A Message from Dean Barrett
A Message from Dean Barrett
This column represents my last chance to champion LA&S and liberal education as I’ll be stepping down from the deanship to return to teaching. While I’m delighted to return to the job for which I earned a Ph.D., I confess that I’m feeling a little guilty about the timing.
It’s a particularly challenging moment for academia: Higher education is under attack, DEI efforts are fast disappearing, and free speech can no longer be taken for granted. Language is changed overnight by the stroke of one blunt pen, the constitution is under duress, and it’s unclear if the courts can stanch the blood flow. It’s bleak out there, but that’s precisely why what we do is so important. In fact, I’d argue that the humanities and social sciences have never been more important.
We are simultaneously confronting a government that has described us as “the enemy,” a new frontier of artificial intelligence, a generation that looks to TikTok and Instagram for their news, and changes in climate so dramatic that they are undeniable. In response, we teach our students to ask the hard questions, the ones that consider issues beyond profitability and ease of use; we ask them to think about fairness, justice, and equality; truth and beauty, concepts sometimes slippery and inchoate. We teach them to be skeptical, to ask questions, and to rely on evidence. We encourage them to imagine a world that’s better than the one we occupy, that’s more just, more curious, more ethical. We model how to engage in civil dialogue even in the most contested arguments, how to persuade and not belittle, how to present and not proselytize. I hope we show them that the world is gray, that, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” That uncertainty is not only okay; it’s a position devoutly to be wished, one that demands we humbly accept what we don’t know, what we can’t fully know, and one that calls for multiple perspectives and interdisciplinarity. At a time when we are engaged in a battle for the future of higher education, I hope we can recognize the vast territory of agreement we occupy and be more patient with the comparatively smaller area of dissonance.
It has been a privilege to serve as dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, to support the work of faculty and students, and to be supported by colleagues and friends. I am proud to join the ranks of our dedicated faculty in their efforts to advance and share knowledge with each other, their disciplinary colleagues, the campus, the community, and, most of all, their students. Finally, I look forward to seeing the campus from a different perspective in and out of the classroom while we collectively make clear that a strong democracy requires an educated society.
