February 21, 2022

I increasingly think that curiosity, or the strong desire to know or learn something, is a critical ingredient to the School’s vitality and sustains me in my leadership role.  I’m now a third of the way through conducting annual reviews of SENR faculty, a February and March ritual of my meeting with each School faculty for approximately an hour to learn about their 2021 activities and their plans for 2022.  It’s the most exhausting period for me as a leader as I commit 43+ hours to these meetings in addition to maintaining all my other responsibilities; but it is also the most fun and interesting period.  I learn so much.  For instance, I’ve learned about the uptake of lead in brownfields, including into pollen, and efforts to neutralize the lead; I’ve learned the importance of being sensitive to color blindness in the construction of PowerPoint slides; and I also learned of an interesting Zen retreat center in New Mexico.  The latter topic came up when I was asked about my post-director plans, and I shared one goal I’ve contemplated was visiting one of those spiritual retreat centers where you can simply be offline, quiet and reflect for an extended period.  One of our faculty volunteered to me a Zen center in New Mexico as a possible destination.

For me, the fun of being an academic is the opportunity it affords me to learn and discover things, and it’s great to be in a community of folks who all have interesting stories, experiences, and expertise to share.  And I know many staff also appreciate these learning opportunities, I am always pleased to hear a staff comment about how cool it was to learn about say urban coyotes or the visual acuity of fish.  It’s pretty cool to go home and share interesting factoids with the family and kids; I can report that in my experience the SENR wildlife faculty and staff generally provide the better stories for sharing.

I know some of our graduate students grow weary of seminar topics outside their particular area of interest; I appreciate there is a phase of curiosity in the academic career where we must delve very deep into a particular topic and become a bit myopic, and such a phase is important to establishing an initial academic identity and expertise.  Some can sustain a career with a singular focus…but for many of our undergrads and probably most of us in general, at some point in our career benefit from more breadth of understanding.  I’m really starting to see that evident in some of my observations of the School’s productivity this year, with some really interesting interdisciplinary teams coalescing and achieving a growing amount of success.

So, despite COVID and the challenging year we’ve had with Workday, GE transition, etc.  I’m delighted to rekindle my curiosity and learn so many interesting things.  I can’t help but recall what our retired SENR colleague Earl Epstein would share with me after some engaging conversation on political philosophy or a legal matter (his expertise was land use law), “what a great job we have to be able to think and discuss.”  I hope all of you are experiencing these moments of curiosity as well…and with Spring’s arrival on the horizon it seems a good time to be curious about the world around us.