No trumpets sound when important decisions are made. Destiny comes silently.
-Agnes De Mille
Karen J. Taylor
Department of History
Alhough I have taken no classes at the College of Wooster, my fourteen years here have educated me in ways that I could never have anticipated. My most powerful teachers have been the students themselves, because they are veritable fonts of contemporary wisdom, knowledge, enthusiasiam, and hope. My interaction with them is a constant source of intellectual stimulation, and it has changed my world view on more than one occasion. My faculty and staff colleagues represent such a variety of backgrounds and perspectives that it is impossible to even begin to enumerate the ways they have changed my understanding of myself and the world around me. In general, they have taught me the value of continuing dialogue, and the fact that differences in perspective are the ground from which new ideas grow best. The College is very generous with its support for workshops and seminars to enhance faculty education, and I have learned everything from computer technology to how my own teaching affects my students, in a variety of venues, the most impressive of which is the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA). The GLCA has provided me with an arena of discourse in which I have joined with students, faculty, and staff to explore the issues of education, life goals, and human well-being, that have brought us together in academe. Perhaps the most powerful lesson I have learned from my long interaction with the GLCA is that academe is profoundly grounded in the world it seeks to benefit (there is no ivory tower), and that we who occupy it are therefore doubly obligated to make our actions correspond to our beliefs.
The graduate program in history at Duke University taught me about Marxism, how to fight for what I believed in, and how to think like a historian. The breadth of their offerings, and Duke professors' willingness to engage in intellectual exploration, made me realize that how you teach is really what you teach.
The graduate program at Clark University taught me how naive I was. While I had long understood the ramifications of race and racism on human lives, I was completely ignorant of the ways gender and class affect human interaction, primarily because I believed that America was a "classless" society, and gender was immaterial. At Clark I learned that class and gender were powerful determinants of who a person could hope to be.
The University of Utah gave me an excellent undergraduate education. It provided me with the basics in a wide range of fields, and, more importantly, taught me that asking questions is sometimes more important than finding answers.
Last updated: July 25, 2006
© 1999 Karen J. Taylor