Humanities Express

From the Dean

Happy New Year! At the beginning of a new year, we find ourselves alternately looking back toward the year that was and looking forward to the one yet to unfold. We always want to approach the new year optimistic that things will be better than they were last year. Before we can fully embrace the promise of the new year, however, we often find it necessary to take a long hard look back at the past year, to savor our successes and lament our failures. As with most transitional times in life, the effort to reconcile the reality of the past with the promise of the future can create nagging feelings of anxiety. The need to alleviate anxiety in this situation accounts in large part for the tradition of making New Year's resolutions. This seemingly innocuous custom represents an attempt to create a bridge from the past to the future through an exercise of personal will. Despite its apparent total focus on the future, a New Year's resolution actually represents an attempt to change or ensure the continuation of something that originated at some point in the past by committing ourselves to a course of actions that will unfold in the future. In this sense, New Year's resolutions are most often as much about the past as they are about the future, as much about continuity as they are about change.

The tradition of making New Year's resolutions has become so commonplace that it is difficult to avoid indulging in them. If we are to judge from what is being presented in the popular media, they are no longer simply individual indulgences. Businesses and other organizations are also "resolving" to do whatever they do in bigger and better ways. Not to be left out, we in the College have made some resolutions of our own. In the spirit of continuity inherent in the concept of the New Year's resolution, we resolve to make sure the College of Humanities remains the premier site for the study of the humanities by:

• continuing our aggressive recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty. We know that faculty are the primary source of our strength as a community.
• enhancing our efforts to recruit and retain outstanding students to our majors at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The success of our students is an important measure of our success as a community of scholars.
• insuring that the college remains a welcoming environment for individuals from all backgrounds and for the exploration of challenging ideas and new fields of knowledge that stretch our understanding of the human experience. We value diversity, both human and intellectual, as one of the most important means that we have for remaining innovative and vital.
• vigorously pursuing opportunities to support our undergraduate and graduate students by building our scholarship funds through development and other opportunities. Our ability to support, encourage, and even provide access for our students is important to both our future and theirs.
• embracing our past through our commitment to a strong alumni relations program and securing our future through a continuing commitment to excellence in all we do. We want our alumni to always be as proud of the college that they called home at the university as we are.

To keep even these modest resolutions, we have a lot of work ahead of us. These large goals (another definition of a New Year's resolution) will require a lot of intermediate steps by a lot of people. We are counting on all of you—faculty, staff, students, and alumni. And we wish you the very best of luck with your own New Year's resolutions! We know you've made some, too.

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