As we head back to campus, we see the unfolding of a grand experiment that will influence the future of higher education and the generation that is forming itself through an unprecedented college pandemic experience. I await with great anticipation what our students will make of it, especially at a time when we see our civic lives through new eyes.
There is much uncertainty ahead, but Indiana University has been planning and preparing so thoroughly that I am looking forward to what will certainly be an academic year like no other, one in which we will learn quite a bit if we open ourselves to discovery.
As we engage online, in-person, and in hybrid formats, we are prepared to be nimble and attuned to the evolving science of the virus, its spread, and the various responses to it that are readjusting our social, economic, and cultural understandings.
Philanthropy will play a key role, including the many ways our research finds how donors and volunteers are stepping up to help. There is strength and hope in generosity. There is a wonderful power in looking at what you have to contribute in times of distress.
I think our emerging generations are brimming with such expectations that they and the institutions that make up the world should exhibit such strength. This is what our alumnus Derrick Feldmann recently conveyed in our conversation about his new book on “the corporate social mind.”
Some commentators are worried that we have a youth generation obsessed with grievance. I would be worried if these complaints were being made at the point of a gun or in search of vengeance. But what I see is more the kinds of grievance we read of in the Declaration of Independence; charges of injustice advanced against positions and practices that have become sites of permanent and unfair advantage in society. And our aggrieved are not waiting to be rescued; they are doing something about it. Consider, for example, the youthful organizers for the Movement for Black Lives.
As we reconvene here in Indiana and around the country, we have new material to test our most cherished personal and communal commitments. New York University’s professor Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that the true face of freedom wears a mask, and this is only suggestive of the interpretive work our community will do to make sense of the pandemic and what it reveals.
We are right to focus on classes and whether they will be delivered in synchronous or asynchronous formats, how socially distant face-to-face classes will function with face coverings, work to arrange virtual internship experiences, hold intensive faculty office hours at a distance, and encourage as much innovative community building as can be mediated by virtual means.
And even though some aspects of the “co-curriculum” will be able to migrate online, most extracurricular activities that rely on close physical proximity will be put on hold. We will learn how much we miss and value them when we emerge from the pandemic. And as with so much else, the pandemic will lay bare more about the value of these activities and how they should resume in the aftermath.
We are continuing to welcome leading practitioners to join us for vital discussions that are open to all. Helene Gayle from the Chicago Community Trust and Fay Twersky from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation join us this month, and Brian Gallagher of United Way is on deck for September.
Our campuses have been some of the most long-standing institutions in our country, and some people expect campuses to reproduce similar experiences for generations of students, or at least to weave threads of coherent continuity that can bind us across generations. Many of our campuses arose because of community or individual philanthropy, entrusting future generations with the legacies of what they had to give the world.
Yet, enshrining one’s legacy without opening it to tomorrow’s needs can be an elusive quest. Just as there is remembrance, there is loss and forgetting, and reinterpretation and recreation to suit evolving circumstances. The best one can do is to articulate values that will be taken up by the next generation and trust that one has done good work to prepare them for the challenges they will face.
In this process, learning with them and interpreting what shared values mean in contemporary circumstances is a wonderful way of getting a glimpse into how one’s actual legacy might be carried into the future. Generous engagement with youthful ferment is an alternative I much prefer to disengaged resistance that dismisses novel learnings and challenging interpretations of once venerated histories.
The easy dismissals we hear too often promise to bring back another echo from the civic upheavals of the past century; the generation gap. Maybe the lack of generational dialogue then has something to do with the fact that we are now revisiting issues that were pushed into dormancy for too many of us.
So, we are back to campus as we wonder how civic roles will emerge in the pandemic context, with faces seen on screens or covered by masks in person. This is where our youth are learning how we got here and deciding where they want to go.
We at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy are fortunate to be living an experiment that focuses on the giving sentiment that seems to play a positive role connecting generations, in weaving together the institutions that make venerated principles and values comprehensible across multiple generations. But beyond that I feel fortunate to be on a campus in whatever formats it manifests itself; to be involved with the next generation as it makes the legacies we carry forward their own.
As I consider the nearly 4,000 college campuses in our country I marvel at the plurality of experience we will see, and yet we still have a common language to listen to each other across this difference, if we choose to engage it with generosity.
At a time when our sources of civic information and news are reduced to a polarized, national sameness and local news sources disappear, our campuses may serve as anchors for local communities to find ways of being generous with differing interpretations of our legacies at the same time as we wrestle with how to support emerging generations as they take them forward.
At our school, a group of doctoral students is leading us in developing a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee to help us work to become anti-racist and to make sure that we engage issues of inclusion as a community, beyond the current institutional commitments that may be inadequate to the moment.
It is something we are embracing as an opportunity for discovery, confident that generous listening will allow each and every one to feel fully embraced by our community with the anticipation that it will help those who follow us thrive and become even more of what we hope for them.
Best regards,
Amir Pasic
Eugene R. Tempel Dean
The next step up the fundraising pyramid: major gifts. I took this course in-person for three days (it’s six weeks online), but again, it was a full three days. We talked about organizational readiness, the fundraising cycle, the extreme importance (this is emphasized in all classes, btw) of identification, qualification, cultivation, and stewardship, and meeting the donor where she or he is.