The Albemarle Pipes and Drums leads the academic procession to Upchurch Field House.

Parker Sworn in as SBC’s 10th President

JENNIFER McMANAMAY
Staff writer

Jo Ellen Parker

It began like a slow faucet leak — rain dripping from a leaden sky — and finished like a busted water main.

By 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, when the inauguration of Jo Ellen Johnson Parker as Sweet Briar College’s 10th president was set to begin, a soaking rain was falling. Led by the Albemarle Pipes and Drums, the academic procession snaked across the dell under a moving canopy of umbrellas from Prothro Hall, where the marchers had donned their regalia.

Delegates from other colleges filed into Upchurch Field House first, followed by board members, faculty, the Class of 2010, senior staff and the presidential party — each giving rise to louder cheers from the gathering inside the Fitness and Athletics Center.

Taking note of the undampened enthusiasm, board of directors chair Virginia Upchurch Collier ’72 delivered a defining line for the day as she opened the ceremony.

“I thank you for the rousing welcome that we received as we walked into this field house,” she said. “I can tell you that there’s nothing better than a Sweet Briar cheer to turn a rainy day into a sunny one.”

Collier would administer the oath and place the presidential medallion and its pink and green ribbon over Parker’s head, charging her to carry out the duties of office. But first she introduced a speaker, Mary Patterson McPherson. McPherson, executive officer of the American Philosophical Society and president emeritus of Bryn Mawr College, also is Parker’s friend and former teacher at Bryn Mawr, where Parker earned a bachelor’s in English and later taught.

McPherson spoke of the particular challenges of leading a liberal arts college in this age. Among them, technology is profoundly influencing how, when and where learning occurs, she said, and generally “making us rethink how we do our business.” Today, colleges also must prepare students for the “information economy,” and for living in a world of shifting influence and power, she said.

But these epochal challenges also can give small colleges new energy and importance, she said, noting that Sweet Briar appears ready to address the key educational opportunities of our time. Its emphasis on the languages and culture of other countries, and encouragement of living and learning abroad, is good grounding for understanding and adapting intelligently to the changing role of America as new economic powers emerge, she said.

Liberal arts education, which excels at teaching historical context, critical reasoning and inculcating students to continue learning for a lifetime, has an essential role in such a world. And Sweet Briar can be a partner in what may be our best investment in the future: girls’ education. There is growing recognition that the best way to beat global poverty is by empowering women in developing countries, McPherson said, and women’s colleges can ride that wave.

Technology is a theme that Parker would pick up in her inaugural address. As she embarks on her presidency, she cast about for “tutelary deities whose auspices I should cultivate,” she said, and settled on the double-headed Janus who sees both the past and the future.

“As scholars and educators we stand between those from whom we have learned and those who learn from us, between the lessons of the past and the discoveries of the future. It is the Janus-like role of higher education to simultaneously interpret the past, serve the present and generate the future,” she said.

Increasingly, higher education is “called to account for itself in purely immediate terms,” Parker said, with demands for students to land the best jobs after graduation or academic laboratories to make the next profitable discovery. She acknowledged these things are right and necessary, but not sufficient by themselves.

Quoting Yogi Berra — an apparent influence of McPherson who also borrowed a Yogi-ism — Parker said the future ain’t what it used to be, demographically, economically, “and crucially, it ain’t what it used to be technologically.”

Arriving at what promises to be a hallmark of her tenure, Parker said, “Digital information technology marks one of those moments of punctuated equilibrium that irreversibly changes the relationship between the past of higher education and its future.”

Information used to be scarce, expensive and difficult to move. The structures of education were built around that reality, she said. “The educational challenge now is not making sure that students have access to sufficient information but rather making sure they know how to sort through overwhelming amounts of information with which they are bombarded.”

To ready students to shape the future, Parker said, “We must make sure that we are educating them to be digitally sophisticated artists, or historians, or educators, or physicians, or field biologists, or librarians or whatever else they may choose to be.”

But, importantly, Parker said, we don’t have to choose between analog and digital — between seminars and webinars, essays and blogs, or field work and remote instrumentation. “We must learn to use digital tools and resources for what they are uniquely able to do, and to use print and personal interaction for what they are uniquely able to do.”

The ceremony included greetings to the president and Sweet Briar community from around the world by several faculty and students speaking in their native languages. An inaugural ode also was performed with lyrics from George Eliot’s poem “The Choir Invisible” set to music by Dean Jonathan Green.

Following Chaplain Adam White’s benediction, the academic and presidential parties were to recess, then continue up Monument Hill to conduct the College’s traditional Founders’ Day service at the Fletcher and Williams family cemetery. Because of the weather, the ritual was moved to Memorial Chapel.

For a long time after the marchers, attendees and staff who worked the event left the field house of Sweet Briar’s brand new Fitness and Athletics Center, the strains of bagpipes and drums could be heard, muted by distance but not the falling rain.