Archives: Magazine Post

About twenty years ago our son quipped with envy about how our generation, the Baby Boomers, possessed uncompromising clarity about what was important to us. My husband and I came of age in the era of Watergate, peace protests against the Vietnam war, the struggle for women’s rights, and advocacy for racial equality. Even as […]

On December 2, 2021, our lives cracked open. Jim was diagnosed with ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is often referred to as the one illness that a physician most fears. It is a rapidly progressive neuromuscular disease that eventually results in complete paralysis, robbing the patient of the ability to move, speak, swallow, and eventually […]

I became a lawyer to fight what I saw as widespread injustice against marginalized people. I am director of the Duke Law School Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which tries to identify and remedy wrongful convictions in North Carolina. Since 2011, ten of the Clinic’s clients have been exonerated, two of whom after being incarcerated for more […]

Thinking About Work When I arrived in Lewiston, Maine in the summer of 2012 to become the eighth president of Bates College, I was captivated by its grand landscape of manufacturing. Enormous mill buildings, most now quiet, line the city’s river and canals, their perfect rectangular forms, huge courses of impeccable brickwork, and row upon […]

As I enter my ninth decade and reflect back, I am reminded of several years ago when my friends Bill Damon and Anne Colby asked me about my sense of purpose. My first response then was that I have always been curious, but that’s an individual trait and I knew they were asking about purpose […]

William (Bill) Damon is a Professor of Education at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. He is one of the world’s leading researchers on the development of purpose and author of The Path to Purpose. We sat down with him to hear about more than a quarter century of work on purpose. […]

Higher education as an industry needs to be re-imagined. The challenges we face are too numerous to think we are just dealing with a series of complicated problems that can be attacked one at a time. Rather, they are complex problems that require creative solutions. If we assume they are merely complicated, or hard, we […]

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parentheses in eternity. —Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist  Coelho’s The […]

There is an uneasy place I often visit when I run. It is a liminal space, or a border between two territories. On one side of the border are edifying discomforts—full of the kinds of chosen suffering my body can absorb and grow from. On the other side are unproductive pains and destructive suffering. On […]

It’s a distinct feeling, walking home from Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library at night. Exiting the enormous wooden doors and stepping out into the dark is like breathing in the air of a million invitations, all at once. I’m there again, relishing in the hushed feeling of being unfinished and uncommitted, of having not yet […]