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Together, students and faculty attempt to understand fully and use ethically that knowledge, both in the present and as a reservoir from which to draw in the future.

The Discovery Program provides a strong academic focus during the first year.

Welcome to the Discovery Program!

Education should consist of a series of enchantments, each raising the individual to a higher level of awareness, understanding, and kinship with all living things.
-Author Unknown

When we learn and teach in Discovery, we take four questions as our common ground:

  • How do we know the world?
  • What questions and what tools shape our knowledge?
  • How do we determine what we value?
  • How do our different perspectives--intellectual and personal--inform each other?

The University Dialogue

Finding Common Ground: A University Dialogue on Solving Complex Problems

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them”   Laurence J. Peter

We hope this topic engages our community on issues of civil discourse, governing together across our differences, and solving intractable, complex public problems.

I had agreed to be part of a small conversation between a noted climate change scientist and a pure skeptic from the corporate world because I thought the encounter offered the opportunity to “find the common ground.” I had enjoyed some success in bringing climate change data and doubts to general audiences, but was still intrigued by many of the concerns expressed in the essays that are part of this year’s dialog about finding consensus. I had hoped to play a moderator’s role; helping each of the other two find points of agreement, and identify the basis for whatever disagreements remained. It didn’t work.   Click here to read more >>