
‘W&L After Class’ Podcast Releases New Episode Featuring Will Dudley The Washington and Lee University president discusses his role as an educator and the ways in which a liberal arts experience crafts an interesting mind.
If you’re going to search for the truth, you can’t do it unless you are exposed to all the plausible hypotheses that are worth considering. So, you need to have the ability to have your mind range widely over the various options that folks can generate that are worth exploring, and the freedom to explore those deeply and construct and evaluate arguments based on evidence and reasoning. If we’re in the truth-seeking enterprise, you just can’t do it without free and critical thinking.”
~ Will Dudley, Washington and Lee University president
First, Will Dudley, Washington and Lee University president, dreamed of playing for the Washington Commanders – and then he wanted to be Pythagoras. As a student at Williams College, exploring the breadth of a liberal arts education in Philosophy 101: Intro to Moral and Political Philosophy, he landed on his lifelong vocation: an educator.
“It was more just the process and activity of philosophy, which is really intellectual combat – the greatest minds arguing with each other about the most important questions,” Dudley says. “And I just found that so exciting that I wanted to be part of it.”
Dudley dons his professor of philosophy hat – versus his college presidential one – in the most recent episode of “W&L After Class” with Ruth Candler, associate director of Lifelong Learning. In this interview, “Cultivating an Interesting Mind for a Lifetime,” he explains how his own liberal arts experience broadened and deepened his curiosity, and how it provided him with philosophy, a discipline that ignited a spark that has continued since his undergraduate years. He discusses why he elects to remain in the classroom, delving into the format of his Virtue, Ethics and Liberal Arts Education course. Dudley also talks of the infectious joy of watching students showcase their passions, whether it be on the field, on stage or in the classroom – and how W&L students even introduced him to his favorite hobby: fly-fishing.
“I had a wise colleague once who said that he saw the purpose of a liberal arts education as making your mind a sufficiently interesting place that you could enjoy living in it for the rest of your life,” he says. “And I thought, ‘That’s not bad.’
“So, hopefully students at a place like this absorb how to go about learning something when it seems important or interesting; how to ask a good question; how to synthesize complicated information, both in the form of written language or quantitative data,” he adds. “Hopefully, we provide all those tools in it, and it does, in fact, make people’s lives more interesting along the way.”
“Cultivating an Interesting Mind for a Lifetime” marks the fifth episode in the sixth season of “W&L After Class,” which launched Jan. 14. This season includes conversations with Holly Pickett, professor of English, on the universal impact of William Shakespeare; Matthew Loar, director of fellowships and student research, on the transformative nature of collegiate research in shaping individuals; Beth Staples, editor of Shenandoah and assistant professor of English, on the power of imagination and the legacy of Shenandoah; and Jay Margalus, Johnson Professor of Entrepreneurship and Leadership and director of the Connolly Center for Entrepreneurship, on the richness in risks and reintroducing “play” for students in the Connolly Center.
“W&L After Class” began in the spring of 2020 and is a collaborative effort of Lifelong Learning, Alumni Engagement and the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Each episode invites listeners to experience conversations with W&L’s expert faculty, giving listeners worldwide a chance to stroll the Colonnade in the comfort of their homes. W&L faculty members discuss their teaching, research and special interests. Previous topics include chemistry, advertising, witches, AI and free speech.
Listeners in the W&L community and beyond are invited to listen to past episodes and seasons or wherever they listen to podcasts.
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