This issue of Arts and Science offers a worldview of the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Science: demonstrating the impact of our school in the world at large, and the impact of the world at large on our school. From my vantage point in Kirkland Hall, Arts and Science seems at once vast and localized. Approximately 4 percent of our undergraduates and 23 percent of our graduate students hail from countries other than the U.S., yet they are all at home here on this beautiful residential campus where their courses, research and service activities are emphatically global in emphasis and effects. The work of our faculty touches every continent on this planet. And our community as a whole has dedicated itself to a yearlong emphasis on sustainability and the environment that addresses the future of the planet itself.

A great university brings the best lessons of the past and the present forward to shape the future. In this sense, a university is an inherently optimistic institution. Each fall, we welcome to our campus new students and new faculty, bright, accomplished and bristling with potential. These newcomers merge into the broad community of students [...]

At home these days, we have been reflecting on the formative relationships with teachers that forever influence students’ lives. My husband, Paul Young, is, like me, an Arts and Science faculty member: Paul is an associate professor of English, director of our dynamic Film Studies program, and a scholar and teacher of early cinema.

I write to you today in a call to community and a call to community action. We, the members of the Arts and Science community, can be so proud of and grateful for the opportunities Vanderbilt University has placed before us.

In this issue of Arts and Science, you will read the words of Gail McConnell, a visitor from Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland. Gail is a Ph.D. candidate in English and a member of this year’s graduate fellows program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities.

Like great parents, great professors seek independence and self-reliance for their students. In Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, we teach the crafts of writing and speaking, of critical thinking, of skepticism and analysis.

There is no greater challenge facing the United States than health care: the provision of affordable, high quality medical attention to every person, and the establishment of a health care system that ensures equity of access and the integrity of new discovery for all time.

To think about the College of Arts and Science is to think about diversity. From chemistry to classics, from physics to psychology to philosophy and everywhere in between, our researchers press deeply into the questions of their disciplines.

Applications for admission to Vanderbilt increased by more than 30 percent this year, to just under 17,000, and standard metrics of diversity, test scores, high school grades and contributions to society reached all-time highs.