The Director's Corner
The Director's Corner
September 30, 2025
This month, my mind is very much on ceremonies, especially ceremonies of beginning. I am writing this column shortly after the Honors College’s annual induction ceremony for our new students, which took place on Sunday, September 14, in Neville Arena. I have also been working closely with the officers of Auburn University’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (Gamma of Alabama) as they prepare to send out invitations to the undergraduate students who have been elected by the chapter’s membership for initiation into the chapter as members-in-course. I thoroughly enjoyed the first event, and I very much look forward to the second one, as much as I also happily anticipate the college’s medal ceremonies every winter and spring for our graduating seniors.
These ceremonies are joyful occasions, and they can feel deeply meaningful -- certainly the induction ceremony felt that way for me, especially as my position on the platform committee gave me the privilege of looking out over the many rows of our students formally voicing their commitment to the values of the Honors College, while their deans and families sat behind them as proud witnesses.
It felt quite meaningful, but how should we describe this meaning? What exactly is a ceremony of induction for?
Like graduation ceremonies, inductions and initiations involve congratulation for, and pride in, past accomplishment, but this is a minor aspect of their meaning. Most of all, induction ceremonies are about a welcoming into -- literally from the Latin inducere, “to introduce” or, in the word’s raw components, to lead into -- an organization or a community. This is important because inductions provide an occasion for an institution like the Honors College to teach our newest members who we are and what we stand for. While we do engage in this teaching, all of our members have the opportunity to revisit, and affirm our commitment to, who we are.
This core purpose of an induction ceremony was what prompted me to add a new element to the Honors College’s longstanding traditions when I joined the college last year, giving a bookmark to our inductees every year with a quotation that we have identified as their cohort’s charge. The quotation for this year, “It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well” (translated from the original French: “Ce n’est pas assez d’avoir l’esprit bon, mais le principal est de l’appliquer bien”), was elected from a list of possibilities by the college’s staff, but it also had a personal layer of significance to me, being from a text I studied years ago when I was a first-year honors student. It comes from Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences) by the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.
I love this quotation because it epitomizes so much of what Auburn’s Honors College is for and about. It connects with our embrace of multidisciplinary conversation and collaboration. It calls us to shun complacency in favor of effort and aspiration, using rather than just possessing our minds. It exhorts us to ask questions, strive for answers and pursue truth. It connects us with the era of breathtaking innovation and discovery that we call the Scientific Revolution. My hope is that this line from Descartes asks us to extend or reiterate that era, bringing about yet more discoveries, more ideas and more creative endeavors to improve and enrich the lives of those who come after us. Those seem to me to be values worth holding. It was my enormous privilege to induct the 2025 cohort of new students into a community defined by these values. Welcome to our newest cohort.
Dr. Laura Stevens
Director, Honors College
Professor of English
