Spring is here again, and once again it’s time to welcome newcomers to Keimyung University. Was it John Edward Masefield, an English poet, who said that university is the most beautiful place in the world? Wow, what a magnificent remark! When I first heard it a long time ago, I thought it really hit the nail on the head. And I still think so, or want to.

Hello, new Keimyung students. Do you think that a university is a beautiful place, let alone the most beautiful place? I mean not this or that particular university or college with many buildings and halls, but an institution of higher education and research. Whatever made you enter this university, I do hope that you can get the similar feeling that I had about that remark during your college life. I know most people today just consider university to be a necessary means of getting good jobs. In other words, university or college is regarded as a place where future workers accumulate all kinds of useful knowledge and skill before getting into the brutal society in which everybody competes to survive. Some of you may think so, too.

Nevertheless, I hope you can spend a lot of time while studying on this campus on the thing which is not directly related to your future jobs. It is a very simple thing. But it may be difficult for you at first because you still haven’t gotten used to it. It is to examine the beliefs that are the bases of your current knowledge and opinions, whatever they may be.

In order to help you understand what I mean, let us compare college with high school for a moment. As you know, the most common method of study used in high school is memorization. You first try to understand the material that is presented, and then memorize the factual information about it. The more you recite facts, the better score you get in tests. Now, as college students you may expect that college courses are simply more difficult and that they are more difficult because they present more difficult factual information. But this belief is mistaken. As you will realize, college work requires that students engage in a different kind of intellectual activity, in addition to the activity of understanding the material. Once the material is understood, the college student must do another kind of work on the material, namely critical examination and evaluation. That’s why college professors are concerned not merely with imparting information but also with examining the basis on which the information is believed.

Why, then, is the new type of intellectual work required in college? In high school, much of the educational material is presented in authoritative manner – almost as if it is absolutely and eternally true. In contrast, in college the material is presented not as something to be believed on the basis of authority (teacher) or social convention but as something to be believed because such belief is rationally justified. For example, you believe that the earth goes around the sun, not the reverse, just because your high school teacher said so. But in college you should ask yourself whether that belief is really true, whether it can be rationally defended.

Why should our beliefs be rationally based? Because a belief can be merely an arbitrary presupposition or assumption. Looking back on the past, you can find so many unjustified beliefs that have been accepted as true. Think of superstition, magic, prophecy, and authority. As moderns we do not accept them as a basis for belief and knowledge. But still we may be deceived by new sorts of unjustified beliefs in all areas of human activity, including science, religion, media, and the Internet.

What we must do, then, is to find good reasons for believing what we believe. For you freshmen, I would say this is the defining characteristic of college work. This is the intellectual attitude you must gain in college. Please keep this habit in mind when you read, talk, write, and think. It will be enormously useful in later life. As you raise questions about some of the important beliefs that you have shared with your friends and parents, you might fall into intellectual confusion and emotional chaos. But if you really want to lead a life without losing intellectual integrity and dignity, you should not be afraid of facing the crisis. Well, it surely is a challenge that is worth the effort.