Each year the LSA Honors Program welcomes our incoming class to campus with a full day activity called Honors Kickoff.  It starts, as most Honors events do, with food: a breakfast reception in and around the Perlman Honors Commons. As soon as the students are fed, we dive right in, with a morning of inquiry and argument.

How should you live your life, and why?

To prepare, we asked our 500 incoming students to spend part of their summer reading UM Law Professor Don Herzog’s recent book Cunning. In it, Herzog raises many questions about how to act, though he provides few answers. At Kickoff, our new students gathered to hear three distinguished Michigan faculty members respond to Herzog’s book. After this, we broke into small groups to give students an opportunity to argue for their own approaches to these classic problems.

This is not a conversation we could finish in a single fall morning, but that’s fine: Honors Kickoff is a beginning, not an event. Indeed, we are hoping to include Honors parents and alumni in the discussion as well. To that end, we videotaped the Kickoff lectures of all of our faculty respondents, hoping that some of you might want to read the book and see what our scholars had to say.

Professor William Miller, the Thomas G. Long Professor of Law

Professor Elizabeth Anderson, the John Rawls Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies

Professor James Hines, the Richard Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics in LSA, and the L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law in the Law School

And you can access all their lectures in the form of online video here.

To cap off the process, on Friday, September 23rd, we hosted a public lecture by the author Professor Herzog as part of our Parent’s Weekend celebration. Click here to view his lecture and those of the faculty commentators.