From time to time, people ask me what I say about Principia when I address audiences off campus, which is a fairly regular thing. My usual answer is that I have a great deal to work with.

Sometimes I tell them about our beautiful campus, one of only a dozen out of nearly 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities that have been designated by the U.S. government as National Historic Landmarks. Sometimes I talk about our Principia Abroad programs. About 75 percent of our students - one of the highest percentages in the nation - have a chance to study overseas. The trips are some of the richest educational experiences of a lifetime. Sometimes I talk about athletics. The NCAA says Principia may have more varsity sports per capita than any school in the NCAA system. That's good. And always, I talk about what it means to be in a community with a shared religious persuasion, about which I'll comment in a moment.

But more and more I'm devoting my remarks to the subject of academics, because I think there's something quite significant going on here that's not well understood and that has to do with the extraordinary change that characterizes the world into which each of you will be graduating - change driven by advances in technology, of course, but also by vast, continuous, quantum leaps in the amount of information we have available.

Let me put this point in some context for you. As late as the Renaissance, one could plausibly claim to have read every significant book ever written. Today, 50,000 books are published each year in the U.S. alone; 400,000 journals are published globally; hundreds of TV channels and millions of Web sites now exist.1 The question is: Are we wiser for it?

According to one expert, you and I have access to more information in one hour than Aristotle had in a lifetime.2 And the amount of information in the world is now doubling every seven years.3 By one estimate, by 2020 it will be doubling every 73 days. These are amazing statistics. And they speak to the crucial fact that we're being swept along by forces of change - information and technology - that seem completely irresistible.

A century ago Henry Adams, the great historian and grandson of John Quincy Adams, made an arresting observation. He said the "velocity of history is accelerating." Well, if that was true then, it's infinitely truer today. There are obviously great gains associated with this fact, but I think there are great dangers as well, because the change is so rapid that we risk losing our bearings, our sense of our place in history, our capacity for concentration, for contemplation, and, yes, even for the most important human connections. It's not surprising to learn that researchers have found a correlation between the frequency with which young people have meals with their families and high test scores in school.4

James Billington, the former Librarian of Congress, commented once that "our society is basically motion without memory. Motion without memory," he adds, is "one of the clinical definitions of insanity."5 Fifty years before, the poet T.S. Eliot famously asked: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"6

So, the question is (and it's the one I address more and more with outside audiences): What's a nice school like Principia doing in an era like this? And my answer is: quite well, actually.

Now there's a huge paradox here that I need to explain. Back in 1900, the vast majority of baccalaureate degrees were awarded by schools just like Principia, which is to say, residential liberal arts colleges. Today, that figure has dropped to four percent, with big state universities and community colleges picking up the slack.7 And yet, educators are taking a fresh look at schools like Principia and saying, "Wait a minute. It turns out that, notwithstanding their declining numbers, these are the schools where you get the most effective education. This is where you get the education you need for the 21st century. Even in an era of rapid change, especially in an era of rapid change, it's schools like Principia that are giving students what they really need most, not just the chance to get prepared for a career, but the chance to get prepared for life."

Last year the Pew Charitable Trusts - one of the big U.S. foundations - looked into the matter of what's really essential to the learning process. They reported that "Small liberal arts colleges - as a group - score higher than all other types of colleges in every area of effective teaching and learning practice that is measured." The foundation reported that its survey "presents a different picture of college quality from that provided by some national news magazines which rate colleges principally on the basis of the resources they have accumulated [meaning money & research facilities] and the reputations they enjoy."8

How can this be?

Here's one reason. It's because schools like Principia have real teachers in the classroom. If you've never been anywhere but Principia this may sound odd. But consider this. Nationwide, fully half of all undergraduate courses are now being taught by graduate teaching assistants and junior-grade, non-tenure track faculty.9 Many of the high-prestige academic stars that some colleges use as an index of the quality of their academic programs never get near undergraduates. So prestige is often completely disconnected from the real issue, which is: How effectively are undergraduates being taught?

