Our view of education then is two-fold. On the one hand we want this to be a humbling experience. We want you to know that the knowledge to be learned is vast. At best even the greatest genius among all of you can know only a tiny fraction of it. Think about how long it takes to read a single book. Then think about the Berkeley course catalogue. And think about the fact that for each course in that book-length catalogue there is a whole syllabus of articles and books. Think about the library. And also the checkout room, with its paneled ceiling that lists the greatest scholars. They include Shakespeare, Descartes, Dante, Newton, and Rousseau. Someone planned those names to be carved in those gold letters as a humbling experience. When you go into that library you are being told how little you know relative to how much there is to know, in a great University like ours, and in that great library of ours, how much there is to know.

But the purpose of the University is not just to leave you humbled. It is our real purpose also to teach you, like Frodo, how to operate in a world that is so potentially humbling.

Little by little, step by step, the aim of this education is to show you how in any chosen area, you can acquire the wisdom to deal with any given problem. An education is not a game of Trivial Pursuit. It is not just cramming odd facts into your head so you can win $1,000,000 on a TV quiz show. An education teaches you how to relate existing knowledge to any situation that may arise. This is what we are teaching when we tell Ph.D. students that their education is not complete until they have completed a new piece of research. They must understand then the relation between all existing knowledge and the question that they are trying to answer. By learning the procedures to sort out how all existing knowledge impacts one question, you learn the discipline necessary to do that for every other question.

I am a social scientist. As a social scientist I see the University then as changing who you are. I see the University as not just changing your views toward science, like physics or biology, or astronomy, or chemistry. I see it also as changing your attitude toward other people.

Every one of the social sciences teaches us that we can understand the motives of other people. People may be very different from us. Their motives may be very different from ours. Their means of expressing those motives may be strange indeed. Our knowledge about other people's problems makes their motives comprehensible to us. That means that we can see other people and their motives in our terms.

The uneducated too often believe that a conflict of interest occurs because other people are evil. The educated believe that conflicts of interest naturally occur. Moreover, these conflicts occur especially because other people are basically so very much like ourselves. So the University teaches us to see other people's views. We have mercy for them.