Friday, December 5, 2008

Creativity, Innovation, Leadership

When in Oberlin, I always find myself thinking about the Oberlin experience. Every time I return, after anxiously wandering the 5 square blocks wondering whether anyone remembers me still, I encounter some intangible, magical experience so unique and so full of an insuppressible momentous excitement that I am forced to reaffirm that this truly is one of the best places in the world. Ironically, you would have been hard-pressed to get this affirmation out of me while I was a student here. Yet as a visitor, looking around, I see this acknowledgment, this satisfaction with what Oberlin is living and producing, in the smiling eyes of everyone else who has happened upon the moment, who has surreptitiously discovered this intersection of whatever they were doing before and the uncontrollable energy and creativity that is constantly channeled into these undefinable things.

On the board we talk about improving three things: the value of an Oberlin education, the perceived value of an Oberlin education, and the sustainability of our commitment to educational access. These are sometimes hard for current students to understand. They spend so much time in these wonderful, undefinable moments that these moments are just everyday life to them. Instead, they look for the value of an Oberlin education elsewhere. Does it lie in the books they've mastered for an assignment or the connections they're making through ongoing conversations with peers and professors? Immediately afterwards, does it lie in their first job title or the ranking of the graduate schools to which they're admitted?

In these challenging times, when the world faces a trying economic situation and a constant threat of terror and a growing environmental challenge, we sometimes miss the point. Seeking normalcy or perceived promise or hope, we cling to metrics and measures, things that we can define and evaluate. But what if the most intangible elements of us are those with the most value? What if the value of an Oberlin education lies not in the fact that x number of people are impacting x number of industries, but in the ethical and intellectual caliber of its lifelong community members and in the spontaneity of true creative production in which these members engage daily?

It goes without saying that Obies are fierce. We are dedicated and fascinated (and often fascinating); we plunge powerfully forward into solving the problems that we identify as meaningful; we pick battles not just because they impact our own lives but because we see them impacting the lives of our neighbors, both in our own towns and cities and in our global society. Perhaps most importantly, we think critically and thoughtfully, carrying with us ethical standards and expectations that we have labored over defining and maintaining, demanding equality in access and opportunity, expecting a level playing field and, when not finding one, creating one. We are innovators and dreamers; we take the facts and methods that we have learned and sync them in new ways; we look for connections that haven't been tried yet; we build bonds that had never before been imagined.

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THIS IS THE HUGE DREAM OF US / THAT WE ARE HEROES THAT THERE IS COURAGE/ in our blood! That we are live! / That we do not perpetrate the lie of vision / forced upon ourselves / by ourselves. That we have made the nets of vision real!
-Michael McClure, The Flowers of Politics (I)


Free of politics / Liberty and pride guide you / You pass from ancestral myths to myth of self / And make the giant bright stroke like that madman Van Gogh.

-Michael McClure, The Flowers of Politics (II)

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