Lehman: 'Sustained engagement' trumps 'respectful disengagement'

President Jeffrey Lehman addresses incoming students during New Student Convocation in Barton Hall, Aug. 21. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Susan Lang

"If you spend all your time preparing for class, you will be a really boring person. If you spend too little time preparing for class, you will be a really unemployed person," remarked Cornell President Jeffrey S. Lehman '77, while welcoming some 4,000 new Cornell students and their parents Aug. 21 in Barton Hall during his New Student Convocation address.

So what's a student to do? Lehman, who also is a current Cornell parent, suggested turning for inspiration to Ben Stiller's movie "Zoolander" as well as to poet John Keats.

New Cornell students, Lehman said, may have something to learn from the movie's Derek Zoolander, a male fashion model superstar who suddenly is displaced by a hot, young upstart: "All Cornell students will have moments when they can identify with elements of Zoolander's plight. Moments when, after years of unrelenting success, they face an unexpected setback or a loss."

Cornell students, like Zoolander, may be forced to reflect on who they are and realize they have "a lot of things to ponder." In that quest, Lehman suggested, they should cast aside what many have internalized -- the norm of "respectful disengagement," that is, "treating points of disagreement -- about politics or religion or culture -- as points of potentially unpleasant conflict" and "declaring them to be mere matters of taste, where everyone's tastes are treated as equally legitimate." Rather, the aspiration at Cornell, he asserted, is respectful and "sustained engagement" with others, rather than respectful disengagement: "A willingness to stay engaged with problems and arguments, to keep pushing for a shared vocabulary and a shared understanding.

"And here you will discover one of Cornell's great strengths as a community," Lehman continued. "It doesn't take much work to search for a shared understanding with someone who is pretty much like you. But it takes real effort to search for a shared understanding with someone who is different."

To cope with conflicting arguments, Lehman suggested, students should master the "Zen-like ability to entertain two opposing ideas without irritable reaching after fact and reason." This quality, which Keats called "negative capability," allows one to test where an argument is both vulnerable and robust and experience the intellectual pleasure of grappling with its complexity. And just how to do that? "Relax your mind. Don't try to get closure too quickly. Put your brain into a state where both sides can coexist, and you will find yourself seeing ever more subtle, nuanced perspectives on the question," Lehman suggested. "We want you, as Cornellians, to have that kind of subtle, nuanced intellect -- the kind of intellect admired by Keats and displayed by Kafka, Shakespeare and Stiller."

But for students to gain the "full Cornell experience," Lehman offered a series of suggestions: Strike up a conversation with a stranger while you're on line; spend time pondering a work of true genius on campus (such as the first edition of Copernicus' master work On the Revolutions, a hand scroll by the painter Wu Li, or the synchrotron); try a new activity you're not very good at; "take at least one class a year that you are certain will never have any practical value for you"; participate in public service; and learn about Cornell's traditions -- "sing the alma mater and 'Davey,' eat far too much ice cream from Cornell Dairy, sleep out for hockey tickets and try to get the bear to talk."

And finally, he advised: "make choices and get involved. If you do, you will lose yourself in Cornell for four years. The time will fly by. And you will find yourself transformed -- ready whenever life gives you new things to ponder."

Also addressing the Barton Hall audience and welcoming new students were Erica Kagan '05 and Jackie Koppell '05, Student Assembly president and student-elected trustee, respectively, and the co-chairs of this year's Orientation Steering Committee, Asha Marathe '05 and Bryan Muldowney '05.

The full text of President Lehman's convocation address is available at: http://www.cornell.edu/president/speeches_2004_821.cfm.