500th Convocation celebrates spirit of open inquiry
Some in the audience at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel were students and new faculty who are still getting a feel for the University, some were alumni with abiding connections to the place, and some were staff members or emeritus faculty who have been here for decades.
But all of those who attended the 500th Convocation ceremony on Friday came to celebrate a distinctive brand of open inquiry—what one speaker described as “the genius of the founding of this University.”
The celebration took many forms, including a traditional 10-bagpipe ensemble that helped brighten the drizzly morning as robed faculty walked to Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. More than anything, though, the day was a celebration of ideas.
University’s Revolutionary Beginnings
It was also a reminder that the free, independent style of scholarship that now seems so natural at the University was still a revolutionary idea at the time of the first Convocation in 1893. President Robert Zimmer’s address described the University’s founding principles as “a bold and imaginative experiment,” rooted in the idea that students should be taught to think, not simply to master a craft, and that teaching and research should be integrated at all levels.
“The founding of the University of Chicago had a profound effect on American higher education,” Zimmer said. He said many of the University’s principles became so widely adopted that they are now the foundation for schools around the world, including the idea that “we are open to all people and all perspectives that can stand the scrutiny of argument.”
“By comparison to the other great world universities, we are relatively young at 117,” said Andrew Alper, Chairman of the University Board of Trustees. “We are however ambitious, uncompromising, and highly relevant.”
Some audience members were hearing the story of the University’s role for the first time. For new faculty such as Daniel Desormeaux, Associate Professor in Romantic Languages & Literatures and the College, it was a chance to get acquainted with the University’s intellectual values and sense of community.
“This is a great way for me to start,” said Desormeaux, who received his doctorate from Emory University but said he had never attended an academic event quite like this one. “There aren’t many chances for everyone at a university to get together like this, so it’s a very valuable moment.”
Many attendees were buzzing before the ceremony about news around campus, including the surprise announcement that President Barack Obama, a former Senior Lecturer in the Law School, had just won the Nobel Peace Prize. The news was a reminder to Michael Ilagan, AB’88, of how ideas honed in Hyde Park can affect the world.
“This is an institution that stands for something,” said Ilagan, who works in private equity and is a member of the Alumni Board of Governors. “It’s about having the freedom to question, and the freedom to pursue your ideas.”
‘A Home for Scholars’
One of the distinctive elements of Convocation has always been the granting of honorary degrees “only for scholarship, not for other forms of accomplishment or celebrity,” Zimmer said. This year’s degree recipients covered a wide array of scholarly pursuits in statistics, South Asian poetry and religion, geology, and the physics of ultracold systems.
Such scholarship is worth praising not just for the solutions it finds, but for the worthwhile problems it identifies, said Martin Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, who delivered the convocation address.
“The University of Chicago has been home for scholars across the disciplines who pursue discovery by converging on problems,” Marty said. He offered the motto of Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher Charles B. Huggins—“Discovery is our business”—as a continuing inspiration for researchers in the sciences and humanities alike.
“Discovery can go on in all areas,” Marty said.
By Jeremy Manier
