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Inaugural Address (PDF)
Neal King, PhD
October 5, 2007

Inaugural Address (PDF)

Although a wiser soul might simply extend thanks and retake his seat at this moment, I am going to say a few words.

• To all who grace us with your presence today as we engage in this centuries old academic tradition
• To the distinguished members of the platform party
• To my fellow presidents
• To those who honor us today as delegates from other colleges and universities
• To the Antioch University Board of Trustees, our Chancellor and the AULA community for the trust and honor bestowed upon me to assume stewardship of this dynamic and progressive institution
• To past presidents Dale Johnston, Mark Schulman and LucyAnn Geiselman - and former Interim President Chole Reid - for your service and dedication
• To our drummers, Nick Preston, Jazz Antigua, Vox Femina and Sandor Lakotos for the great gift of your music, dance and voices today, which thrill our spirits
• To distinguished portraitist Don Bachardy for his new show Emotion Pictures, created to mark this occasion
• To Professor Donald Strauss and our community colleagues, who share our dedication to urban sustainability and social justice, for their partnership in yesterday's excellent and substantive summit
• To our partner institutions for our past and future good work together
• To Nancy Fawcett for her generous hosting of this week's AULA Board of Visitors' luncheon
• To Antioch University archivist Scott Sanders for his erudite and enlightening presence amongst us this past week
• To the faculty, staff and student volunteers whose generous labors have made this week's events possible
• To my passionate, learned and honorable AULA faculty colleagues - and our treasured staff colleagues - all of whom I am honored to work with side by side in the day to day
• To the AULA community - our students and community partners for whom we exist, our cherished alumni, our sage and committed Board of Visitors and generous patrons - without whose counsel and support we could not hope to fully serve our mission
• To colleagues, friends and family from near and far
• To my sister Sharon, niece Lally and great friend and life partner Peter Morrison for their love, friendship, companionship and support over the years,

I thank you.

On this day, one hundred and fifty four years ago - October 5, 1853 - Horace Mann, the first president of Antioch College, delivered his Inaugural Address on the Antioch College campus, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I learned recently from Scott Sanders that the population of Yellow Springs at the time was approximately 1500 -- and that 5000 gathered to hear Mann speak that day. He spoke for two hours - causing many to miss their train home.

While I am honored today to claim Horace Mann and Antioch College's direct lineage and legacy on behalf of Antioch University Los Angeles - I have no intention of speaking for two hours and promise to cause no one to miss their train home.

Cesar Chavez said "The end of all education should surely be service to others." And Nelson Mandela that "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

In our inaugural events, culminating with this ceremony, we celebrate our history and mission as Antioch University Los Angeles - and proclaim the shape of our future as an institution of higher education.

Last month, Culver City - host to AULA, this event, and guest performers Vox Femina, celebrated its 90^th anniversary. Long at the center of the motion picture industry and known locally as the "Heart of Screenland," Culver City has in recent years also emerged as destination for the arts, fine food, engaged citizenry and intimate community. At a recent day-long free film festival titled "Made in Culver City," such classics as An American in Paris and Laurel and Hardy shorts Pulling Pants on Phillip and Hog Wild were aired for the community. We have appreciated working with our friends from the city on our common commitment to sustainable practice and protecting the environment, and are proud supporters of the Culver City Education Foundation. Culver City we salute you.

Today we also commemorate the 50^th anniversary of unprecedented acts of young courage, principle and vision - of a magnitude unthinkable in September of 1957 in any part of this country. The Little Rock Nine, who celebrated their 50^th anniversary little more than a week ago, and their 40^th a decade before - with President Bill Clinton, and were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by him in November of 1999 - include our own beloved and esteemed Dr. Terry Roberts. Then students at Central High School in Little Rock, AK, guarded by the US Army and forced to run a gauntlet of hatred and rage, these heroic individuals helped to turn this nation away from its horrid history of racism and discrimination and toward a path of equality, opportunity and social justice for all citizens. We honor their courage, take inspiration from their willingness to act on their beliefs, and celebrate the golden anniversary of their contribution to modern American history. Dr. Terry Roberts, we salute you.

