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November 2009

College and the Big World

Higher education places much emphasis on "global awareness" and the importance of study abroad experiences. I certainly agree with this, because we need this kind of understanding if we are going to find a way to live peaceably together. But I think this emphasis goes to the very core of what a college education is about: Providing a direct experiential understanding of how much we do not know. Honors College students arrive at university from the top of their classes. They have been rightly supported and praised for their abilities and their knowledge, and their successes have earned them entry into the Honors College. Relatively speaking, they know a lot-but really, not so much. A successful college education must be about how little we all know, and of course, how to learn more, and how we all must continually work to learn more. Professors pursuing research are, in this sense, in the same situation as first semester freshmen. They are recognizing what they don't know, and working to learn more. I learn at the beginning of a fascinating film, The Linguists, that the two linguistics researches featured in the film together speak more than 25 different languages. Impressive. But then the film informs me that there are more than 8,000 different languages worldwide. These languages are the life blood for the cultures that use them. Learning more, through college and beyond, is, ironically, learning how little one knows.

Davis Baird
Dean,
  -Click here for Bio

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