Start _______ Here

I started my last year of grad­uate school on Wednesday, and the campus is a whirl­wind of activity as we welcome a new provost, inau­gu­rate a new pres­i­dent, and (next week) open a shiny new acad­emic building. There is an opti­mistic energy around the school these days, and I am enjoying being a part of it, espe­cially having expe­ri­enced this place in its more cynical persona as well.

This Friday was the inau­gu­ra­tion of John Maeda, the 16^th pres­i­dent of the Rhode Island School of Design since its incep­tion in 1877. It was held in the First Baptist Church in America (which is not just a dramatic name, it really is the first Baptist Church in America, founded by Roger Williams in 1638 after being expelled from Massachusetts for his crazy insis­tence on reli­gious toler­ance, sepa­ra­tion of church and state, and fair treat­ment of Native Americans. That guy — what a nut!).
To get through to the upper balconies, I had to climb two flights of winding stairs, walk through the music director’s office, and squeeze around the timpani drum before I could grab a pew. This office, by the way, could have come straight out of Professor Lupin’s class­room at Hogwarts, complete with a small balcony, moldy piles of ancient manu­scripts, and a thick rope that emerged from the ceiling, where I believe he could actu­ally ring the church bells from his desk.

I will admit that I am a sucker for offi­cial cere­monies like this one, so imagine having one in a three hundred year old church, with an Easter-worthy combi­na­tion of brass ensemble and pipe organ playing Haydn, the theme from the West Wing (for when the new pres­i­dent walks in, of course!), the Trumpet Voluntary, and all manner of other rousing music. It was all very moving and inspiring &mdash with a dash of scary every time a partic­u­larly low organ note would send the whole balcony struc­ture into a notice­able shudder.
After the speeches (which you can read more about here and here), we all filed out into the pouring rain to attend a RISD Block Party. There was a photo booth, a silkscreening station where you could choose what word to have printed on your free “Start _______ Here” tshirt, and lots of food and music.

It was all so unusu­ally pulled together for RISD, a place that regu­larly botches even the most routine plans. I saw them spirit a US senator out the back door of the cere­mony and into a waiting motor­cade without batting an eyelash. Hundreds of tshirts were distrib­uted and screen­printed in the pouring rain with apparent ease. Its been happening all week, too. At an orien­ta­tion lunch, I received a deli­cious sand­wich, packed effi­ciently inside a canvas tote bag with a bottle of water, an apple, and a RISD caribeener (some­thing I had been needing, actu­ally!) without any sort of bottle­neck. There are also these new tele­vi­sion screens across campus that pull announce­ments and event images from online — these screens are prop­erly installed, synced across every campus building, and actu­ally look good.
Those of us who have been here a few years have been watching all this in bewil­der­ment, wondering what happened to our funky, peri­od­i­cally bumbling insti­tu­tion that could have trans­formed it into a place where stuff actu­ally works. It can’t all be due to our new pres­i­dent, and perhaps its only tempo­rary. But everyone agrees that there is a different, more charged energy in the air these days. It will be inter­esting to see where it leads us this year!