The Economy, the University, and a New Kind of Human Flourishing

2009 Downtown Business Breakfast

Watch President Eaton's
address or read the text below.

April 27, 2009

Philip W. Eaton, President

Good morning. Let me offer my words of welcome to all of you as well. Thank you for coming to our annual Downtown Business Breakfast. This is our 13th year doing this breakfast. And once again we are sold out, with a waiting list to get in the doors. That pleases me a great deal. Something’s working here. We hope you enjoy our morning.

Let me also say thank you to our table captains. Thank you for bringing new friends to your tables and into our midst. And, of course, once again, I want to say thank you to our sponsors. In a time when company budgets are being cut back, you have stepped up once again, and I am grateful. Thank you for your partnership.

And let me say this — I hope you’ve had a chance to get to know one of our students at your table this morning. These are the greatest students you will find anywhere in the world. And I mean that. They are going to change the world, you know. They too are going to bring hope into the world. That’s our mission — and they know it. They get it. They are simply the best.

We want to talk about the economy this morning. The economy, of course, is on everyone’s mind. We have a great speaker this morning to help us think through the issues. Dr. Shiller, thank you for being with us this morning. I told Dr. Shiller on the phone a couple of weeks ago — please tell us when we will see the bottom of this whole thing. He assures me he will give us all the answers in a few minutes.

Part of what we are suffering right now is a sense of profound uncertainty. Where is the bottom? Where are we headed? Are the changes we are making permanent? Are they good changes?

Two weeks ago in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan made this comment: “People are in a kind of suspended alarm, waiting for the future to unspool and not expecting it to unspool happily.”

There is "a pervasive sense of anxiety, as though everyone feels they're on thin ice.”

And then she says something quite stunning: “People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions.”

And these are the questions on our mind right now, aren’t they? Is this a turning point in America? Are we in decline? Will our investments return to something normal? What is normal? Are we really leaving behind “old assumptions” about the economy, about the role of government, about individual opportunity, about our standards of living?

Wherever we are headed, we do feel like “something is slipping away,” and we are groping our way toward something new. And we are both frightened and exhilarated, mostly uncertain, very cautious.

But what kind of a world is emerging? What kind of a world do we want to see emerging?

And the biggest question for me is always this: What should education be doing to help shape that emerging world? What should our universities be doing in a time such as this?

One university president said last week that “what we need is radical reformation” of our universities. “At this defining moment – when our communities and our nation need us more than ever – we must fundamentally reinvent our institutions.” If we do not, we will find ourselves “slouching into irrelevance.”

Yikes! Could it be possible that we are storming through this turbulent time of crisis and upheaval and profound uncertainty — and our universities are sitting on the margins of influence? Slouching toward irrelevance?

Here’s what I think: If indeed we are in the midst of a defining moment, a moment when old assumptions are “slipping away,” I believe our universities must regroup, reform, reinvent ourselves, so that we might be out on the point trying to guide the way toward a new and better world.

We must marshal all of the considerable tools of the university to help define a new, emerging, flourishing human community.

And so to meet such a challenge, what are we doing on the SPU campus?

First, we are tightening our belts. Like all businesses, we are examining our economic model, looking quite intensely at our spending, trying to make sure we are investing our resources in things that matter.

We are flourishing at Seattle Pacific, even in this moment of crisis. I am just amazed. We are aggressively laying out our plans for the future—bold and exciting plans. And yet, I assure you, we’ve got our eyes wide open. We are paying attention to costs and access and financial prudence. We are focused on our students and their changing financial needs.

But the second thing we are doing is to focus precisely on the critical competencies our world needs right now.

• Just at the time, for example, when we desperately need more scientists to remain competitive in the world, we have invested $34 million in science facilities, and we have hired exciting new faculty—and our science programs are flat-out exploding. We are among the leaders in the nation for undergraduate science through hands-on research. This is a big deal.

• Under the leadership of Dr. Stamatis Vokos and his team, the National Science Foundation just awarded us a $4 million grant that places us on the cutting edge of knowing better how students learn science. We are contributing to a revolution in science education.

