Yesterday, on my way into the Campus Center for lunch, a group of students sitting at a table called out to ask if I was registered to vote. I replied that I had already mailed in my ballot and received confirmation that it had arrived. The student group was not advocating for a candidate or a party, just participation in democracy. They gave me an “I voted” pin and asked me to wear it to encourage students to do the same.

Last weekend, as part of Family Weekend, Nick Clark, Professor of Political Science, presented a session entitled, “Understanding Why People Vote and What is Going to Happen in the 2022 and 2024 Elections.” Nick shared a range scholarship on reasons why people do or don’t vote, issues that affect participation in and outcomes of American elections, and historical election results across midterm and presidential elections during the past six decades.

There were many families in attendance. They were deeply engaged in the presentation, and as it ended, a number of them praised Nick for his clarity and his non-partisan approach. They were clearly relieved and surprised that he did not share his leanings or favor any side. He responded to the latter by indicating that this is the tradition of his discipline in the classroom.

I was momentarily surprised by their surprise, but then remembered how much the press and many politicians accuse the academy of indoctrination. There are correlations between educational attainment and voting patterns, but that has been true for at least a century, and it has shifted from one side to another. Our faculty and their colleagues around the country strive to give their students the tools to be informed citizens, and they encourage them to participate in democracy, but that’s where it generally stops.

Susquehanna University has been engaged in a concerted effort to increase student participation and engagement in elections. The table at the Campus Center is an example of those efforts. A co-curricular effort called “Achieve, Lead, Vote” was another. It was especially focused on promoting student voter participation in the 2020 election.

Recently, I received the NSLVE (National Survey of Learning, Voting, and Engagement) report from IDHE (Institute for Democracy and Higher Education), which is run out of Tufts University. This report collects voter participation data for institutions of higher education around the country and analyzes those data across time. They also disaggregate the data to help institutions strategize ways to continuously improve voter participation among their students, and by extrapolation, their alumni.

These efforts have helped increase voter registration and voting rates by students across higher education. In 2014, the national undergraduate voting rate was 18%, in 2018 it was 39%, and in 2020 it was 68%.

Historically, Susquehanna had trailed the national participation rate with only a 7% voting rate in 2014. This climbed to 28% in 2018, a significant improvement, but still well behind national numbers.

That changed in the 2020 election. We went from trailing to leading. 75% of SU students voted in the 2020 election. It is one of the most dramatic improvements in the nation. I am grateful for the work of my colleagues from the faculty and staff who have helped students meaningfully engage in the democratic process, and I am proud of our students for exercising one of the greatest privileges of citizenship.

National Banned Book Week began today.

Some of the most frequently banned books in American history include these classics:

• 1984 – George Orwell
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of books being challenged in this country. These complaints have called for books to be removed from curricula and from the shelves of school and public libraries.

In a recent press release, the American Library Association (ALA) announced:

Between January 1 and August 31, 2022, ALA documented 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources, and 1,651 unique titles were targeted. In 2021, ALA reported 729 attempts to censor library resources, targeting 1,597 books, which represented the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling these lists more than 20 years ago. 

Additionally, more than 70 percent of the 681 attempts to restrict library resources targeted multiple titles. In the past, the vast majority of challenges to library resources only sought to remove or restrict a single book. 

The ALA publishes lists of the most frequently challenged books each year. Here are some additional resources from the ALA office of Intellectual Freedom.

We each enjoy the right to read what we want and not to read what we do not. Banned Book Week is an opportunity to recognize that democratic privilege and to call us to action to protect those rights. On a daily basis, we see news of groups and individuals challenging these fundamental intellectual freedoms, and we must be vigilant.

This summer, I visited The Empty Library. It is a memorial created in 1995 by the Israeli sculptor, Micha Ullman. In the middle of a square in the middle of Humboldt University in Berlin, now known as Bebelplatz, this memorial consists of empty shelves that can be seen through an unmarked sheet of glass on the ground. These shelves represent more than 20,000 books burned by the Nazis on that site on 10 May 1933.

These books were pulled from the University library because of the backgrounds of the authors or because they were critical of aspects of society and history. Sound familiar?

At our campus memorial event for 9/11, I read this passage from Deuteronomy, 4:9:

“Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy son’s sons…”

Banned Books Week exists to be sure that we do not forget, that we do not repeat the sins of the past.

I encourage all of us to read books this week (and every week) that have been challenged or are being challenged, so we can better engage in conversations on the precious value of intellectual freedom and the freedom to read.

 We hosted opening convocation yesterday, welcoming 624 new students and their families to Susquehanna. Below is the message I shared with them.

