Features

On a Friday afternoon in October, coinciding with Meliora Weekend, a line of buses departed the River Campus, transporting faculty, staff, students, parents, and alumni to Eastman Theatre’s Kodak Hall to witness the inauguration of the University’s 11th president, and the first woman to hold the office.

A crowd of roughly 2,000 people—with many more viewing in simulcast—looked on as Sarah Mangelsdorf was handed the three symbols of presidential authority: the original 1850 University charter, a University seal, and the four-foot-long, 6.4-pound silver and mahogany mace newly engraved with her name.

In her address, she signaled her commitment to discovery, inclusion, high ambitions, and the University’s rootedness in the Greater Rochester community. She began by sharing her thoughts on the role of the university in “the creation, preservation, and advancement of knowledge.”

“It is through the knowledge derived from research that we fulfill our mission to make the world ever better,” she said, also noting that Rochester researchers engage in “virtually every area of human endeavor, from Nobel Prize–winning optics and DNA science, to the catastrophic effects of climate change and the tragedy of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, to the pathways to social justice for the incarcerated or for urban families and children, to a better understanding of the historical roots of globalization.”

But knowledge has less tangible benefits as well. Quoting the scholar and author Louis Menand, Mangelsdorf said, “Menand alludes to an important concept: knowledge is valuable for its own sake. Those of us in the academy would do well to keep this in mind, and to promote and protect this idea whenever possible. What we teach—and what our students learn—may not always result in a product or a prize or some other tangible result. The payoff is in the cultivation of a well-informed critical thinker and citizen of the world.”

A developmental psychologist and most recently the provost at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Mangelsdorf took office in July and spent much of her first three months getting to know people in the University and Greater Rochester communities. As she met with University and civic leaders, faculty, staff, community organizations, local media, students, parents, and alumni around the country, she struck a consistent theme: her intention to remain a curious, visible, and accessible leader.

“My plan is to spend as much time as possible out of my office and in the community,” she wrote in August, in a guest essay in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

She struck that note throughout her inauguration address, pointing to the necessity of deep community engagement, at both the local and global levels. Such a commitment, she noted, “is what a contemporary university—a university of global consequence—must always keep in mind.”

“Gone are the days of the Ivory Tower,” she said. But the University of Rochester may never have been an ivory tower in the first place.

FAMILY: An alumnus, the husband and parent of alumni, the son of a staff nurse—Wade Norwood ’85 gave a stirring account of how Rochester “is literally a part of my family.” (Photograph by Mary Cooke for the University of Rochester)

“The University of Rochester was built by the people of Rochester,” she said, referencing the pages and pages of area donors, big and small, listed in the University Archives as contributors to the Campaign of 1924, which led to the establishment of the River Campus. “We are not just a University in this community. We are a University of this community.”

In addition to faculty, students, staff, alumni, and parents, the audience included Mangelsdorf’s husband, Karl Rosengren, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and psychology at the University; their daughters, Julia and Emily Rosengren; and son-in-law, Richard Lee. US Rep. Joe Morelle also attended, as did many community leaders. The four living University presidents who preceded her—Dennis O’Brien, Thomas Jackson, Joel Seligman, and Richard Feldman—were seated on the stage.

Among the highlights of the ceremony were several musical performances: the Ying Quartet, artists-in-residence at the Eastman School of Music, premiering The Pathway, composed by Emmy Award–winning Jeff Beal ’85E specifically for the ceremony; Jamal Rossi, the Joan and Martin Messinger Dean of the Eastman School of Music, performing a Rachmaninoff piece on saxophone, accompanied by pianist Toni-Marie Montgomery, dean of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music; and University a cappella ensembles leading in the singing of “The Genesee.”

In an especially stirring address, Wade Norwood ’85—the CEO of Common Ground Health and an at-large member of the New York Board of Regents—outlined what the University has meant to him and his family. The husband and father of fellow alumni and the son of a longtime nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital whose tuition benefit allowed him to attend the University, Norwood said Rochester is “more than just a college or a college community to me. It is literally a part of my family.”

As she officially joined the Rochester family, Mangelsdorf said that while participating in a day of community service this fall, she was introduced to an adage of University benefactor George Eastman: “A good reputation is measured by how much you can improve the lives of others.”

That sentiment resonated with her, she said, as she thought about leading Rochester into the future. Being a president requires many attributes, she said, but she would do her best to “keep my feet on the ground, my head in the clouds, and my focus on Meliora.”

“It is through the knowledge derived from research that we fulfill our mission to make the world ever better.”