The Wellspring

Remarks by Chancellor Richard Herman
at the Academic Excellence Recognition Banquet
February 13, 2006

I have been in a reflective mood lately.

Living as I do—and as you certainly do—in the omni-present world of Blackberries and emails and multi-tasking, finding the time to reflect on the purpose and meaning of what I do in my job as Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is not always easy. It’s hard to steal moments when I can ponder not what I am doing but why I am doing it—to what end is all my action and motion and energy being put?

I know that you know that feeling.

The week before Thanksgiving, I was in China to forge new partnerships with that emerging mammoth of a world power. On that trip, again and again, I was asked by my Chinese hosts, “What is the spark that makes the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign so excellent a university?”

The Chinese know about the 21 Nobel prizes that have been awarded to Illinois professors and alums, our Crafoord Prize-winning microbiologist Carl Woese, our Medal of Technology and Science Award-winner Nick Holonyak, our journalism faculty’s three Pulitzer Prizes, our five MacArthur genius award-winning professors in geology, fiction, biology, mathematics and chemistry. The Chinese know about Harvard and Yale and Princeton, of course. Yet it is your university to which they aspire.

It is a long flight back from China, twelve hours. And for the first time in a long time, I had the luxury of reflection, “Just what is the spark that makes Illinois excellent?”

Are we an excellent university because of all our Nobel prizes, all our awards? Are we an excellent university because we have projects underway with more than 200 institutions around the globe, or because of our new $90-million Institute for Genomic Biology project, or because of our computer power that surpasses that of all other academic institutions in the country?

Are we excellent because of all that we do? Or are we able to do so much because of a source deeper than our achievements?

I kept asking myself, “What is the wellspring of our excellence?”

Ian Hobson, our Swanlund Chair Professor of Music, believes excellence emerges from the yoking of innate gifts with a passion for one’s work and an old-fashioned lunch-pail work ethic. What my grandmother in Yiddish called “sitzfleisch”—meaning: sit your flesh down in that chair, boy, and work until the work is done.

Ian’s “sitzfleisch” ethic and his passion for his work eventually combine on-stage in moments when his personal labor and love blend in artistry, and people in the audience are touched. “I’ve worked as hard as I can,” Ian will think to himself before a performance. “Maybe I’ll do something that I’ve never done before, and they will hear the best interpretation of this piece they’ve ever heard—and they’ve helped me do it.”

“They’ve helped me do it”—just what does Ian mean by that?

I came home from my trip to China for Thanksgiving and spent a few days with Susan and our children and grandchildren. We made the kids hot chocolate, watched the Macy’s Parade. After a couple days of the grandkids hopping on my lap asking me to read them stories, asking why my hair is gray and Susan’s is still black, why the African masks on my wall are so brightly painted, why it snows when it is cold and rains when it is warm...

Why? Why? Why?—I was exhausted!

Then I realized—that is the spark, the source, the wellspring of all you do at Illinois—Why? Why? Why?

The answer, as is so often the case, from the mouths of children.

To always ask “Why?” is to be connected to the wellspring that ultimately makes the University of Illinois rich and abundant and successful—and the wellspring that makes you as individuals satisfied, challenged, and always growing. To ask “Why” is to live in tune with the deeper source of excellence—with your own creativity and curiosity.

Because if there is a quality of transcendence that we agree upon across all the borders of faith and belief, it must be that our own human creativity is sacred. I know that many of you do not think of your work as a job but as a vocation—a word that in its original Christian meaning referred to doing God’s work on earth. We do not think of the word “vocation” in that sense today. Yet, still, all of you know that your work is a calling. Not only a career but a gift of your creativity offered up to the common good of humanity.

Of course, nobody in this crowd will be surprised to know that there are scholars who study creativity—analyze it, correlate it with family background, with events of history, with prosperous times and lean times, with IQ. Yet it is still a mystery. Most interesting to me is that once you reach an IQ of about 120, adding more points to your Intelligence Quotient does not appear to increase your creativity. That’s because creativity isn’t only about being smart.

Creativity is a stance of mind, a stance toward life.

