The Abridged Provost Hexter
Selected excerpts from his speeches and writings, 2011–2020
A university does not and should not emulate a factory, working in a narrowly focused and highly efficient way to produce useful knowledge and technologies. A university will rightly pursue certain practical activities, but it is dedicated first and foremost to disinterested intellectual exploration, a journey guided by the researcher’s curiosity, not by the possibility of profit or practical usefulness. A university is founded on the idea that this sort of disinterested exploration is immensely beneficial to society, and that no other institution is as well qualified as the university to perform it.
Remarks to the Symposium prior to the 23rd International Conference on Supersymmetry and Unification of Fundamental Interactions, 2015