But I would argue for Amherst that the morality of our enterprise rests most fundamentally on a deeper moral structure inherent in the idea of scholarship. My answer is that the student who learns the way of the scholar, learns to practice it, if only for a short time, has learned all that we could hope to teach were she to stay a century. Only by opening our eyes can we open our hearts. Simone Weil, the French mystic, spoke of attentiveness as the purest form of love on earth. Plato had it that the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, is one stopped in his tracks by wonder, by a blend of amazement and curiosity.
Scholarly inquiry disciplines our curiosity and leads it on to knowledge.
Even more, disciplined inquiry leads the scholar on to inquire yet further, to ask more questions, and to see that knowledge itself is always alive with new questions and the possibility of new insight and revised conclusions. The scholar must have, as well, the courage of convictions, the courage to teach them, to put them forward in whatever form best expresses them, whether in the classroom, lectures, performances, books, essays, paintings, poems. We were once a college structured by religious faith. Now we embrace less certainty and more doubt. That too is part of its greatness.