For high school students and undergraduate students, intellectual collaboration is the exception rather than the norm. notwithstanding the occasional socalled group project or work with a lab partner, students are usually asked to take tests and write papers on their own, without any help from others. this is a good thing. Just as athletes must develop their own bodies individually, so all of us must develop our own minds. In order to build essential stores of information, develop habits of thought, and come to recognize our own abilities to think and do, we must both endure the frustrations that attend difficult individual work and experience the satisfactions that follow from successful effort.But after we complete our student years, things change. As adults, we far more often find ourselves undertaking tasks in concert with others.That is especially true in experimental scientific research, where we often find giant research teams engaged in hierarchically structured efforts that resemble work teams in the private sector. But it also is becoming more and more true in theoretical domains of science, in the social sciences, and even in the humanities. Today interdisciplinary research teams regularly develop insights that never would have emerged from sets of atomized researchers working in isolation.

對于高中生和本科生來講,學術合作是特殊活動而不是常規活動。盡管學生們偶爾也會做所謂的小組項目,或與實驗伙伴一起工作,但是他們通常會被要求參加測試,獨立完成論文,而不能尋求別人的幫助。這是件好事,就像運動員必須自己去強壯體魄,我們也必須自己鍛煉心智。為了積累核心的信息儲備,養成思考的習慣,并認識到自己思考和付諸行動的能力,我們既要忍受艱難的獨立工作帶來的挫敗感,也要體驗獲得成功后的滿足感。

而當我們結束了學生時代,情況就變了。作為成年人,我們越來越多地發現自己需要與別人合作去完成工作,這種情況在實驗科學研究中尤其突出。在這類研究中,我們經常發現超大型的研究團隊在不同層面展開合作,這種情形就像私人企業里的工作團隊。這種情形在理論科學研究領域、社會科學甚至是人文學科的研究領域也變得越來越明顯。如今,跨學科研究團隊常常能夠獲得全新認識,而孤立的個體研究人員絕對做不到。

本書為杰弗里·肖恩·雷蒙先生在康奈爾大學任職期間所發表的演講集。全書內容結合當今時代發展,包括大學生的學習生活、大學在當今社會的地位和角色、目前世界發展面臨的幾大挑戰以及大學校長的心聲四大主題板塊。每篇文章采用中英雙語對照形式,適于閱讀和朗誦。

本章節演講的對象主要是學生和家長。無論是展望未來還是回首往事,每一篇講話都談到做學生的經歷,都提出一種特定的立場,論述了接受教育的意義以及過上有道德和精神豐富的生活的意義。

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