Victoria College Principal’s Address | Professor Alex Hernandez
Principal Alex Hernandez delivered this address during his installation ceremony in the Isabel Bader Theatre on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
Honoured guests and esteemed colleagues, members of the Victoria and University of Toronto community, cherished students, and beloved family and friends, what a delight it is to have you here on this occasion. It’s a cliche, I know, but I’m incredibly humbled by your presence, and humbled at the prospect of serving as Principal of Victoria College. To do so is to take one’s place in a line of distinguished academic leaders that have made Vic what it is today. The gravity of that charge isn’t lost on me, even if (as too many of you have reminded me) my installation this afternoon makes me sound like I’m a refrigerator.
For nearly a hundred years, the Principals of Victoria College have fostered a culture of academic excellence. With our partners at the University of Toronto and the Faculty of Arts and Science, Vic has been instrumental in securing the humanities, becoming a place where world languages and literatures, philosophy, and history among other fundamental disciplines still flourish. But we’ve been antsy in those disciplinary boxes, and over the years we’ve found ways to break out of them. Through our renowned research centres, fellowships, and upper-year programs, Victoria College faculty and fellows have gone on to forge interdisciplinary connections that shape how and what we know. Vic is a place where scientists work alongside sociologists, where educators are in conversation with ethicists, where musicologists rub elbows with medievalists. The electricity of that atmosphere courses through our community, and it’s powered successive waves of student leaders that embody Vic’s excellence in the world. Victoria College graduates have gone on to be captains of industry, Giller Prize winners, Prime Ministers, and Rhodes Scholars. Indeed, for the first time in our history, we’re shipping the latter off to Oxford in pairs!
The Victoria College I imagine upholds this proud tradition, even as it looks forward to the substantial challenges of tomorrow (among them, a rapidly shifting climate, the uncertainties of AI, global inequalities, and a rising illiberality threatening our democracies). In my view, we meet those challenges not by abandoning our historic roots in the liberal arts, but by recognizing on the contrary, that solutions are rarely siloed into discrete disciplinary boxes. If Vic is to lead in shaping our future, it will be because its members are empowered to explore their curiosities. Because they're encouraged to ask and answer difficult questions. And they’re supported in expanding their capabilities. In fact, problem-solving of the sort we’ll need is an essentially inventive act. So we’re building what we believe will be a landmark centre for the study of creativity, bringing together thinkers across a variety of fields to reflect on how the world is made and re-made.
Students will no doubt play a central role in this next chapter, and equipping them for an uncertain future means developing their critical resilience, which is to say, their ability to press through discomfort in order to learn and grow. Victoria College must therefore remain a place where robust free inquiry occurs, where our differences aren’t papered over with feigned agreement but acknowledged as resources that somehow make us greater than the sum of our parts. In this way, the college will continue to cultivate academic excellence across domains as it approaches its next century.
Yet I also believe that the real measure of Vic’s excellence is to be found somewhere else entirely. For all our Rhodes Scholars and our Giller Prize winners, for all our Fryes and Atwoods and Pearsons, the best measure of who we are as an institution lies in how we broaden the scope of that flourishing, enabling ever greater numbers to find their excellence and bring it to bear on the world. The Victoria College I want to preside over should be known for how it creates these opportunities for all kinds of people, who then go on to work or to serve or else to throw down the ladders of access for all those daring enough to climb up. The Victoria College I want to preside over finds its proudest boast in the character of its graduates that is, and in this way, lives up to its motto: studies pass into character.
Of course, none of this should discourage the pursuit of our culture’s highest achievements. Far from it. But I maintain that excellence can also be a matter of the everyday, that excellence is just as much a daily practice where, in using our gifts, we return them to the communities that have nurtured them in us.
Today’s musical fanfare is lifted from Fleet Foxes’ 2020 album, Shore, and if you’ll indulge a brief detour, I’ll tie up some of the loose ends here. [and by the way, can we briefly give it up for that lovely rendition by The Uplifters with Robin Dann, Doug Tielli, and Charles Spearin?]. Written and recorded partway through the pandemic, Shore opens on a note of hard-earned thanksgiving. “Sunblind,” in particular, sees frontman Robin Pecknold list the influences that have made him who he is. They’re artists like John Prine and Elliot Smith and Curtis Mayfield, departed heroes and friends gone too soon, whose songs make up the textual fabric of Pecknold’s own creativity. In fact, their company has illuminated his way: “No one alone / can leave the cave.” The central tension of the song then is: how do you repay a gift of that magnitude? How best to honour those who have made you who you are? And how do you respond when their brilliance renders you sunblind?
The past few days have reinforced for me just how many brilliant individuals have similarly lit the way for me. To my colleagues in the English Department and the Faculty of Arts and Science, I thank you for your support, your mentorship, and your collegiality. To the former Principals of the College, and especially Angela Esterhammer, I thank you and honour the work you’ve already done to make this place so exceptional. I hope I am a fitting steward. To my colleagues at Victoria University, thank you for creating such a warm and welcoming academic home to spend this season in leadership. Rhonda, I thank you in particular, for sharing a vision for the future of Vic excellence.
To my outstanding students, past and present—what a joy it’s been to teach you. You regularly amaze me and have taught me more than you know. To the teachers that invested in me, I hope I have repaid you in full. To friends and family, both near and far, you have been such a blessing and have helped to ground me, even during troubled times. I thank my grandparents and parents especially, who braved a new life as immigrants and in so doing, gave my dear sister and I opportunities they never had. But I reserve my deepest gratitude for my wife and partner, Kelsie, who just makes everything beautiful. Thank you for being a constant companion; your integrity and fearlessness is an inspiration. And what a gift and source of pride it’s been to raise our two children. Ellie and Charles, you made me a Dad and in the process, taught me so much about how boundless love can be. I’m honoured that together we make C-A-K-E, C.A.K.E.
And so let me respond, friends, to your collective brilliance in the only way I see fit, with a promise to use what I’ve been given in the best way I can. For a better University, a better community, and a better Victoria College. Thank you.
Principal Alex Hernandez