I understand that undergraduates are making a long and difficult transit from adolescence to adulthood. Over their four years here, most of them make the transit pretty successfully. Students who are easy to like, who are responsive, and who look to older adults for help as they make that transit—they are the typical Trinity students. I believe that their teachers, their advisers, and, yes, maybe even occasionally a dean, do help with that process.

Please tell us something about your approach to advising.

Insofar as you can find a way to do it, you need to convey to students—and it’s particularly crucial during the first couple of years—the importance of becoming independent adults. When you get that across to them, that’s where the earnestness of the typical Trinity student will cause them to rise to the occasion. I start early by saying, “Look, I can give you advice, but it’s your education. You have to shape it; you have to make the hard decisions, you have to sometimes make mistakes. You have to learn from those mistakes so that you’re less apt to repeat them.”

It sometimes helps to say, “I remember a student seven or eight years ago who had the same uncertainties that you do. Let me tell you how she worked them out and how it finally came out well in the end.” I remember that when I was a student, I sometimes confronted a dilemma or problem, and I assumed I had been singled out among all the people in the world as the one who had to confront it. It helped to hear that there was a kid four years ago who confronted the same thing and lived to tell about it!

Of what achievement are you most proud?

On a short list, there are two in which I take particular satisfaction. I know you asked for one, but I’m not that decisive a fellow! It’s been a source of great pleasure to have worked with my colleagues Sam Kassow, Milla Riggio, Drew Hyland, and Frank Kirkpatrick to create the Guided Studies Program in European studies and to have been its director. We’ve just recruited our 30th class!

The other, more recent thing I’ve taken a great deal of satisfaction from is that I wrote the original two-page sketch of what became the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. That, with input from Andrew Walsh (currently associate director) and Frank Kirkpatrick, became the charter for the center. It was presented to former president Evan Dobelle, who wanted the College to do something novel in the area of religion, and to Leonard Greenberg ’48, who agreed to let us use the income from a gift he had made to the college as start-up funding.

I also take some satisfaction in having invited Mark Silk to apply to be the center’s director. A chance comment to a mutual friend in New York led her to urge me to contact Mark, whose work I knew but who I thought was settled in as a journalist. I reached him at the Atlanta Journal- Constitution later that day, he agreed to apply, and he ended up getting the job. It was one of those fortuitous things that has been a great boon for Trinity.