MINERVA VOICES

Falling in Love with a City: A Letter from the President

Letter from the President | 2022

May 6, 2022

Dear Minerva Community,

There is a scene in the film “Lady Bird” in which the eponymous Lady Bird, played by Saoirse Ronan, sits across from her Head of School, Sister Sarah Joan, expecting to be disciplined for a youthful indiscretion. Instead, Sister Sarah Joan praises Lady Bird’s writing:

Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.
Lady Bird: I do?
Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
Lady Bird: I was just describing it.
Sister Sarah Joan: Well, it comes across as love.
Lady Bird: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
Sister Sarah Joan: Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

During the pandemic I taught myself to draw by sketching some of the people I love most. I make no claims for the results but the experiment allowed me to not just consider but to experience how symbiotic love and attentiveness are. In the case of these drawings, I found that I had to abandon my preconceived notions of how these people I knew so intimately appeared and instead, out of deep affection, commit many hours to the minute particulars of light and shadow. In those hours, in order to achieve anything meaningful at all, I had to be fully present. This is, as Sister Sarah Joan suggested, as good a definition of love as any: a willingness to be fully present and attentive, to see, to hear, to know. And, yes, one can fall in love with a city.

In the 1990s I fell in love with Philadelphia — with Ortlieb’s, a jazz club equidistant from Chinatown and Fishtown alongside the Delaware River; with the people accessing the mobile clinic at the North Philadelphia Needle Exchange as a first step towards health and the people who, like myself, volunteered to help them; with films by Fritz Lang and Yasujirô Ozu at the Roxy Screening Room; with the people dancing in the courtyard of an urban commune adorned with art, in a location whose exact address I cannot now recall; with Sunday mass at Old Saint Joseph’s Church; with the Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and, yes, with the occasional cheesesteak in South Philly.

This is all, I realize, more intelligible to me than it is to you, and that is to the point. You will fall in love with your own cities, as you will your own people. At Minerva, we don’t believe in the gates that too often separate a university from its city; we likewise reject the tourism of too many study abroad programs. What we stand for is immersive and experiential learning, with a purpose. What we offer is, as John Dewey once put it, “more opportunities for resistance and tension, more drafts upon experience and invention, and therefore more novelty in action, greater range and depth of insight and increased poignancy of feeling.”

Recently, several of our students created a film about the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, a short distance from where they study and live. Having experienced the whole city during their semester-long residency, they might have made a different San Francisco film, featuring the vibrant Mission District, opulent Pacific Heights, bustling Financial District and laid-back Ocean Beach. Their film about the Tenderloin is unflinching and in many ways, deeply saddening. It is also an extraordinary act of love for this neighborhood and the people who live there, some of whom tell their own stories in the film. In their very attentiveness the filmmakers create space for the inherent beauty and dignity of people to emerge from struggle and sorrow. I encourage you all to see it when it debuts on May 7th.

My request to Minerva students joining us in San Francisco for the first time this fall is that you be open to the possibility of giving a place and the people who live there the complete attention of your full self. My request to our current students preparing to live and learn in Taipei, Hyderabad or Buenos Aires, is that you continue to do so. To our alumni, as you reflect on your experiences in these cities as well as Berlin, London or Seoul, find the right way to tell all of us, the Minerva University community, about what you learned, and who you met, and which experiences you are taking into the future.

Sincerely,

Mike Magee
Minerva University President

Quick Facts

Name
Country
Class
Major

Social Sciences & Business

Business & Computational Sciences

Business and Social Sciences

Social Sciences and Business

Computational Sciences & Social Sciences

Computer Science & Arts and Humanities

Business and Computational Sciences

Business and Social Sciences

Natural Sciences

Arts and Humanities

Business, Social Sciences

Business & Arts and Humanities

Computational Sciences

Natural Sciences, Computer Science

Computational Sciences

Arts & Humanities

Computational Sciences, Social Sciences

Computational Sciences

Computational Sciences

Natural Sciences, Social Sciences

Social Sciences, Natural Sciences

Data Science, Statistics

Computational Sciences

Business

Computational Sciences, Data Science

Social Sciences

Natural Sciences

Business, Natural Sciences

Business, Social Sciences

Computational Sciences

Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Computational Sciences, Natural Sciences

Natural Sciences

Computational Sciences, Social Sciences

Business, Social Sciences

Computational Sciences

Natural Sciences, Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences

Arts & Humanities, Social Science

Social Sciences, Business

Arts & Humanities

Computational Sciences, Social Science

Natural Sciences, Computer Science

Computational Science, Statistic Natural Sciences

Business & Social Sciences

Computational Science, Social Sciences

Social Sciences and Business

Business

Arts and Humanities

Computational Sciences

Social Sciences

Social Sciences and Computational Sciences

Social Sciences & Computational Sciences

Social Sciences & Arts and Humanities

Computational Science

Minor

Computational Science & Business

Economics

Social Sciences

Concentration

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence & Cognition, Brain, and Behavior

