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August 25, 2006 > News > Zammito encourages path of discovery

Zammito encourages path of discovery

By Sarah Mitchell | Thresher staff

In his Orientation Week address to new students, History and German Professor John Zammito urged students to guide their university experience using the vision of Wilhelm von Humboldt. He explained that the German Romantic emphasis on individuality and the whole person in academic and extracurricular pursuits mirrors the ideal university experience.

“I thought that since I know O-Week very well from my years at Rice, that it’s time for you to have a dose of pure academicism, so that you don’t get the impression that it’s strictly a party university,” Zammito said.

Zammito said von Humboldt’s quest for wholeness also represents the ideal function a university. In this way, von Humboldt’s philosophy helps preserve the idea of universities, Zammito said.

“The point of the university experience is to discover who you are in the process of discovering something about the world around you,” Zammito said

Zammito said von Humboldt combined teaching and research, an integral part of the Rice experience. Zammito said students should be active learners, and teaching should not just preserve knowledge but also add to it.

“Humboldt articulated the idea of the university of scholarship not so much as a body of knowledge but as a spirit of shared discovery,” Zammito said.

Romanticism’s teachings are connected to a wide variety of human experiences, Zammito said.

“Utopian socialists asserted that sexual liberation and emotional intimacy were indispensable ingredients in the paradise man was now to make for himself out of the world,” Zammito said. “From Romanticism we have inherited ringing affirmations of a vast number of ideas and values: emotion, imagination, creative genius, rebellion, dynamism, organicism, and above all, wholeness.”

In his conclusion, Zammito said students should engage with Rice’s learning and nonacademic environment in order to preserve culture.

“What the Romantics believed, what Humboldt instituted in the University of Berlin is a cultural heritage worth upholding,” Zammito said. “Welcome to Rice where I hope you will join me in keeping it alive.”

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