08/26/2026
๐ ๐ช๐ฒ๐น๐ฐ๐ผ๐บ๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ผ๐บ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐น๐ฒ๐
๐ ๐ฐ๐๐น๐น๐ถ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ:
The evening of Tuesday, August 25, we celebrated the Opening Convocation of the 2026-2027 academic year, welcoming new faculty and students to the Centre Community, joining together in music and song, and with a keynote address by Professor Genny Ballard entitled the Magic of Making Mistakes. During this transition into the new academic year, I reflected on the question: โWhy are we here?โ
One partial answer can be found in the mission statement of Centre College: to prepare students for lives of learning, leadership, and service. When we say Centre College, we mean, in part, a particular place on the Earth in central Kentucky. But even more, we mean the people โ the faculty, the staff, our alums, and all of the students here. We are Centre College. And together we co-create transformational learning experiences focused on preparing, learning, leading, and serving.
Alongside this mission, the Centre Community has also named five core values that animate and guide our work and play in bringing this mission to life. At Opening Convocation, I highlighted our core value of a โgrowth mindsetโ โ that is, we believe that all of us have the capacity to learn and become more and better in all the many dimensions of being human โ as intellectual, social, spiritual, and physical beings. The faculty of Centre are particularly committed to helping our students become better thinkers and speakers, better writers and artists, better collaborators and questioners.
I began working at Centre as a mathematics professor, and a few years back I ran across this sentence in the preface of a calculus book: โHere's another reason to study calculus: because calculus is among our species' deepest, richest, farthest-reaching, and most beautiful intellectual achievements.โ To me, that sounds pretty sweet โ like a bit of poetry or an excerpt from a love letter. Every member of Centreโs faculty shares some version of this passion for their field, and each year we all look forward to the work and the play of developing the intellectual with our students. And I mean both work and play. We work hard and feel challenged! And play and feel joy! Both of these are natural elements of building better brains as we learn well, of becoming different and better, of co-creating the transformational learning experiences that are the hallmark of Centreโs exceptional education.
