As an experimental, progressive college, Sarah Lawrence is known for its activism on behalf of social justice as well as its emphasis on individuality.

When the individual matters, the individual can make a difference in the world. Dewey believed that individualism need not be narrow or selfish. The question is, though, how is developing the capacity of the individual related to the capacity for community and contribution to community? How are connections forged within this campus of individuals and between the campus and the wider community? It has been said that developing community at Sarah Lawrence is like “herding cats,” a cliché often applied to academic communities. And it is true that the vocabulary of “difference” that is so abundant here has sometimes obscured, even inhibited, a sense of community on campus.

Joan Cannady Countryman '62, Trustee

The most important and challenging achievement of any board of trustees is its selection of a president. We are proud of our work in that regard, and we are delighted to welcome Karen R. Lawrence as tenth president of Sarah Lawrence. We look forward to her leadership of the College that we cherish.

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One response is that the imagination plays an important role in the development of both capacities. Just as the individual voice requires the imagination to freshen ordinary existence and make and remake the self, so community involves imagining the lives of others, being able to stand in the place of another and feel what it is like to live inside that person’s skin. William James, another important American pragmatist, bemoaned narrow individualism and what he viewed as an inability to understand “the sources of delight for individuals other than ourselves.” Novelists understand the exercise of such sympathetic imagination when they establish characters from words on a page. After reading Joyce’s Ulysses, one of my favorite novels, readers probably know Leopold Bloom’s “sources of delight” almost as well as they know their own.

And yet, in our contemporary local and global societies, Dewey’s faith in the ability of individuals to know each other—to make themselves legible to one another and to “read” each other—is being tested in a much more heterogeneous society than Dewey experienced. It is tested by the changing demographics of college communities, where students and faculty of different backgrounds come together in a learning environment. It is tested by the expansion of community through technology, where individuals from radically different cultures can enter each other’s living rooms and where identity and community can take on “virtual” existence. These are tests we must welcome if we are to form communities of individuals who understand people with different likes, dislikes, backgrounds, preferences, and ideologies—people on our campus, in our neighboring communities, and in the world. Our colleges and universities must encourage the deep study of languages and cultures at home and abroad if we are to avoid our own parochialism. Both locally and globally, we have a responsibility to others, to make a difference in their lives without succumbing to ill-fated attempts to export our system of beliefs.

Phillip Amicone, Mayor of Yonkers

Sarah Lawrence College has been a very important part of the educational system in Yonkers. We are always pulling in the same direction, and that direction is toward a better life and a better future for everyone—especially those young people who will follow us, who will be better leaders than we are, and who will make a better world than we’ve been able to make. That only happens through great education.

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Earlier, I mentioned Paul Newman’s commencement address. In it, he spoke eloquently of the various communities he had belonged to in his life, communities in which he felt that a group of individuals could make a difference in the world. Community, he said,

inspires, supports, demands, extracts all I have, keeps me in the process, keeps me honest. The community is the demand that creates my supply. I need its invitation to remember that I am responsible, that I long for fellowship, that I have any generosity at all. Individualism needs, for its own moral comfort, to be tempered by community.