him, exclaimed heartily: ‘There it is! That beech! Is there anywhere on earth, any living thing more beautiful?’”

Familiarity breeds contempt, and we can take even the greatest gifts for granted. The October 29 storm renewed for all of us a sense of nature’s other and more beneficent side, the grace of the land we at Drew have inherited. Indeed, this issue of Drew Magazine is a visual hymn to the Forest.

But the truth is that had students returned just a day or two after the storm, they would have been saddened by the mounds of debris on campus and stunned by the degree of destruction.

After Drew lost power on Saturday afternoon, the food staff successfully came up with makeshift meals, even cooking outdoors on grills, until we could evacuate the campus. Families of students who lived nearby took in students who could not easily travel home to further destinations. (One New Jersey family took in nine students. Another housed 14!) Meanwhile, student life personnel led by Associate Dean Frank Merckx worked overtime to accommodate 40 students who could not get away and who were taken in by our very generous colleagues at the College of St. Elizabeth.

For what seemed an age, Executive Director of Facilities Mike Kopas and his staff went without sleep and the usual creature comforts to clean up the campus and make it ready for the rest of us. In fact, my only reluctance in writing about the quiet heroism of some is that I am perforce neglecting others, colleagues in every office from computing to the registrar to finance to the various schools. I don’t know of a single case where an individual did not shine.

And so the quirky, terrible storm and its aftermath reminded us finally of the one thing we love more than Drew’s natural beauty: its people, who are tantamount to its soul.

Treemageddon

The premature snowstorm blessedly left trees standing, but took down branches with a vengeance. For photos, visit drew.edu/treemageddon.

I conduct a personal interview with each new faculty member who joins Drew. After my first half hour with our music professor, Trevor Weston, my administrative associate, Amy Sugerman, knocked on the door to alert me time was up.

She had to do that every 10 minutes or so, for the next half hour.

Trevor was telling me about his introductory class on music history where he discusses the various traditions of music—from classical to Latin to gospel—that go into the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I found myself wanting to resign the presidency to become a first-year student again, just so I could take Professor Weston’s class. [More on Weston]

In fact, I rarely find myself able to end interviews with new faculty members on time. I’m intrigued by how each one might shape Drew’s future. The right professor at the right time can be empowering, a truth confirmed every time I meet alumni who speak of teachers who dramatically changed their lives.

It is unfortunate that such a buyer’s market exists in the arts and sciences today. All too many superb, newly minted Ph.D.’s end up underemployed. But Drew and its students benefit mightily. Our senior faculty members not only set the standard for excellence, but they also participate in a painstaking process to select one person out of what often can be hundreds of applicants.

The selectivity shows. And because teaching and learning constitute Drew’s reason for being, even during the worst days of the economic recession we made our first priority the replacing of great teachers who were retiring with great new teachers coming aboard.

This replacement business is complicated, though. The academic disciplines are not dusty museum pieces. Every field is a living and breathing organism, with fresh discoveries and new controversies arising at every moment. We always consider the current shape of the field rather than blindly seek to replace a retiring teacher-scholar with her or his replica in interests. And we also seek to appoint new colleagues who, 20 or 40 years from now, will have the capacity to change and grow with the ongoing life of their field.

This fall, a small army of new faculty members will join Drew in disciplines as varied as biological anthropology, Christian social ethics and political science. I’m looking forward this semester to my interviews with them and learning more about the rich scholarship they bring from their disciplines.

While I hate to take issue with Mick Jagger, it seems that with this group of faculty we can get what we want—and what our students need.

Message From the President

“You won’t believe what I just saw,” I shouted to my wife on my cell while heading home one evening last spring. “You know the production of As You Like It we saw at the Old Vic in London? Well, I just saw a student production, and it was 10 times better.”

It was, I told everyone, one of the best Shakespeare comedy productions of the perhaps 100 I have seen. One of the leads was acted by the woman on our cover, Caitlin Aase C’12, a New Mexico native who also performed in last fall’s The Veri**on Play. In the latter, Aase’s sister was played by rising senior Kathleen Burke, a two-time winner of Drew’s Oxnam Award for playwriting who hails from Oakland, Calif.

Our theatre arts department, ranked first in popularity nationwide by the Princeton Review, is attracting terrific students from near and far. That has everything to do with a superb faculty, and it helps to have the fine professional company, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, on our campus. But students are also attracted by the department’s gracious home—the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts.

