Critics, including some alumni, make the point that teaching is what is essential in a liberal arts college. To them, scholarship is secondary and certainly not of the essence. Most of us will acknowledge the primacy of teaching. Educating is our chief purpose and has been so from the beginning. Yet we touch on a real ambiguity in this.
Study is an end in itself, much of the time.
And where we reduce our study in this way to some immediate end, we will lose at a least a portion of the joy and reward of inquiry. But your most glorious moments in the physics laboratory will not be those that fall neatly into line as leading on to your vocation. To the contrary, they will be those moments in which the excitement of learning and discovering brings you a joy that stands alone. In this sense, as in the language of the medievel universities, students and professors here are scholars together, studying together in a joint enterprise, with the professors situated much farther down the road of study and research, but on the same road and with the same purpose and direction. Great teaching is itself a kind of mystery.