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When I arrived at Davidson, I noticed how collaborative our faculty really are and want to be.
Probably the best-known example of that is the Humanities course.
It is a course that is taught by faculty from many different departments
and asks faculty members to expand their teaching
repertoire to include things far outside of the area
in which they were trained. Both the faculty and the students,
who have experience with this course, love it. They love the sense
of intellectual community that arises
when people with different disciplinary backgrounds and different training
come together and talk about ideas that matter. How do you turn that into a
campus philosophy?
How do you turn that idea for collaboration into
an idea that informs how you organize yourselves
physically on your campus? This is the idea
of the neighborhood, building on something that Davidson
has always been good at. Davidson has a
tradition of cooperation between faculty and students. We have collaborated on our work
for many years at this point. The truth of the matter is that
the physical plant, as we have with the facilities as they are presently
organized, don't really facilitate our ability to interact with one another
as smoothly and frequently as we'd like to.
Without the Duke Endowment support, I think we would never have imagined this
concept
for the neighborhood and for the ways in which we can organize ourselves
physically.
Certainly without their extraordinary investment in Davidson's
future, we wouldn't be able to begin to do it and execute on it. Our gratitude is
both to them as a thought partner
and also as an extraordinary investor in Davidson's future.
One of the courses I've taken that promotes this idea of the academic
neighborhood
is neurophilosophy. What was unique about this course is that we
did not take it from a single-minded approach. For example, we might
tackle this problem from a neuroscientist's perspective,
a psychologist's perspective, a writer's perspective, and a politician's perspective,
all within a single class, to delve into these ideas of who we are,
what we are, and why we are. I think the new academic neighborhood
is incredibly important, regardless of whether your discipline is housed there
or not, because
it's about a mindset, not a physical location.
It models that we need to leave our academic safe houses of identity
and to find out what we have in common in terms of how we produce knowledge
and seek knowledge in our different fields. What I'm most excited about this new facility
is that it will allow us to integrate as a community in these social environments
where we could have spectacular, interesting,
passionate dialogue about what it is we are engaged in, the big questions we are all interested in.
Whether it's in the neurosciences, chemistry, psychology, biology,
arts, or humanities, creating these social spaces
will allow us to energize the dialogue on campus in ways that we can't do currently.
My hope is that when people learn what we are trying to accomplish
with this academic neighborhood, their response would be -- What can I do
to make that happen? How can I help make that happen
for Davidson, for our students, for the faculty who support our students,
and for the world in which we live? We need the ongoing support of
alumni, parents, and friends of the college
to make possible this vision which will allow
our amazing faculty and students to achieve their highest aspirations.