2026 Alumni Assembly Address Given by President Anne F. Harris
Good afternoon, most cherished Grinnellians! Welcome to this Alumni Assembly of the 146th Alumni Reunion of Grinnell College in beautiful Herrick Chapel and welcome to all those who join us on the livestream. You are gathered here on campus from 45 states and the District of Columbia and from 13 destinations abroad: Bolivia, Canada, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Hong Kong, Hungary, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, and Switzerland! You are wondrous – and from your generosity for each other and fortitude in coming all the way here, you have done something deeply meaningful for the power of presence: dear Grinnellians, you have assembled for the largest reunion of Grinnell alums in our college’s history!
Today we gather to honor your fellow Grinnellians; those recipients of Alumni Awards, as determined by Alumni Council, that we recognize for championing the common good. We do so, gladly, intentionally, joyfully, in person. As we do so, my hope for all of you – as ever – is that Grinnell be a wellspring for you (in the people who are Grinnell, in the places at Grinnell that remember your time here): that it replenish your resolve and honor you. It will also be my great honor today to present the Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award to its esteemed recipient. And I can tell you that doing all this replenishes my resolve, that seeing you and being with you affirms the wonder and hope for the world that I always feel in your good company.
“Letters … in the first place represent sounds.”
John of Salisbury penned that observation in the year 1159 in the Metalogicon, a treatise recognized as a first defense of the liberal arts – so yes, that’s been going on for a while now. John of Salisbury focused his defense of the liberal arts on the arts of words: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. For words, in the 12th century, were undergoing a paradigm shift, and as a teacher and philosopher, John of Salisbury had occasion to think on how words were created, on how they were experienced when spoken, and how they were experienced when written.
“[Letters] secondly … stand for things, which they conduct into the mind through the windows of the eyes.”
In these two statements especially, John of Salisbury grappled with the paradigm shift of the 12th century: the shift from an oral culture to a written culture. The shift was not absolute nor mutually exclusive – troubadours and poets would continue to recite hours of memorized songs and sagas; and texts, especially Biblical texts, had been around for a long time. But the shift was pronounced in terms of trust and authority: even as more and more scholarly treatises and feudal agreements and transfers of land were written instead of spoken, people in the 12th century struggled to know which was more trustworthy: the spoken word affirmed by presence; or the written word marked by absence. Thus, John’s own words, his own fascination, arguing for the vitality of written letters: their evocation of spoken sounds, their ability to stand for things and create images in the mind’s eye.
I bring John of Salisbury in our midst because he stood on a threshold of the paradigmatic change between oral and written communication and its resulting fascination and hesitation with words existing outside human presence. And here we stand on a threshold of paradigmatic change between human and artificial intelligence and its resulting fascination and hesitation with words created outside human consciousness. What does it mean, then, for us, what does it mean for Grinnellians, to be here now together on that threshold?
This is a vital question for Grinnellians, who feel and foster the power of human presence, whose college motto is “truth and humanity.”
As his recent encyclical to the world attests, this is a vital question for Pope Leo XIV as well. In “Magnifica Humanitas” he affirms “the grandeur of humanity that shines a light also in the era of AI” and he asks “What does it mean to safeguard our humanity?” Among his many theological arguments, he evokes the Tower of Babel in negative contrast to the city of Jerusalem. On this point, I would want to put Pope Leo’s ideas in dialogue with those of Toni Morrison, who invited us to see, in the multiple languages suddenly spoken in the ruins of the Tower of Babel, a calling to reach out to each other precisely when there isn’t understanding, precisely when we stand on thresholds of the unknown.
So what does it mean to be here now together on this threshold? What does it mean to be present to each other in the age of AI? To begin an answer, I offer a list of moments from campus this year as an invitation to think with this College and its brilliant, marvelous students and all of the people that you hold dear.
To be present to each other this year meant:
- To gather for legislative updates to affirm our rights and our recourse
- To rush out upon the golf course during spectacular Northern Lights
- To be Rachel Rudicille ’26 who, with multiple partners, created the Community Fridge, providing fresh food at Drake Community Library for any who need it
- To mourn the passing of Mrs. Edith Renfrow Smith this January
- To vote to open the North Lounge in Renfrow Hall (in homage to South Lounge)
- To gather faculty, staff, and students and begin to plan, as a community of inquiry, 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and 180 years since the founding of both the state of Iowa and Grinnell College
- To be Professor Clark Lindgren and receive a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
- To rise up in a standing ovation at the Commencement address of Chase Strangio ’04, Co-Director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project and advocate of trans rights
- To be Grinnell faculty members and design tutorials such as “Luddites, Past and Present” and “American Freedom” and “Learning and Unlearning How to Tell Time”
- To rush the stage and dance together to (DtMF) “Debi tirar mas fotos” at the end of International Cultural Evening
I will close with John of Salisbury’s third statement about the written word and its emerging primacy over the spoken word. In his 12th century fascination and hesitation, he concedes the wonder of the threshold on which he stands:
“[Letters have the ability to] communicate… the utterances of those who are absent.”
We don’t yet fully know, let alone understand, the threshold of human consciousness that we are crossing. But you are here, wondrous Grinnell alumni – in historic numbers, in meaningful ways – and we are present to each other. And there is no better company to keep when looking out upon a shimmering future, than that of Grinnellians.