Mortality defines the human condition.

The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination.

Working women seemed “brazen,” even to those like Lila Chunn who understood and encouraged necessary departures from tradition.

Death has no power to change moral qualities,” he insisted in a Decoration Day speech in 1883. “Whatever else I may forget,” the aging abolitionist declared, “I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.

Yankee private Henry Struble was not only listed as a casualty after Antietam but assigned a grave after his canteen was found in the hands of a dead man he had stopped to help. After the war ended, Struble sent flowers every Memorial Day to decorate his own grave, to honor the unknown soldier it sheltered and perhaps to acknowledge that there but for God’s grace he might lie.

Leadership is about moving people from where they are to where you hope they’ll go.

A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future.

I often read nonfiction with a pencil in hand. I love the feel, the smell, the design, the weight of a book, but I also enjoy the convenience of my Kindle – for travel and for procuring a book in seconds.

The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new – and sometimes unexpected – directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations.

If you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.