You will not be surprised that the results of the presidential election disappointed many of us in the English department at Pitt. We don’t, as we’re sometimes accused of doing, indoctrinate our students or advocate politically in our classes, but English faculty have commitments as intellectuals and professionals that raised concerns during the presidential election and worry us at its outcome.
The day after the election, I attended a very glum meeting of the Humanities Council at which Pitt’s Title IX Coordinator, the person who addresses sexual assault and harassment, met with us and worried that the federal administrative mandate that led to the creation of her position might well be revoked in the next administration and that it would be hard to address a group of 19-year-old men about sexual assault with a president who had condoned and perhaps committed it. These were hard words at a hard moment for all of us there. But I realized and said to the group that the University policy adopted in response to the Obama administration’s interpretation of Title IX is now a university policy that we can continue to uphold because it addresses a crucial issue of the safety and good treatment of all members of the University that we should be concerned about as a university.
That thought reminded me that the University enjoys a degree of autonomy to make its own commitments and policies, and I suddenly felt jealous of that autonomy and determined to defend it. I was reminded by the importance of university towns on the electoral map of the importance of universities in shaping dispositions toward a number of crucial values that the recent campaign undermined and that the incoming administration may weaken.
So I spoke to a department meeting the next day and reaffirmed those commitments, and I reaffirm them again here. Modern universities are founded for the sake of the careful and collective testing of claims to truth and to educating young people to respect the results of that testing and learn to participate in it. We need to hold the political realm as closely as possible to that standard and to redouble our educational efforts in higher and in secondary education—a domain we have too long neglected—to widen respect for it. The department just approved a new course in media literacy and we are teaching our students to be responsible journalists at a moment when fake news has metastasized. We are also committed to making special efforts to bring women, people of all races, religions, and nationalities, and people of diverse genders and abilities into this community of inquiry not just as students but as the next generation of teachers and researchers, and we must hold fast to this goal in the face of newly stirred bigotry. We are committed to vigorous and civil exchange of divergent views, and we must do all we can to encourage vigor, practice civility, and bring divergent views into the arena of investigation without keeping discredited views in circulation.
The motto on Pitt’s seal is Veritas/Virtus, and perhaps I’ve said enough about our commitment to the first term. Our commitment to the second one opens ambiguities that can be troubling or edifying, but parsing ambiguity is one of the things we learn and teach at the university. A quick look at, dare I say it, Wikipedia, reminds me that the term virtus was originally “used to describe specifically martial courage” and associated with “masculine strengths,” but eventually grew to include a range of virtues including prudence, justice, self-control, and courage. At this moment we must be especially wary of the masculinist reading of the term while taking pains to think through how the more inclusive reading names qualities we may be especially primed to affirm and cultivate. We are mandated by our motto to cultivate these virtues in our own conduct and in our students along with our commitment to truth, and at this moment we need to mobilize these virtues. We would be prudent to measure carefully and patiently the threats that we anticipate to our university values and not to respond to them quixotically. We would be just to weigh thoughtfully what has moved half of our voting fellow citizens to repudiate so much that we value and put us all at what we feel is such a great risk. We must restrain ourselves from overreacting with rage or despair to the position in which we find ourselves. We must be courageous in standing up for our values against strong opponents with the power to do them and us great harm.
I feel braced and ready for the struggle we face, and I hope you do, too. In my sixth year of chairing this department and my twelfth of chairing in my career, I sometimes feel that the job is tiring, tedious, and occasionally thankless. There’s so much paper to push that says what other documents already say. There’s so little to give to colleagues who do so much. It’s hard to disappoint your friends. It’s hard to face uncertain changes in the upper administration on which the department depends. It’s easy to envy those who are just teaching and doing their research, not to mention those who are retiring.
But I can tell you that after these reflections on what the University and our department stand for and on what universities mean to our fragile civil order, I am determined to stick it out to the end of my term and do everything I can to clarify and act upon what it means to be committed to veritas and virtus. There is no more consequential place to cultivate these values not just for their own sake but for the sake of the nation and the world we love and fear for. Today I see more clearly than ever that the University to which our department belongs and the universities like it are all crucial to our future. I hope you will join me in defending what this University and all good universities stand for in the dark days ahead and work with me to make our department and Pitt more worthy to defend.
—Don Bialostosky