Remarks by Amy E. Hungerford

Thank you, Dean Rosen-Metsch. And welcome, new General Studies students and your families!

People may say--and you may feel--that you are coming to Columbia at a historic moment. This era of cultural foment has been likened to other times of transformation—the student movements of the late sixties, or the peace activism following World War I. And both those histories shaped Columbia: our Core Curriculum was founded in response to the first World War, to strengthen students’ readiness for democratic citizenship. The student protests of 1968, and the university’s healing afterwards, set norms for activism that we live with today.

But the history you may feel most keenly right now is your own: all that you brought here along with your school bags and devices. These things include your knowledge and skills from previous coursework or from a career or a job, expectations shaped by your family life and friendships, cultural intuitions born of the places you have lived, and a working ethics rooted in your decisions and your reflections on them. This historic moment is first and foremost a feature of your history. For you and your families, the achievement of arriving here is both an ending and a beginning, the fulcrum of a changing life.

Because of that other historic moment—Columbia’s, the world’s—you will hear much about pluralism and about learning from conflicting points of view. The activities that we associate with a growing mind—reading, reasoning, listening, analyzing data, learning context and history—all of these sit at the heart of the university’s mission. And Columbia is designed, above all, for this work: your studies will change your mind.

In my reading this summer, I became interested in just this question—exactly how minds change. I want to credit a book and a friend for spurring me along—the book is How Minds Change, by David McCraney, recommended by a friend who graduated from Columbia College in the 1980s. McCraney synthesizes several strains of research in the science of cognition and social change. He shows how a changing sense of belonging is where a change of mind begins. The research shows that feelings change before beliefs do; kindness precedes persuasion.

I will admit, this truth is difficult for me: I believe in, and love, the freedom of changing my mind, and it feels like something intentional. At 18, I came to college intending to make a difference in the world—through education or environmental policy. I chose to major in Political Science.  But then came poetry: specifically, a teacher who introduced me to poets who seemed to speak in a voice I’d been hearing all my life. And those poets led me to more poets, and other teachers, to writing and research and to the career of an English professor. It was an intellectual journey, to be sure.

But in all these transformations, belonging to a university came first. I love the fact that universities are made to foster changes of mind, to step over any shame or sense of being “wrong.”  Here, we embrace the earned reality of a better argument, better data, or a new question that makes our understanding suddenly shift. It’s electrifying; it’s continuous.

And it is worth pausing on this counter-intuitive fact. In many communities, common views about the world bind the group together. But here’s the amazing thing: the community of the campus is held together by the shared view that beliefs are always a work in progress. Here, to signal a desire for continuous learning is to signal that you belong. And you can learn a whole lot more about how all of this works in the human mind from our world-renowned faculty in psychology, behavioral economics, philosophy, neuroscience, literature, religion and more.

GS students have shown that they are exceptionally open to change. My wish for you on this morning is that you live out the Columbia identity that I have been describing in every classroom you enter. Take joy in this special place where you belong not because you agree to a popular opinion or a particular truth or set path, but because you want to change your mind.