The Choice to Invent Ourselves

Connections: Spring 2009 -- As I’m sure is the case with each of you, sometimes I find disparate parts of my professional life reflecting on each other. Recently the class I teach in moral philosophy has seemed relevant to my work as an administrator and the financial challenges confronting our school and our families.

I’ve had many conversations with parents in recent weeks about the economy’s effects. For all of us, this recession has caused losses that force a reassessment of priorities. Hackley’s endowment has lost around a third of its value, which in turn reduces the income from endowment that supports our annual operating budget. Fortunately, Hackley relied on our endowment for under 5% of that annual operating budget, so the constraints we face on that score are not as grievous as those faced by some colleges, where 30-40% of the annual operating budget may have flowed from endowment income. Hackley’s annual operating budget is primarily supported by tuition and by annual fund gifts from parents and alumni. As of now, our reenrollment of students for the 2009-10 academic year is very strong, with attrition lower even than last year’s, and our applications from new students, while off slightly from last year’s historic high, are comparable to those from the previous year. Total giving to annual fund is also comparable to our prior two years, only down around 2% on a year-to-date basis (much stronger than many other independent schools in our region).

Enrollment depends on the choice of hundreds of Hackley families to commit to the major expense of tuition for a year (and the actual cost of a Hackley education is thou¬sands of dollars more than that daunting tuition charge). A very high percentage of Hackley families — 92% in 2007-08 — then choose to make gifts to our school above and beyond that tuition expense. As of January 31, 2009, 68% of Hackley parents had made gifts or pledges in 2008-09 as compared to 69% as of the same date last year. Since all Hackley families have suffered economically, many people might be surprised by the generosity of Hackley families in the midst of such a painful recession. Why do so many families choose to offer their support to Hackley?

I attribute this commitment to two primary causes — first, the perception that a Hackley education is a crucial advantage we can give our children; and second, the cohesiveness of Hackley as a community, the sense that in so far as we are able we all want to help support each other and the common purpose that has brought us together. We all want to assure that our faculty compensation will allow us to continue to attract and retain talented and caring teachers, and that our financial aid budget will allow us to continue to support families with demonstrated need. Even with such support, due to changing personal circumstance, some of our families face significant sacrifice if they continue enrollment at Hackley. We wish we could do more.

In my moral philosophy class, we’ve been discussing existentialism and reading Ortega and Sartre. Existentialism begins with the premise of radical freedom. In the words of Ortega, “I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not.” That assertion of freedom is not a denial of the physical and social circumstances that constrain us. It is the assertion that the most significant constraint we face is that of our limitations of imagination, our self-deception in failing to recognize our freedom to choose, and our plagiaristic cowardice in seeking an external authority to save us from the responsibility for our own necessary self-creation. Sartre writes, “You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.”

Existentialism’s credibility is challenged by mankind’s predisposition to see limitations rather than opportunities. Quite simply, we find it hard to believe in our own freedom. The ideas of controlling supernatural powers, predestination, deterministic natural law, or even the conspiracies of people in power all have much more resilience in human cultures than the idea that we are responsible for ourselves. Again, existentialists do not deny the constraints of physical and social circumstance; they simply assert that meaning is created through our own free choices, and that this freedom to choose can never be taken from us. Existentialists challenge us to recognize that this freedom is ours if we have the heart, the will, and the imagination to see it and to act on it.

I believe that such freedom is the precious gift we seek to give our children through the best education we can offer. We want to strengthen their minds and hearts to prepare them to respond effectively to a world where economic norms can undergo revolutionary change in a matter of months, to a world where human perfidy, civil strife, or environmental degradation can challenge our dreams and unsettle our expectations. Education that is worthy of our commitment prepares our students to think flexibly, to see opportunities where others see only constraints, to recognize their freedom and have the strength to act on it. And education in a caring community teaches that our efforts are more effective when we join together with common purpose, when our caring for each other allows us to reach beyond our differences of background and perspective to make common cause.

In choosing to support Hackley despite the economic constraints we all face, Hackley parents create freedom, providing opportunity for their own children and all our children. Sartre would say that when we act on that priority, we “invent” Hackley, just as we invent ourselves with every choice, every day. In adversity lies opportunity. The commitment and generosity of the Hackley community is inspiring, and together we will continue to make Hackley a stronger school for our children, every day.

— Walter C. Johnson