Raymond E. Crossman, Ph.D.
Adler School of Professional Psychology
May 14, 2004, Sears Tower, 99th floor

Almost five thousand miles from Chicago, more than a century ago, Alfred Adler began a revolution that has brought us all here together tonight. The first community psychologist, he was the among the first to do forms of what we now call group counseling, family counseling, and public mental health education. Adler, speaking the same truth spoken by Aristotle, Saint Francis, Buddha, Muhammad, and Maimonides, articulated the construct of social interest to explain people, to guide work with people, and to describe our responsibility to each other within our community.

It is revolutionary to lay the foundation for the best of modern psychology, what we know to be the roots of community, preventative, and positive psychologies. Rudolph Dreikers continued that revolution and began new revolutions. Dreikers completed Adler's final lecture tour and continued to speak around the world. His work led to the establishment of the first child guidance centers across Chicagoland and around the world, and he began the School that brings us all here together tonight. It is revolutionary to start a great School out of one's private practice office. Dreikurs' colleagues, his disciples and his evangelists, Bernard Shulman, Harold Mosak, Bina Rosenberg, and Robert Powers, continued that revolution and began new revolutions. Shulman, Mosak, Rosenberg, and Powers individually touched thousands of practitioners, primary educators, and parents with a message about common sense, effective, optimistic ways to support health and community.

Many of those they touched are here tonight. These men brought their life on the road in what I'd call an international tent revival, they started new school locations in Canada, they began Adlerian communities across the United States. That's revolutionary. So here we are. We are celebrating a School lifted up through a legacy of revolution. Tonight fourteen hundred feet up in the air. Following the work of many revolutionaries, what is our responsibility to the School now? Following our heritage of revolution, what is demanded from each one of us? Following such revolutionary vision and work, where should we be looking? Chicago reformist Jane Addams said, "The lessons of great men are lost unless they reinforce upon our minds the highest demands which we make upon ourselves."

To me that means that we can't simply put our elders and our teachers on pedestals. Instead we must each aspire to their heights. We are required by the legacy of the School to be revolutionaries as we continue the work of the School and build our School's future. The examples of Adler, Dreikurs, Shulman, Mosak, Rosenberg, and Powers require us all to go beyond ourselves and our comfort, to rise above the ordinary, to find new challenges, to mount our own new revolutions. What kind of challenge and revolution is worthy of our legacy? What challenges today require a revolution? What revolution can we offer the world as Adlerians, as psychologists, as educators?

Many challenges in the world clamor loudly for our attention. In 1851, abolitionist, feminist, and evangelist Sojourner Truth said, "Well children, when there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter." The same racket that Sojourner Truth heard over 150 years ago still resonates as "out of kilter" today. There remains confusion, hatred, conflict, and subjugation mistakenly related to the extraordinary difference and diversity of humanity. We don't know how to handle difference, and we don't know how to respect and participate in a global community. Somehow the differences of geography, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexual identity, religion, and a host of other dimensions of our beautiful humanity, lead to divisions, craziness, and dis-ease. Somehow blame is valued over understanding. Somehow authenticity, integration, and justice are not the community prize. We don't know how. Don't we know how?

Alfred Adler's revolution offers us the tools to forge our own revolution. Adler wrote, Most of the methods employed today to solve pressing problems in the lives of peoples or groups are obsolete and inadequate. They are mostly based on stimulating nationalistic and religious passions and lead to oppression, persecution, and war… Whoever desires… human community must renounce… striving for power over others… [Solutions] can only be won by being involved, by cooperating, and experiencing, and by being useful to others. He's saying that we need to engage and pay attention to each other. Adler and his many students have told us about the particulars of choice, purpose, and responsibility for building community.

Their words are a charge for us and for the School. Adler wrote, "What we all lack, and for which we struggle relentlessly, are new [approaches] to raise… social [sensibility and community]." Now is the time to imagine what we might be, to imagine what the School might be. Adler's vision must be joined now with our imagination, our creativity, and our sweat and dedication, in pursuit of our revolution.

Let us translate our legacy as the oldest psychology school in the world into becoming the newest. Through selecting and preparing only students who will be socially responsible practitioners, the best and brightest from every different community, practitioners to fill new and emerging roles, beyond the old, safe, known roles we ourselves were trained to fill. Practitioners who will be high impact community leaders, who will be social change agents. Let us take seriously that we are now the most international psychology school in the world, that our student body is right now more international than is found in any other psychology school. Through better supporting our international students and campuses, through better connecting with the global community, through requiring of all of our students international attention, experiences, and practica. Let us welcome a diversity and broadening of Adlerian perspectives and discourse, to create the most forward-looking and innovative and unexpected Adlerian work, to go beyond being a footnote or being the foundations for contemporary work, to become absolutely indispensable to the world and to become the solution for our most pressing real world problems.

Let us turn to the issues that most affect our diverse and marginalized and forgotten communities. Issues such as HIV disease, such as incarceration, such as family violence. Issues that are perpetuated due to the powerlessness of those affected, due to a lack of coordinated community activity, due to a failure to implement what we know about systems and prevention. Let us realize our potential and our responsibility as psychologists to improve humanity, and also to move the School beyond psychology.

While we continue to consider the Adlerian model's application to the one-to-one psychotherapy endeavor, let us also continue and deepen our applications for the struggling primary education establishment, for our besieged and mission less prisons, for our too-medical health care, for our evolving and diverse family systems, for the always changing workplace, for our complex global community. Through pursuing broad community research, consultation, and the development of programs and policy.

Let us make it our distinctive revolution that we notice and find the forgotten problems, the overlooked issues, the unpopular causes, the unserved peoples, the less obvious and less pursued models of leadership and community.

Tonight is a wonderful celebration of our School. I believe that it is a brilliant and useful academic tradition for the stakeholders of a school to come together, to remind a new leader and a new servant about what is important through Calls to Service, and to consider together who we are and who we might be.

I am honored, I am excited, and I accept your Calls to Service. Let us together be worthy stewards of our great legacy and our important mission, as we create revolutions in our classrooms, within our different communities, and across our world.