2004 Honorary Degree Recipients and
Commencement Speakers
click on the names below to view bios or on “remarks” to view speeches.
John Seely, Commencement Speaker and Honorary Degree Recipient (remarks)
DuWayne J. Peterson, Jr., Honorary Degree Recipient (remarks)
Synthia Laura Molina, Distinguished Alumni Service Award Recipient (remarks)
Michael M. Hertel, Distinguished Alumni Service Award Recipient (remarks)
Karen Linkletter, Student Speaker (remarks)
John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown, formerly the Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation and Director of its Palo Alto
Research Center, is a prolific writer, lecturer, and thinker on issues related to the information age.
With a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Brown University and a doctorate in
computer and communications sciences from the University of Michigan, Dr. Brown has spent his
career examining how technology impacts and changes the society.
While at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), he expanded the role of corporate research to
include such topics as organizational learning, sociological studies in the workplace, and complex
adaptive systems. His personal research interests include the digital culture, ubiquitous computing,
and organizational and individual learning.
He is the co-author of the highly acclaimed book, The Social Life of Information. He is a member of
the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.
He holds honorary degrees from Brown University and the London Business School. He serves on
numerous boards of directors, including Corning, Polycom, and Varian Medical Systems. Dr. Brown
has published over 100 papers in scientific journals.
Dr. Brown describes himself as “part scientist, part artist, and part strategist.” His views are
distinguished by the range of human contexts in which technologies operate and a healthy skepticism
about whether or not change always represents genuine progress.
Remarks by John Seely Brown
Honorary Degree Recipient and Commencement Speaker
Thank you and good morning. It is a great pleasure to be here. I want to start by asking a question.
Has technological progress, vast as it has been, actually improved the quality of our lives in the last
ten years? Or are we more stressed out, more anxious, feeling totally overwhelmed, out of control,
and never having the time to stop, step back, reflect, meditate, and take stock of our well being?
Now, this is a heavy topic–a topic I was recently asked to address at a conference (actually a town
hall meeting) in Seattle last week titled, “Information, Silence, and Sanctuary.” I eagerly agreed to
attend, but then found that the organizers had twisted my arm into giving one of the public open talks.
After saying yes, I became increasingly nervous. The first speaker was an environmentalist, Bill
McKibben, who has been writing about information pollution for more than ten years. The second
speaker was an Episcopal priest who spoke on the importance of the Sabbath in our information age.
And then there was me–a geek. A guy who spends at least ten hours a day in front of his wireless
laptop, who is never too far away from his Treo and who habitually surfs the web for entertainment,
rather than watching television.
In fact, when I was asked to speak here today, I was gently but firmly told, “No laptop.” That caused
me to panic, I must admit. Yes, I’m somewhat of an unusual geek, one who started out life as a hardcore computer scientist who believed that if an idea couldn’t be expressed as an equation, it wasn’t
really an idea. But now I find myself spending much of my time with social scientists, digital
storytellers, illuminists, moviemakers, and so on. For through the years I have come to realize that,
although technology is important, so is the human touch, and although the individual mind is
important, the social mind is as well. And although information is important, perhaps meaning is even
more so – but how is meaning created? Although our entire economy makes things more efficient,
perhaps we have lost sight of what makes our work more meaningful.
So what caused my transformation from the standard computer scientist? The simple answer is
learning – learning to see the world more as an artist does and holding in awe the amazing amount of
improvisation that happens in even the most routine work. My start down this path happened quite
innocently. I had just come to Xerox and the management asked me to see if I could use artificial
intelligence, something I had studied a great deal, to generate some smart job performance aids to
help our tech reps (tech reps are the people who repair our copiers and printers) so that the company
would not have to spend $200 million a year on training them.
Fortuitously, before setting out to design a solution to this problem, several of us had a bizarre idea:
let’s hire some anthropologists and have them live, work, and learn with our tech reps for at least six
months. From their observations we would then be able to see how our tech reps really work. Sure,
we knew what they were supposed to do, but what were they actually doing that they themselves
might not be aware of?
Well, to begin with, these tech reps never bothered to look at the five-inch-think manual designed to
guide them through the trouble-shooting process. Why? It made them look stupid in front of their
customers and thus damaged the customers’ confidence in them–not a good way to start out to build
customer relationships.
