October 15, 2004

Good evening.  Thank you Richard!  Our success, including this great campus, would not have been possible without the leadership you have demonstrated as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

I would like to warmly welcome our trustees, alumni, faculty, staff, student leaders and guests.  I also wish to convey to everyone here the best wishes and congratulations of Governor Blagojevich and Mayor Daley.  The Mayor is out of the country today but has issued a proclamation declaring today Chicago School of Professional Psychology Day in the City of Chicago.  I would like to acknowledge Beth Sullivan, Vice President of Administration, for her outstanding leadership in taking our collective dream of a new campus to this amazing reality.  And Chrystal Maxwell, our new director of advancement and alumni relations for putting this wonderful evening together.  Thank you to the two of you and thank you to all the members of The Chicago School Family for your incredible efforts in creating this wonderful space, this event, our history, and our future together.  Please join me in a toast to our school’s 25th anniversary and the opening of our new campus!and toast and ribbon cutting – where does this fit in – so people can have sipped their champagne while I talk?).

Tonight we are celebrating a tradition of excellence and the beginning of a new era of leadership.  As I was anticipating this wonderful day, I kept thinking of the Vince Lombardi quote—“When all is said and done, more is said than done.”  Not at The Chicago School.

What makes The Chicago School different is not what we say…it’s what gets done.  We have an emphasis on results—on building capacity.  We build it in our institution and in every student that studies here.  We aspire to be the nation’s school of choice for the study of professional psychology.  We train leaders and we believe deeply that organizational capabilities and leadership competencies are connected to results.

At The Chicago School the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—all of our programs together are more than the collection of our individual curricula, all of our faculty, students, staff, alumni and trustees are more than a collection of individuals.  We bring together our skills and our commitment to the task of educating professional psychologists and that’s how more gets done…and done better.

We believe that our achievements as a school will outlive the energy and the actions of any one of our people—we have an internal culture—a shared culture that says we will go beyond any one skill or area of expertise.   We are driven to expand our educational mission beyond existing boundaries—to be innovative, and to expand the reach of psychology.  We have a standard that distinguishes us from any other institution of its kind …we are committed to building capabilities.

That’s what we say.  What we’ve done is become the broadest and largest professional school of psychology in the United States in four short years.  We never set out to become the biggest -only the best – the school of choice - and the numbers have followed.  We have become the school of choice because we have built our capacity, and the capabilities of our students in Clinical, Forensic, Organizational and Industrial and Business Psychology and Applied Behavior Analysis. And looking ahead, into School Psychology.    

We said we wanted to cross all kinds of boundaries…to go beyond the traditional limits of mental health: to primary health care, the legal arena, business government, schools and all types of organizations.  We wanted to create blended curricula where we could draw on the strength of psychology as a powerful discipline…as a broad base of understandings that were too important to be locked away in traditional silos and margins.  We said we wanted to share the excitement and the freedom that could come from real synergy…from weaving psychology right into the texture of our culture…from putting it all together in one place.  That’s what we said.  

And that is exactly what we’ve done.  Our students speak more than one language…they can take their understanding of human behavior and bring it to business and organizational challenges.  And they are doing just that.  We are very active in mental health—individual, group, family and community settings…and we are also active across the entire spectrum of human endeavor.  We are meeting the needs of real people—with real services and excellent education.  We know that needs are not limited by arbitrary walls—a Psychologist working in communications, as a business executive, as a school President, as the head of the United States Air Force Aviation Safety program is a relatively new idea and a new and important kind of success.  And that is The Chicago School’s culture in action.

We want to be defined by the capabilities we build and those that we teach.  We want to focus on learning of course—the finest faculty, the most challenging courses, but also learning as an organization.  This school is committed to constant learning.  Is there a new and better way to get our job done, new areas for us to master…whether that is learning how to be more effective advocates for patients in need or to improve the human potential of an organization.  So for us, learning means innovation in our curricula…and in our connection to our profession.  

We also want to focus on change—ours is a dynamic profession and we not only want to embrace change, we want to lead it.  New programs, new concepts, new roles for our students and consequently for Psychologists.  Our core stays constant—education, community, service and innovation; all grounded in a commitment to Diversity—and that gives us the solid ground to walk on…to take risks and grow.  We are not interested in change for the sake of change, nor are we aspiring to be everything to everyone… but we know that now is just a moment on the way to next, and we want to get there early.   

And we want to continue our commitment to crossing boundaries, to collaborating and teaming up with different disciplines; finding cross-disciplinary solutions to society’s great challenges.  We will be responsible for our results—and own our programs and their implications.

We want also to be identified by the great city where we live.  We’re right in the center now; in the finest campus devoted to professional psychology in the United States.  Growth and change have come to Chicago, and this city has been more than a home for us—it has been a model.  Chicago has shown us a true Renaissance of development, growth and Diversity.  And now here we are, right on the river, in what is now the middle of an incredible process of becoming more…and better.  We are a school with a great mission inside a city with a great mission and the combination is working for us both.  We’re the nation’s school of choice in part because we are Chicago’s school.

Ultimately, the success of this institution will be determined by what is in the hearts and heads of the people who work here, study here and partner with us.  We believe that leadership means helping to move people to a place in which both they and those who depend on them are genuinely better off, and it means getting that done in a way that is respectful to the people and communities we serve.  We are a school that has developed a vision for the future and we invite you to join us on our journey.  

We are practical dreamers here.  We know that our values and our vision are important; especially if they are integrated into making great things happen—getting things done.    As a Zen Master once said:  “First, enlightenment…then the laundry.”  Both need doing.  Thank you for being here, and thank you for believing in The Chicago School.