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One of the things I think it's really important for our—for students in our college to appreciate
is the unique role that humanities and social sciences is going to have in solving the world's
problems. There's so much talk about STEM, science/technology/engineering/mathematics,
and, of course, those areas are important. Scientific discovery and technical innovation
is going to continue to improve our quality of life. But I don't think the solutions to
the challenges of the 21st century—things like energy, environment, health and well-being,
security and safety, food, all of those are going to be helped through scientific discovery
and technical innovation; none of them will be solved solely through those areas. What
they are going to require is understanding and helping people to change the way they
think and the way they act. And that's what we do in our college. We're every bit as important
to finding solutions for the future as any discipline.
I think that CHASS is going to grow into the future, particularly in its graduate programs
including those in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, as this university gets
better and has more and more global impact in all of its colleges.
One of the things that I think is very exciting and that should happen and I think will happen
is that I think that we will form more partnerships, particularly in the STEM disciplines. There's
a great need for social sciences and humanities, to work on projects and not simply as the—sometimes
we're put on grants as the evaluator. But I think we will be more likely to become more
central partners as we really understand more about what interdisciplinary perspectives
are. And I think that's every exciting. I've had conversations with people who ask
questions like—in urban forests, one of the things that happens is that trees in poor
neighborhoods die before trees in rich neighborhoods. And the reason for that is that there's a
particular insect that's much more likely to attack trees in poor neighborhoods. And
so why is that? That's not a—that's a social science question. That's not, um—that's
not a natural science question. It's a lot of those kinds of questions came
up so that we—I could see the real potential and the excitement of being full partners
with professionals in other disciplines. And I think that's one of—a major role that
the College of Humanities and Social Sciences will play.
You can't be a scientist, and just purely a scientist, without considering the implications
of what you're doing. Because what you're supposed—what you're doing is supposed to
have an effect on society. What are the ethical, moral—along with the
economic and scientific—benefits of your research. We have a functional role to play,
right? - as the conscience, if you will, of society to protect us from ourselves.
We should give more emphasis to the total development of North Carolina, all of North
Carolina. When I retired, the department established a scholarship for me. They asked me who I—what
I wanted it to be and I said, "Well, I think all scholarships should go to the worthy students
who are going to be good students. But, I would like to see this go to students who
cannot afford to go to college or if they do they're going to borrow large sums of money."
Of course, that's many students now. But the ones that need it the most. There are a lot
people still in North Carolina that don't go to—get a college degree that are capable
of it, and I believe in most cases it's economic. Now, I can't tell whether a student is from
Currituck County or Mecklenburg County. They're all so tied in, all very much tied together,
through technology and—and they are very plugged in and they know what's out there
now. And I think they're getting educational background, there's just differences in the
quality of our schools obviously, but most of the students in most of these high schools
in North Carolina are producing people with the ability and education to go to college.
I think that the students that are not going to college today are—it's largely economic.
And I think that's where we need to reach out. And that's going to be somewhat out of
the area we're impacting mostly now. So I think impacting more areas of North Carolina
would be my mission for North Carolina for the next several decades.
Well, hopefully, we'll have more and more talented and qualified students coming through
the ranks, and they'll continue to strengthen their graduate programs here so that students
that go through undergraduate also want to transition and go into more of the graduate
programs that they're offering. I think we already have an incredible faculty in a lot
of the departments, but to continue to bring on more faculty that inspires students for
generations to come, I think, is really key for the success of CHASS moving forward.
Professors aren't supposed to do social media. If you polled most of the people on campus,
I assume, most of them don't have a Twitter account like I do, and they're not thinking
about those things. But I've drawn into the world of social media because I think it's
just another way to let people know what you're doing, what you're thinking, and to use your
expertise to talk and speak to contemporary issues.
So, I joined Twitter, I guess, about two years ago, and I found it to be a really amazing
community of people who are interested in different aspects of things that I am doing
that are available in this sort of "Twitterverse," as we call it. And so it's been a lot of fun
to share the kind of work I do as a professor, to complicate what people assume professors
are like and what we do and how we would treat other people, and to really use it as another
kind of classroom, to talk about the ideas that I work with every day.
The thing I'm most passionate about is how technology is affecting our whole experience
of work. That's something that I've seen unfold before my very eyes, as have many of you,
just during the past decade, you know, with social media, with electronic performance
monitoring—all these things that, sometimes they've had positive and intended effects,
and other times they've had completely unforeseen effects that aren't always so positive.
I really wanted to come to NC State because I wanted to be at a state university, I wanted
to be at a public university. I think it's very important to give back to the community
in a way. I'm surrounded by universities and graduate students and other faculty who work
in my area, so there's a lot of collaboration in the Triangle, to prepare students for all
kinds of careers in foreign service, underdevelopment policy or, you know, working in global medicine
issues and public policy. I'd love for faculty, literally, to be able
to get out to all hundred counties and for people all over the state, regardless of their
own educational background, to sort of have opportunities to be exposed to history and
literature and thought and art and music and drama and film and everything else and get
to see that—that the university is sort of without walls. So that's really dreaming,
but yeah, that's what I'd love to see. The life lesson to take away from being a
student or a major in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is that we don't know
what we will want to know or be or do. And when we're young, we can benefit ourselves
every day for the rest of our lives by broadening the potential for meeting our curiosity or
our opportunities or our challenges. From the faculty point of view, faculty members
who do their best work love what they do, but they love what they do not only because
of the pleasure of their technical or general knowledge, but because they see that it benefits
the people with whom they share it. And it's that sharing that's most important and, I
think, most rewarding, long range.