February 2006

"Holistic Studies: An Alternative No Longer" (vol 1, issue 1)

Since my arrival at JFKU in mid November as Dean of the School of Holistic Studies, I have had a chance to meet and begin to know many of you. This has been a pleasant and instructive process, as I am quickly learning about the great talent and depth of commitment that you and our staff possess. There are many of you, however, particularly adjunct faculty, whom I haven't met. Therefore, let me take this opportunity to share some thoughts with you and commit myself to try to meet more of you in the near future.

I come to the School of Holistic Studies with more than thirty years experience in higher education. For the last twenty years I have been Professor of Humanities at The Juilliard School. For the final 12 of those years I supervised the undergraduate bachelor's degree program. In addition to administrating, I taught courses in folklore, mythology, comparative religion, poetry, and philosophy. During that time I received training in the professional studies program at the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology in New York. There I taught courses on fairy tales, myth, Western and Eastern classic texts, and anomalous folk belief and experience. My recent scholarship focuses on learning and teaching theory. I am completing a book (Healing Education: Achieving Wholeness through the Arts and Humanities) on Noetic learning that offers a broad definition of intellect that includes perceptions of the body and imagination, since thinking and perceiving are not mutually exclusive, and the analytical disciplines of higher education do not by themselves address the issue of the full development of the human. I love poetry, myths, fairy tales, and dreams. This spring quarter I will teach a course on fairy tales in our Consciousness and Transformative Studies Program.

It is clear to me that our School is strong; you have seen to that. The university readily recognizes our expertise in teaching and programming. Our students continually speak of the power of their transformative education to develop an all-sided body-mind capable of thinking with the heart and feeling with a conscious and disciplined valuing of experience. This epistemological pluralism that we promote and nurture can no longer be considered an alternative way of thinking, acting, or being. At the heart of our mission is freedom - freedom to think imaginatively beyond ideologies or authoritative systems, freedom to express creative energies to direct the human spirit and mobilize social action, and freedom to become one's own intellectual and artistic authority. In a free society, there can be no credible alternative to that freedom required of an enlightened citizenry capable of effective decision-making and evaluation of competing claims to truth. A democratic society benefits when its universities increase the diversity of the nation's intellectual perspectives, products, and performances. Educational equity results not simply by providing people with opportunities to enter the university, but also by providing them opportunities for integrated learning and whole knowing. We offer an educational experience that is now considered by many to be fundamental for all, since prudent individuals know that to educate people properly requires attention be given to their mental, physical, cultural, and spiritual needs within a sustainable environment.

Secondly, holistic approaches to learning and living are more central to people's lives due to a large degree to the collapse of the intellectual infrastructure of the academy. In the present relativistic climate, many in the academy seem feckless to integrate competing claims to knowledge into a dynamic vision of purpose with which we may develop educational policies that promote human wholeness. With its integral, somatic, humanistic, existential, ecological and health oriented approaches to learning and living, The School of Holistic studies provides such a vision. The nation needs us to balance our justifiable needs for research and intellectual freedom with the obligation to point out to the public the interdependence among the intellectual and cultural values of nations in a global context. In the next five years let us together establish our School as the premier agent of integral influence on management, art, politics, technology, and law by intensifying our efforts to connect emerging knowledges into holistic understandings. Let us connect with the force of our collective intentionality to shape and reshape reality on behalf of what is sacred and human.

We face some important challenges to our goals, as universities do nationwide. One such challenge involves the increasing cost of a university education and its consequences. In the coming years we must confront the increasing corporatization of higher education that threatens the integrity of faculty, staff, and students alike. When they are not tempered with holistic values, corporate values commodify consciousness and provide a breeding ground for nihilism. In a time of increasing costs of higher education we must carefully follow a policy of strategic engagement rather than isolation from or surrender to the martketplace. We need to position our School to develop programs and initiatives that prepare our students for emerging professional roles, such as knowledge managers, innovation specialists, game designers, image makers, and symbol interpreters. While it is important for us to prize knowledge for its economic rationality, it is equally important to seek knowledge for its essential truth and its potential for human transformation. Otherwise, learning is but an instrument of economic individualism over substance and truth, a revenue stream, not a path toward enlightenment.

I am honored to be part of The School of Holistic Studies where standards of academic excellence are high and our students' welfare is carefully nurtured. I am greatly impressed by our faculty of teaching-practitioners who embody the wisdom saying "To know is to become." Here is the idea of sapere, related to sapid, taste, or what is pleasing to the body-mind. People of refined intellectual or aesthetic taste are sapient, wise, knowing; such people attract and move others by their integrity. I salute you as you continue to necessarily bring the passionate principle to bear on your work. I look forward to working with you in the future on matters of importance. Please feel free to come by my office to chat when you can. My door is open.

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