By Coline Irvine<\/p>\n
In his book My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir offered a sentiment which, more than 100 years later, represents as good a justification for higher education in contemporary society as one is likely to find in any college catalogue: \u201cWhen we try to pick out anything by itself,\u201d he says, speaking of the profoundly ecological nature of the world, \u201cwe find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be sure, college campuses\u2014meaning the empirical kind with living, breathing students, with staff, teachers, textbooks, trees, quads, and stadiums\u2014sit squarely at the various junctures of this tangled-up creation, seeking from these vantage points to understand through intensive study the pressing issues, the timeless questions, and the persistent, ineluctable mysteries that unite our places in time and space with those of countless others.<\/p>\n
College is literally where and when we hope to experience the joy that comes with accessing the eternal through the particular. It is where we come to study, in our specific yet overlapping disciplines, the problems of the world so as to appreciate the complexity of all things\u2014because it is, without question, an informed appreciation for complexity that inspires reflection and breeds compassion.<\/p>\n
COLIN IRVINE is an associate professor of English at Augsburg College and serves as the summer 2012 research coordinator for the College\u2019s Office of Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunity (URGO).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Coline Irvine In his book My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir offered a sentiment which, more than 100 years later, represents as good a justification for higher education in contemporary society as one is likely to find in any college catalogue: \u201cWhen we try to pick out anything by itself,\u201d he says, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":6576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[63,52],"class_list":["post-180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories","tag-auggie-voices","tag-spring-2012"],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6554,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180\/revisions\/6554"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.augsburg.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}