• With a $1 million gift from a generous donor, Dr. John Medina, from our Brain Center, along with our faculty from education, psychology, nursing, and physical education—these folks are figuring out what happens when we actually take the rules of the brain into the classroom. The results are astounding—as 1,200 students and 60 teachers in the Northshore School District are discovering. We are changing the way we do school.

• Just at the time of looming crisis in healthcare, close to 100 percent of our pre-med students get into the med school of their choice. The national average is 45 percent. The graduates of our nursing program are in constant demand across the region and beyond.

• In a time like this, we simply have no choice in our country but to educate people in mathematics, engineering, biology, chemistry, physics — and I might add in literature and history and theology and music and philosophy and economics — even as we educate in the professions. At Seattle Pacific, we get this business of undergraduate education. This is our expertise. Our four-year graduation rate, by the way, has shot up 15 percent over the last ten years. This too is huge.

• As we speak, we are sending students and faculty to Beijing and Shanghai, Kyoto and Seoul, to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to South Africa, Burundi, and Kenya, to London and Paris, to Guatemala and Argentina, to Cairo and Jerusalem. Ten of our students just returned from Vietnam where they practiced and trained and served as nurses in rural clinics. We are reaching out across the globe.

• In a time of virtual biblical illiteracy across the nation, our School of Theology is pioneering a powerful new web program that will lift up Seattle Pacific as a world resource for biblical and theological education. We await a $1 million grant for this effort.

• Through our Perkins Center for Reconciliation, under the leadership of Tali Hairston, and through another $1 million gift, we are decidedly about the work of building strong bridges into our urban community, and learning and teaching reconciliation literally across the globe. Just eight years ago, 9 percent of our incoming new students were students of color. For two years running now, close to 20 percent of our new students are ethnic minority. This is huge.

• Just at a time when we see the enormous societal and personal scars from the lack of integrity and honesty in business, we have received from a donor $500,000, and under the leadership of Jeff Van Duzer and his team, we are launching a Center for Integrity in our School of Business. We are trying to change the face of how we do business. Stay tuned. By the way, with AACSB accreditation, our business school is among the top 33 percent in the country.

It’s just astounding what’s happening on the SPU campus. We are flourishing indeed. Such energy and creativity — contributing hugely, through competencies that matter, for such a time as this.

But I think there must be even more. We must tackle a third and very vital thing. In this time of crisis, in a time when old assumptions may be slipping away, I believe our universities must regroup, big time, around educating for habits of the heart.

Let me tell you what I mean by this.

This economic crisis has taught us some very painful lessons about the damage that takes place when dishonesty, deceit, greed, broken trust, betrayal, too much complexity, too little common sense — when all of this is set loose into the world. The consequences of a culture gone wild are enormous.

And so we must ask, at this critical moment, how do we educate for honesty, trustworthiness, integrity, fairness, dignity, decency, wholesomeness, civility, clarity, simplicity, responsibility, reconciliation, accountability.

In my opinion, I believe it is urgently critical that we learn again how to educate for these habits of the heart. Sadly, I believe we have forgotten how to educate in these ways.

We must teach a language for these habits, just as we would teach any foreign language. We must tell the stories of these habits, over and over again.

And this is where Seattle Pacific University is at its best. This too is where we are on the leading edge of the whole culture. We know this business of shaping lives with new habits of the heart. We know this business of shaping culture.

And here’s the way we do this critical work. We are reaching back, in fresh new ways, into our biblical tradition, to locate there the enduring habits of the heart that will shape a new community of human flourishing.

And what does such a community look like? The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, drawing on this tradition of the biblical imagination, says that we must imagine “the restoration of public life, safe cities, caring communities, and secure streets.” We must imagine “the restoration of personal and interpersonal life, happy families, domestic well-being and joy, shared food and delighted relationships.”

This is a vision of human flourishing we want to propose for such a time as this. Guided by this ancient vision, just at the time when old ways may be slipping away—we intend to equip our graduates with these new habits of the heart — so that we might give shape to new communities of human flourishing.

That’s what we are all about at Seattle Pacific.

God bless each one of you. Thank you for being with us this morning. I invite you to join all of us at Seattle Pacific as we all seek to bring hope into the world we serve — so that all of God’s children might flourish.

Thank you.