At Principia, nearly all of our faculty are real, full-time professors - and that's crucial because we now know how central the relationship between teacher and student is to the learning process. As the Pew study shows, one of the keys to effective learning is teachers working with students on research projects; talking with students outside the classroom; traveling with students on off-campus study programs; helping students think through personal challenges; teaching in small classes where there's real interaction; attending student plays and athletic events. You'll be interested to learn, by the way, that the latest U.S. News and World Report ranking of colleges reports that only one college in the nation - that's out of nearly 4,000 - has a higher percentage of classes with an enrollment under 20. All of this makes a huge difference in the learning process.

And as educators point out, the fact that you have real teachers is important, not just because they teach but because they are mentors and role models - the kind of people, as one expert once noted, who make it possible for a student to walk out of class and say not just, "I'm a better thinker," or "I'm a better writer," but "I'm a better person."

Here's the second of three reasons that schools like Principia are getting a fresh and approving look from the experts. It's that employers are saying that schools like Principia are turning out exactly the kind of students they're looking for - which is to say, students who have the capacity to think analytically and communicate effectively and the ability to work comfortably and productively with people of different backgrounds. That's an ability that's honed best in a residential environment where there's a great sense of community.

Fortune, the influential business magazine, put it this way recently: "If one asks the CEOs of business corporations and non-profit organizations what they prize most in an employee, the list looks just like the mission statement of a liberal arts college." Interestingly, 90 percent of CEOs surveyed in one poll said the humanities are essential to developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills. And this is the key here: These skills - critical thinking, communication, and social skills - happen to be more crucial now than ever before because the job market is changing so fast that learning simply never stops.10

Here's what I mean: It is estimated that two-thirds of the jobs that will exist in 2020 - and which many of you will hold - did not exist as recently as ten years ago. And estimates are that the content of the jobs you will hold is likely to change at least five times during your career. The point being that keeping pace in a world of rapid technological change doesn't mean learning one skill that's likely to become obsolete within a decade, but learning how to learn.

Let's take one more run at this. The life span of an education decreases as the pace of change increases.11 That means that coping with a world of stunning technological change and proliferating information doesn't require a more specialized education so much as it does a general education. Now, academic majors are obviously important. And this certainly isn't to say that you shouldn't be majoring in fields like computer science. It is to say that the setting within which such specific skills are learned needs to be broad enough to provide a rich context. Because it's the breadth of an education that makes it possible for students - as one group of educators put it recently - to "attain the capacity and flexibility to educate themselves for the rest of their lives."12 It's breadth that enables people to understand change and adapt to it better. And that's exactly why CEOs love places like Principia.

Now there's one final reason why schools like Principia are so crucial and it's what lies at the core of their curriculum, which is the "liberal arts," by which I mean that combination of humanities and sciences that has been at the heart of a liberal education for centuries. It's the liberal arts and sciences that help schools like Principia shape students whose education has context, who know their place in history, who have a frame of reference in life, who have points of fixity in their lives, who have sensitivity to the human need and to other cultures, who know enough to know that they don't know everything.

Or put it this way: Who have enough background in philosophy, the social and natural sciences, languages, music, literature, history, and the arts that they have real perspective on their world and with that perspective are able to make the crucial distinctions that have been so completely blunted by our culture between what's permanent in this world and what's merely a trend; between what endures and what's merely a fad. In the words of New York University professor Todd Gitlin, to be able to say, "In a culture of chaff, here is wheat."13 The greatest possible need in a society that places a premium on relentless change is knowledge that provides an anchor, that provides bearings. Without this we can have no sense of where we are in the grand scheme of things.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of the nation's most prominent historians, has pointed out that liberal learning is to the nation what memory is to the individual. What the liberal arts does is to help us know who we are and where we've come from. Without knowing this, we'll be forever disoriented. Not knowing where we've come from, it's infinitely harder to know where we should go. As Schlesinger puts it: "The liberal arts balance past and future, drawing on the experience of our ancestors to meet the challenges that lie … ahead."14

Former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine put it this way recently: "When we are reading Anna Karenina, watching Othello, wrestling with Thucydides, or reciting Keats, we know that we are about as close to the vital signs of human experience" as we can get. And getting that close, he says, "we may gradually learn how to see more clearly the nature and possible meaning of events, to be better attuned to the nuances, inflections, and character of other human beings, to weigh values with more precision, to judge on the basis of increasingly fine distinctions, to become more effective, generous, and wise in our actions."15

I would add that getting close to the vital signs of human experience means listening to a much wider range of voices. James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrision, Vladamir Nabakov, Ralph Ellison, Lope de Vega, V.S. Naipaul - these are all people whose insights make the liberal arts so crucial.

