Service Day Begins the Year at Bryn Athyn College.

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As part of the beginning of the academic year, Bryn Athyn College continued its tradition of sponsoring a service day for students and faculty. On August 28th crews undertook projects at Briar Bush Nature Center, Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust, and Mitchell Performing Arts Center. Members of service teams painted at Help Philadelphia, St. John's Episcopal Church, and Hatboro YMCA, renovated the playground and cleaned inside flooring at Ivyland New Church, helped remodel a house on Central Avenue in Hatboro, and took children from Help Philadelphia to the Please Touch Museum. The day's efforts highlight Bryn Athyn College's commitment to serving others.

An evening program and dinner at Glencairn Museum featured a slideshow of the day's service projects and an opening address by the dean that focused on the educational mission of the College. Below is a copy of the Dean's remarks.

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Welcome Bryn Athyn College faculty and staff-and a warm welcome to the students here tonight- especially members of the Class of 2011.

This is the beginning of a new academic year. And that means there's a lot of anxiety out there. Each of you is worried about many things: getting into classes, adjusting to more rigorous academic standards, declaring a major, getting along with roommates, making friends, and the list goes on.

As a result, the first portion of my remarks tonight will be a sort of public service announcement: a primer, if you will, to provide you with sound advice for getting through the school year and even enjoying it.

And while I have some idea of what makes for a successful college experience, there is a wealth of information available online on this subject. Obviously millions of people have gone to college and somehow muddled through, so there must be some sort of collective wisdom on the subject, right? So, I went online and Googled 'advice for college' and discovered that there are about 125,000,000 sites related to my query and that this information was provided to me in just 0.12 seconds.

Now the reason I went online has to do with a book I read this summer- The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. This title, while provocative, may sound like a contradiction in terms. After all, most situations involving crowds such as riots, rock concerts, and professional soccer matches, don't exactly conjure up an image of sensible people making intelligent life-choices.

The point of the book though is that a large group made up of independently operating people who hold varying opinions and degrees of knowledge, is remarkably intelligent and will almost always produce a better collective decision than a single person or even a small group of so-called experts.

The book starts with the story of a British scientist named Francis Galton visiting a country fair in 1906. As he walks through the exhibition, Galton notices a weight-judging competition where hundreds of people are lined up to bet on the weight of an ox. For a small fee, you can buy a numbered ticket, where you fill in your name, address and your estimate of the ox's weight. Those whose guesses are closest to the real weight receive prizes. About 800 people participated. The striking thing was that, by averaging all of the guesses, Galton found that the group collectively guessed the ox's weight to be 1,197 lbs. As it turned out, they were off- by only one pound. None of the individual guesses were this close to the actual weight and even farmers familiar with oxen weren't this close. So the upshot of the story is that the common man, at least collectively, may have real wisdom after all!

So I offer you this sage advice, distilled from the collective wisdom that is the internet, in the hopes that it will help you navigate the challenges posed by the college experience.

Under the heading of reasoning: a conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking. It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Next, under the category of class etiquette: always laugh at the teacher's jokes.  Always.  Just be sure they're jokes. Do not ask any of the following questions: "Do I need the textbook?" "Do I need to read the textbook?" or "Do I need to know this for the test?"

Some health advice: expand your horizons and not your belt size

Special note to the men: grade-point averages are inversely related to time spent playing video games

A dvice on waking up: to get your brain going first thing in the morning, set your clock ahead 18 minutes so that the first thing you do when the alarm goes off is a complicated math problem.

When phoning mom or dad for money, always start by saying "While I was studying in the library today."

Right about now you may be thinking that crowds really don't have much wisdom- more on that later.

Today marks the beginning of Bryn Athyn College's 131st year as an institution of higher learning.  We begin the year with a talented and diverse student body from sixteen states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts,

Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington; and thirteen countries: Australia, Benin, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, France, Ghana, Japan, Kenya, Lesotho, South Africa, South Korea, and the Ukraine.

Congratulations to all of you on your choice to attend a liberal arts college. Congratulations for embarking on an educational journey that will open your minds to ideas and perspectives and possibilities in ways other kinds of learning do not. That's what a liberal arts education is all about- freeing your mind so that you can make wise choices and contribute not only to your own well-being, but to society as a whole.

And you didn't choose just any liberal arts college-you chose Bryn Athyn College of the New Church, a unique and distinguished institution.

There is a distinctive idea of Bryn Athyn College, a sense of place and a sense of purpose that is not found on any other campus. That sense of place and purpose grows from the conviction that academic and spiritual inquiry are connected and that both must be applied to your life- everyday, if you are to be truly successful. ".unless knowledge is learned for the sake of life it is of no consequence." AC 1964.

Today, students and faculty participated in a number of service projects in the local area. Our efforts to help others are a picture and an example of the much broader idea of use. Being useful is more than just doing good things for people.

You may have heard that being useful means performing the duties of one's office honestly, justly, and faithfully. This is certainly an important part of being useful and as students means working hard on your studies, not presenting the ideas of others as your own and generally doing the best you can. Some of you may know that use also includes recreation- that the mind and body need periods of rest and play in order to focus effectively on the job at hand.

In the broadest sense however, use can be defined as anything you do that is worthwhile in the eyes of the Lord. Helping you to discover for yourself what is useful and apply it to life is what your education at Bryn Athyn College is all about. Every aspect of your experience here is geared towards this end- from the classroom, to social life, to the playing field and everywhere in between.

If these do not end up being some of the best years of your life, they will certainly be some of the most transformational. If we at Bryn Athyn College are doing our jobs well, you will be stretched in new and different ways. At the end of each term you will probably see the world a bit differently. You will encounter new ideas, the implications of which, may lead you to rethink your view of the world.

Your undergraduate years have the power to be transformational because they provide a unique opportunity for focused intellectual, social and spiritual growth. This is not just a time for preparing to make a living; it is a time for considering how to lead your life; a time for redefining your understanding of the world, for assessing your place in that world, and for determining what responsibility you have for improving that world.

It is our hope that in the process of considering how you will lead your life, you will make use of all that makes this academic community special. To do this, you must be engaged: engaged with the ideas you encounter and with the individuals who champion those ideas, and engaged with those who view the world through a different lens, those whose life experiences are different from your own.

We are delighted that each of you is here and has chosen to make Bryn Athyn College a part of your journey. We trust that you will grow to love this special college as we do - with passion and purpose, and with the knowledge that it can be only as strong as we collectively are, only as thoughtful and wise, only as compassionate and caring. We create this community, this crowd of people, by looking to the Lord in the choices each of us makes, minute-by-minute, year-by-year, decade-by-decade. It is ours to share and shape, and then to pass along.

And so my advice to all of you as we enter this new academic year is: Be good. Have fun. Work hard. Play well. Make friends. Learn new things. Thank you.