Finally, we celebrate our own 35^th anniversary of service to the communities of the greater Los Angeles area, the living legacy of which is generations of educators, writers, mental health professionals, managers and socially engaged citizens who carry their Antioch University experience in their hearts and into their work every day as they provide leadership and service to the uniquely diverse communities of the City of Angels, and beyond.

I joined the Antioch University Community because of how closely my own values align with those of the university. An Antioch University education is values based, its pedagogies relational, and its objective that one wed theory to practice, acting, through service, to benefit community. Every voice matters. No one is better than another.

There was little formal education in prior generations of my family. Descendant from Irish and Scotch-Irish working class immigrants - my grandfathers worked respectively for the railroad in the Midwest and in textile and steel mills in New England - I was the first to earn a degree on either side of my family.

I remember being a bit surprised as a high school student when my teachers took for granted that I was to be in the "college prep" track - I wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but I was immediately honored, thrilled - and intrigued... even though most of the cool kids didn't seem to feel the same way.

My undergraduate years began my life-long love affair with education - you'll notice I've never really left school - as I was introduced to the world's philosophies, literatures, histories and arts. Reading James Joyce for the first time, a line spoken by Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seared itself into my memory-- "I will always be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's cultures." There was so much to learn, to explore, to absorb - how could one ever hope to accomplish more than to nibble around the edges?

Habits of mind became the revelation of my graduate years - critical thinking, lifelong learning, original sources, the literature of the field, historical and contextual analysis, comparative methodologies, original research.

In between my undergraduate and graduate years, my restless and curious young spirit called me to vagabond and collect life experience in different parts of the world. I learned again and again that life itself taught the greatest lessons and that one's formal education could at best inform, refine and explicate one's moments in time.

My oldest childhood friend, and one of my greatest life teachers, is here with us today: Rey Villegas. We first met at age 12, and were surprised to find ourselves undergraduates together years later at St. Mary's College in Northern California. We shared an apartment after graduating while Rey taught elementary school and I taught high school English - and we both struggled with our consciences and the war in Vietnam. We spent many hours, in the company of thousands, on the streets lending our bodies and our voices to oppose the war -- and I learned what a great teacher the streets can be.

I was the first male on either side of my family not to serve in the US Navy. My father and older brother were career officers. I am a lifelong pacifist and was a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam.

Rey made a different decision from mine - he refused induction. He felt that mine was an option for articulate white boys and that he would be disloyal to his Mexican-American heritage and contemporaries if he were to opt as I did. Rey taught me a powerful lesson about privilege.

At age 22, I ran an English language school in southern Laos - during the war in neighboring Vietnam. As I drove my US government-issue Jeep through the provincial capital where I lived, soldiers and policemen saluted me - assuming, by my appearance, that I was a part of the occupying force. As I got to know my students, they confided that the local population assumed that all non-military Americans were CIA. Here I was a naïve conscientious objector in a war zone - thunderstruck to realize that simply by being an American I was a part of the war effort.

Three of us in similar positions who were conscientious objectors requested that our organization cancel the contracts we worked under and that we be allowed to transfer to other posts.

The next fall I joined a dear friend as a teacher in Algeria - oblivious (how much about the world I had not learned in school!) to their having recently concluded a brutal war for independence with France. As colonizers, the French allowed access to education only to those few being trained to work for them. As an independent nation after their long war, opening schools across the land was a first priority. I was part of an international faculty - the only American, who taught in initially lousy French, in a brand new high school serving the Berber populations east of the capital, where some of the war's most brutal battles had been fought. First priority for admission was given to the children - mostly sons - of the war dead. When I visited students' families and villages, I was always taken to visit the fathers' graves.

Laos and Algeria taught me what it means to be a citizen of the first world. I got a glimpse of the realities of colonization for subjugated peoples -- other huge lessons about privilege.

I believe that with privilege comes responsibility.

While a doctoral student at Berkeley, I participated in a seminar called "Psychological Research and Third World Americans." We - a Hispanic man, a Jewish professor, an African American woman, three Asian- American women of different ethnic backgrounds and a white gay guy - set for ourselves the challenges of conceptualizing a single paradigm by which to consider our collective social and cultural realities. We were not successful, but we all were changed by the attempt. We wrote about our experience together in a joint chapter for a book published in 1988 by the American Psychological Association.

