The Hedgehog & Fox Faculty Lecture is returning to East Central University Wednesday, April 13, at 2 p.m. in the Estep Multimedia Center inside the Bill S. Cole University Center. Dr. Josh Grasso will be giving the lecture.
The lecture – previously an annual event – is now named for former ECU Provost Duane C. Anderson, who will be on-hand to welcome guests to the event.
The purpose of the faculty lecture series is to provide a campus-wide forum on exemplary faculty research and other academic experiences. Dr. Anderson established the lecture series during his time at ECU and originally named it for an essay by Isaiah Berlin that he read in graduate school. The essay’s title, “The Hedgehog and The Fox,” was pulled from a line in the work of Greek poet Archilochus. That line roughly says, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
The line may be taken to mean that “in the world of thinkers, there [are] those who pursue a single vision or idea round which they see and interpret everything, and there are those who pursue many visions and ideas, often unrelated and contradictory,” Berlin wrote, “The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes…”
For more information on the lecture, contact the ECU Office of Academic Affairs at 580-559-5204.