Every year, we enthusiastically welcome incoming students to the academy. I teach at a large research university with a strong and proud commitment to teaching undergraduates. For those of us in professional roles, belonging to the academy means something rich. It includes discussions in hallways and offices as we chew on new ideas; learning and dissecting the work of those who came before us; and asking tough questions as we look to the future. For our students, this introduction happens in the classroom, where we take ideas, generate hypotheses, test them, look at findings and creatively apply them to problems.
