University of Richmond Freshman Wins $25 Thousand Scholarship With Two- Word Question: "Why Change?"
April 23, 2001
Submitting the deceptively simple question "Why change?" as the topic for a yearlong series of debates and academic programs on campus has earned a University of Richmond freshman a scholarship worth nearly $25,000.
Liza Stutts of Richmond, Va., competed with more than 200 other entrants proposing topics for the university's biennial Richmond Quest. The program encourages students to develop stimulating questions, coupled with detailed rationales of how those questions could be explored across the academic spectrum. The goal of the Quest program is to spark serious campus-wide examination of a single topic.
"The reason Einstein is revered is not only because he was a great thinker, but also because he could ask great questions," said Richmond President William E. Cooper, who launched the Richmond Quest in 1999. "It's challenging work, but a whole institution can be charged by an idea led by an enterprising student."
A selection committee composed of faculty and President Cooper chose Stutts' question and rationale from the entries, which were submitted anonymously. A group of faculty, student and staff volunteers will begin planning the yearlong program of special courses, guest speakers and activities to focus campus attention on the topic of change.
The inaugural Quest program brought comedian Lily Tomlin, political reporter Molly Ivins, experts on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship and other speakers to campus to answer the question, "Is truth in the eye of the beholder?" Faculty hosted guest lecturers and revised and created a number of courses to include Quest-related topics. The math department even hosted a homecoming weekend debate about truth in mathematics.
Stutts said events surrounding the previous Quest motivated her and a number of friends to submit entries for the 2002 program.
"It's very empowering to ask students to have an influence over such a major academic project," Stutts said. "It seemed like a fun challenge to people like me, who enjoy thinking and discussing big, philosophical questions. Honestly, I didn't think I would win, but I thought the whole process would be fun-thinking about thinking."
"Even people I don't know on campus have been congratulating me and e-mailing me to say it is a cool topic. I know several people who also entered-I think there were a lot of great questions that would have been equally exciting," she said. "A lot of people on campus came up with good questions, although many of them didn't submit entries. Lots of students were thinking about it."
Stutts credited her parents, faculty members at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, and especially her faculty mentor on her Quest entry, Professor Richard A. Couto, with helping shape the language of her question and rationale. She began thinking about her question months before the submission deadline and spent four weeks preparing the two-page, single-spaced entry, which is posted on the university's Richmond Quest web site (www.richmond.edu/academics/quest).