I mentioned that our present and past Illinois faculty includes five men and women who have won the coveted MacArthur Prize, the so-called national “genius award.” Just recently, our Professor Todd Martinez, a theoretical chemist, won the award. He joins Illinois geologist Susan Kieffer, novelist Richard Powers, microbiologist Carl Woese, mathematician Stephen Wolfram, and dozens of other MacArthur winners in the United States from the last quarter century—scholars, writers, artists, journalists, photographers, physicians, a binder of rare books, a builder of hand-made rocking chairs, even a clown.

All men and women whose creativity raced ahead of their times.

I ask, Why?

In one study of MacArthur winners we discover that they are tenacious “sitzfleisch” workers with the ability to laser-focus their minds. They trust their instincts in the face of fierce criticism. They love their work. They are imbued with a drive to always be better at what they do, never to be satisfied that they have achieved success. They are forever destined only to split the difference between their achievements and their perfect ambitions. Yet, most importantly, they invest their work with a vision—a dream of purpose and mission—that reaches beyond their personal goals.

They are you.

MacArthur winners—and all of you—have a stance of mind, a stance toward life that inspires, even generates creativity. Your lives are the product of your own creativity: men and women for whom excellence is the only and ordinary standard. You studied hard, mastered your field, enjoyed your work immensely and instilled it with a purpose larger than your own desire for success.

And when the time of great challenge arrived, your creativity rose to the occasion. Sometimes, at these moments of creation, you feel not as if you have come up with the fresh insight yourself, but rather that the insight has somehow come to you magically, was received from somewhere outside yourself.

The former U.S. poet-laureate Rita Dove recalled writing this line in one of her poems: “He used to sleep like a glass of water/ held up in the hand of a very young girl.” Writing those words, Ms. Dove once said, “was a great moment.” Not because she wanted the admiration of those who would read the words but because of the feeling she got when she wrote the words. Not pride, but wonder. “I feel very humble,” Ms. Dove said. “Thank you, line. I don’t know where you came from, but you are greater than I am.”

I know you recognize that sensation, and that even after all these years, it baffles you. Because creativity is forever a mystery, and anyone who has experienced it will forever honor that mystery.

Gene Robinson is a professor of entomology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He studies honey bees. Why does he study honey bees? Well, in his grant proposals and prestigious lectures, he studies honey bees because their elaborate social behavior is a window into understanding how genes influence social behavior not only in bees but in humans.

But if you ask Gene the real story of his fascination with honey bees, he will tell you about a summer on a kibbutz in Israel when he was 19 years old and writing home to his parents after only one week of tending to the beehives. “I said I wanted to work with bees the rest of my life,” Gene remembers. “My parents were appalled. They wanted me to be a doctor.”

That first week with his bees, Gene had no grand social purpose.

“I was smitten,” he says. “How intricately organized their society was. These little tiny insects with tiny brains that can produce all this order.” His curiosity and passion and creativity foretold his mission, “I wanted to know everything about honey bees.”

Gene Robinson has gotten his wish.

We can only be thankful that humankind has acquired creativity’s blueprint, grateful that we have found it in ourselves, humbled by its responsibility, and overjoyed at the pleasure it has given us.

What we are taught by our children and grandchildren sitting on our laps asking us “Why? Why? Why?,” is that we are all imbued with the spark of creativity, with the blessing and burden of wide-eyed wonder, with the capacity to be energized by an impossible challenge and by the desire to be elated and fulfilled at discovery.

You are here tonight, honored for your excellence, because you simply cannot stop yourselves from wanting to know. Call it a gift or an addiction, but you can’t stop yourselves. As Marianne Kalinke, our CAS professor of Germanic languages, says, “It is the love of learning that gets me up in morning. It is so exciting. There is so much to be known and learned. I turned 66 in November. It keeps you young. I feel like a kid. I’m working on a lecture now, and it is so much fun.”

I know that you know that feeling.

Ralph Waldo Emerson saw creative genius as God within us. When I hear a child ask a wide-eyed question, read Rita Dove’s poetry, ponder the multiple dimensions of reality postulated by string theory, I cannot help but believe Emerson was right.

