Message from Provost Karen A. Holbrook

Three things strike me about this building. 

First, the Student Learning Center is a major investment in the best instructional technology we can bring together and it symbolizes our commitment to a generation of students, particularly undergraduate students, who are truly children of the information age. 

Secondly, the building exemplifies the state of higher education in general – a situation where the emphasis is on learning rather than teaching, where it is recognized that the student has a major role in her own education and where the interactions and participation of students create a learning environment that produces a different experience than the standard classroom. 

Third, while this building emphasizes the value of technology in education, technology is not a means to an end. In today’s world you have to possess, understand, use and even be able to continually change and update how technology fits into your life. But you need so much more. Most students arrive at college today with the skills to collect vast amounts of information from the Internet and other sources, but many lack the skills to assess critically or to synthesize the data – to turn the data into knowledge. The new Student Learning Center provides an environment where these two can come together – where the latest technology can be evoked to enable the oldest teaching methods and to support the educational values that we know. 

More than 400 years ago, Francis Bacon explained the right way to get an education. He said: “Read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”

We will have a new building that is wired for information exchange and designed with classrooms, conference rooms and conversation areas for students and faculty to “weigh and consider.”

Adapted from remarks made at the groundbreaking for the Student Learning Center, September 1, 2000.