The Inauguration of
President Selma Botman

  • Saturday, April 25, 2009

president Botman's Inauguration Speech

Listen to President Botman present her Inauguration speech

This is a joyous day for me.  Let me begin by thanking Joe Wishcamper, Chair of the University of Maine System Board of Trustees—indeed all of the Trustees—and Chancellor Rich Pattenaude for giving me this opportunity to lead the University of Southern Maine. Rich, it is especially gratifying to have been given this responsibility by the person who led USM for 16 years and presided over its evolution from a modest comprehensive university to a distinctive and ambitious institution.  I pledge my best efforts to USM. 

I would also like to take a moment to recognize some very special people. Thank you, Annie Finch—USM faculty member, accomplished poet, and acclaimed teacher—for your artistry, originality, and generosity of spirit. You are an inspiration and a USM treasure.

The music for this event showcases USM’s music students, faculty, and community members. I am so proud of this gifted group of people. Thank you for sharing your talents with us on this happy day!

I am particularly fortunate to have the unqualified support and love of my family who are here today: 

-my wonderful mother-in-law Agnes Birmingham, who is something of a poet in her own right; my remarkable educator, sister-in-law, and friend Nancy Birmingham;

-my beloved mother Gertrude Botman who, along with my father, impressed on me the importance of education and its formidable power to transform my life;

-my cherished daughters, Erica and Megan, who each and every day give me unbounded pleasure, and who have grown into wonderfully independent, highly educated, ambitious young women in their own right; and

-my husband Tom Birmingham, my childhood sweetheart, my true partner in all of my endeavors across many, many years. You are the love of my life.

Thank you all.

I am also so very delighted to see friends and colleagues from both my personal life and my career in higher education.  Thank you for sharing this day with me: my dear friends from Chelsea, Massachusetts; my colleagues from Holy Cross College, the University of Massachusetts, The City University of New York, and those of you from across the great state of Maine and from higher education institutions beyond. Your being here today means so much to me!

My investiture is not only an occasion to celebrate USM’s faculty, staff, and students but also an opportunity to articulate our hopes and dreams for the future. In that spirit I am delighted to announce a $1 million gift from the Bernard Osher Foundation for the endowment of the Osher Reentry Scholarships at USM. These scholarships will allow adults who have been out of school for at least five years to resume their studies and to earn baccalaureate degrees. I am deeply grateful to the Bernard Osher Foundation for this welcome affirmation of USM’s mission and the Foundation’s recognition of the academic aspirations of adults who have deferred their dreams of a college education. What a joyous note for this occasion!

In the months since I arrived at USM, I have been moved by the deep commitment of USM’s  faculty and staff, their dedication, and their abiding pride in this university. I also must recognize the level of support for USM from the larger community, from people who are very often not alumni but who believe simply and unequivocally in the importance and promise of our university.

From the perspective of the grand sweep of history, the University of Southern Maine is part of our national expansion of higher educational opportunity, from first-generation college students just like I was years ago in Chelsea, to new immigrants, to working adults, and to learners of every age and background who are motivated by hard work, by dreams of a better life, and by their aspirations for personal success. USM plays a proud role in what must continue to be an American commitment to the expansion of higher education’s reach and influence.

As Americans we can be proud that the cultural and social history of the United States has been marked by the advance of higher education: from the sole privilege of men it has become an opportunity belonging to the many.  Colleges and universities have gone from being training grounds for society’s elite to a transformative educational experience owned by women and men of every social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion.

I marvel at the degree to which American society has opened itself so far beyond what our Founding Fathers could ever have imagined. In fact, many of us present today would not be in attendance but for the vast democratization of higher education over the last two hundred years. Like Walt Whitman, we “sing the Body electric,” with voices raised from the middle and working classes, from women, from the many races that have peopled America, and from its teeming immigrants who make our country their home. In other words, American society and our culture are simply unthinkable outside the advance of higher education and its transformative impact on generation after generation of newly empowered students.

That transformation provides the best evidence that I can think of for student success. However, for first-generation college students the path to success is by no means clear. When I was an undergraduate, I had the good fortune to be taught by a psychology professor who ended up changing my life. She was a remarkable teacher—professionally successful, intellectually talented, and tremendously accomplished—and she believed in her students. She believed in me.

I saw in her someone I wanted to be, and she became a powerful role model, someone who inspired me, someone whom I could emulate.

After the wonderful experience I had with that psychology professor, I was inspired to go on to graduate school in England where, once again, I had the good fortune of another life-changing academic mentorship. My Middle East professor, the doyenne of Middle Eastern history for his generation, impressed on me the value of respecting people who were different from me. From the conflict and chaos of the Middle East he invariably extracted civility and reason.