As Schlesinger says, the value of the liberal arts - the collective insights of those who have gone before us - is that they "remind us that human wisdom long predates the Computer Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - that as smart as we think we are, we still have things to learn from Plato and from Confucius, from Augustine and from Machiavelli, from Shakespeare and from Dostoevsky…. Technical education helps us to live with the micro-chip," Schlesinger says. "The liberal arts help us to live with ourselves. They offer the great entry into that most essential of human qualities - self-knowledge…. They remind us of our common humanity. They remind us, as Paul said, that we are members of one another."

Well, I promised to answer the question, "How is Principia doing academically in an era of rapid change?" And, as you can see, I think Principia is doing extraordinarily well - because of what we teach, because of who teaches, and because of the setting in which we teach.

There's just one final thing, and it has to do with a point that was suggested by an article that ran a few months ago in the Atlantic Monthly that drew a significant amount of national attention.16 It was written by a Princeton graduate who went back to his alma mater 20 years after graduating to see what college students are like these days. And he makes an interesting observation. He says when places like Princeton were founded, their very reason for being was to provide character education: training in citizenship, in moral and ethical values, in virtue, without which, the reasoning went, mere academic skills were useless or even dangerous. As Teddy Roosevelt put it a century ago: "There is not - in all America - a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility."

What struck this Atlantic Monthly writer is that places like Princeton - and almost all colleges during the past couple of decades - have virtually given up on character education. They simply don't know how to do it. They don't even try any more. They're afraid to try in this aggressively materialistic and morally confused era. As the article puts it, "The simple truth is that adult institutions no longer try to talk about character and virtue because they simply wouldn't know what to say."

I guess you can anticipate my final point as I make the case for a Principia education. In the last analysis, the remarkable thing that really distinguishes Principia is not just the courses, the great faculty, the learning environment, and the supremely relevant education you get here for the 21st century, but the fact that we still specialize in the main thing - the main reason Mrs. Morgan started this school in the first place - which is character education.

Everything we do here is premised on the conviction that character - by which we ultimately mean spiritual growth - is the most important thing and that without it there is no such thing as a truly educated man or woman. As one of the early Principia workers put it: "To know the demonstration of every geometric problem, to be able to locate every objective point on the globe, to be able to write with a pen of fire, to be skilled in everything in the modern curriculum, is a failure in education if the individual is not more honest, more clear-sighted, more steadfast in the right; in short, if there is not a well-defined character development."17

The fact that Principia can do this; the fact that in Christian Science we have the definitive yardstick for moral and ethical behavior; the fact that virtue matters, that word "virtue" that most of the world is afraid even to talk about these days - all of this is the real reason why you are in a place where you can get the best education anywhere in the world. I don't use the phrase "anywhere in the world" casually. Mrs. Morgan used it first. She says, Principia "has a basis unsurpassed by any school in the world, a foundation upon which may be built an educational institution which shall glorify God as no other school has ever done."18

This is what gives academics at Principia its animating purpose. This is what makes Principia so extraordinarily relevant and resilient in the 21st century. This is what makes Principia graduates so crucially important to the world - not just that they know what Copernicus discovered or what Mozart composed, but because they have gained that "moral and spiritual culture" that Mrs. Eddy says is the true purpose of education.19 Because Principia's purpose - to borrow from Mrs. Eddy again - is not only to help you "know the truth but live it."20

And that's why - even if lots of people in this world have never heard of this tiny college in the prairie - it stands as the best in American undergraduate education for the 21st century. On this rock-solid basis, I know you will have a good year.

Thank you.