I want to open by acknowledging with sadness, the passing of Robert Shapiro, husband of Board member Alison Bonds Shapiro and great friend to Saybrook and the entire human potential movement. Bob passed away on October 4th. I dedicate my words to him.

I also ask us to hold in our hearts and minds the people of Pakistan and the Kashmir region. The devastating earthquake has killed and injured hundreds of thousands and we must stand in solidarity with them.

Thank you all for being here. I particularly want to thank Terry Hopper and Ann Luckiesh, and to acknowledge their unstinting efforts to make this gathering happen. I have felt your love for me and your care for Saybrook in all you have done to create a space for our celebration this evening that is both festive and I hope in some ways sacred.

I also thank Saybrook’s new president Art Bohart . Art has taken the helm under particularly difficult circumstances. He is also an introvert, so I am pretty sure a party for a former president was not high up on his to do list! Thank you, Art.

But I have much more than a party to feel gratitude to Saybrook about.

When Margaret Mead reminded us never to underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world, she might have been speaking of the Saybrook team of faculty, staff and board that for over thirty years has nurtured this small institution and helped bring it this far. I think of three times acting president Rudy Melone, who in 1996, with Faculty members Tom Greening, Dennis Jaffe and Amedeo Giorgi, put on a full court press to persuade Bob and me to leave our sybaritic life on the beach in Southern California, to sign on with Saybrook. I also wish to acknowledge Gerry Bush—that big bear of an Irishman, who hired me exactly nine years ago this week. He called and asked me three times—because the first two times I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the Blue Angels overhead —to become the Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. I will always be grateful to Gerry for taking a chance on me only a few months after I arrived green from the provinces, with a promotion to Executive Vice President and entrusting me with an institution-wide organizational transformation. The whole school scenario and planning process resulted in renewal of our commitment to our humanistic heritage and values, our transformational agenda, a new long range vision, and a decision and plan to restructure and rebuild so as to develop the operational capacities to take the school on the next stage of its journey. It was one of those times of rapid institutional learning, it was hard work, and it was also a lot of fun. I thank Michael Doyle, who as Chairman of the Saybrook board, on the tragic and untimely death of Gerry Bush less than two years into our transformational process, trusted me to continue the job we had started, only then as Saybrook’s president. In the time since, Saybrook grew from 280 to a high of 520 students. Our annual budget grew from 2.9 million dollar budget to over 8 million, we now have over 600 alumni doing first rate transformational work in the world, we have state-of-the-art business systems, information services, interactive website, and a new blend of our traditional one-to-one mentorship model and online cohort learning. We have a new facility, a highly professional staff, a global reputation for excellence and academic creativity, faculty with international standing, and we have money in the bank. Amedeo, Tom, Dennis, Michael (and Rudy and Gerry, where ever you are), I hope you feel that I warranted your faith.

But obviously a President does not build a school. It takes a team—and then some—and I have been blessed with terrific colleagues. There are many more people than is possible to mention by name today --staff, faculty, board, supporters, consultants and friends--, who have been crucial in our collective journey, but as I look around here, I see many of you here in the room. It fills my heart to at last be able to thank you in person for your efforts, collegiality and solidarity, to acknowledge your enormous contributions to this institution. I also want to express my gratitude for the overwhelming support that Bob and I have received these past months. Saybrook is very fortunate that you are a continuing part of it, and I am blessed to call you colleagues and friends.

Thinking about what I wanted to say today involved some rather deep reflection on my nine years at Saybrook. You all know me as a person who values candor, and transparency. My entire professional life has been focused on the question of how we build organizations, communities and ultimately a shared human future, in which all human beings can participate as whole persons, with the freedom to know and interpret the world on their own terms--as subjects--to be the authors of their own lives, and to speak their own truth freely and without censure or reprisal. This is the humanistic vision at the heart of any democratic society, and is key to reconnecting to the unknowable whole.

No matter how different our starting points may be, I believe if our diverse perspectives can be shared openly and fully, in a mutually respectful dialogue, we have the chance—though not the guarantee—that our inquiry might help us reach some measure of common ground. I think you also know me well enough, that as a humanist, feminist, and civil rights activist, I am acutely attuned to and have always resisted the ways in which dissenting or unpopular voices are silenced, through, power, intimidation, shame, legal maneuvering, cooptation and apathy. I hope for a better world, and I see my work is to help bring it into being.

I say this as a preface because I want you to understand why I am choosing to focus tonight not only on the local story of Saybrook itself, but on the deeper and more important cultural story of which we are part . On what it was nine years ago that I found compelling enough in the Saybrook vision to disrupt my husband and my lives for it, why I am still committed to this mission, and on what those of us with a personal stake in this movement might yet accomplish together.

