Welcome from the Dean
Thank you for your interest in the
Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri-St.
Louis. I
hope that this web site will encourage you to take that interest
forward, to apply for admission, and then once here to achieve
high academic success in your chosen field of study. We regard
your interest
in us as a trust. And we promise to respond by investing in you.
After all, our business is your success.
The rest of this web site offers information on how we go about encouraging student success through our admissions program, our scholarship funds, our challenging academic seminars, and our theme of scholar development which centers on our writing program. And we will go on learning how to improve our program, to make better investments in our students. No doubt we still have much to learn.
Meanwhile, you owe it to yourself to think carefully about the investments in higher education that you, and probably your family, will be making, investments of time, of money, and of effort.
Your investments of money are important. For one thing, they buy you
warm welcomes and also help, when you need it, from people like me, from
the university's faculty and staff. Be sure you get your money's worth
from your classroom professors, from honors college and main campus advisors,
from career counselors, from all of us. Let your mottoes be "pester
your professors" and "disturb your deans" and "query
your counselors." The price of admission also buys you access to
wonderful research libraries, state-of-the-art computing facilities,
in general to a superbly equipped campus including the new Touhill Center
for the Performing Arts.
But the rest of your education, all of the rest of it, cannot be purchased.
Instead, it has to be produced. By you. And that is why, in the end,
the student is not a consumer. And my advice is, don't be satisfied
by anyone who calls you a consumer and leaves it at that. You do have
some important consumer rights, but your proper role, as a student,
is far more complex and far more powerful than that of a mere consumer.
The student is an apprentice, a producer, a learner, a teacher, a translator.
A student is a reader, a writer, a speaker, a critic, a calculator,
an experimenter. What you must really invest in, in short, is the wonderful
privilege of becoming a partner in your own education.
So, there you have our offer of an investment partnership. I will close
by quoting a passage from Martha Nussbaum, one of our leading philosophers,
defining for you a clear objective for your educational investment.
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An education is truly "fitted for freedom" only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free . . . because they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech. --Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. 1997.
___________________
By visiting this web site, you have begun to pay the price
of admission. Now all that you need to do is to take ownership of
the property.
I look forward to helping you in that quest.
Yours truly,
Robert M. Bliss
Dean of the College