We must also appreciate the importance of re-interpreting, of reapplying knowledge that has been known for a long time. Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of the spirit, because of its focus on spirit and its reminder that there are still many things about the human spirit that are unknowable, vague, unpredictable, immeasurable, unanswerable. Professional education has always been and will always be central to our mission, and we will explore new ways to strengthen our professional schools. But to those who argue that students should learn only what is practical and useful, we will respond emphatically that nothing is more practical and useful than a refined and educated mind. Nothing is more practical than critical thinking, nothing more useful than a mind that can grasp the genuine complexity of difficult human problems and avoid the lure of simplistic explanations.
Nothing is more useful than understanding the moral dilemmas that confront the human condition.
The education we provide our students must therefore aim at their full education, at the development of their civic sensibilities as well as their technical expertise or professional skills. Our education must derive from the recognition that few problems, few issues, and few discoveries are any longer, if they ever were, the province of a single discipline. Amidst greater specialization must also come greater reintegration. At the very outset of this great University, President Gilman foresaw it would be funded from a mixture of public and private support. One cannot walk across this beautiful campus without being made aware of the early contributions of Charles Franklin Doe, or Mrs. Peder Sather, or Elizabeth Joselyn Boalt, or, above all, Phoebe Apperson Hearst.