I need only look to all of you.

When I think of microbiology professor Carl Woese, a man some say must be ranked with Charles Darwin, working for long years against the harsh criticism of fellow biologists before successfully proving his theory that a previously unknown, third domain of life existed in the earth’s harshest aquatic environments.

When I think of our now deceased physics professor John Bardeen coming home on the breakthrough day in the eventual Nobel award-winning discovery of the transistor and telling his wife simply, “We discovered something today.”

When I think of our novelist Richard Powers sitting at his desk, writing these lines for his book The Time of Our Singing: “Delia could feel them as she sang--the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up with her as she savored the song’s arc. She sheltered those souls in her sound and held them as motionless as the notes themselves, in that safe spot up next to grace.”

When I think of all these things, I cannot help but believe that Emerson was right— Whether bestowed by God or granted by nature, human creativity is a sacred gift.

What we cannot forget, what we must always find time to reflect upon, is that all of your excellence is ultimately in service to nurturing the spark, the source, the wellspring at the heart of it all. Young men and women come to us filled with wonder and curiosity. We want them to leave Illinois able to earn a living, yes, but we also want them to leave more deeply imbued with the creativity to live truly satisfying lives for the rest of their lives.

Because if we enhance the gift of curiosity and creativity that they have been given by birth, we will have done much good. The ultimate task for you—our amazing faculty—beyond your own creations is to ready your students for creative lives. To borrow the words of Richard Powers, You must shelter a piece of their creative souls in a “safe spot up next to grace.”

Remember what Ian Hobson said of his audience when he is performing at his best on stage, “They’ve helped me do it.” Yet just how do the people for whom we create, the people who are the justification for this great university and its culture of excellence, the people who will live with and, we hope, benefit from our creations, whether they be in science or art or literature—just how do those people help us achieve excellence?

People—our students and the public—are the other half of our conversation with ourselves, with our passions and our ambitions. As Ian’s insight implies, the people for whom we create are not an audience of passive listeners. They are the energy that ignites us. They are the flesh and blood embodiment of the grand idea that we are doing social good. A person touched by what you do is your purpose and reward. When they are changed, you are changed.

In the parlance of the African American church, you are call, they are response. Or is the other way around?

I know many of you well. And because of that I have come to believe that excellence, finally, is rooted in a human quality that we once called “character”—the constellation of traits that make a person honest, compassionate, sincere, and concerned about the good of their friends and neighbors, near and far.

Only a single hand craftsman has ever been awarded a MacArthur Prize. He is Sam Maloof, a maker of wooden rocking chairs that are collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To build fine chairs, Mr. Maloof believes, you must first be a fine person, because the human qualities that make a builder of beautiful chairs are the same qualities that make a beautiful person—humility, patience, integrity, and sincerity. Sam Maloof sees the qualities of the creator always embedded in his or her creations.

Mr. Maloof employs craftsmen who must sometimes spend days doing nothing but sanding wooden spindles by hand. “But they wouldn’t even think of doing a poor job because they were bored,” he says. “It isn’t because of how much I pay them. They do it for themselves. You have to work with integrity.”

I think of our own most recent MacArthur Prize winner, Todd Martinez, not a chair-maker but a theoretical chemist. His groundbreaking and breathtaking research into how molecules respond to light are a profound contribution to the field of sub-atomic molecular engineering. Todd expanded our knowledge because he did not accept the common textbook wisdom—he tested relentlessly, and came to a new, far more complicated formulation. He echoes the abiding curiosity of our entomologist Gene Robinson when he says, “I wanted to understand it completely.”

Yet Todd also echoes the sentiments of chair-maker Sam Maloof when he adds, “And I wanted to do it honestly.”

In excellence of any sort, character counts.

As I said when I began, I have been in a reflective mood lately, so grant me one final reflection. If human creativity truly is sacred, perhaps by encouraging and nurturing and sheltering it in yourselves and others, you all do something that is not only good but even holy. And that is work worth doing.

It is a vocation.

It is a calling.

Thank you.