Opening Convocation address by Brent Nelsen

Opening Convocation 2023
Address by Brent Nelsen, the Jane Fishburne Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs

I would like to add my welcome to all of you to this great university. If you are a returning student, faculty member, or staff member, you know that Furman is a place where lives are changed. We have watched members of our community discover new talents, decide new courses for their lives, and meet life partners. We can’t wait to be part of that process again.

If you are a brand-new student, still trying to locate Johns Hall (because all the buildings look the same!) you are going to discover, for the first time, how beautiful Paris Mountain is from the top row of Paladin Stadium on a November football Saturday, how your parents will subtly treat you differently when you return home for Thanksgiving—because by some miracle you turned into an adult in 13 weeks, and how your body can literally tingle when you hear Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #6, or read Dante, Shakespeare, Baldwin, or the Gospel of Matthew for the first time. By the way, your body can also tingle in a very different way, as when, for instance, you see the most beautiful person in the world walk into your fall-term French class and your world is changed. That happened to me. And that woman has been my wife for 42 years! Sometimes class opens your eyes in ways you don’t expect!

Now to business. Dr. King mentioned an “Initiative on Discourse” that will soon make you aware of all the opportunities we have on this campus to reach across our differences of opinion and identity to listen to and learn from one another. Why is this necessary? Why can’t we just find a group of like individuals – in person and online – and just stay in that comfortable bubble?

The short answer is that doing just that is tearing our country apart.

The problem with our comfort zones is that they have become alternative realities. The people inside them are similar, they agree on the facts and how to interpret them, they agree on values, they agree on religion, and they agree on who is wrong. All of this is fed by cable news and social media algorithms that bake in one fundamental characteristic: they feed you what you want to see.

These alternative realities are accelerating what we call “polarization”: a growing gap between groups of people operating in different social, informational, and political environments. This is fueling our toxic politics and touches every level of education from pre-school to graduate school. And Furman is not immune. There is no polarization vaccine or mask mandate that can keep us from the polarization virus. If you were on campus last year, you know that we ended the spring term infected. The culture wars came to Furman.

We need to do better this year, but the headwinds are against us. We are in presidential campaign season. Debates start this week. In February, South Carolina will be the focus of world attention as the Republican primary rolls through our state. We have seen tense politics here before, but never while a former president and leading candidate in the race faces serious charges over his actions just before, during, and just after his term in office. Already we are seeing both political parties ginning up anger in their respective political bases. Court trials will only widen the alternative realities gap.

We must prepare ourselves for a difficult 18 months or more. Furman must be resilient in the face of national turmoil. Some schools have chosen a political side and built the walls high around their campuses. In fact, they have chosen a reality and are reinforcing it among their faculty, students, and staff. As far as I can tell, Furman has not chosen fortress-style resilience. We don’t have walls; we let the world in and encourage all to share their opinions, even their alternative realities, but always in a manner respectful of the dignity of all persons. This is risky; last spring proved that.

Furman will prove resilient, not by building strong walls, but by building strength from within.

The opposite of polarization is not unity, but community – and community has been proven to overcome polarization.

Over sixty years ago, just after World War II, the leaders of Western Europe determined to end war on the European continent. That meant getting the French and Germans to reconcile after 1200 years of conflict. Their solution was to create a North American Treaty Organization and a European Community.

Karl Deutsch, one of the great political scientists of the last century thought about what European leaders meant by the word “community.” It doesn’t mean the same thing to all people. I know that for some of you the word carries a great deal of negative baggage. I understand the term has been used in the past to marginalize some people who were not considered worthy of the community as defined by the majority. That was unjust, and the resulting pain is real.

But Deutsch, as a Jew who fled the Nazis, understood that pain. He, nevertheless, believed that a “spirit of community”—a “we-feeling,” a new identity—could be learned over time. Sworn enemies could eventually come to consider the “other”—the enemy—as part of an “us”—a “we.” The question was how?

