On Saturday, August 25, 2007, Provost and Dean of Faculty Teresa L. Amott spoke to first-year students about service learning during 2007 Orientation Weekend festivities.
You have heard many times that HWS are committed to service. You’ve heard it from our President, our admissions counselors, our faculty and staff; your orientation mentors, your RA’s, you’ve read it on our website.
And today, on this unbelievably hot morning, you have become part of that commitment. It is no longer something you read about or heard about—it is something you have started. We devoted a whole morning of your orientation to acts of service, and in a few minutes we are going to ask you to reflect on those actions, to see the deeper meanings, the connections, the possibilities that can emerge from small, but concerted, action taken by individuals working together.
This morning, I was reading a book by Paul Loeb, a writer and student activist, who has been here speaking at HWS in the past. The book is called The Impossible Will Take A Little While – A Citizen’s Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. In the introduction to this book, Loeb tells the story of the democracy movement in Czechoslovakia, an astonishing nonviolent revolution that ended 4 decades of Communist dictatorship. That movement was led by playwright, Vaclav Havel, who later became the Czech Republic’s first democratically elected president. And how did that happen, that a brutal, repressive regime was undone without violence? Well, it started with a rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe. The authorities called their work “morbid,” said it had a “negative social impact,” and had its members arrested. So, Havel organized a defense committee, which, in turn evolved into the Charter 77 organization, named after a manifesto published in 1977, which called on the government to respect human rights. Many of the members of Charter 77 were imprisoned or persecuted, including Havel. But they persevered, and in 1989, the dictatorship fell in what became known as the Velvet or Gentle Revolution. Three years before that Revolution, Havel wrote, “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.”
Hope, in other words, is not a prediction about what will happen, or must happen, or cannot happen. Hope is about what might happen, if people act, in private, in public, alone and together, to change the world. On Wednesday, at our convocation, you will meet John Lewis, a man of profound hope, who changed the world. So, today, we hope that we have given you not only an orientation to Geneva, or to community engagement, not only an orientation to HWS, but also an orientation of the heart.
To read comments offered during other on-campus events, visit Selected Transcripts.