Imagine you’re mingling at a dinner party and guests are talking about their lifework. You have five conversations.
The first one is a researcher who you know is looking for a cure for HIV/AIDS. He tells you what technique his team is now trying and why they are investigating that, as well as the theory behind it, and how much that would actually contribute to finding something out.
A second man explains to you the mechanics of suspension bridges and how they are built, and how tunnels are made beneath the ocean floor, linking one island to another.
A young lady talks about her work in a third-world country setting up a micro-credit institution that allows local villagers the means to kick-start their own independent businesses and the effects that this has had on their lives. She tells you the theory of why it works and how it works.
Another man tells you how it is possible for a large, ‘factory’ farm to downsize to a family, sustainable, organic one and yet still make 30 times more money than he did when he was being subsidized by the government.
The last woman speaks about her writing, albeit hesitantly, and why and how she writes about identity crisis; why, in a world where people are being born where their parents had never been before speaking languages their grandparents may never even have heard of travelling to places no one ever imagined, this is important to her to express and to allow other people to resonate with that.
Wouldn’t you, on some level in the furthest recesses of your heart — even if none of this has any applicability to you, even if all you’ll ever do with this information is file it away in some dark corner of your brain or forget it entirely — be interested? Just interested in learning what someone else is doing (even if you’d never, ever do it yourself), interested in having a whole new perspective on familiar things or learning something you would never otherwise have heard of?
I would be.
And if you would… then why do we have all this faculty rivalry, with students from each one putting the others down? Why don’t we stop and ask and listen to our friends from other faculties — for we all have those — without pre-judging: So what do you actually learn?
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