In President Sanford's 2024 Faculty Day Address, he wrote about, "Individuals and Educability"
I hope you do not mind an aporetic reflection from your president. I have long been intrigued by a paradox at the heart of our work as scholars and educators: we can only really grasp truths universally, but the things we hope to understand are each individuals. Universals do not exist as standalone beings, only individuals actually exist. To discover, to know, to grasp an individual requires transforming it through the attention given to it鈥攊n our case through long study, experimentation, and dialectical inquiry鈥攊nto a mode made fit for our minds: we universalize individuals in order to apprehend them. But the individual beings, the things we seek to know, really only exist as individuals. Can we really know individuals? If only individuals exist, can we really know any thing?