However, there was something more profound that I gained from that mentorship. I was a motivated young graduate student with a very definite interpretation of Egyptian politics.  When I communicated my analysis of early and mid-20th century Egyptian society to him, to my surprise he declared authoritatively that I had hit upon a whole new way of thinking about the topic, and that my point of view had never occurred to him.

As I remember him with fondness and reverence, I honestly do not know whether he was behaving like a skilled teacher and encouraging my budding scholarship, or whether I had really offered him something new.  But I recall leaving that meeting with a sense of profound satisfaction and with the belief that learning was reciprocal. I had my first exchange of knowledge with someone from whom I had learned so much, but to whom I may also have taught something.

People have heard me talk repeatedly about the importance of student success, but what I am relating here is how deeply and personally I was affected by my teachers, by professors who gave me the clear sense that I was a worthy student, a promising teacher, and someone who could aspire to generating and communicating knowledge itself. I experienced, firsthand, that teachers change lives, build confidence, and shape futures.

Those of us privileged to have benefitted in that way from a professor can never forget, or minimize, the impact. So when people say to me, “This period of economic distress must be a dreadful time to be a new university president,” I think of the 10,000 students at USM who depend upon me and all of us in this academic community to make good choices, to inspire them, to help them believe in themselves.   Our students, who intuitively understand that USM is essential to their aspirations for a better life, remind me of my younger self, inspire me, and awaken a level of optimism and intellectual engagement that makes my work at USM a joy.

Ironically, at a time when our nation and this state need more associate, baccalaureate and graduate degree holders than ever before to remain competitive in the global marketplace of the 21st century, all of us in higher education— whether public or private—are facing unprecedented pressures to do more with less.  Daunting? Yes, but the education and training we provide not only improves individual lives and families, but also enhances whole communities, workplaces, and in the end our society as a whole. Consequently, we roll up our sleeves and simply go on with our work because what we do matters, and because our hearts and souls as educators make no other choice possible.

Consumed as many of us are by the sometimes sysiphisian struggles of the moment, as educators we draw inspiration from the linkage of higher education to the democratic process.  Our society’s survival depends upon an informed, knowledgeable citizenry that practices tolerance and respect, that values the liberties that Americans cherish. We must never fail to recognize the potential inherent in our students and the role of faculty to advance our society and nourish our democracy. At its core American higher education enlarges opportunities for freedom, as that thought-provoking philosopher of education Maxine Green reminds us, through “the capacity to surpass the given and look at things as if they could be otherwise.”  We can rightfully take pride in our efforts to sustain the promise of higher education and to renew its potential in this new century, for if democracy is forever in the making, it is also forever incomplete.

We are engaged in perhaps our generation’s most important obligation to history: to leave this world a better place than we found it. I am convinced that our work in higher education does just that when we do it with heart, conviction, and integrity.

I look at the University of Southern Maine and see the promise of a community passionately devoted to educating the future lawyers, nurses, engineers, scientists, teachers, accountants, businessmen and women, managers, artists, musicians, and public servants of Maine. I see a university treasured by its community, responsive to the community’s needs, and poised to furnish Maine and the nation with the talent and brains they require. I see USM’s potential for greatness.

One of the great historians of higher education, Richard Hofstadter, advanced the idea that the university was the “intellectual and spiritual balance wheel” of modern civilization.  Just as the swing of a clock’s balance wheel allows the forward movement of its hands, the give-and-take of a university’s intellectual life propels society’s advance while keeping it both honest and honorable.

That’s why I feel so deeply privileged to be entrusted with the leadership of this wonderful university at a moment of great trial, but even greater possibility. Today, I make a sincere commitment to the future of USM, and I ask each member of the USM community to renew your covenant as well. The work ahead of us will only succeed if each of us takes it as a personal responsibility, if each of us discovers what we can offer and applies it with heartfelt commitment. Working together we are capable of truly great things, and I, for one, am impatient to get on with the task.

USM stands at a crossroad. The diverging paths—the choice between the comfortable, the familiar, or the way that hasn’t yet been tried—will take us in very different directions, each promising very different adventures. As in Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, we have a choice between the known and unknown. It’s time for us to choose a road for our journey together, and I want us to look back some day and be able to describe this moment in USM’s history as Frost does in his poem:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Where will USM be at the end of that road? I can’t yet know. That is what is so exciting about journeys. They challenge us, test our faith, and exact a toll, but they also give us insight into ourselves, our values, and our aspirations.

The 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic Farid Ud-Din Attar described this process in his masterpiece the Conference of the Birds. The birds embark on an arduous journey to find their leader, but in the process come to understand that what they seek is within themselves. As fellow travelers here at USM we may have our doubts, but in the end we will also have the privilege of understanding better who we are and what this remarkable university has the potential to become. I invite you to join me on that journey. It’s time for us to discover together who we are.

 

back to The Order of Exercises