September 16, 2002

Craig Haney tells students what sets UCSC apart

UCSC Professor of Psychology Craig Haney gave the faculty keynote speech at the Chancellor's Fall Convocation on September 15. Following are his prepared remarks.

On behalf of my colleagues, the distinguished faculty at UC Santa Cruz, I want to welcome you to a place that a New York Times writer a few weeks ago called the most "off beat" of all the UC campuses.

I want to organize my few words to you around the idea of what it means to be "off beat," exactly what we do here better than at any of our sister schools that makes us so "off beat," and why being "off beat" is exactly what universities should be striving to be, especially in these times, but which few of them, present company excluded, have the courage to be.

"Off beat" does not mean laid back, wacky, or embracing the unusual for the sheer sake of being odd; as it applies to the Santa Cruz campus of which you are now a part, "off beat" means instead, "off the beaten path"--that is, it means to be independent, extraordinary, and uncommonly committed to the pursuit of truth, however unpopular or unconventional that pursuit may be--all qualities, incidentally, that all truly creative, outstanding, "path breaking" educational and scholarly pursuits should possess.

You are entering this fine university at a time when, perhaps more than any other time I can remember since I came here nearly 25 years ago, that we badly need people who, as the folks at Apple Computer say, can "think different." Think well, but think different.

For reasons that are painfully obvious, we now live in perilous, Orwellian times. Times when forces of hatred have been unleashed throughout the world, times when the true "axis of evil" of injustice and inequality and domination are masked by campaigns of misinformation and mischaracterization and misunderstanding, times where people in power too often say one thing to mean another, or say one thing in order to have their minions believe that they really mean another.

But the only known antidote to the hatred that stalks the world and to the Orwellian doublespeak that increasingly fills our airways and newsprint is intelligence, genuine intellectual analysis. Disciplined, refined, thoughtful, fact-oriented intellectual analysis--exactly the kind you are about to be immersed in, here, over the next four years.

In a world beset by hatred and doublespeak, this kind of intellectual analysis is not only desperately needed--indeed, our very survival may depend upon it—but it is, almost by definition, "off beat."

So, the fact that we do that here, more often and better than at our sister schools, and that we are, therefore, more "off beat" than they, is a great compliment and a source of great pride, and you are now about to become an important part of that great Santa Cruz tradition.

Just as I did when I first came here a long time ago, you are about to fall in love with this campus. Yes, you will love the sheer physical beauty of it, to be sure, the deer in the parking lots, the redwood groves that sometimes lull you into thinking you are in a national park rather than on a college campus, and the spectacular, breathtaking vistas that look out on what is one of the most beautiful coastlines anywhere in the world.

But you will fall in love with many other less obvious yet more important things about this campus as well. You will learn to love an ethos at UC Santa Cruz embodied in the way in which your professors, many of whom are world class scholars and researchers, innovative, iconoclastic, critical intellects, are at the same time uncommonly kind and respectful toward one another, and uncommonly kind and respectful toward you.

You will learn to appreciate and even to love the way in which, no matter how famous or esteemed, they take their teaching and your learning very seriously. I don’t think there is another university in the country where the precious balance between cutting-edge scholarship and research and dedicated undergraduate teaching is struck so effectively as it is here.

And you will also come to quickly appreciate and even to love the intellectual atmosphere, the norms of learning, and the overarching commitment to fairness and social justice that the students on this campus have created and maintained, as part of a tradition that has existed here for decades now.

All of you are about to be introduced to "the Santa Cruz way," something that is impossible to convey to outsiders but which is a tangible fact of life on this campus for those of us who teach and learn here, and something you will begin quickly to feel and become a part of.

The "Santa Cruz way" is embodied in the uncommon importance our students attach to linking scholarship--in whatever discipline--to the real world around us. It is embodied in the authenticity of the students and, in comparison to attitudes that permeate the student bodies of so many other first class universities, the relative lack of cynicism and inner smugness among students here.

In place of self-satisfied, myopic careerists, you will find among your classmates an uncommon number who believe that unchallenged truths need to be questioned, who understand that so many things in the world away from this magnificent "city on a hill" need to be made better, and who believe--in a genuine and unselfconscious way--that they can and will help to bring these things about. And they, and now you, can and will.

You will also learn to appreciate and maybe even to love that you are among students who are uncommonly committed to the values and vision of diversity and equality and social change. To be sure, part of what establishes us as "off beat," in the best possible sense of the term, is the fact that you are now among students who are willing to analyze and reflect deeply on the nature of their own race and gender and class-based privilege as well as disadvantage, to critically analyze the structural advantages that at least some of them enjoy, and yet to commit themselves to attacking unfairness in its various forms, even unfairness from which they themselves would otherwise have benefited.

I also know that many of you will begin a personal journey this week that will last for years, a journey of self discovery and self exploration, in the hopes of finding yourself, your goals, your passions, the purpose in your life that allows you to exclaim, "Here, at last, is the thing I was made for," what the British writer C.S. Lewis called the "secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want," our very purpose for being.

I honestly do not know a better campus in the United States for you to search for that signature purpose. The people on this stage are here to help you find it, my UCSC faculty colleagues and I devote our professional lives to this search.

You should know that we will ask a few things from you in the search that is about to begin--we will ask that you commit your energy, your discipline, your intelligence, your open minds and hearts to the undertaking. But we also know the journey will be truly exciting in ways you cannot foresee, and truly worth the struggle and extraordinarily hard work ahead, in ways you cannot yet anticipate. We know because of course, it is a journey we have taken ourselves.

We are delighted you are here, and eager to begin the journey with you. Welcome to Santa Cruz.

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