Convocation Remarks

Convocation means to be called together – from vocare meaning voice. We are called together to signal your entry into the life of this university and to celebrate the beginning of your matriculation. It is an opportunity to declare a new beginning for all of us, to be drawn together with one voice to affirm what we are called to do.

Students you are beginning an extraordinary chapter in your lives, but in addition to your excitement, I know you are experiencing cognitive overload. This is a moment in your lives when you are likely experiencing the most concurrent change: a new community; a new role; soon to be new classmates, neighbors, and friends; will they like you, will you like them; a new academic experience with a different kind of faculty (you’ll soon discover how great they are) and a different set of academic responsibilities. For most of you, for the first time, home has just become a place different from where your family lives.

You are all hitting your limits of newness. You are probably also reaching your thresholds for the unfamiliar and different, and here I am in a pink velvet robe acting as if you will remember anything I say to you today.

In addition to formally welcoming you and signaling the beginning of Susquehanna’s 165^th academic year, I believe that this is an important occasion to affirm why you are here and to give you some basic, but critical advice on how to make the most of your college experience.

As many of you already know, Susquehanna’s mission statement is: We educate students for productive, creative, and reflective lives of achievement, leadership, and service in a diverse, dynamic, and interdependent world.

More succinctly, we help students to become better neighbors and better citizens. We are here to help you discover your best selves and to prepare you to live your lives most fully. Those are lofty goals, but I have the privilege seeing them fulfilled every day. The greatest rewards are reaped by the students who dive in deepest and are most present.

Every spring, seniors lament that their four years went by much too fast, and they scramble to make every possible remaining connection.

Life goes by faster and faster, and your college years especially will go by in the blink of an eye. It is an experience much like how almost 1300 years ago, the Venerable Bede described the passing of our lives in the kingdom of God. He wrote:

The present life of people here on earth (as a comparison to our uncertain lifetimes) is like a sparrow entering the house, and flying through swiftly, it enters one window and straightway flies out another, while we sit at dinner in wintertime…the room made warm by the fire kindled in our midst while all places outside are troubled by the raging tempests of winter rain and snow. For that moment, the sparrow feels not the winter storm, but after a brief moment in passes again from winter to winter and escapes our sight. So, our lives appear here for a brief season, and what precedes and follows we surely know not. ^[1]

You have the wonderful privilege to savor the comfort and luxury of that metaphorical warm banquet room. My fear is that you will miss out on truly life-changing relationships because of your own fear of missing out on superficial virtual engagements. You are all vastly interesting people, which means you are surrounded by vastly interesting people. You are in a beautiful place brimming over with opportunities. Put down your phones and revel in being here with each other. Dive in and make the most of your time here, because we need you to be enlightened and able leaders prepared and eager to steer our weary world to better times.

We are here because deeply engaging in the life of the mind and opening ourselves up to the holistic world view that is the core of a liberal arts education prepare us to make good and often difficult decisions.

Each of us hopes to seek the truth, and we find our calling, our vocation in advancing what we believe to be in our own, and hopefully our collective best interest. This is what it means to have a life well lived.

This is why you are here. This is why we are all here.

The faculty and staff at Susquehanna are here because they share a commitment not to tell you what to think, but they will prepare you to discern what is true, what is good, and what is just.

They will prepare you to figure out what matters and why, and more importantly, they will help you to develop the skills to be advocates for the causes that become your passions.

As a living learning community, we must always strive to be better. We must commit to being a community where all members feel welcome, respected, loved, and able to flourish.

This is what we are called to do. This is our one voice, our vocare.

We must be an example for our neighbors. This is what is means to achieve, lead, and serve. This is what it means to be Susquehannans.

At the laying of the cornerstone of Selinsgrove Hall in 1858, which was the founding of this great university, Joseph Casey stated, “Education, in its legitimate sense, includes not only the cultivation of the mental powers, but the proper training and development of the moral sentiments and faculties, and its true object is to ‘make us not only wiser but better…’”^[2]

Today, I invite you to your graduation in May of 2026. Each year, I give this charge to the graduates. Today, I challenge you to commit to doing all you can during your time at Susquehanna to meet this charge to your fullest.

Achieve all you can for good,
Lead with honor and humility,
Serve with love and pride,
And always strive to be not only wiser, but better.

Welcome home!

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^[1] Adapted from Bede: Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, translated by J.E. King, 283-285. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press—Loeb Classical Library, 1930

^[2] Joseph Casey, Esq.: “Remarks delivered at the laying of the corner-stone of the Missionary Institute at Selin’s Grove, PA, September 1, 1858.”