So what did they do when they encountered a nasty problem? They called in a buddy and together
they started to construct a partial story about the machine’s faulty behavior. As soon as they created
one fragment of the story, that reminded them of a fragment of a past story they had heard, and that
suggested new tests to run and new data to explain that then evoked another fragment of another
story and so on. Finally, when their evolving story had accounted for all the data, they had the faulty
machine figured out. Very interesting! Troubleshooting turned out to be story telling, pure and simple.
Then guess what those tech reps did. The next morning they sat around the table, drinking coffee,
relating, listening to, and critiquing each other’s stories. They were in fact engaged in active learning,
day in and day out.
But this was the era of business process re-engineering, and our goal was efficiency. Think of all the
time those guys were wasting socializing over the coffee pot or around the water cooler. Then signs
went up in the work place: “Do not tell stories.” The results were immediate. The tech reps stopped
learning from each other and indeed needed more training. Then they started telling stories behind
our backs about how stupid the training was. Under the guise of efficiency, we had eliminated a highly
cost-effective but subtle form of social learning. So what did we do with our research group? Did we
use fancy, high-powered computers to solve the problem? No, we gave each tech rep a two-way
radio that was always on, so that each individual was in earshot of each other.
As soon as one of them ran into a problem, the others could sense it, and without having to get in
their cars and travel over there they could offer a suggestion. They were seamlessly moving from the
periphery to the center and back again. We had found a way to tap the social, distributed mind of
these tech reps by using the world’s simplest tool–an inexpensive, two-way radio much like Nextel
now sells. The ability to have these tech reps always in two-way communication with each other also
provided a neat tool to help new recruits learn their craft: A newbie could always link up and listen in
on the periphery and learn new tricks by picking up new stories—a very interesting way to enable
learning-in-situ.
After a year the experiment came to an end, and we started to take back the rather expensive twoway radio system. The tech reps were so upset that they stepped forward and offered to use their
own goal sharing money to buy the entire system! We asked them, “You want to spend your money
for this new type of ‘communication?’” Their answer was, “Yes.” It was also the turning point in our
recognition of the power of honoring and supporting the distributed intelligence of the social mind.
Hmmm, we thought to ourselves. This system works beautifully for the 100 or so tech reps in the
Denver district–but what about the 22,000 other tech reps spread around the world? And, we
pondered, could this system be scaled so that all these great learning stories wouldn’t just disappear
into radio ether but could be captured and built upon? This led us to the second phase of learning
how to capture and socially vet these stories in a distributed way over the Internet. This led to the
system we called Eureka where any of the tech reps could create a story from their own immediate
experience, put their name on it, and send it out over the Internet for peer review. Very quickly, the
story would be vetted, and if the vetting itself created a new insight then the vetter’s name would also
go on it. This was the beginning of our experience in the capturing and sharing of knowledge through
story telling thereby forming a knowledge network around the world.
The amazing interplay of social and intellectual capital, generated from the source minted a new coin
with social capital on one side and intellectual capital on the other. These tech reps were becoming
global heroes minting a coin—a coin of meaning. Their identities started to take shape according to
their roles within the process of creating knowledge and sharing it in this vast network of communities
of practice. Then we had an idea. We said, “These ideas are really saving us money. Maybe the tech
reps with the best ideas should be recognized with a financial reward.” But guess what? They were
horrified with this idea. That would take away the meaning and social capital that they were crafting
for themselves. They wanted to keep their network for themselves, as a way to create meaning for
themselves; free from the corporate game playing that nearly always emerges around any kind of
formal reward system.
This all happened some time ago, and was an embryonic example of several interesting movements:
one having to do with social software and the other having to do with open source. The world’s most
complicated, beautiful, and robust operating system, Linux, was built by a similar notion of
constructing meaning and intrinsic motivation, as thousands of people contributed to its amazing
construction. If you use the Web today, you are accessing it using another piece of open source
software called Apache. Almost every Website in the world today runs on an Apache server, built in
this exact same way by an open-source community. Think about the new social software you hear
about. Think about instant messaging. Think about blogs. Think about wikis. Blogs are personal types
of journals that allow you to link to others, almost the foundation of the social mind. A wiki is a form of
collaborative software that allows users to create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.
This communication software supports hyperlinks and allows documents to be authored collectively in
simple syntax. For example, Wikipedia, perhaps the largest wiki in the world, has at the moment
6,000 people constructing an open source encyclopedia with more than 250,000 articles—all current
and all peer reviewed.
My last example is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare, developed out of that
school’s mission to “advance knowledge and education.” OCW provides free, searchable access for
educators, students, and self-learners to MIT’s course materials, including the syllabi, lecture notes,
problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and even video lectures from more than 700 MIT
courses in more than 33 academic disciplines.