Dorothy’s passing this spring, at age 103 after a fabulous life on stage, was reported everywhere, along with the note that she had donated, with her characteristic enthusiasm and generosity of spirit, over $13 million for this great building.

My point is that buildings matter. Drew is people first, of course. When I meet alumni, they invariably speak of professors and friends. But buildings bring people together, and that is where great stuff happens.

In June, we begin renovating the University Center so that it will live up to its name, as a “center” both in its role of collecting people for great conversation and informal learning, and as a light-filled space in the middle of campus that will look out upon the Forest, a physical manifestation of Drew’s collective character. Like DoYo, as Dorothy Young’s center is affectionately nicknamed, a revamped UC will have a galvanizing effect on the academic and social quality of our campus.

Over the next four or five years, we also hope to rethink the Hall of Sciences, and this, too, should have a major effect. These new science facilities will mirror and make possible a bold set of ideas about the teaching of science at Drew—profoundly interdisciplinary, with an eye to the public interest.

What really pleases me most is that at Drew we begin with teaching before we go to blueprints. We start by asking what we want to have happen academically and socially, and we take time in getting the answers right. Then and only then do we reach for bricks and mortar.

Photo by Bob Handelman

I’m truly excited by Drew’s ongoing development of a new strategic plan. I know, I know. “Strategic plan” is one of those concepts with all the excitement of counting dots on acoustical ceiling tile. My family jokes about my excitement. In our kitchen, we now have a strategic pan. Last night at a restaurant, my wife ordered a strategic flan. And so on. My passion, I’d argue, is understandable, especially now that we’re seeing four big goals in The Plan for Drew emerge, the fruit of the tireless efforts of a President’s Task Force of 15 faculty and staff, a separate planning group and a team of committed students. The first two goals mingle the permanent values of a liberal arts education with Drew’s future directions. Our first goal—intellectual engagement—speaks to Drew’s great tradition. We must ensure that students are exposed to the life of the mind, and to the human history of thought and achievement, without which any other goal becomes tantamount to an empty suit.

But the second is a departure. It takes account of the ways a liberal education (one befitting a free citizen, as defined by Cicero) is changing. For much of the 20th century, universities defined the liberal arts in opposition to the material world, emphasizing the theoretical over the practical. But we began to see how such an absolute separation fails to empower students and shortens the reach of those academic disciplines that rightly should inform major social decisions. Drew, after all, was created to employ learning to benefit others. Thus the second goal calls for social engagement—applying classroom learning to social urgencies and taking those real-world experiences back to the classroom. It calls as well for global engagement, for widening our horizons to the international in all fields, for no nation will prosper if the world fails. And finally it includes professional engagement—asking how an academic interest might lead to a practical career. As Louis Menand argues, if we fail to teach our students how the actual world works, we create the ignorance of the well educated. The third and fourth goals are themselves more practical. They involve branding the university to define more sharply and compellingly Drew’s identity and ensuring our financial stability. Ultimately Drew’s future depends on growing new sources of revenue that feel right to us in terms of our academic ideals. Gently and gradually increasing the undergraduate population so that we can grow our faculty and curricular offerings, launching master’s degrees that lead to rewarding careers and expanding our offerings to local adults can provide more academic impact while garnering resources for Drew that will raise the quality of everything we do. Robert Weisbuch

As a college student, my idea of study abroad was tourism with a little studying thrown in to justify the lark. It’s always been more serious at Drew, a form of cultural study, and our Drew International Seminars (DIS) have exemplified this kind of experiential learning, tied as they are to the semester-long course work that precedes boarding a plane. Perhaps that is why so many of our alumni mention their DIS experience when I ask them about their most cherished memories of Drew.

The tradition continues, but it has been informed more than ever before by a number of factors. One is our growing emphasis on civic engagement, the commitment we’re making to tie learning to the common good. In 2008, we sent students to Mamfe, Cameroon, with the charge to interview residents about their most pressing needs. With microfinance grants developed by Drew students, a school there has been able to pour concrete floors, and a health center has delivery kits for the arrival of the community’s newest and most fragile members.

The world into which our current students will graduate is a complex one, and understanding how the growth of a country a continent away might affect the international community is also something we have defined as an essential part of a 21st-century study-abroad experience.

