Letter from the President

A KEY TO LEARNING

By Gerhard Casper

hink back to your own college days: Probably the most important thing you learned was not specific data but rather the capacity to acquire, integrate and apply new knowledge throughout your life. If anything, that is even more important for students today, who will need to relate such knowledge to all parts of the world. Unless one is equipped to reason independently and critically, no accumulation of facts will add up to a sufficient education.

This is the habit of “unceasing inquiry.” And the first year of college sets its tone. Students’ minds should be challenged and stretched from their first year onward. Yet, courses taken predominantly by freshmen and sophomores are larger and less frequently taught by regular faculty members than courses aimed at juniors and seniors. As a result, we miss important opportunities to bring students fully into the search for knowledge from the very beginning of their university careers.

To address that, we have renewed our continuous effort to strengthen Stanford for the coming decade with two initiatives. Here, I should like to focus on Stanford Introductory Studies, an integrated way of thinking about the first and second years of college.

President’s Column (Plain text) President’s Column (Adobe Acrobat format - 93k)

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