Spring 2025 Newsletter: Message from the Dean

Dear Friends,

As the academic year draws to a close, I find myself struck by how it has been, by turns, deeply inspiring and intensely challenging. The inspiration has come from working with all of you. Your brilliance, generosity, passion, and care have made me grateful every day to be part of this remarkable community. The difficulty, of course, has come from the broader climate in which we work. Higher education in general – and Harvard in particular – has come under fire. And yet, like Antigone before Creon, we speak from an older, deeper law – the essential truth that we shepherd in our work. I began my term as Dean last summer with the observation that the arts and humanities are the soul of higher education. If possible, that is even clearer to me now.

Last week, I had the privilege to co-host – alongside Suzie Clark at the Mahindra Humanities Center – an extraordinary event. Three world-class composers each created a musical setting of Yeats’s poem The Second Coming. In an “interactive concert” at Holden Chapel, performed by the Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Krista Rivers and the brilliant Arneis String Quartet, the audience explored with the composers themselves how each musical interpretation illuminated the poem’s meanings in different ways. Phrases like “things fall apart,” and “the center cannot hold,” and the haunting image of the “rough beast” who “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born,” came alive in all their depth and multiplicity. Surprisingly, even though the poem is nothing short of apocalyptic, the discussion of it was deep and redeeming.

A few days later, still reflecting on that experience, I came across a poem by the young Nigerian writer Romeo Oriogun. We had once welcomed Romeo as a resident scholar at Dunster House, and it was a joy to discover his work again. In his poem From Darkness into Light, the speaker – confronting loneliness and cultural erasure – cries out into the wild. “… And the wild replied,”

you must not seek for understanding, your language is extinct,
a dead thing wandering at the boundary of darkness, you must
hold it and shout, for only language can begin the restoration
 

It was that final line that arrested me: “only language can begin the restoration.” Language, in Oriogun’s vision, is what the poet wields. But more than that, it is the means by which we begin to build light out of darkness. 

This, to me, is what it means to call the arts and humanities the soul of higher education. We are the place of founding, articulation, and renewal. Even in the deepest darkness – and perhaps especially there – we uncover the light that already shines. Perhaps this is why the German poet Hölderlin could say that “where there is danger, the saving power also grows.”

Thank you for all you’ve done and all you’ve made possible this year. May your summer be a season of rest and reflection; and may the saving power grow within you.

Yours truly,

Sean