pre sid ent’s me ssage
in an Eden-like simple paradise, the Country residence of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, the young simpleton is educated by a series of ridiculous calamities including war, the Spanish Inquisition (and as Monty Python used to say, “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”), carnage, and the death and dismemberment of his friends and teachers, who are repeatedly restored to life in ridiculous ways. Raised by his teacher, the glib Dr. Pangloss, Candide is trained in the philosophy of Optimism—the idea that, as Alexander Pope put it, “Whatever is, is right.” Or, as Dr. Pangloss would say, “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire would buy none of this. He knew the world in which he lived, where tyrants reigned and disease and pestilence prevailed. He knew that there was a role for reason, for human progress. After the final series of fantastic traumas, Candide realizes that the world is not the best it can be, and that much is to be said for the simple life of hearth and home, and above all the requirement that makes up the last words of the book: “...we must cultivate our garden.” Note the verb. Cultivate. An evocative verb, that implies labor and action, and one that suggests honing one’s mind as well as hoeing one’s garden. It is not let’s let our garden grow, or have our garden cultivated. Thus, Voltaire’s very candid Candide makes a remarkable choice. He rejects the Optimism of Pope, the positivist idea that whatever is exists for a reason and we just need to be satisfied with it. Optimism fails to recognize the reality of the great challenges we are facing and the existence of great suffering in the world, with the potential of truly unspeakable suffering in the future if we simply ignore the challenges in the optimistic, Panglossian style. But Candide, very importantly, rejects the opposite pole of pessimism as well. Pessimism leads to apathy and no concerted attempt to deal with the challenges of our world in any systemic or systematic way, and this has similar consequences as the optimistic approach in that it does not address the realities we face in any constructive manner. Meliorism, which is what the approach of Voltaire’s Candide is called, is the view that the world can improve and that humans,
through hard work, can aid its betterment. This way, Voltaire and I think, is the only constructive way forward as we work together as human beings to cultivate the only garden that we have all been given, the garden that is our only Home, planet Earth. And within that earthly garden, the specific gardens that come under our tutelage. So Candide, fantastically reunited with his oncelove Cunégonde, marries her even though she has grown old and ugly—but, Voltaire points out with appropriate Frenchness, she was an excellent pastry chef. All great leaders of positive social change have been meliorists of one sort of another (Gandhi, King, Mother Teresa, and the list goes on), and if our university—today’s garden—is to take seriously its moral responsibility as an institution of higher learning, we must take on this melioristic project by helping our students and our community become moral leaders for social, educational, ecological, and spiritual responsibility as we tend the garden of our university, our society, and our world. What is called for is servant leadership—we can labor within the vineyard given to us to make the world better than it is now. One hundred six years ago, the founders of OCU planted this garden. They invited all faiths to come and study, to learn, to become servant leaders. Our garden was planted by another. But we can put our special talents and community labor together to enhance the modest profusion of bloom. After I was approached by the University and asked if I would allow my name to be considered for the presidency, I had a most difficult question. I was a gardener, a forester perhaps, in the garden of the law. Yet I treasured my days in the academy and used all of my spare time to teach. As I struggled with this decision, I was driving from the airport. I turned on the radio, to KCSC, and was delighted to hear the announcer explain that a piece from Bernstein’s Candide was next. I was further delighted when I heard that the piece was “Let’s Make Our Garden Grow.” I was breathless when the announcer revealed it would be the OCU Choirs and orchestra that would perform it. I pulled my car into a parking lot. I listened to Bernstein’s free and exultant passages
against Candide’s simple text. I saw the OCU garden more clearly, and felt that was what I needed to do. Music, like poetry, can get you into trouble. But, it can also get you in the right place. All of you here today are friends of this great university that, while not the best of all possible universities, is a remarkable university that keeps getting better. Together, we must wield the tools of our cultivation, which in turn will increase and improve our yield. Our means are many: academic excellence through rigor, inspired teaching, curiosity, creativity and problem solving; engagement, whether it be of the civic, intellectual, scholarly or community variety and preferably all of them; diversity, which means respect and civil discourse, and speaks to the unlimited potential of people; creativity, which OCU fosters and is particularly blessed with through the fine and performing arts; social and ecological responsibility; and the development of moral and spiritual maturity. I hope and trust that all of you here will join with me and the University Community to make Oklahoma City’s university all that it can be. In the last two sentences of Candide, Voltaire fires one final shot at the delusional world of his teacher Dr. Pangloss. Pangloss says, as they talk on their little farm: All events are connected in the best of all possible worlds; for, after all, if you hadn’t been driven off from a beautiful country residence with great kicks in the backside for the love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been brought before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t stabbed the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep (and wealth) from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be here eating candied citrons and pistachios.” “That’s well said,” replied Candide, “but we must cultivate our garden.” Indeed, let us do so: “We’ll build our house and chop our wood And make our garden grow.”
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