President's Message
Happy 40th to...Us
I’d stand up for Kettering. A leap-to-your-feet ovation would fit like tape.

When you start off with 137 first-year students, all aiming at associate’s degrees, perhaps it’s a case of “giving it the old college try.” But now, 40 years after 1967, more than 5,000 alumni have left campus for the wider world. And now more than 800 science and health care students crowd the hallways and classrooms, many of them heading for bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

So now we’re in a position to talk success! Future success. It’s not just what we have achieved, but also what we’re going to achieve that interests me. And I know that future success requires leaders who listen — and alumni, faculty, students, and staff who insist on being heard.

One Gospel story that wakes me up is the one about Jesus and the Canaanite woman. You can find it in Mark 7 and Matthew 15. Jesus had crossed a border into the region of Tyre and Sidon. He was looking for rest from a mission that was already stressful and dangerous. In this new place, non-Jewish strangers were everywhere, and suddenly a Canaanite woman found Jesus and asserted her need to be heard: she wanted him to heal her sick daughter.

Her assertiveness was itself remarkable. Back then, women were expected to be deferential, expected to keep their silence. Jesus actually resisted her at first. He said his mission was only to Israel and declared further (in a way that must have hurt her feelings): “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Instead of backing away, the women said that at her house, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” The rejoinder was jaw-dropping. What’s more, it changed Jesus’ mind. From then forward, the Bible says, he began to direct his attention to Gentiles as well as Jews.

It’s so easy to be boxed into yourself, unable or unwilling to learn from others. Still, let me say what any leader of Kettering College ought to say every day: I want to deal with points of view different from my own. I want to have colleagues who are insistent with their questions and ideas.

I hope you will think that the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is a mandate for all of us to listen a lot, share a lot, and learn a lot.

I love the rah-rah-rah of a 40th birthday, but let’s not forget to love the conversation that builds an even better future. The cheering will go away unless we go forward. And the key to going forward is a brain trust made up of … all of us.