On Friday, April 11, 2025, Dr. Jeannine Diddle Uzzi was officially inaugurated as Thomas College’s sixth President. Below is a copy of the inauguration speech that she gave during the inauguration ceremony to an audience of about 350 including students, faculty, staff, trustees, family, friends, and community members.
As you sit here this afternoon, already full of many words and with my remarks standing between you and your weekend, you might wonder why colleges and universities do this thing called inauguration. I’ve learned that President George Spann was known for putting into every speech a word that would stump his audience. This makes me like him so much. The word “inauguration” is not exactly a stumper, but if you know me, you know one of the great joys of my life has been teaching Latin, and, lucky for you, “inauguration” is essentially a Latin word.
The “in” part is easy: it’s the same in English. In means in. The end of the word, -ation, is just a suffix that creates a noun. The interesting part of the word “inauguration” is the “augur.” In Latin, an augur is a soothsayer or a prophet, someone who predicts the future. And the noun augur is related to the verb augere, which means to increase, honor, or promote. So, in etymological terms, an inauguration is a ceremony intended to portend the successful future of a person or entity. To inaugurate is literally to foresee a successful future.
The successful future of Thomas College starts with our students. You probably noticed that our students were the first to march in this afternoon; this was no accident. Our students marched in first because they are our reason for being. We exist only to support them in preparing for the lives they want to create—yes, the careers they want, but not only the careers. At Thomas we are extraordinarily proud of our focus on career preparation and our guaranteed job program; we are proud of the pragmatism of our mission because we know that our graduates will have to support themselves after they leave us. But our mission at Thomas College is “to prepare students for personal and professional success and for leadership and service in their communities.” We are not just educating workers: we are educating whole human beings to thrive throughout their whole lives for the good of the whole society. This is the purpose of higher education.
There’s a lot of skepticism out there today about higher education—whether it’s worth the time, the effort, the cost. When asked if they value a college degree, almost everyone says “yes.” People really do understand the value of a college degree when it comes to tangible outcomes like lifetime earning power, physical safety, health, mental health, even that elusive thing called happiness. And this collective understanding that a college degree adds value to a human life is backed up by decades of research: the facts are in, and we all seem to understand them.
And yet today, almost 1/3 of the population says they do not value higher education: they value the degree, but they do not value what happens in the classroom or the experiences students have on the way to that degree. In this country, we are witnessing a cognitive gap between the educational experience and the degree to which that experience leads.
Most ascribe this gap to the cost of college, but it’s not that simple. Even here in Maine, where community college is tuition-free, college-going is still down 20%. People are saying “no” to higher education even when it’s free. This is because the cognitive gap between the education and the degree is at least in part cultural; it’s a perception gap. In some quarters, college is still assumed to be an out-of-touch ivory tower where the college experience bears little resemblance to the real world. And in some cases, perception is reality. It was reality when I was in college, and it was reality even early in my teaching career. As a scholarship kid at Hamilton College, I certainly felt like a fish out of water. I wanted to be that fish, but it was not always easy. I recall heated debates among the Whitman College faculty in the late 1990s about whether the college should be offering curriculum in applied fields like education. We were teaching education, and that was controversial.
This gap between a certain segment of the American populace and higher education may be decreasing, and it may be in some ways outdated, but it’s also rooted in lived experience and historical reality. Thomas College can bridge this gap. In fact, Thomas College has been bridging this gap for decades, especially for first generation college students, and the bridge Thomas College provides is more important today than ever before. Thomas College is not selective. We have never sought to be selective. Thomas College is not chasing rankings. Instead, we are chasing outcomes; we are chasing impact. We want to be distinguished, but not for the reasons you might imagine. We want to be distinguished for helping students design and build the lives they want; for the quality, breadth, and depth of the support we provide to our students; we want to be known for driving social mobility; for always expanding the accessibility of a college education to more learners; and perhaps most of all, we want to be known for making each and every student feel seen and welcome and included in our community. Only when students genuinely feel valued and included in the learning community can they reach their full potential.
Here I have to pause and thank my colleagues from Adler University. Not until I worked at Adler did I fully appreciate the power of community in the mental health and well-being of the individual. Psychologist Alfred Adler was talking about the social determinants of health in the 19th century. Way back then, Alfred Adler understood that only when human beings feel a genuine sense of belonging in their community can they thrive and become their best selves.
Adler taught me these lessons; Thomas College embodies them. When I applied for this job, I knew the Thomas College community had a reputation for feeling like a family, that students, staff, and faculty were known for caring about each other. What I did not know was that every single time I went to an athletic event, the Chair of the H. Allen Ryan School of Business would be there, too. I did not know that every single time I went to a Diversity Week event, a Mitchell Scholars event, Casino Night—you name it—the Dean of Students would be there, too.
I did not know that as a matter of course, Thomas employees donate their vacation time to colleagues who fall ill, or that at Thomas we celebrate Thanksgiving each year by trying to break our own record for how many food baskets we can donate to those in need. I could talk all day about the uniquely welcoming culture of Thomas College, but until you come to campus, you don’t really get it. And, lucky me, I get to live right here on campus, where I know the Safety and Security team is going to come by my office when it gets dark to make sure I’m okay.
Thomas College has the kind of culture you can’t manufacture and you can’t purchase, and this is why we are here. To go back to the etymological reason for this ceremony, we gathered together today very literally to foresee the successful future of Thomas College. Like most other institutions of higher education, Thomas is facing challenges we could not have imagined a decade ago. We are small; we don’t have a huge bank account; we have to adapt to an external environment we do not control and that may not favor us. In the face of it all, our culture is our special sauce, the thing that augurs well for us. Our culture is the thing will see us through these challenges. Our culture will allow us to shine out there in a world that can seem these days unforgiving, even cruel. The culture of Thomas College is powerful, and this culture is the thing that will bring us new students, new faculty and staff, new partners, and new funding.
I am grateful, humbled, and honored to stand at the head of an institution whose culture is so valuable and whose mission and values are so desperately needed at this moment in this country. Thank you for being here today with me and with the whole Thomas College community as we reaffirm who we are and why we are here and foresee the great success of this College yet to come.