In the recent days since the RISD announcement I have been expanding my search for wisdom by meeting with current sitting university presidents as my new hobby. One president told me a funny story about former MIT president Paul Gray who was MIT's president when I was an undergraduate here. He said that Gray told him once, "For any given evening while you are trying to go to sleep, you will realize that you have let down 3 or 4 people or groups on campus. This will be the case daily. What is important once in a while, is for you to let down 5 or 6 to make you realize what a good job you're doing in general." This bit of dark wit certainly made me smile.
Currently at RISD I'm doing something a bit different in the virtual space. There is an internal forum where I am in the midst of connecting with RISD students, staff, and faculty to begin to learn all about RISD. It's funny because one of the staff persons discovered an interesting coincidence along the same vein of my finding MIT in the words SIMPLICITY and COMPLEXITY. She discovered that the current RISD president's name, and my name, are coincidentally connected to the word, "ONE," -- which is the launch point for our internal forum called one.risd:
I certainly felt the strong hand of fate. Oh my.
Posted by maeda at December 30, 2007 12:14 PM