November 3, 2023

Dear all,

First, I want to make sure that all of you saw this recent (Nov. 1^st) message from the President, issued in response to the crisis on the Middle East and its tentacles into our community: Affirming Support. The President’s messages, and other communications from senior administration, are posted in Campus Announcements. You have to scroll down to see them, but they are there.

Second, you also may be interested in the resolution passed at the most recent Board of Visitors meeting, tasking our community with revising the Faculty Handbook. I think it’s useful to read the resolution itself to understand the scope of the requested revisions.

Third, some announcements:

Don’t forget that the university is closed on Tuesday and there will be no classes. I have worries that someone might forget and wander into their empty classroom or lab and wonder why they’ve been abandoned. But you haven’t been! Everyone is off voting.
We have been working on a one-stop ~~shop~~ page for funding requests from faculty, including for programmatic and curricular ideas, as well as May seminars. Please take a look at this page, which also links to the Faculty Grant Fund (FGF) page. Please note that the next round of requests for FGF funding will be due on December 15. For more details, go to the FGF page.
Gerald Bullock and I met with the Advancement team on Monday to share some preliminary ideas for A&S campaign priorities. Thanks to all of you for putting thought into this, and to your Chairs and Directors for bringing those thoughts to more than one meeting. I have a very drafty document which I am happy to share with anyone who wants to see it, but this is just the beginning of the road, and it may turn out to be the road not taken (though we all know that is a very complicated and misleading poem, and perhaps he did take it after all). Anyway…
I am in the process of putting together a steering committee for the Future of Arts & Sciences. Stand by for an announcement. I hope to have the committee confirmed and to share a charging document by the end of next week.

In this broken world, I know that many of us are looking for moral certainty and for some way to ease our shared world through this darkness into some kind of light. Many of you have expressed anxiety about the wellbeing of students and of colleagues, and I thank you for that. There is no way anything I could say about the world geopolitical situation would be of any interest or use, but here is what I keep thinking about.

My colleague Deborah Morse drew my attention long ago to a passage in a novel we both read and teach, He Knew He Was Right, by Anthony Trollope (1869). A man is thinking about marrying the woman he loves. He wonders what it will be like to be with her through the inevitable wear and tear of age. “Was love to lead only to this,—a dull life, with a woman who had lost the beauty from her cheeks, and the gloss from her hair, and the music from her voice, and the fire from her eye, and the grace from her step, and whose waist an arm should no longer be able to span?” Leaving aside the gender politics of this sentence (if you can), let’s focus on what comes next. He starts to realize that he has got it all wrong. I leave you with this: “The beauty of it all was not so much in the thing loved as in the loving.” That seems like one good way to live.

Apologies if this feels sentimental.

Suzanne

Suzanne Raitt
Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Chancellor Professor of English
Pronouns: she/her/hers