Curiosity and the Love of Learning

A Message from the Director

Scott Black
Professor of English

In his introduction to his mother’s autobiography, Obert C. Tanner writes of Annie Clark Tanner’s “deep satisfaction in learning; her joy with books and lectures; and her search for knowledge about the world, the causes of events, the motives of people, and scientific explanations. With religious devotion she loved and sought the truth with all her mind and all her soul. And in this quest for truth, her children came to believe with her, that a university was the noblest creation of man.”

Though a devout man, Obert Tanner celebrates the formative influence of his mother’s devotion not to religion but to her search for truth, for knowledge about causes, motives, and explanations. It is her curiosity, he writes, her search for knowledge and the way her love for truth is bound up with the quest for it, that is her gift to her children. Obert Tanner subtitled his own autobiography, In Search of Freedom, and his story shows how the two are intimately connected: the freedom to search is part and parcel of the search for freedom. At the heart of his life project is the love of knowledge, and the place dedicated to that quest for freedom and the freedom to ask questions, the place formed by curiosity, is a university.

In my first year as director of the Tanner Humanities Center, I have found myself thinking often about Obert Tanner’s vision of the importance of education and the humanities. With our public programming and support for innovative scholarship, we’ve sustained and strengthened his legacy of cultivating the curiosity and love of learning that are at the heart of the university.

Here a few highlights of our year. We introduced a new model of collaborative fellowships, Tanner Labs, which offer spaces for shared, interdisciplinary, and experimental work in the humanities. Each Tanner Lab funds a team of researchers for two years to develop an innovative research project that experiments with newly emerging theoretical questions, research methods, pedagogical practice, and models of public engagement. We renewed our partnership with the U’s excellent Mormon Studies program and relaunched the popular Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture. We offered a public Evening with Great Books event featuring faculty from the College’s exciting interdisciplinary course. We formed a new Tanner Book Club that brings readers from across the community together to discuss classic literature. And last but not least, we developed a podcast, The Virtual Jewel Box, which provides broader public access to conversations with our invited guests, fellows, and faculty.

I am proud of what the Tanner has accomplished this year, and look forward to working alongside our friends and colleagues across the university and the community to continue this wonderful legacy.