Fall 2005 Message from the President

Welcome back. I hope you had a most enjoyable summer. I would like to extend a special welcome to our new faculty and staff and the members of the class of 2009. I encourage all of you to take advantage of the superb academic and extracurricular opportunities Queens College has to offer.

This should be an exciting semester as we once again have a full schedule of guest lectures, concerts, theatre and dance performances. You may have already noticed that the lobby of Kiely Hall now features computer stations where you may check your email from the college and search for information on our Web site. We hope to have more of these stations operating very soon. We also plan to install a series of plasma boards in key spots campuswide where you will be able to get all the latest college news.

Also of note this fall, the Academic Senate will resume its discussion of the recommendations of our Task Force on General Education (our first major curriculum review in almost 25 years), and we will be kicking off a $100 million capital campaign to ensure that Queens College remains an extraordinary institution well into the future.

It was a busier than usual summer at the college. Thanks to some detective work by Queens College graduate Jeff Gottlieb, we discovered that in 1839 the great poet Walt Whitman taught in a schoolhouse located on what is now our campus. To commemorate this, we dedicated the Walt Whitman Garden on a spot close to where that schoolhouse stood, just north of our Student Union. And in what I hope will become an annual tradition, on July 31 we held our first Summer Fest, a full day of great music, art, and fun.

I was fortunate to spend part of my summer in Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance. Having recently dedicated the Walt Whitman Garden, I naturally started to think about what is often called the American Renaissance, the early 1850s, when some of the most challenging works in American literature were written: Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. It seems to me that in many ways we are still living in that Renaissance as America has remained a nation of extraordinary creativity and new ideas.

But we should be wary of congratulating ourselves. The golden age of Florence did not last long. Such periods end when people grow complacent, or when governments feel the need to restrict the circulation of ideas. Unfortunately, there seem to be signs that we as a nation are becoming less tolerant and more uncomfortable with new ideas.

It is the duty of all Americans—and especially those of us who are privileged to attend or teach at a college—to make sure that our campuses remain places where all ideas may be examined without fear of censure or reprisal. With this in mind, I would like to offer you an extra assignment this semester: Challenge your teachers and challenge yourself. It is the only way to maintain a thriving democracy and a continuing Renaissance.

President James Muyskens

Fall 2008 Faculty-Staff Assembly Address  ·Fall 2006 message from the President · Spring 2006 message from the President   · Fall 2005 Message from the President   · Biography of President Muyskens  ·  Final Report of the President's Task Force on General Education  · Fall 2003 Faculty-Staff Assembly Address   · Photographs of President Muyskens  ·  Archived Material