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Paul left quite a legacy at Bryn Mawr College, and I will feel honored to wear his Stanford cap and gown at commencement this year, when my first graduate student receives his degree. (Thank you, Jed! That's very kind of you to make Paul's robes available to me. And thank you Kim, Anne, Alice, and Marc for making this connection.)

It's now my seventh year at Bryn Mawr College, and from early on in my time here, Paul stood out to me as an uniquely thoughtful, questioning, and creative individual who really made a difference at the college. Let me say a few words about what I feel I have learned from his example.

In 2009, I co-organized a Class of 1902 Lecture with the philosophy department, by a speaker named Guy Blaylock who talked about interpretational problems in quantum mechanics. Paul followed this lecture with a flurry of email messages to the speaker and physics faculty, and posted some of his thoughts here:

https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/paul-grobstein/multiple-worlds-multiple-interpretations-quantum-physics-and-brain

How did he have time to do this?! He attended a lecture in another department, personally engaged everyone, wrote a blog entry placing major themes from the talk within the broader human context of subjectivity of empirical observation, and linked to a large number of related blog entries inspired by similar experiences that show he does this sort of thing all the time. I on the other hand, went more or less back to survival mode, preparing my courses, reappointment dossier, and so on.

Like many of us in academia, Paul would get incredibly excited about ideas, but unlike most of us, he managed to consistently keep the real substance of the joy of thinking and at the forefront of his daily activities in a public and inclusive way. It is so easy to get buried beneath the practical pressures of grading, course preparation, and scholarly publication in one's discipline, and to relegate this universal childlike intellectual spark to the back burner, but Paul made it a shared priority. It is also true that as we advance in our disciplines and specialize, we tend to grow apart from one another. But, there is always something special about the original seed, the root, the central foundational essence of any field. This is usually the most interesting part and touches on the broadest and most universal questions — the ones we can share with others. It is the organic living earth that feeds the individual and collective satisfaction of contemplative souls driven dually by the arrogance of a quest to understand what others have not yet understood, and by the humility of an awareness that this understanding is of value only to the extent that it can be meaningfully shared with others. Without it, we risk finding ourselves on ever bifurcating scholarly branches, lost in synthetic and lonely detail.

It's hard to walk this talk, and I can't say I've succeeded at harmonizing my life's work, values, and intellectual curiosity in this way. However, it is important to keep trying. To me, Paul's example is proof that another way is possible.

All the best, Michael