Faculty Voices
Keynote Address by Gerhard Casper
President Emeritus, Stanford University on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary celebration of Stanford University’s Breyer Center for Overseas Studies in Florence in June, 2010.
“In the speed-oriented video and texting culture of our age, it seems to me to be of exceptional importance that students do not lose the 'arts of reading' (reading texts, pictures, sculptures, artifacts, buildings): to read, to read carefully (less is more), to reread, to read in dialogue, to interpret, to interpret in context. Through Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio the reading of art can be taught in a context that could not be more enticing to the human mind, eye, and heart.”
Professor David M. Kennedy
Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus
“Italy has more history, and more of it accessibly displayed, than any country in the world. And no Italian city has a richer stock of that visible history – not to mention an abundance of beauty and sheer enchantment – than Florence. My own studies in Florence as a Stanford undergraduate altered my sense of history itself, of time’s scale and weight. I also fell in love with a culture, a language, and a people in ways that have deeply affected my life ever since.”