I suggest that as we march forward into the twenty-first century, we are seeing a rise of many different
kinds of community-based IT tools, or as I said earlier, what may be more popularly called social
software tools. But I hope we can transform the Internet into a platform of life-long learning and social
construction, so that we can understand story telling and knowledge sharing. It is my hope that these
tools will help us develop the ability to listen, to listen across cultures, to listen with humility, and to
move across cultures. I hope these tools will help us to move between the rigid walls of traditional
disciplines and to engage in deep collaborative and transdisciplinary endeavors–the hallmark of this
great university. It is also my hope that these tools will provide each of us with the means to follow
problems to their roots, and in so doing invent comprehensive solutions to the systemic, global
challenges that no one group or one discipline could ever solve by themselves.
You have all been well provided here at Claremont Graduate University to solve problems. The tools
you have been given at your disposal have amazing powers. But please leave here today questioning
whether you are working on the problems that make a significant difference to society. We need all of
you here to help us to think differently, to listen with humility, and to proceed from here with openness
and thought.
DuWayne J. Peterson, Jr.
DuWayne Peterson is President of DuWayne Peterson Associates, a consulting firm he established in
1991, specializing in the effective management of information technology. He is also a founder and
chairman of the Pasadena Angels, a group that invests in start-ups in information technology and life
sciences.
Mr. Peterson’s career spans some of the world’s largest business organizations as he played a
central role in moving those organizations into the information age over the last forty years. In the
1960s, he began his career at Ford Motor Company in operations research and quickly transitioned
into the fledgling information technology area. He moved on to Citibank and RCA Corporation where
he was responsible for the introduction and implementation of information technology into their
management systems. In the 1970s, Security Pacific Bank recruited him to become Executive Vice
President of the ADP Group. Over a ten-year period, he managed the transition of the Group to a
more business-oriented technology organization that became known as Security Pacific Automation
Company, becoming its chairman and CEO. In the 1980s, Merrill Lynch recruited Mr. Peterson to
become Executive Vice President of Operations, Systems, and Telecommunications. In this capacity,
he led the modernization and streamlining of the firm’s global operation and information technology
functions.
Mr. Peterson holds degrees from UCLA and MIT. He is a past member of the MIT Corporation, its
board of trustees, and was honored as Life Member of that organization. He is a past president of the
MIT Alumni and Alumnae Association. A member of the Board of Trustees of Claremont Graduate
University, Mr. Peterson serves as the founding chair of the board’s Information Technology
Committee. He also chairs the CGU School of Information Science Board of Visitors and has worked
energetically to increase professional visibility for the school, its faculty, and its graduates.
Remarks by DuWayne J. Peterson, Jr.
Honorary Degree Recipient
President Upham, Provost Dreyer, Honored Guests, Fellow Board Members, Distinguished Faculty
and Graduates: Thank you for bestowing upon me this great honor of Doctor of Humane Letters.
I am particularly appreciative of this honor from Claremont Graduate University. My involvement with
the university began in 1984 with the beginnings of the information science program and now with the
Board of Visitors of the School of Information Science and the Board of Trustees of Claremont
Graduate University. This is a very special place, and I am honored to serve in any way I can.
Although I am being honored for the achievements cited - they would not have been possible without
the strong and loving support of my wife Nancy for the past 48 years – plus the many people that
worked with me in the past and today. No one person can accomplish anything without this kind of
support network.
As all of you begin or continue to pursue your selected fields of expertise, always treat those around
you with respect and dignity and always pursue excellence. For in the end – the real measure of
success is that the world is a better place for your having been here.
Thank you very much.
Synthia Laura Molina - M.B.A. '89
Synthia Laura Molina served for two years as the president of the Alumni Association Board of the
Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at CGU. Today, she continues
to be an active and dedicated member of the board, inspiring Drucker/Ito alumni and students to
become involved with the University and the alumni network. Ms. Molina previously served as
director of the M.B.A. program of the Drucker/Ito School, and is a passionate and long-time supporter
of the School and the University.
Currently chief executive officer of Alternative Link, Ms. Molina has spent two decades assisting
organizations in delivering cost-effective health care that promotes individual and public health. Prior
to joining Alternative Link, Ms. Molina founded and led Mission:Accomplished, an industry analysis,
strategic planning, and business development consulting firm with Fortune 500 and venture capital
clients. She also headed the industry development, business development, and marketing research
units of HealthIQ.
