Faculty Retreat

Ah, here we go. Time to prepare ourselves for the upcoming school year. I am grateful to set aside health concerns and switch my focus elsewhere. We have many new faculty this year - a dozen or more. Our incoming freshman class is robust and large. SAT score requirements have been raised, so they will be more prepared to deal with the paper writing and class assignments. It promises to be a good year.

We are moving from a division structure to a school structure, and some of our retreat engenders conversations about how that will play out and what that might mean. We examine diversity with the help of our guest speaker. He urges us to see that many places think of diversity as inviting a guest into your home, but that the model ought to be everyone moving into a place where the playing ground is determined by all occupants. It is difficult to move from one model to another.

We break bread together, catch up with those who have been absent over the summer, are brought up to date by administrators, and worship together. I look forward to these retreats every year both for the fellowship and the challenges they present. This year I find myself realizing how much more I understand the culture here and how many more people I actually know in our institution. And how many more people are getting to know me. This is both wonderful and scary. Wonderful because it is so good to belong somewhere. Scary because I don't want to get so comfortable that I lose my edge.

Today I am happy to see everyone, to come together for a common purpose, to help find better ways to transform lives that will shape and serve our world. Here we go indeed.