James A. Robinson
from the Macalester Public Knowledge Base
[edit] Writings
From a letter by President James A. Robinson to the Faculty, September 4, 1973:
“Beyond 1974-75 lies a decade of challenge to liberal arts colleges such as ours… These forebodings deserve to be taken seriously by all who are associated with Macalester. I certainly have worried about them and will continue to do so. We need to ask ourselves bluntly whether these poor tidings might just apply to us. I am persuaded, however, that we have the resources and the wit to overcome the challenge of the 1980’s. We have an endowment as large as any for a college as size between Chicago and the West Coast. I think it is fair to say that we are the major small liberal arts college located in an urban setting between Philadelphia and Portland. We have a faculty of distinction in the classroom, with variety in its curriculum, with ability in its scholarship and artistic expression. … Beyond our resources there is the need for what we have aspired to offer. I would like to close by trying to relate the liberal arts tradition to what I see to be the present and emerging societal context.
"One day this summer, the Board of Trustees met to consider a preliminary sketch of the Charter Year Campaign. This will be an ambitious undertaking, larger than the one we completed a year ago and will be undertaken in half the time allotted for the first one. It will be conducted simultaneously with other campaigns in the Twin Cities equally worthy and in an era of disillusion about the liberal arts. After hearing all the obstacles, one member spoke movingly about the value of what we aspire to. He asked how could anyone who reads the daily papers about Watergate and its associated scandals have any doubt about the continuing merit, indeed, need for an education that stresses wisdom as well as knowledge, moral leaderships as well as technical competence. I think he bespoke the best sentiments of Macalester, old as well as new.
"And yet there is still another and longer term need for what is distinctive about Macalester. It’s true that higher education as an enterprise is in a condition of distress, even depression. In large part this is because limits to growth are now impinging on America’s domestic life. And in foreign relations, we have reached the end of expansion. That is what the Vietnam settlement is about and the reapproachment with China and the ending of the Cold War with Russia. That is what higher food prices and a potential fuel shortage next winter are about.
"Not for 200 years have most people in this country known what it is to be on the defensive for a long period of time. The optimism of the last century and a half cannot be confirmed by expansion. We have entered perhaps a century of retreat. Our fellow countrymen, and our friends around the world, will need something other than materialism to satisfy and sustain them. They will need instead the inner strength that comes from individual and collective understanding of the liberating arts, of what Matthew Arnold called culture, the best that men and women have thought and done in every format of inquiry and expression.
"If I am right in this guess about the configuration of events that lies before us in the last quarter of this century, then there will be every reason for Macalester College to be as necessary and desirable a place as Charles Macalester thought it would become when 100 years ago last Tuesday, August 28, 1873, it was announced that he had given Edward Duffield Neill the first $100,000 of the College’s endowment. Having come thus far we are obligated to persevere in offering the best and most humanizing education of which we are capable. It is in this spirit that I am happy to greet all of you and to declare officially open the academic year 1973-74. We stand adjourned."
--Selection from pages 4 and 5 of "Tartan Topics" 9-7-73