Ms. Molina has served as a consultant in the areas of corporate planning and product/portfolio
optimization for companies in the United States and abroad, including Abbott, Amgen, Bristol-Myers
Squibb, Eli Lilly, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Philips Medical Systems,
Manhattan Associates, and WebMD.
An internationally recognized author, lecturer, and expert on health industry and corporate evolution,
Ms. Molina has delivered presentations at dozens of health industry conferences. She is the author
of numerous articles in health industry trade publications and is frequently quoted in the press.
Ms. Molina received her Bachelor of Science degree in management and organizational psychology
at the University of La Verne. She also studied studio art and was a pre-med major at the University
of California, Berkeley and Pomona College.
Ms. Molina completed her M.B.A. in 1989 at CGU in strategy, leadership, and general management,
graduating at the top of her class. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Remarks By Synthia Laura Molina
I feel privileged to welcome you into the CGU alumni community. As you know, it is a community filled
with individuals who, as a great scholar once advised, seek to “think as people of action and act as
people of thought.” In my view, your commitment to trans-disciplinary thinking and action—made
evident by your alma mater—reveals rare insight and competencies.
Clearly, you serve a higher set of principles through a commitment to truth and knowledge and
effectiveness. You see the relationship between your wellbeing and that of the global community. You
have chosen to advance both. Yes, you have chosen to advance both! I sense that you have made
great personal sacrifices to refine your understanding of the world in which you live. In my view, you
have honored your natural gifts by attending to their development and refinement. In doing so, you
have gained competencies to improve the human condition. Yes, you have competencies to improve
the human condition!
We, who have turned the textbook pages and tassels before you, have been hoping. We have been
hoping for you. We have carried the torch for a time, and we do not want to walk on without you or
continue in this life without your essential help. We have yearned for peers exactly like you, who seek
to be of the greatest possible service to higher principles and to others. That is why we now applaud
your achievements, and we celebrate your success.
On behalf of the entire alumni community, I say that we are fortunate to have you among us. We offer
our gratitude and praise for your hard work, your capabilities and the honor you have already brought
to us through completing your education. We have faith you will continue to bring to us, to the
University, and to the global community such honor. We believe in your purposeful thinking and your
inspired action. With great admiration, we offer our warm congratulations. We trust that your every
principled pursuit will be blessed!
Michael M. Hertel
Michael M. Hertel is a member of the Board of Visitors of the School of Politics and Economics at
CGU. He was among the very first members of CGU’s inaugural alumni coordinating group, and for
the past 30 years has remained actively engaged in supporting the University’s academic and alumni
programs.
Dr. Hertel has spent more than three decades as a national leader, advisor, and analyst in the field of
environmental policy and protection. Currently the Director of Corporate Environmental Policy for
Southern California Edison Company, Dr. Hertel manages the company’s programs and activities in
the areas of environmental issues, legislation, trends, and policies. He oversees the company’s
communications with agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the California Coastal
Commission, and the California Department of Fish and Game, among many others.
Dr. Hertel joined Southern California Edison Company in 1972. He has served in the environmental
division since 1981. Between 1971 and 1972, he was Assistant Professor in Political Science and
Government at Pitzer College.
Dr. Hertel is a member of the Board of Directors of the California Council for Environmental and
Economic Balance and is Chairman of the Southern California Coalition for Pollution Prevention. He
is also a member of the California Environmental Dialogue, a non-profit partnership of environmental
activists, corporate environmental practitioners, and California’s Cabinet environmental officers. In
addition, he is a member of the board of the Nature Reserve of Orange County, a non-profit group
that is responsible for the management and funding of a 37,000 acre habitat reserve in Orange
County. Dr. Hertel previously served as a member of the board of Sustainable Conservation, and for
ten years, chaired the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group of Edison Electric Institute.
Dr. Hertel and his wife, Barbara, have two adult children, Katherine and Matthew. They are long-time
residents of Claremont, where Dr. Hertel served on the Parks and Recreation and Human Services
Commission for seven years. Dr. Hertel earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations
at San Jose State University. He earned both his Master of Arts and his Ph.D. in Government at
Claremont Graduate University.
