Convocation 2002
Presented by Judith Swift
Professor of Communication Studies/Theatre
University of Rhode Island


President Carothers, Provost Swan, Governors Smith, and DiPetrillo; Secretary of State Inman, Commissioner Warner, President of the URI Foundation Pendergast, Executive Director Coleman, President of the Faculty Senate Arakelian, Professor Annas, honored guests, faculty, staff, students, fellow excellence award winners and my functional family.

I must confess that being a winner is nothing new to me. In fact, people have frequently blurted "you're a real winner" in my direction. Today it appears that the epithet is offered in the best sense of the word. I share the honors this year with a distinguished trio, Kim Bissonette, Eileen Tierney and Alain-Phillipe Durand. That alone is humbling. In addition, the roster of previous winners of the Scholarly Excellence Award had convinced me that I would be best served by accepting this and then maintaining a shroud of inscrutable silence. I'd have the award and people would assume I was simply engaged in higher thought. But the President and Provost blew my cover by asking me to speak. So, for the sake of this exercise, I have indulged in the notion that I might have something worth saying.

Among you I see many exceptional scholars and researchers. You already know how to tread the path of scholarship and why you chose it. So I am speaking to our students for I feel more akin to you in my approach to scholarship. I am a member of the academic community for a couple of reasons. One, I get to buy new shoes every September and two, I am encouraged and even paid to be curious-in every sense of the word. Curiosity is my watchword. Every day I bait my intellectual tackle and go fishing to see what I catch. Now, I am in the arts and have earned a "Get Out of Jail Free" card in the humanities, so I have artistic license which means I can drive down roads of the imagination to unknown destinies. I have the freedom to never reach the port of call. I only need report on the journey. My fishing grounds are bountiful and endless unlike those of the natural world. Not so with scientists who are often limited by what's in season and catch limits better known as a request for proposals from the National Science Foundation. Artists can fish whenever they get inspired to cast a line. Artists have the freedom of Huck Finn and like Huck, are sorely burdened by troubles too. Artists worry trouble like a man with a toothache who can't stop touching the painful molar with his tongue. Trouble: In aqua turbida piscatur uberius or as my grandmother, not being Roman, used to say, "It's good fishin' in troubled waters." For that's what artists do. When something is too ugly or frightening or morbidly odd, we photograph it like Diane Arbus. When someone is suffering, we write a play about that misery. Consider: Arthur Miller's Willy Loman died at his own hand because he was a fellow human in pain and attention must be paid; Bob Dylan fanned the flames of protest with a simple ballad, Blowin' in the Wind; Sophocles penned Oedipus Rex thereby giving mothers a bad name as well as Freud and his followers fodder for decades of sexual confusion. Michelangelo sculpted the Pieta and captured the essence of exquisite agony. Bruce Springsteen created a fitting tribute to 9-11 with the simplicity of a haunting song, "You're Missin'."

Artists are driven, even obsessed to capture what they see, what they perceive. For them it is a truth if not the truth, a truth expressed through trust in the imagination to capture reality at some subliminal level-maybe even at a place as primal as our limbic system where our senses and needs run the show. But the key word here for all of us is imagination.

Unfortunately, imagination is a thing in our society which goes from being cute in toddlers to the target of budget cuts in K through 12. What is almost without fail cut first in schools? The arts. Consider this: How many artists speak proudly of doing well in school? Most were dismal failures in the traditional learning model. Moreover, school as most of us knew it was anathema to imagination because facts were king. But never fear. If you survive the rigors of formal education with your imagination in tact, you could go on to win a Pulitzer, an Oscar, or an Emmy. More importantly, however, ask this? Is imagination the territorial imperative of artists? Absolutely not. Imagination and the nurturing of same is critical to the work of any scholar be she an engineer or he a bioethicist. I was once talking to a colleague who commented that he could never do what I do-conceive, write or direct plays- because he was a physicist and did not have the artist's imagination. " Isn't your research in subatomic particles says I? Of course I knew he journeyed regularly to the mythical blue pool of the reactor on the Bay campus to do his research. "Yes, I do," says he, brightening at the thought of those photons and quarks and gravitons. "Have you ever seen one says I?" A stumped physicist is a thing of beauty. Case closed.

Imagination is the stuff of dreams, of inspiration, of risk, and, yes, of failure. But without it, we are never fully human. We cannot conceive of our past, analyze our present or prophesy our future.

As any good academic, I will prove my case by quoting others:

Albert Einstein: I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Emily Dickinson: The possible's slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.

John Keats: I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

William Butler Yeats: People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. And Yeats recognized this before right and left brain theory.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And last but always yeast… Mark Twain: You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

The imagination is an insatiable beast. It must be fed. My imagination got the mental version of a Big Mac when I was a little kid. I had polio and was quarantined in a hospital for many weeks. Even the health workers avoided coming in as much as possible. A sad tale? Not really. I had books that took me more places than real life ever could. I had intellectual frequent flyer miles. And I had the Venetian blind people -little tiny folks-who walked their dogs and played with their kids on the slats of the blinds in my room. You see, I had my imagination so I was never alone. So when you leave here, have the chutzpah to lie on the ground and imagine what creatures you see in the clouds. Feed your imagination and your mind will never go hungry.

Where to find the buffet? For starters, run, do not walk every Tuesday night to the Honors Colloquium: "Genetic Technology and Public Policy in the New Millennium." Imagine technology that can obliterate disease, feed billions, create pest resistant crops and give us lifespans of 150 years. Imagine people stacked up on our ailing planet like cordwood. Imagine what you will, but do it. And finally-the word we all wait for in speeches-thank you to the URI Foundation and my colleagues for imagining me as one to be so honored.