Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.
Interpretation
Understanding our history and embracing both science and the arts can guide us towards a better future.
This quote emphasizes the importance of learning from our past while integrating both scientific inquiry and creative expression to foster innovation. Drew Gilpin Faust suggests that universities serve as pivotal environments for developing this dual focus, thereby equipping individuals and society with the tools needed to navigate and shape the future effectively.
In practice
In a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of combining diverse fields of study.
When I was growing up in Virginia, the Civil War was presented to me as glorious with dramatic courage and military honor. Later, I realized how death was central to the reality. It was at the core of women's lives. It's what they talked about most.
High school students ought to seek out campus communities where they feel not only empowered to engage their talents, but also challenged to leave their comfort zones. The ability to embrace new opportunities emerges, in part, from a willingness to take risks and to fail.
As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.
I've always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor - I never would have imagined that. Writing books - I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. - I'm not sure I would even have imagined that. I've lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
I lived in a world where social arrangements were taken for granted and assumed to be timeless. A child's obligation was to learn these usages, not to question them. The complexities of racial deportment were of a piece with learning manners and etiquette more generally.
Don't be afraid! We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.
America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.
Heart and head are the constituent parts of character; temperament has almost nothing to do with it, and, therefore, character is dependent upon education, and is susceptible of being corrected and improved.
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.
What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
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