Deutsch believed that building trust was the key to building community. Trust, in his mind, emerged from successful interactions with the former enemy that would begin small and trivial and grow to include transparent cooperation to preserve security. He knew there were obstacles. He admitted that creating a “we-feeling” was difficult when communities did not share common values. He admitted that many community-building projects failed. But he still believed that deep peace could come from everyday human interactions at a local level. He was, perhaps, overly optimistic, but the European Union, for all its problems, has achieved a we-feeling that remains the bedrock of peace among its member states.

We at Furman are not trying to create world peace. We are just trying to make our little corner of America a little less combustible. I appreciate Deutsch’s emphasis on little interactions that lead to big reconciliations. But I believe, in this moment, when time is not on our side, that we have to be more active in our approach to building what President Davis has called a “thriving community,” a place where everyone can do their best work.

Yes, participate in every dialogue group you can find, go to CLPs with a discussion component, speak up in your pathways class and listen to those who disagree with you.

But we have to go beyond the activities provided by the University – as valuable as they are. Building a thriving community – a community of trust – requires that we step outside of our friend circles and social media silos and embrace the other. This will entail courage and sacrifice. You may have to forgo your usual evening with Rachel Maddow and watch Tucker Carlson with a new friend (on whatever Twitter show he’s on). Then talk about this stuff, with one another, without any professors around. Be truly subversive!

What I’m asking you to do is counter cultural. What I’m asking you to do is love one another. This isn’t a new thought. Jesus of Nazareth made loving one another, and loving your enemy, central tenets of the Kingdom of God. Love means you put aside your interests for the interests of the other. You extend grace—undeserved favor—to someone who isn’t like you and who might not deserve your grace—but you give it anyway.

Here’s a suggestion to make it easier: love one another with food! Breaking bread together is a time-honored peacemaking technique. Jesus was always eating—with collectors of the Roman tax, with prostitutes, with Pharisees, with several thousand people he didn’t know, and with his close followers on the night he was betrayed, the night he commanded his followers to love one another. When Dr. Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 60 years ago and gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech, he described the pinnacle of his dream this way: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” And I say any table of brotherhood worth its salt in the South will be piled high with pulled pork, slaw, beans, and sweet tea! It will be a feast for family!

So here is what I want you to do. Eat with people you don’t think you agree with, or even like.

Or go one step further. My youngest son, Derek, when he was living in North Village, made pancakes on Saturday mornings and opened his door to anyone who would walk in. He served 30 people every Saturday. And relationships blossomed. You don’t have to be a good cook to invite someone to coffee, or your DH table, or a grill-club night, or Papa John’s pizza night. Groups can do this too: College Democrats and Republicans could—maybe should—eat dinner together one night per week until the primaries are over.

None of this is risk-free because ALL of us are crooked timber. There will be conflict. People will say the wrong words, cross a boundary, and hit a cancel mine. Feelings may get hurt as we test the boundaries of speech.

Grace and forgiveness will have to be part of everyday life if this is to work.

It can work at Furman. As Provost Pontari has often said, we are well positioned to be a rare success in the liberal arts world. We are more diverse—in nearly every sense of that term—than we have ever been. Politics is no exception. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fans out there, I’ve got news for you, real, live Trump supporters are in this room. And Trumpers, I’ve got news for you, there are real, live socialists in this room. Building community with that kind of diversity is hard. And hear me on this—it does not mean enforcing a single orthodoxy. It does mean learning to love people you will never, ever agree with. It means committing to stay and fight for the “beloved community,” even in the face of conflict.

Taylor Swift knows this. The preeminent lyricist of the 21^st century put it this way:

I’m pretty sure we almost broke up last night
I threw my phone across the room at you
I was expecting some dramatic turn away
But you stayed
This morning I said we should talk about it
’Cause I read you should never leave a fight unresolved
That’s when you came in wearing a football helmet
And said, “Okay, let’s talk”
And I said
Stay, stay, stay
I’ve been loving you for quite some time, time, time
You think that it’s funny when I’m mad, mad, mad
But I think that it’s best if we both stay.

Paladins, new and old, love one another, and STAY!

Thank you!