Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Maxwell family and friends of the School. I’m delighted to see you all here today, and I’m particularly delighted to see the number of faces in this audience from the larger University community, since this is my one chance to express my gratitude to that community as a whole.

Last night we had a thank-you dinner for our Advisory Board members, who have done so much to further the interests of the School; and later this spring we will have a picnic for all of Maxwell. But today we have with us a number of people who, while not terribly visible within the Maxwell family, have made my administrative life immensely easier and more pleasurable over the last 15 years. I’m talking about people like Ginny Denton, who translated our physical space aspirations into such a glorious reality; people like David Rubin, with whom I’ve had the good fortune of making common academic cause for 13 of those 15 years; and people like John Hogan, the University’s budget director, who helped me squirrel away money that, to this day, Chancellor Shaw still cannot find. Syracuse University is, in my experience of large institutions, a remarkably collegial one, and not the least among my regrets at leaving the deanship is losing the easy, day-to-day interactions with such colleagues. Thank you all so very much.

Now, on the subject of the message I want to leave with you, I have been instructed by those who purport to know about such things—namely, Bob McClure and my wife—that a farewell address should contain an admonition—a kind of parting spell that would give the whole enterprise some form of protection in your absence. And when I hopefully suggested that wouldn’t “entangling alliances” or the “military/industrial complex” serve the purpose, I was told, “No.” It had to be something more contemporary—though, God knows, those two admonitions still seem frighteningly contemporary to me.

And then the Sunday New York Times (bless its heart) stepped up to the plate—as it so often does—with a very contemporary admonition: “Beware of unreal loyalties.” This came with the Review of Books, which contained a kind of Virginia Woolf retrospective that, thanks to the popularity of the movie The Hours, is very contemporary indeed. Here’s the quote:

Asked what kind of freedom would advance the fight against fascism and its enduring allies, racism, colonialism and sexism, [Woolf] replied: “Freedom from unreal loyalties. . . . You must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place, also of religious pride, college pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them.”

I read this and I thought, in kid vernacular, “Whoa.” That seems so spectacularly and ecumenically wrong-headed—she manages to hit just about every allegiance one could possibly feel—that I concluded I needed to parse the sentence more closely.

Maybe by pride she meant pride in the biblical sense, as in the most deadly of the deadly sins, the one that in modern parlance would translate into bigotry, a puffed up sense of one’s own worth in comparison with others of less privileged station. The word pride, after all, in its long etymological history, has come to mean some very different things. But then, I thought again: She’s a writer. Her currency is words. She must mean what she says. In biblical parlance, pride was the worst of sins because it closed one’s ears to the voice of God; or, if one wasn’t open to that voice, the voices of the prophets; or, if one couldn’t even hear those, the voices of one’s family and community. But she seems to be telling us to close our ears to every conceivable outside voice that might lay claim to our allegiance—except, possibly, her own. In other words, she seems to be committing the sin of pride in its contemporary intellectual form—which is to say, she seems to be arguing that “only ideas matter” and that “my ideas matter most of all.”

So, as admonitions go, I think I’ve arrived at the right one for an academic audience: “Beware of people telling you to beware of ‘unreal loyalties’.” People in the academic world are so quick to be critical, so enamored of the ironic voice, so distrustful of tradition, so fervent in the advancement of their ideas, that they often fail to hear the voices of people like me, who end up saying “Whoa: let’s parse that sentence. Do you really mean that?” To a person who deals pretty much exclusively in ideas, all loyalties may come to seem unreal, but to a person like me—entrusted with the care of an institution—loyalty may come to seem a pretty important, maybe even a paramount, virtue.

Thus far, I think I am just restating in a more personal vein a theme that I touched on in my inaugural address many years ago. Then, I referred to the inevitable “tension between the responsibilities of the University for the generation and transmission of knowledge and the responsibilities of the larger community, of which the University is a part, for the conduct of worldly affairs.” Now, I am referring to the working out of that tension—the tension between needing to know and having to act—within each of us as individuals. Here I felt myself on firmer ground in parsing Virginia Woolf’s lines, because real loyalty—whatever she might mean by unreal loyalty—was very much on my mind.

A few weeks ago I had a video encounter with my younger self—the self I was around the time I came here. I was at a memorial service for Michael Sawyer, one of Maxwell’s faculty giants, and after the service, as part of the reception, they showed a videotape, in the lovely, refurbished Maxwell Auditorium, of Mike’s last class, which included a series of tributes at the end. There on the video—which also was set in the (then unrefurbished) auditorium—were gathered some other Maxwell giants: Don Meiklejohn, Spencer Parratt, and Roy Price, who have since passed on. And there were some still with us, like Ralph Ketcham.

And there was I, certainly no giant, but looking sprier, hairier, and altogether more “technicolor”—that is, less grey—than I currently find myself to be. It was a poignant moment in a day of poignant moments: so much change, so much continuity. I found myself overwhelmed by gratitude that, for the past 15 years, I have been part of this community.

And that sense of gratitude, I concluded weeks later, was what I understood real loyalty to be. Maybe Virginia Woolf never had reason to feel that sense of gratitude, and so maybe that’s why all loyalties seemed unreal to her? Maybe it’s not an intellectual failure but an emotional impoverishment?

I don’t know. But I do know that institutions like the Maxwell School and the larger University of which we are a part are much more fragile than people like Virginia Woolf understood them to be. That is something that 15 years of administrating in a University has taught me.

I have in my home office an untitled file—which, were it to be titled, would read “matters which no administrator should ever have to deal with anywhere, but which in an academic environment will inevitably arrive on a dean’s desk.” In this file, I put the pieces of paper that cross my desk that no game plan could have prepared me to deal with—that I have dealt with, one way or another—but that, having dealt with them, still leave me scratching my head. These pieces of paper pertain to marital problems, to the disruptive effects of body odor on office morale, to the priorities for bathroom access, to the footage of space allotted to display of faculty books. All these diverse contentions are right here at work in this community that I’m extolling to you. To deal with them has required a lot of love and loyalty.

It’s no surprise, then, that I don’t find Virginia Woolf giving good counsel on matters of loyalty. I have taken my counsel, rather, from another, I think much better, writer, W.A. Auden, whom I’ve quoted on several previous public occasions. I want to repeat one of those quotes now, because I think Auden gives us a more eloquent rejoinder to Woolf than I could ever come up with (this from “The Sea and the Mirror,” a commentary on Shakespeare’s Tempest):

So, if you prosper, suspect those bright
Mornings when you whistle with a light
Heart. You are loved; you have never seen
The harbour so still, the park so green.
So many well-fed pigeons upon
Cupolas and triumphal arches.
So many stags and slender ladies
Beside the canals. Remember when
Your climate seems a permanent home
For marvelous creatures and great men,
What griefs and convulsions startled Rome,
Ecbatana, Babylon.
How narrow the space, how slight the chance
For civil pattern and importance . . .

Auden came to value, as I have also come to value, though by a very different route, “how narrow the space” and “slight the chance” there truly is “for civil pattern and importance.” And he came to value loyalty as having no small role in preserving that space and expanding the chance.

I don’t think that Virginia Woolf ever got that. I don’t think I will ever understand exactly what she meant by the lines I quoted earlier (and I will always fault her for not being as careful with words as Auden), but I will also always be indebted to her for inadvertently leading me—through my parsing of her words—to the conclusion I think appropriate to my term as Maxwell’s dean: You can have a A Room of One’s Own—the title of one of her books—or you can have a “seat at the table”—the Maxwell message—but you probably can’t have them both. And I’m so very grateful I got the latter.

Thank you all very much. 

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2003 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.