From the President

Menlo College was founded in 1927, the same year that Philo Farnsworth submitted a patent for the first all-electronic television system. It wasn’t long before television began to exert its influence. People of all ages, but young people in particular, formed values and ideas about the world around them from this new medium. That phenomenon carries a profound impact on our society and culture to this very day; it has shaped our views on seminal social issues, particularly race, gender, and class. Hindsight tells us that we accepted far too much of television’s influence without critical examination.

Almost a century later, it’s now social media that’s shaping our views, and its influence is arguably even more profound than that of television in decades past. More concerning yet is the even greater degree to which we may be allowing our opinions to be driven by social media without critical examination.

Facts mattered in 1927. Given the speed with which people can now access new information and the ever-decreasing lapse of time before people act on that new information means that facts matter even more in 2023. That’s where education is needed.

At Menlo College, our goal is to ensure that our students acquire the skills they need to better understand the world around us, and our place within it. We aspire to instill in young people a perpetual hunt for shared truths—a quest that should inform their Menlo experience, but as importantly, a quest that should inform their life’s journey. Facts help us understand complex economic and social problems, and thus help us craft solutions to problems that seem intractable. Problems can’t be solved with misinformation.

The quest for better understanding is reflected in the theme for this issue: research as a means to divine shared truths. Thinking critically and researching facts well are the tools at our disposal, but like any acquired skills, they need to be honed to be perfected. Archeologists believe that humans first tackled complex problem solving 300,000 years ago—the same time we evolved to have complex cognition and language abilities. That sounds like a long time ago, but the first humans walked our planet over 2 million years ago. Looked at that way, problem solving and the analysis it requires is a relatively recently developed skill. We need to keep working at it—as if our future depends upon it.

Steven Weiner Menlo College President