The Director's Corner
The Director's Corner
December 2, 2025
My Grandmother’s Needlepoint Parrot
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my mother’s sister Joanne gave me a surprise gift, a piece of needlepoint by her mother — my grandmother — Eleanor Nixon, née Doherty. It’s a simple object: a vivid, multi-colored parrot against a background of black, unpretentiously pinned to a wrinkled strip of cardboard. The cardboard backing made me smile in recognition of her, even more than the needlepoint did. Like many people who came of age during the Great Depression, my grandmother was very frugal, throwing almost nothing away. I have memories of her painstakingly shaking out and smoothing the plastic bag from every empty box of corn flakes to reuse, then flattening the cardboard for later use as a cutting board, and I am certain that the backing for this needlepoint is a similarly repurposed object.
My grandmother’s needlepoint might not seem to have much to do with an Honors College. Along with the vast majority of people born in the United States around the time that she was born in 1907, she did not attend university, and nothing like an Honors College even existed in her day. But her needlepoint made me think about why we are here — at Auburn University, in its Honors College — and what I would like to say to our students as they prepare to complete the fall semester.
The needlepoint parrot is something my grandmother created. My aunt thinks that she may have completed the needlepoint while she was convalescing in the hospital during a long illness in her early adulthood, before she married and had children. It would have been a way to pass the time, perhaps something to brighten a dull hospital ward, but now it is here, a work of craft, something of her that I can hold. Like most needlepoint it follows a pattern, and there are probably many other pieces of needlepoint out there in the world that look like it. Yet it, along with its humble backing, is entirely and quintessentially hers.
We are in the middle of an era in higher education that is both transitional and turbulent. While universities are among the world’s oldest institutions, their scope and purpose have changed a great deal over the centuries, and that change has accelerated immeasurably since the Morrill Act of 1862 began a tradition of federal aid to higher education in the United States by establishing Land Grant Universities — of which Auburn University is one — “for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanical arts.”
Far more people attend universities now than in earlier eras, and they do so for a wider range of reasons. This is a good thing, indicative of an improvement in living standards and expansion of opportunity, even as the cost of higher education and the spiraling of student debt have grown into immense challenges for our country. These challenges, which have fed doubts about the value of a college education, have combined with the disruptive force of LLM’s (large language models, also called artificial intelligence) to provoke debates about why exactly we are here, now, at a university. Why are students here for at least four years, what should their goals be, and what should their professors teach them?
There is no one answer, but here is my answer today, inspired by the humble heirloom I received last week: we are here to create things that we can leave to those who come after us, things that contribute to the world’s betterment in ways large and small. These things may be material objects, but they may also be creations that are less tangible, including texts, methods, businesses, scientific experiments, life-saving medical procedures, and — perhaps most of all — ideas. We are here to teach and learn various forms of craft, with the goal of advancing more creating.
Many creations, like my grandmother’s needlepoint, do not require a university education. But many do. This is especially the case when what we are creating draws upon large, complex bodies of knowledge and requires finely honed skills of judgement and critique, discerning what has been done well, what is flawed, and how things can be improved.
Much of what a university does is maintain a continuity of knowledge with the past, conserving what others made and learned before us, so that we do not condemn our societies to perpetual repetition of more elementary forms of creating when we collectively have the capacity to do more. Universities are there to help us carry things forward by maintaining ties to where we have come from. They play a crucial role in the task of stretching a thread between past and future, keeping the memory of what others have made, and preserving those creations along with new ones to be valued and used in the future.
When LLM’s can shuffle and sort language so efficiently in response to rote commands, what do humans have left for their purpose? The answer is that we can and must create. That is what an LLM cannot truly do, and so in this moment of what might seem to be a crisis for higher education, we can discern that the new purpose of a university is also its old one: to hone minds for the work of creating.
What is the role of an Honors College within this understanding of a university’s mission? Here again, my grandmother’s needlepoint offers me one answer, through the tactile connection it offers me to my past. Honors is, among other things, where we are able to resist economies of scale, pulling together small groups of students from their various majors and backgrounds to read texts and ask questions together, with hopes that new vantage points, and new contexts for creating, emerge. According to this line of thought, connection itself, especially intellectual connection forged in the framework of a seminar, fosters creativity through awareness of the past even as it sustains a better future. I think it is usually through proximity to others — both physical, living others, and the things that departed others made for us in the past — that we can acquire the knowledge and inspiration to create on our own.
That is, finally, why we are here. It’s all needlepoint parrots in the end: the things those who came before us made, and the things we will make for those who come after us.
I wish all our students an easy pathway through examinations and a restful, joyful holiday. See you in January.
Dr. Laura Stevens
Director, Honors College
Professor of English
