you had me at change

Yesterday was my orientation for the new doctoral program, International Educational Development. My new department, International and Transcultural Studies, is part of Teachers College so many of the people in orientation with me were teachers there to begin a noble new study of education. Everyone was fresh faced and well rested, which is strange to see this time of year. In 12 months their skin will be tight from finals, work, and social fun.

The orientation speaker was Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Her presence through the introduction speeches made for a disorienting cap of an already too early, too rainy cold May morning. I sat in a balcony of a centuries old bi-level lecture hall looking directly down on a table that held the president of the college, the head of admissions, and the 4 foot 7, 80 year old Dr. Ruth.

She was striking in her acumen. Her talk was relevant, funny, and inspiring. She herself had studied at TC after New School. She had given a few lectures at Columbia's John Jay medical center on sex ed when an offer floated around school for a non-paying offer for a 15 minute/once-a-week local network show on sex ed. No one else was interested because it didn't pay so she said she decided to "float a little balloon" and take it. And that's how she became a Time Magazine notable person of the 20th century.

There were other great stories. She was only 11 when she was relocated to survive the Holocaust. Although she wasn't educated any further until adulthood, a very strong elementary-level foundational education provided her the ability to educate herself with any texts she could find. It's that experience that propelled her on to TC--the belief that an early education foundation is the most critical education experience of a person's life.

Before Dr. Ruth spoke Susan Fuhrman, TC President, spoke. She created a sense of history. She sited TC hero alums like John Dewey. Her message was that Columbia has been a cradle to beautiful, brave ideas for hundreds of years as it will for hundreds to come and we are taking our rightful places in that history. She spoke eloquently about the strong leadership the college is now providing the world with research in international development. She discussed a UNICEF pilot study across five Sub Saharan African countries, a secondary education model in Jordan, a curriculum project in India. She began her talk by welcoming us, the incoming students and commending us on sharing the value of changing the world. It was beautiful to see 500 new students showing up to/for change.

This week also marked the anniversary of my last meeting at Rice. My old department chair was so offended by my altruistic desires; that my motivation in academia was to change the world. His feelings were professionally couched in terms of applied versus theoretical research, but this argument is crumbling from under his toes in the discipline. I think I represented all of that pedagogical [r]evolution to him. Once he asked how I could measure that my research improved women's lives, meaning any measure was culturally suspect. I was hurt by the insinuation of Orientalism and told him I would use living or dead as a bottom line measure. He hated the word empowerment.

The experience taught me to locate myself where my work can stand on its own. That's a hard lesson for me--to stop talking my way into the side doors. When President Fuhrman welcomed an academic class who was collectively and passionately devoted to changing the world, I knew I have arrived at a better place for me, my aspirations, my research. Even if it took two years.