Louise Henn Feroe '68
LOUISE HENN FEROE: Thank you so much for this honor. It is a peculiar honor and a wonderful one to be recognized by one's peers. And even better to be honored by the family. Wheaton today feels like a family celebration. And it is the Wheaton family that taught me much about life and what things are important.
Education, by that I mean the process of teaching and learning, the real university, as your class president talked about, is really the foundation of our society or of any society. It matters who we choose to teach, it matters how we choose to teach, it matters to whom we take this service, and it matters when and where we teach.
America as a participatory democracy is built on the assumption of universal education. And to the extent that we have lived up to that promise, we are successful as a democratic society. We have done better and we have done worse over the years. And we have enjoyed the fruits of the education we have provided, and we've suffered the consequences when we haven't kept our promise. But Wheaton is a keeper of that promise.
I have spent my career in higher education administration, lately as the president of Mercy College in New York. And I have done that because I believe it is the most important activity in which I could be engaged. Let me explain to you why that is.
It's not just because I was reticent to leave school. Historically, higher education is where our young people have learned to be disinterested observers. It is the place where we all learn over and over again that our opinions are less powerful than our ability to defend those opinions using reason. It is where our perspectives about the world and what is important are radically enlarged. It is where we learn certainly not just content, it is where we learn to discern, where we learn to think and engage with people who have radically different world views from our own.
That's what I learned at Wheaton, that's what I learned when I walked in to prison, and that is what should be made available to every student who pursues higher education. It's been an exciting venue for a career and a privilege to work on the who, what, where, when, and how of higher education.
We at Mercy redrew the line for who should go to college; age, preparation, income, class, we debated the curriculum on the highest level, even as recently as this past year when faculty had a spirited debate, as only college faculty can have, about what the general education curriculum should look like. We redrew the lines of where this education should take place. Should it be in the halls of ivy, or in your neighborhood, or should it be in cyberspace?
We expanded the "when" of education. We have more students in class at six o‚clock at night than we do during the day. And we expanded the "how." We've been an arena for serious discussion of pedagogical strategies at levels of higher education for many years, and Mercy is proud to be called a teaching college.
Being an educator, as you can tell, has mattered to me profoundly. It also matters to our students, it matters to you, our community, of course to the world. This endeavor is never a lonely job, because it is always the product of community, hence the name college, collegium. All of you here are members of that collegium, the community of teachers and learners. As such, you are the keepers of the future.
So this is, you can see, a very special honor for me today to be recognized by Wheaton College, my alma mater and a community of teachers and learners. I will carry your honor with me and continue to depend on the commitment and hard work of this community to constantly expand the definitions of who can learn, and to constantly enlarge the definition of what is good teaching, because our existence as a free society depends on it. Thank you all.