Video Transcript – Institute for Advancing American Values

Video Transcript

[Dr. Marlene Tromp, President, Boise State University]: We are so excited to introduce the Institute for Advancing American Values. This project, which is so important right now in this cultural moment, is designed to show us that it is possible for people from a wide range of political perspectives to be in dialog with each other and to have their voices heard on campus. Universities are places where these dialogs should take place, and so the work of this institute is in many ways the work of the university. I’m really proud that we have appointed Andrew Finstuen the inaugural director of the Institute for Advancing American Values. Andrew, I’d love to have you talk a little bit about what you see as the potential for the Institute.

[Dr. Andrew Finstuen, Dean, Honors College]: Well, you’ve already spoken so eloquently about our goal with this, which is really to reenergize and have the university focus on that range of opinions and ideas and concepts that universities are supposed to house. In fact, I’ve often talked about in the context of the institute that a university is a house of the whole. And I want to make sure I say that a house of the whole, the full range of human experience, ideas and the natural world that we come together and study. So the institute allows us to range across all of those ideas and questions, and especially in this moment where we are having conversations and conviction and disagreement around values and specifically around the notion of American values. And so this institute helps us have a vehicle to address those questions and have those conversations. Yeah and that’s what we’re looking forward to in the programing is the Speaker Series, or various things that we have in the works that we’ll unroll or unveil here in the next few months, but also as we engage more of our scholarship, both external scholars and our own Boise State faculty, and think about courses in new ways and think about their own scholarship in new ways so that we’re not just having conversation alone. We’re also studying and using the the resources of the university and expertise to help drive understanding of different values and perspectives. And then also thinking about how we educate and teach in across all these disciplines with these kinds of ideas in mind. So that’s part of what our next steps is actually now putting, you’ve used the word architecture, now we have to fill out that architecture between our dialog, our research and our teaching and educational pursuits.

[Dr. Tromp]: And what really excites me about all of this work, it’s such important work and I thank you for your leadership, Andrew, and I’m excited to see how our community engages. But what really excites me is it allows Boise State to be a national leader in this effort and to really provide a model not just for our own community and our own state, but for our country about what it can mean to come together instead of driving apart.