Remarks by Michael M. Hertel
Honored Graduates:
Let me be among the first to welcome you as CGU alums. Congratulations! I know it must have
seemed an interminable struggle at times. I know you probably dreaded facing writing one more
paper or going through one more examination or one more night or weekend seminar, but you made
it—you succeeded! And now you are in the company of some very good people who are making
contributions ranging from government service to teaching, to business. In case you weren’t aware,
CGU alumni count among their ranks
* 38 current and former college and university presidents
* 2 members of Congress
* 3 MacArthur fellows and
* high-ranking government officials in more than a dozen countries
I envy you this next phase of your lives—taking what you’ve learned here at CGU and putting it into
practice in your chosen fields. It is a challenge that is at once daunting and at the same time one of
life’s more rewarding experiences. So enjoy it!
I also know all of you are particularly good at learning. I hope you will continue to nurture that skill,
and there’s no better way to do it than to stay connected to this great institution. In whatever way you
choose, stay part of this learning community. Help those that will follow in your footsteps—you’ll find
that particularly rewarding. Ask important questions. Help find meaningful answers. Continue to
make important contributions to your families, to your chosen vocation, to the community.
Remember, it is in giving that we receive.
Once again, congratulations!
Karen Linkletter
Karen Linkletter is receiving her Ph.D. in History today and previously was awarded the Master of
Business Administration Degree from CGU. Her life combines the transdisciplinary elements CGU
holds dear. A cellist and cello teacher, she lectures in American Studies, has served as an archival
research assistant, worked as a financial consultant for an international investment firm, and
managed marketing functions for several corporations.
An English graduate of U.C. Berkeley, she has performed with numerous chamber groups and
symphony orchestras, including a concert tour in China. She has played with the Long Beach Ballet,
Berkeley Symphony, Laguna Playhouse, Capistrano Valley Symphony, and other regional orchestras.
She has also been a member of the orchestras for performers Sara Vaughan, Jose Feliciano, Juan
Gabriel, Smokey Robinson, and Buddy Ebsen. She has written and performed for several
contemporary rock, jazz, salsa, Christian, and New Age recordings, as well as movie soundtracks.
She works with Music for All Seasons, an organization founded by Dudley Moore, which seeks to
bring music to those who, because of hospitalization, incarceration, or other reasons are unable to
attend live concerts.
Her dissertation, however, has focused on the work of Peter F. Drucker and her doctoral studies have
centered on modern U.S. intellectual history, the history of capitalism and economic theory, and the
history of American management practices. In her dissertation, “Drucker Redux: Management as
Intellectual and Philosophical Product,” she analyzes Drucker’s management and social writings in
terms of how they reflect his own European background and his unique vision of American Society.
Dr. Linkletter has been honored with CGU’s Fernandez Prize in History, the Hillcrest Transdisciplinary
Research Award, the Jean Kearney Fellowship, and the Paul and Bernice Albrecht Fellowship while
pursuing the M.B.A. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta honor societies.
Remarks by Karen Linkletter
Several weeks ago, while teaching, I invoked the psychological impact of World War I on Britain, the
growing burden of empire, and the social history of a generation lost to brutal trench warfare. Par for
the course for a college, or perhaps high school history class, but I was teaching a private cello
lesson in my home studio. Yes, we discussed proper bowings, intonation problems, and other issues
of technique, but I believe one cannot play the Elgar Cello Concerto without an understanding or a
sense of the time in which Edward Elgar lived and wrote that great work.
I am probably one of the oddest, yet most appropriate, representatives of Claremont Graduate
University to speak at commencement. My undergraduate degree is in English literature, I have an
M.B.A. from the Drucker/Ito School, and now, a Ph.D. in History. And how have I made a living for the
last ten years or so? I work as a professional musician and private teacher. You must be thinking,
“she has the worst case of identity crisis I have ever seen.” Actually, I have found that all of this
education, as well as years of work experience, has formed me into the performer and educator that I
am. I draw on all aspects of my background when I work, which not only is enjoyable for me, but is
stimulating and challenging for my students: encouraging them as well to reach beyond the
boundaries of traditional disciplines.
Our institution prides itself on fostering, in the words of our President, “holistic, transdisciplinary
thinkers” who can function outside of the narrow constraints of their own disciplines. We have not
yet, as a university, articulated a clear, precise definition of “transdisciplinary thinkers,” relying instead
on differentiating them from interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary scholars. In spite of this nebulous
definition, I believe there are some excellent illustrations of what we would call transdisclipinary study
that can be used as models. In the dissertation writing and research group that was such a
contribution to my own work, the Hillcrest Transdisciplinary Research Fellows blend Religion, Social
History, Economics, Cultural Studies, Management, Political/Intellectual History, Philosophy, Legal
History and Sociology in their dissertations. Although our individual projects are vastly different, we
always found common ground. I cannot credit my peers, Fay Botham, Dan Cady, Glenn Mitoma, and
Sara Patterson enough.