Designing Societies & New Ventures

Strategic Finance & Data Science and Statistics

Brand Management and Designing Societies

Data Science & Economics

Machine Learning

Cells, Organisms, Data Science, Statistics

Arts & Literature and Historical Forces

Artificial Intelligence & Computer Science

Cells and Organisms, Mind and Emotion

Economics, Physics

Managing Operational Complexity and Strategic Finance

Global Development Studies and Brain, Cognition, and Behavior

Scalable Growth, Designing Societies

Business

Drug Discovery Research, Designing and Implementing Policies

Historical Forces, Cognition, Brain, and Behavior

Artificial Intelligence, Psychology

Designing Solutions, Data Science and Statistics

Data Science and Statistic, Theoretical Foundations of Natural Science

Strategic Finance, Politics, Government, and Society

Data Analysis, Cognition

Brand Management

Data Science and Statistics & Economics

Cognitive Science & Economics

Data Science and Statistics and Contemporary Knowledge Discovery

Internship
Higia Technologies
Project Development and Marketing Analyst Intern at VIVITA, a Mistletoe company
Business Development Intern, DoSomething.org
Business Analyst, Clean Energy Associates (CEA)

Conversation

Dear Minerva Community,

There is a scene in the film “Lady Bird” in which the eponymous Lady Bird, played by Saoirse Ronan, sits across from her Head of School, Sister Sarah Joan, expecting to be disciplined for a youthful indiscretion. Instead, Sister Sarah Joan praises Lady Bird’s writing:

Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.
Lady Bird: I do?
Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
Lady Bird: I was just describing it.
Sister Sarah Joan: Well, it comes across as love.
Lady Bird: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
Sister Sarah Joan: Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

During the pandemic I taught myself to draw by sketching some of the people I love most. I make no claims for the results but the experiment allowed me to not just consider but to experience how symbiotic love and attentiveness are. In the case of these drawings, I found that I had to abandon my preconceived notions of how these people I knew so intimately appeared and instead, out of deep affection, commit many hours to the minute particulars of light and shadow. In those hours, in order to achieve anything meaningful at all, I had to be fully present. This is, as Sister Sarah Joan suggested, as good a definition of love as any: a willingness to be fully present and attentive, to see, to hear, to know. And, yes, one can fall in love with a city.

In the 1990s I fell in love with Philadelphia — with Ortlieb’s, a jazz club equidistant from Chinatown and Fishtown alongside the Delaware River; with the people accessing the mobile clinic at the North Philadelphia Needle Exchange as a first step towards health and the people who, like myself, volunteered to help them; with films by Fritz Lang and Yasujirô Ozu at the Roxy Screening Room; with the people dancing in the courtyard of an urban commune adorned with art, in a location whose exact address I cannot now recall; with Sunday mass at Old Saint Joseph’s Church; with the Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and, yes, with the occasional cheesesteak in South Philly.

This is all, I realize, more intelligible to me than it is to you, and that is to the point. You will fall in love with your own cities, as you will your own people. At Minerva, we don’t believe in the gates that too often separate a university from its city; we likewise reject the tourism of too many study abroad programs. What we stand for is immersive and experiential learning, with a purpose. What we offer is, as John Dewey once put it, “more opportunities for resistance and tension, more drafts upon experience and invention, and therefore more novelty in action, greater range and depth of insight and increased poignancy of feeling.”

Recently, several of our students created a film about the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, a short distance from where they study and live. Having experienced the whole city during their semester-long residency, they might have made a different San Francisco film, featuring the vibrant Mission District, opulent Pacific Heights, bustling Financial District and laid-back Ocean Beach. Their film about the Tenderloin is unflinching and in many ways, deeply saddening. It is also an extraordinary act of love for this neighborhood and the people who live there, some of whom tell their own stories in the film. In their very attentiveness the filmmakers create space for the inherent beauty and dignity of people to emerge from struggle and sorrow. I encourage you all to see it when it debuts on May 7th.

My request to Minerva students joining us in San Francisco for the first time this fall is that you be open to the possibility of giving a place and the people who live there the complete attention of your full self. My request to our current students preparing to live and learn in Taipei, Hyderabad or Buenos Aires, is that you continue to do so. To our alumni, as you reflect on your experiences in these cities as well as Berlin, London or Seoul, find the right way to tell all of us, the Minerva University community, about what you learned, and who you met, and which experiences you are taking into the future.

Sincerely,

Mike Magee
Minerva University President