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Winter 1998, Vol. 60, No. 2 The Inaugural Address of William V. Frame, Oct. 11, 1997 Augsburg: The Once and Future College This is a very special day, for me, and your attendance has filled it with wonder - for this College, for my family, and for me. Thank you for the honor you have done the three of us. You glitter so with rank and reputation, represent so extensive a geography of parts and places, that you have drawn the College today to the pitch of its capacity for self-expression.  It is ironic, I think, that the College whose voice you have been hearing
speak so carefully has actually been long dedicated to careful listening
- listening for the calling to its particular purpose; listening to find
the vocations of each of its members and graduates; listening for the directives
of stewardship in a world deafened by cacophony; listening for the still
small voice of conscience, beneath which we might just hear the muffled
grinding of the mill wheels of God.
This ceremony inducts a new listener and a new voice into the 128-year history of the College. And the College, I suspect, is listening again, very carefully. Will the new voice harmonize with tradition? Mine is not a Norwegian voice - although there are those who retain the hope that Frame is a misspelling of Fram, a Norwegian word that Charles Anderson tells me means "forward," a direction surprisingly contrary - at least to Irish ears - to the one suggested by the word. The new voice lacks the mark of a Plains dialect, although it is known to be both Midwestern and rustic in origin. It is a Lutheran voice, but will its owner hear a new confession in the master's teaching - for an Augsburg in service to the modern city, seeking a new reconciliation between cultural variety and communal purpose, a new conduit for ethics into the professions by way of the dialogue between faith and reason? Perhaps I should attack this collegiate anxiety with a clear and reassuring speech. But about 10 days ago, I met a very disturbing fact. A colleague found the courage, for which I am profoundly grateful, to point out to the new president that his speechmaking skills needed work. He had been holding forth in a monotone; his stance was "wooden"; his subjects did not include himself, and so his words continued to drop from an alien and strange source. Worst of all, he appeared to be reading rather than speaking; this was making for poor eye contact. Well, being part of the educational industry, the new president immediately sought professional help; you are seeing - or I hope you are seeing - the results of the first couple of lessons. But two lessons leave the new tools of gesture and inflection in an infantile state, not yet ready for really hefty work. (I can't yet pass the midterm, to say nothing of the final.) The only subject that seemed to fall within the capacity of the instrument is the disability itself. So this is a sort of "coming out" - painful for me, personally, because I so love speechmaking (as my children will attest), and because speechmaking is the principal tool of influence given to presidents. It is not so much a speech as the plan of one - for eventual delivery when I have graduated to animated elocution. When I was growing up on the farm in Southeastern Ohio, in the heart of what Lyndon Johnson later called Appalachia, the little church up in town became our training ground for the polite arts. There I saw the power of speech demonstrated every week. The pulpit was high, and the Good News flowed down from it not as a gentle stream but as a raging river, cutting a new course through the congregation each week. Nearly every Sunday - and for two weeks solid in the summers - we had altar calls - and oh! bewail the poor soul who found himself the lone survivor of his pew with the closing chords of "O Lamb of God" coming up fast! I dreamed of moving people as those pastors did - to torrents of tears, to a catharsis more thorough than any produced by Sophocles or Shakespeare. I supposed that only pastors could do that, and I switched from theology to journalism only after discovering that newspapers enjoyed larger audiences than preachers. When my professors discovered that my journalistic contributions consisted entirely of political opinionation - a discovery that led to the retraction of my editor's title for the Ohio State (University) Daily Lantern - I became a student of political science and eventually a professor of the subject. I continued to make speeches - in class, at conferences, to my children - not yet knowing of my disability, and taking full advantage of the modern orthodoxy that "academic freedom" plus a doctorate perfectly permits the publication of opinions, so long as they are disguised as "research findings." But then I met among the subjects of my discipline the finest speechmakers of our time - Lincoln, Churchill, DeGaulle, King - and a great light dawned. I learned from them that the master art does not serve opinion. It aims at moving people - indeed, it does, but only in the right direction - and the right direction is mapped out in the past. Speechmaking, it turns out, consists of the ability to connect in the listener's heart yesterday with tomorrow, the past with the future. Now by some miracle that we all are praying is not a mistake, I have been made president of a college. Speechmaking is not only permitted here; it is required. Presidents make speeches whether or not they are rhetorically challenged, and whether or not they have anything to say. It has struck me from the beginning of this latest and most unexpected episode in my life that I shall here have something to say only to the degree that I speak for and of the aspirations of this College - and that I must find those aspirations only by careful listening to the articulate tradition of the place. I have hoped, of course, that the College actually exists beneath the cloak of its campus, its degrees, and its name - and could, therefore, make itself heard. And oh, my! - Augsburg exists. Three weeks ago, for example, a congregation that is now merged with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America celebrated its 100th birthday at its birthplace - this campus. The 2000 who came here had constituted the only church body ever spawned in the United States by a college - a phenomenon that resembles on a smaller scale the remarkable fact that the Reformation originated in a university. So, I shall try (I am trying) to find the soul of the place, and draw it up into literate form - not to conserve it, but to discover in its constitution its final and future cause. The oak is in the acorn. The Augsburg College of the 21st century is in the Augsburg that both is and was. But the acorn does not yield the oak without help, and the future and right form of this College will not automatically arise from its tradition. Each requires intervention - the oak by nature and genetics, the College's future by the craft known as history and - you guessed it - speech; public speech, forensic rhetoric. A careful understanding of the College that is will discover several immanent futures. Some promise institutional decline; others, growing strength. How can we tell which is which? We can't. Nevertheless, we must choose; and I, for one, shall look for the future of this College among the principles of its founding. Those principles were drawn from Martin Luther's reverberating call for the establishment of schools and colleges. These were commissioned to cultivate the arts and sciences required for the management of this all-too-human world. Luther's principles of education are discoverably distinct from many which guide the academic enterprise elsewhere, and they are emphatically applicable to modern and prospective circumstance. They suppose that the human condition is superficially relieved - not fundamentally changed - by the modern techno-mastery of nature or the replacement of national by global societies. Hence, we shall seek a future consistent with our origins and resources and demonstrably relevant to the emergent human circumstance. Ours, after all, is an "education for service." And how but by speech might that once and future College be portrayed? How otherwise can it be made the causal and organizing passion of its members, without whose confident and proud support the dream will lack a delivery vehicle? Speech - both the talking and the listening part - must be brought in this job to the level of a fine art. I shall continue working upon my disability; might you listen for the call that reveals Augsburg's mission in the 21st century; might you each find new service in the task of uniting our future with our past; might this great gathering give new voice to the proposition that reason, when harnessed with faith, can move mountains in this world - tomorrow as yesterday. Thank you. Litany of Spirit Speech read by Regent Inez Schwarzkopf '56 Litany of Vision read by Philip Quanbeck Sr. '50 |
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