Westacott delivers opening convocation address 8/23/07
During Thursday's Opening Convocation, Alfred University Philosophy Professor Emrys Westacott posed a moral dilemma to more than 600 first-year and transfer students who arrived on campus for the start of the 172nd academic year.What would you do, he asked, if your professor asked you to tell who had hacked into a computer to get the questions that were going to be on that day's quiz? Knowing that your roommate and friends were involved, would you tell?In "Between Loyalties and Ideals," Westacott explored what it means to be part of a community, particularly a community like Alfred University."An enlightened community is one that doesn't subjugate the individual to the group but seeks the right sort of balance between individual and collective well-being. So it tolerates difference, welcomes criticism, and strives after self-improvement. It also recognizes the legitimate claims of other communities that exist alongside it or that may even encompass it. "That, certainly, is the sort of community that Alfred University tries to be;
and the university has a distinguished record of championing enlightened ideals. It was one of the first co-educational colleges in the country and admitted native American and African-American students in the 1840s and 1850s when educational opportunities for minorities were hard to come by. This is a community that prior to the civil war was strongly abolitionistFrederick Douglass spoke here twice in the 1850s and was warmly received. And at the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, every graduating male student immediately signed up in the union army. This is an institution that was in the forefront of the struggle for women's suffrage."As thousands of alumni can testify, Alfred University has always inspired a very strong sense of allegiance among those who belong to it. But it is the mark of an
enlightened institutionand this is true whether we're talking about a club or a company, a college or a countrythat while it values the loyalty of its members, it does not want that loyalty to be blind; it wants it to be deserved. Today you join this community, our community. And part of the responsibility you take on in joining us is to help make us that kind of institution."