I also have my own chapter in this book, which describes the experience of being part of a group of psychologists, sociologists and graduate students collaborating in the teaching of the first general course on lesbians and gay men taught at UC Berkeley, which we called "Sexual Diversity and Social Change: Homosexuality in America." Satisfying a breadth requirement for undergraduates at the university, a total of 500-600 students took this course in 1982 and 1983. It was wild - exhilarating, ground breaking, liberating, celebratory.

I recently crossed paths with former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Harry Britt - who had assumed the seat of the assassinated Harvey Milk - and commented on our first meeting when he presented a guest lecture in this course a quarter century ago. He remembered it well.

My dissertation at Berkeley was a critique of historically prevailing theories in psychology which posited as normal - and therefore psychologically healthy - reality as experienced by heterosexual Judeo-Christian European men. It has taken recent generations of women, people of color, disabled people and lesbians and gay men speaking in our own voices through our own activist scholarship about our own realities to begin to correct this long prevailing distortion and its pathologizing effects on our communities.

Antioch has a distinguished history as champion of activist scholarship and energetically setting the record straight about the effects of colonization, subjugation, sexism, racism, homophobia - and Eurocentric thinking, theory and practice. I feel very much at home here.

As a member of a generation that has witnessed the assassination of hope far too many times - we need only think of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Steve Biko, the AIDS epidemic and the tragedies of Vietnam and Iraq - I believe that those of us blessed to still be here must not fail to continue to believe and to instill in future generations the profound confidence that our better selves can and must prevail.

My experience as a gay man has guaranteed me the life-long experience - up close and personal - of the forces of hatred, bigotry, discrimination and marginalization that continue to form the shadow side of our social contract.

I proudly stand before you today as one of very few allowed to serve as an openly gay college and university president in the history of American Higher Education - and I salute Antioch University for continuing to walk its talk and embrace social justice in its actions as well as its words.

I lived as a boy in LA from the third grade through high school, first in west LA, and then later in San Pedro. Except for the 405, I have always loved LA. My years in such lesser venues as San Francisco, London, and Paris - and visitor to many of the planet's other urban wonders - from New York to Bangkok, Beijing to Mexico City - have only intensified this love.

There's only one LA -- center of the known universe, as far as I'm concerned.

We designed this week's events to honor and celebrate the multitudinous diversity that we live and work amongst on a daily basis - which is the very face of the students and communities we serve. Our skin comes in every color and our creeds in every form; we are rich and poor and straight and gay and there is unparalleled talent in our midst. LA Times columnist Sandy Banks wrote recently of life in LA that "despite all our differences, stamina and ingenuity bind us. We're survivors."

We are 10 million and growing in the greater Los Angeles area, our diversity staggering in its complexity. We absorb newer and newer technologies while, amidst what can at moments be dispiriting anonymity, placing an ever insistent value on relationship and community.

At a time when 25% of the toxins in the air above us today originated in China, we seek to become - and train - better stewards of the environment, instilling the imperative for sustainable practices into the very fabric of our lives and every action. A charter signatory of the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment - which now counts nearly 400 college and university presidents and chancellors as signatories, I believe that we must never cease our own life-long learning as responsible global citizens - nor forget our responsibility as role models for others.

Antioch University Los Angeles, a community of enormous caring, generosity and good will - with a rare and inspiring absence of malice - is blessed to call Los Angeles home. Tiny but spirited and determined, we imperfectly answer the call on a daily basis to make ours a more just society. That's our challenge, our opportunity and our responsibility. We refuse to be silent where there is injustice and where our sisters and brothers are treated as lesser in any way.

We strive to embrace and model the core values that we teach: critical thinking, life long learning, social activism, the responsibility to others of our privileged lives.

It is our deeds - the lives we choose to live every day - that betray and distinguish us. We are collectively called to action - and to leadership - by the venerable roots and noble deeds of those who dreamed Antioch to life and those to whom we must ourselves deliver the institution to serve generations yet to be.

Mahatma Ghandi once said "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

We at Antioch University Los Angeles have been blessed with an unusual opportunity and a unique responsibility. As we continuously renew our own call to excellence, ours is to fearlessly step up, make noise, rattle cages - and give back... in the very best Antiochian tradition.

Thank You.