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"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." Plutarch
As a Faculty-Fellow-in-Residence and as a team-teacher in an Explorations Floor (a themed floor in the residence halls) called "Great Books, Big City," I have a special opportunity: to live and learn with my students while helping them explore the intellectual and cultural life of New York. The students and I participate in a broad range of events that allow us to extend our discussion of the great works of the Western tradition. In the classroom, we discuss Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and others. But outside, we visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters; we tour the United Nations; we attend Broadway plays; and we tutor as well as organize field trips for children from a nearby homeless shelter to the Museum of Natural History and the Central Park Zoo. We not only watch other people trying to make sense of the world. We struggle to do the same. From the classical Greeks, who tried to articulate a new vision of life amid great cultural change, to the French existentialists, who coped with the tragedies of the twentieth century, we see how great works and great minds of earlier ages can still throw light on the present. My hope is to help students see how alive these ideas are-and how they can shape the kind of person, student, and citizen each of them hopes to become.
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