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.
Emotions are a critical source of information for learning.
It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives
We are human behind and this part of our human nature that we don't learn the importance of anything until it's snatched from our hands. In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, and that time I realized that education is very important, and education is the power for women. And that's why the terrorists are afraid of education. They do not want women to get education because then women will become more powerful.
Most students who take math classes aren't going to be mathematicians. They're going to be engineers, statisticians - in many ways, that's the more important mission of math education.
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
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