Spoken Word

“The famous high school question of whether we identify with the predicament of the hero or heroine is not really the central question. It is rather we who live our life as if it were a story, constantly reaching for meaningfulness.”
Angela Moger, literature faculty¹

“All human beings smile; I would call that a universal. All babies eventually smile, but what that smile ends up meaning, and what it looks like, might vary enormously from culture to culture.”
Nancy Baker, philosophy faculty²

“What humans have been selected to do is to learn, and that is why we have a large brain. We do not come with many innate, already-shaped behaviors. We’ve been selected to use learning to guide our behavior. As a consequence of that, we are able to learn diverse things from the environment that may, in fact, lead to the cultural differences that we see.”
Leah Olson, biology faculty²

“One of the things the United Nations system has never committed itself to is tackling the law—tackling police, jails. No donor country wants to touch police or jails, for understandable reasons. We’ve never really been serious, in the developing world, about bringing about more lawful conditions for the way ordinary people live.”
Samantha Power, foreign policy columnist at Time³