Follow the Truth Wherever It Leads
Several weeks before their forum, student planners at Cooper Union sat down with the college President (an atheist) to chat about his thoughts on faith, dialogue and the purpose of education. “Follow the truth wherever it leads,” he said. So when the planners shared with him the mission of Veritas, he was immediately supportive. In fact, President Bhuarucha gave the opening remarks to the Cooper Union forum. Click here to read the complete text of his inspiring introduction, or watch the video at our media site.
“I believe that the fundamental purpose of education is to stretch your mind, to learn to think about things in ways you have never thought about before. In fact I think if you graduate from college without having had the experience of going, “Eh, I never really thought about it that way. That’s weird but I want to understand it.” If you haven’t had that experience, you haven’t had an education. And I think the mark of an educated person is to learn how to do that for the rest of your life, always open yourself up to learning about new perspectives and putting yourself in the shoes of others, be it people of other cultures, other religions, other languages, other academic disciples. That really is going to be the key to better understanding between peoples and I think a more peaceful and harmonious world.
If you go to the foundation building and you’re waiting for the elevator there’s a plaque that has a quote from Peter Cooper, “whatsoever shall be truth.” Now if you go back to the emergence of that quote, he’s talking about his own view, which is very much in line with this, he believed that no idea should be unwelcome, no idea should be unworthy of careful examination. You should be willing—even if someone says something you want to take an ax to, that really cuts at the foundations of your thinking—you should be willing, as a person committed to lifelong learning and education, you should be willing and interested in finding out more and understanding why some group or some scientist or some humanist or some religion might actually believe what they believe. And follow the truth wherever it leads.
It’s in this spirit that I’m delighted to introduce this event. Whether you agree with the speaker or not I think it’s extremely important that as part of promoting vibrant intellectual life on campus we bring to campus speakers who can challenge us with different points of view and different ways of looking that we’ve never had before, based on civic discourse and vigorous challenging debate, but nevertheless civic debate.” (Jamshed Bharucha, President of Cooper Union)