Margaret A. Miller

Listening to Students: The 2011 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders

Hemingway attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald— wrongly, it seems—the quotation, “The rich are different than you and me.” I could say the same thing about the best of the upcoming generation: They too are “different than you and me.” The winners of the 2011 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards are this year’s best in show, and the portraits of them that emerge from their application essays don’t look anything like me or my friends at that age. For instance, they are no respecters of boundaries—between the university and the world, among disciplines, within education, or between people. They develop knowledge not by adopting the academy’s sense of itself as the locus of authority but through the co-creation of understanding in the context of relationships that reach well beyond the By Margaret A. Miller