My friends, we are living in tumultuous and uncertain times in our nation and in the world. Even before 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, there was already a rising awareness that despite immense advances in technology, connectivity, longevity, standard of living, the social consensus—the grand narratives or world views upon which the last 500 years of Western cultural development has been based, are unraveling and coming apart, and have been for some time. As established consensus breaks down all over the world, a new global consciousness is emerging for which we are unprepared. We live in a period of cultural upheaval on a scale that the world has never before seen. There is much to be viewed as positive happening, and on some other day we can explore the opportunities of life in changing times. But there is also much danger and much for us to do.

The surface signs of a world turned upside down are everywhere – rising levels of level of rage, alienation, polarization, environmental degradation, the general lack of civility, apathy and violence, provide a steady drum roll announcing a world pushed beyond its limits. Our context of boundless complexity, unpredictable change, messiness and paradox, confounds even the smartest of us,—we are drowning in data, information, contradictions and it sickens us. Our species’ awesome intellect has created a world it can no longer understand. As the pace speeds up we fall further and further behind in our attempts to make sense of things—to find meaning. We are out of our depth and we become increasingly bewildered and anxious.

So like our Dark Age ancestors, we grasp at anything that offers us ways to simplify or organize things, to reduce the complexity and uncertainties to something easier to cope with. In the face of the unraveling we invent brave attempts to exert ever more rational control over our circumstances through bureaucracies-- with their chains of command, rules of order, management by objectives, measurable outcomes, as if that will make our uncertain world more manageable, less scary and more predictable. And if bureaucracy does not do it for us—and it rarely does for long—we can turn to fundamentalisms of various kinds— for alternative sources of certainty and freedom from ambiguity. Other options for coping include denial, cynicism, delusional thinking, projection, and distraction, and it that doesn’t work—we can always lash out and find a scapegoat. And if this means we must ignore or betray our souls, our anxieties, our emotions or our relationships, “so be it”—say the pragmatists—“it is necessary—it is reality”

It is not hard to find examples of such attempts to reduce the complexity of life in these times. When the President asks us to accept his nomination for Supreme Court Justice by reassuring us that he knows her and does “not expect her to change over the next decades” he speaks to his own and the people’s needs for simplicity, order and predictability.

In unraveling times—whatever local or global—promises to make things simple, run on time, get things done are appealing; silencing dissent, forsaking dialog for manipulation, information control, misinformation and spin become acceptable because they are expedient; taking decisive action—even if unwise, inept, or unjust—is preferable to living in the messiness of thoughtful and inclusive deliberation; and though it may chill to the bone those of us in the change business, for millions including many of those who govern us, the appeal of a strong father—whether on earth on in heaven—who provides reassurance, a simple story and consistency in the face of uncertainty, is extremely comforting. Times of unraveling are fraught with psychic danger and the risk of regression to less mature ways of being, and for losing faith in ourselves and each other, is high.

But I do not raise these issues tonight to bum you out or wind you up. This is a celebration. I raise them with you tonight, as I move into my new role as President Emerita, because I believe today, as I believed nine years ago—perhaps even more intensely even than then, that Saybrook’s core mission must be to provide an alternative and transformative response to the psychological and spiritual challenges of our times. We owe it to our founders, to our history and we owe to our future to step out into that learning space where crisis become opportunity.

Saybrook was born at another time of great upheaval—where to those with the sensitivity to hear it, the song of new a new kind of consciousness seemed to be emerging. It was a time of cultural turmoil, vibrancy, protest and hope—generating new and heretical ideas about ourselves and about the kind of world we wanted to live in. Saybrook’s founders (two whom --Arthur Warmoth and Eleanor Chriswell--are in this room tonight) created a place where brave new ideas that challenged previous certainties could find sustenance, and within that crucible of intellectual activity and collegiality we call transformational education be developed and refined. They imagined an intellectually rigorous community where established and cherished assumptions-about human potential, about gender, race, consciousness, politics, and reality itself could be opened up for re-examination. In its choice of cutting edge content, Saybrook encouraged people to cross established disciplinary boundaries, bringing together diverse ideas and practices, and to become alchemists of new ways of thinking and of being.

The curriculum then, and the curriculum today, was conscientiously heretical, challenging the cannons of conventional academia— consciousness studies, organizational and systems design, transformational psychology, integral health, peace studies, studies on gender, race and class, eastern psychology, engaged spirituality, epistemology, social criticism—all asking through multiple lenses, the core existential questions of the modern condition. “Who are we?” “How should we live?” “What does it mean to be a fully human being?” “What can we do to sustain human aspiration and advance human potential?” “How do we address evil, ease suffering and reduce pain?” “What must be our relationship to each other, to our environment, to the cosmos—to the future?” A look through the Saybrook catalogue is an inspiration—a call to action.

But Saybrook was always about than more than the content of its curriculum. Saybrook is about expanding consciousness.

In my experience, the scholars and students who come to Saybrook, unlike those I meet at other institutions, have already awakened to the fact that a great sea change is underway that cannot be managed with the same kinds of minds and systems that created it. They understand that they are active participants in the evolution consciousness. People come here already with a song of the future in their hearts, seeking a place where their experience, accumulated wisdom, and their desire to transform themselves and their worlds, will be met by mentors, colleagues, playmates, healers, lovers and friends, who will take their vision seriously. They come here as warriors and lovers—warriors against the forces of conformity and accommodation, lovers of the great mystery we call life, and lovers of the immense possibility we call humanity. They are willing to enter the darkness, to go to places where their certainties are challenged, and when their old meanings can no longer sustain, they are willing to let them go and search for new sources. They are people who have the courage to walk into the fire, to risk their easy answers and to entertain new heresies. At Saybrook you will hear story after story of people who come here full of conviction, with the book they want to write already mapped out, only to discover in their dialogues with faculty and colleagues, that they are made of larger stuff, and that they have bigger work to do. Saybrook is not like most other professional schools, providing training and legitimization to those who seek to fit into a world that is already dying. This is worthy work, but in my view, not the highest use of this unique institution. Saybrook has always been a place for heretics and visionaries and for those who already hear the early phrases of a newly emerging world song.

So, as I reflect on this moment in my own life and move on to the next stage of my own journey, I realize that I came here for the same reason as everyone else. I came to challenge the certainties of my secure world and to step into a world where I had to learn my way. There were many surprises and many dark nights of the soul. I realize now that like generations of Saybrookians, I came here to be transformed. I came because Rudy, Gerry, Tom, Dennis, Amedeo and the wider humanistic community of which we are all part, heard the heretical song in my heart and offered me a place where I could turn aspiration into action.

And so the wheel takes another turn. I move out into uncertainty once more, into my life-long learning journey, but this time with my Saybrook experience to enlarge my capacity to see in the dark, to not lose faith and to learn my way along.

In an strange way, I see an interesting parallel between where I am as a person and where Saybrook is as an institution. After journeying together for nine years, we both face an existential challenge—an inflection point. What next? We each have choices to make, yet the light is dim, the water murky, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.

Perhaps because of disappointment or fear, either of us might be tempted to opt for a more conventional path, where there is more light, better maps,—usually referred to as “reality” and to step back from our place out on our learning the edge.

For the world’s sake, and for our souls’ sakes, I hope we don’t take this road. I am convinced this is not the moment to retreat, and surrender to fear. With every cell in my body—including my brain cells--I urge us—myself and Saybrook to resist this temptation. As the sages tell us, at those moments when we lose our way, the best place to look is not out into the world of false light, but rather to go inwards and remember who we are. Not in the superficial forms that turn up in tag lines and branding slogans—but in the spiritual sense. What is the song in our hearts—and who really is the singer?

For thirty years, in various situations, with different constellations of colleagues, often on a shoestring, and with great love, we in this room have kept faith with a higher vision of human possibility. To help us we have done our own psychological work in therapy, in spiritual practice, creative expression, and acts of service. As educators we have developed and refined the art of creating sites for transformational learning, we have developed curriculum relevant to serious adults that puts daring ideas together in creative ways, we have developed unique person-centered pedagogies that honor the wisdom our students bring with them and then helps them grow to new levels and to make a difference. The Saybrook education does not simply add to what people know, but changes the frames within which they know it, and it enlarges what their knowledge may mean for the global commons. We have been a home for heretical adults who seek to explore new territory and to bring light into the world, and they are willing to be transformed themselves in order to do so.

Saybrook is not just a graduate school—at its best it is a site of personal and social transformation. We have a destiny and we have a calling. A friend of mine once told me that at the place “where the heart’s deepest passion meets the world’s greatest need, is where true vocation begins.” I believe we—Saybrook and I ---and many of us in this room tonight are at such a place. We live in a world undergoing one of the most radical transformations in its history. It is in desperate need for those with the courage and experience to live through the murkiness, to keep their hearts open and to keep the faith in human possibilities. Saybrook is an academic community that knows this territory as well as any. We have much to give. What an opportunity! What a blessing!

Thank you for welcoming me back in my new capacity and for giving me the time and space to follow my heart’s song.