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Community Lecture by Dean Carter at ��������, Aliso Viejo, on May 4, 2001, as part of the “Celebration of �������� and the City of Aliso Viejo” dedication ceremonies. 

On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America became a reality with this pronouncement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When our founding fathers penned these words 235 years ago, they pointed us in the direction of democracy and inclusiveness. Since then, there have been those among us who keep bringing us back to the grand and noble idea of democracy.

Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi, believed to be the greatest world leader of the 20th century, once said: “Civilization is the encouragement of differences. Civilization thus becomes a synonym of democracy. Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity is, therefore, both uncivilized and undemocratic.”

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the civil rights movement in the United States, also understood the deep well of democracy and wanted the “world house” to drink from that well. King said: “We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together–black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu, [Buddhist and Bedouin]–a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” How do we learn to live in peace?

How do we learn to live the lessons of democracy? Thomas Jefferson said democracy cannot survive with an ignorant population. For centuries, we have depended on our institutions of higher education to teach us community, humanity, service, and happiness.

W. E. B. DuBois, whom I believe to be the greatest sociologist ever produced on American soil, once said: “The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a center of polite society. It is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”

And so for the sake of democracy envisioned by our forefathers, for the sake of civilization as conceived by Gandhi and for the sake of civil rights imagined by King, we need new educational institutions to teach us SGI President Daisaku Ikeda’s civility for the uplift of all human personality and the environment. We need Ikeda’s �������� of America to help us grow up into democracy’s crown.

You may ask, why? I ask, why not?

Why not Daisaku Ikeda’s idea of a university founded to use the power of education to promote respect and peaceful coexistence around the world? Why not an American educational institution built on the philosophy of peace, a philosophy that emphasizes the need for human bonding with the natural world, the need for community and the need for character-nurturing education? To paraphrase a popular 1960s song, why not give a pedagogy of peace a chance?

We can, if we think outside the box.

The Reverend Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called his spiritual and intellectual mentor, was admitted to Bates College in Maine on probation. He went on to pursue four concentrations and graduated with honors. In 1950, 15 years after he received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago, Mays was inducted by his undergraduate alma mater, Bates College, into Phi Beta Kappa, when its national chapter voted not to be racist. His 1935 doctoral dissertation, The Negroes God, is still in print and hailed as a classic. Today Dr. Mays is considered one of the most published college presidents in American history and is referred to as “walking integrity.”

Think what we might have missed if Bates College had not thought outside the box–if the equivalent of affirmative action (equity) had not been practiced by the college in 1918 or if it had used the standard of pure merit for admitting Mays.

Dr. Mays went on to become the sixth president of Morehouse College, where he mentored generations of young men–including Dr. King–and led that institution in thinking outside the box. Morehouse admitted Dr. King at the age of 15 from the 10th grade in high school. He entered with an eighth-grade reading level and graduated with a “C” average. We should keep this in mind when we are reading his brilliant “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” We are still a family “unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interest,” and we don’t all blossom at the same rate. Some blossom early and some blossom late. The tragedy is if we don’t blossom at all.

Think what we might have missed if Dr. Mays had not continued the courageous stance of thinking beyond the standard of pure merit in admitting students like Dr. King.

Today, more than ever, we need a certain kind of educational institution that promotes international exchange, cross-cultural dialogue, and environmental justice that is needed for all of us to blossom and self-actualize to the maximum. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi, and Daisaku Ikeda all had extensive international, interracial, interdisciplinary, and interreligious educations through a worldwide dialogue.

We must not think without history, detaching from it in a new autonomous cultural space, losing our historical memory. �������� of America is prepared to honestly tell its students about the history we have passed so that we might have a more honest and inclusive tradition for building leaders in the academy. “Without a truthful tradition, you cannot build leaders,” says Dr. Ikeda.

In the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, we are witnessing a time in history: “When civilization is shifting its basic outlook; a major turning point in history where the pre-suppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed.”

All of this change has the go