I also happen to be married to a transdisciplinarian, although he wasn’t aware that he was one until I
told him. A geologist by training throughout his academic career, George researched and wrote a
dissertation under the traditional graduate school model of strict, disciplinary focus. The title of his
dissertation was “Weathering and Soil Formation in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica.” He also
followed the standard paths of teaching and post-doctoral research, but has now been living in the
transdisciplinary world of engineering and environmental consulting for over 30 years. He is currently
helping to reorient the Geological Society of America away from its traditional emphasis on narrow,
disciplinary concerns to broader issues that impact the world community. He regularly works on
teams involving individuals from a host of areas of expertise, addressing everything from soil and
groundwater contamination, traffic concerns, noise and air pollution, land use battles, and even
immigration and associated issues of race and class.
Back home at CGU, we have a number of examples. Corey Sinclair is combining studies in
management, music, and the broader humanities in evaluating the impact of the internet on people’s
music listening and concert going habits. Will Krieger branched out from his traditional archaeological
training in field work to include courses in history, philosophy, and languages in his study of the
philosophy of archaeology. On our faculty, Robert Dawidoff has applied his years of experience and
training in intellectual history to study various aspects of the history of the American song. Peter
Drucker is the model of transdisciplinary study, with his blending of history, philosophy, religion,
economics, and political theory into his work with management and organizations.
So, while we may not have a tidy, precise definition of transdisciplinary study, we have several
examples of it in the sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. Clearly,
transdisciplinary research does not replace training and grounding in the traditional disciplines. By
definition, one cannot be an expert in every field; specialization is a necessity in graduate education.
But, as Peter Drucker noted years ago, knowledge workers, or specialists, must share the goals of
the institutions and organizations of society for which they work, while still pursuing their individual
interests. And, in today’s pluralist society, experts within each discipline must have respect and
understanding for those from others. As John Seeley Brown, our commencement speaker points out
in “Sustaining the Ecology of Knowledge,” we need both the inward-looking, creative artists and
designers as well as the outwardly-oriented, application-minded engineers and business people. The
key is in bridging the gap between the two, or finding ways in which these two mindsets can work
together to benefit society. Transdisciplinary scholarship at its best is a remarkable model of this very
objective.
Thus, I believe that CGU’s transdisciplinary emphasis can only help us all with respect to our
employment status. For those wondering if the traditional post-graduate teaching path is for them,
the CGU transdisciplinary model may be particularly useful. Indeed, in what for many disciplines is a
difficult job market in terms of traditional college teaching positions, research appointments, or other
such work in the academy, a more transdisciplinary, holistic approach may be the key to obtaining
employment. Those trained in management are schooled in reinventing, marketing, retraining for
new knowledges that are in demand. Other disciplines might take note of such flexibility and
willingness to think differently.
Even if your degree is in a traditional, specialized field, and your planned career, too, is neatly
confined to the boundaries of an academic discipline, you will likely be faced with the need to retool or
re-engineer yourself at some point in your life. No discipline remains static over time, thankfully. My
field, history, has been enriched by the infusion of interpretations of historical events from multiple
perspectives. Keeping current with scholarship within one’s own discipline itself often requires
changing one’s own very views of that discipline.
I personally hope to use my degree to teach, specifically, to bridge the wide chasm between
management and humanities students through a series of interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary
courses. We shall see. We don’t live in an ideal world, and transdisciplinary study is not always well
received. Some historians see my work as tainted by its association with business, as the subject of
my dissertation is the intellectual origins and history of Peter F. Drucker and his management
theories. Some business people are unsure as to how to take the philosophical and theological
implications of my argument. In another area of my life, some music educators do not see the value
of teaching the history of World War I to a cellist learning the Elgar concerto. I can’t teach it any other
way. In any event, we will always face those who view graduate education solely as a kind of
membership to an exclusive club, a way of setting themselves apart from others, rather than as a
vehicle for creative scholarship that benefits the academy and greater society. Your graduate degree
does indeed confer status, status you have earned and are entitled to. But such status also carries
with it commensurate responsibilities. Never forget that.
Whether you go on to teach, conduct research, create art, perform music, manage a company, or
work for an institution, I hope that your CGU education and degree mean something more than simply
training in a narrow field or discipline. I hope they mean you have learned how to enjoy learning, how
to share that learning with others, and that there is no end to a true transdisciplinary education.