This spring, students traveled to the United Arab Emirates to see how this desert republic has reshaped itself from a nomadic Bedouin culture into one of the world’s most significant economic players, all in less time than it took Europe to build its grandest cathedrals. Observing the UAE at this juncture is, to me, a singular experience at a remarkable time in history. Our students have acquired a deep understanding of how this country will affect commerce, finance, international relations, even the power balance in an increasingly interconnected world. Read more in “The Wealth of a Nation.”

Still another tradition has been maintained in our study-abroad programs, and even strengthened. Traveling together, Drew students bond deeply with each other—even more profoundly than they could on campus. I love to see them laugh together as they present a slide show, owning jointly a memory the rest of us cannot fully appreciate. In a heartening number of cases, these will be lifelong friendships, adding to the sense that perhaps the most important academic experience at Drew is not strictly academic at all. It is other people, and sharing with them the startling condition of being alive.

Robert Weisbuch

Walking into a Theo School faculty meeting often feels like being in a winning team’s locker room at halftime. Serious issues get discussed, which supplies a little game-time tension, but the laughter is spontaneous and loud and there’s a sense that we are all in it, whatever it is, together. It is as productive and just plain enjoyable an academic environment as one can imagine.

It is also evidence of the character of our great dean, Maxine Beach, who is retiring this spring. Maxine’s intelligence is exceeded only by her wisdom, and her spirituality is matched only by her moment-to-moment spirit. No easy rider, Maxine lobbies hard for the interests of the Theo School—whenever I hear the drumming of her knuckles on the table at our cabinet meetings, I know the Beach temperature is rising—but she also exudes a collegiality that is utterly infectious.

There’s more that makes Maxine’s achievement still greater. This is as diverse a student and faculty community as one can imagine—international and multi everything. It is also a community that, unlike many seminaries associated with universities, has a large and still-growing role in the overall community. Maxine has embraced the notion of Drew as a uni-versity and encouraged her gang to open its doors to undergraduates and Caspersen students and to teach with faculty from the rest of Drew. On a material level, her tenure has been marked by her ability to raise funds and expand Seminary Hall. But for me, Maxine is the architect of something still more worthy—all that takes place inside that building.

In fact, I urge Drewids to stop by Seminary Hall for a service. As you enter to the sounds of an African liberation hymn and live through an hour of meditation, personal speech and joyous music, your sense of the human potential for good will revive. Maxine is in all of this, as she is in the bookshelves that hold the prodigious publications of the professors, as she is in the continuing improvements of the academic programs and, most, as she is in the hearts of the students.

We are all a little fearful about what Drew will be without Maxine. But it is overpowered by something still greater: the legacy of human and divine love, a continuing breeze of energy and achievement and goodwill by which Dean Beach will remain vibrantly at Drew wherever she may be.

Robert Weisbuch

Take Laquan Austion, a senior political science major and avowed conservative. While he’s passionate about his views, he knows how to disagree civilly. That’s a quality we need more of in our society—it’s a cure for talk radio and all the sound­bite extremisms and the current spate of divisiveness that’s driving us apart. We need people with strong political views who nonetheless are able to talk to each other and hear what the other is saying, and Laquan exemplifies that. Which reminds me: I owe him the keys to my Mustang—I promised him a drive.

He’s just one of our nearly 1,700 students who’ve brought with them to Drew considerable smarts and talents, and by the time they graduate, I hope they will have only enhanced them by being part of our community. But 10 years from now, or 20 or even 30, I’d like to ask them—and all of our students—what from their Drew experience is most central to their lives. Many years ago at another university, I heard a graduation address by the film director Larry Kasdan. You may recall his most popular film, The Big Chill, which was about a college-reunion weekend. Not surprisingly, Kasdan told the students that perhaps the most important experience they had in college was not a particular course or teacher but, in fact, each other. Close friends, he said, lifelong friends, may be the greatest benefit of a college education. Even if they live far away, Kasdan said, if they’re getting married, if they need you for any reason, however inconvenient it might be for you, go!

Indeed, my best friend was my RA 40 years ago. He’s still him, I’m still me, we agree on very little and we still laugh more with each other than with anyone else. When I think about college, I see Bill.

Those readers who are alums probably have made a similar friendship at Drew. I have a suggestion: Before you read the rest of Drew Magazine, pick up the phone, however long it’s been, and call that friend right now.

Robert Weisbuch