Dear Assistant in Instruction:
As a great research university, Princeton
aspires to excellence in both scholarship and teaching. Graduate
education at Princeton is dedicated to training students to master
a field of scholarship, to make independent contributions to an
area of research, and to develop skills as teachers. In these
terms it makes the premise that the discovery of knowledge and
the communication of knowledge are interrelated, that research
and teaching are synergistic.
As "apprentice" teachers,
you are entering an age-old craft that is essential to the
identity and mission of the university. The future of that craft
is in your hands. I encourage you to learn to teach with enthusiasm
and with dedication, realizing that good teaching, no less than
good scholarship, requires an ongoing commitment to learning,
to revisiting older issues, and to innovation.
Your own attraction to the academic
life may have been influenced by the example of some of your teachers,
who communicated to you their own intellectual passion for their
subjects and their personal concerns for their students. I hope
those qualities will come to characterize your teaching.
John F. Wilson
Dean of the Graduate School and Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion