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Barbara Jordan Keynote Address National Association of Student Personnel Administrators March 24, 1994 Dallas "Orchestrating Our Own Renaissance: Culture, Collaboration and Technology" That is your theme. Orchestrating our own Renaissance; Culture, Collaboration and Technology. My first reaction was, that is a very ambitious theme! Orchestrate-Compose; arrange. Our-relating to us. No alienation here. Us-Our. Own-Redundant-Still talking about us. Renaissance-Rebirth or revival Culture-Particular form Collaboration-Work jointly with others. A step out of the isolation booth and into community. Technology-Applied Science. A step away from the theoretical and closer to the reality. The real. I call this theme ambitious because it demonstrates a refusal by you to become prisoners of modernity or cowards in the face of the challenge of change. Your theme represents the moral equivalent of giving the future-"the finger." You are in control of you in an environment which demands the best of your instincts and a Solomon like cast for your judgment. You are the first door keeper encountered by the young as he/she takes that first step on the road to adult status. The warmth and security of home and neighborhood are suddenly no longer there and you are the head of this new family of strangers and it is expected that you will spark the creation of a sensible, sensitive, coherent and cohesive community of young adults. The expectations placed on you are tremendous. You are to be austere at a time when the knowledge you and your faculties are to disseminate is expanding exponentially. With help from you and the faculty, your students are expected to be prepared to compete in a global economy. You must foster freedom of thought and expression while preventing harassment of any form in an increasingly sensitive environment whose watch words are "political correctness." Students face pressures. The minds of young people are torn and pulled by the same forces that tug at all young people in that 17 to early 20s age group. I am lucky. I am not young and I teach and learn with graduate students who have-more or less-weathered the storms of their undergraduate years and have a better sense of the directions of their lives. You must deal with every crisis from homesickness to intellectual awakening-and many in between. While your task is a daunting one, it is an important one-both to the individual student and to the larger community into which you are helping them evolve. The most important sub-set of value issues following your theme is justice and human rights. Those twin virtues form the indispensable base from which the rest of your deliberations will emanate. Justice and human rights. What is justice? Justice is fairness. John Rawls says that justice is the first virtue of all human institutions. There is no need to get too entangled in rhetoric or philosophy to have a
