Have you sometimes felt that you were being pressured by an impressive or dominating tutor to argue for something you didn't believe in? Are you easily fazed by brilliant minds? Do you feel uneasy about accepting a scholarship from an organization whose basic standards you can't fully agree with? Do religion and the spirit of free inquiry seem to you incompatible?
Most of us involved in academic life have come up against some of these questions. Many thoughtful people bring their talents and ideas forward at a university or college hoping to see them refined for service to humanity. Instead, they may find them distorted by fashion, molded by forceful personalities, manipulated by envy or self-aggrandizement, bargained for, or perhaps ignored by a mercenary society.
To pass through this highly competitive marketplace with our intellectual integrity intact may present a challenge that will force us to strengthen our understanding of man's spiritual integrity. Christian Science shows us that deep spiritual understanding is always the need. We attain it by identifying ourselves and our fellow students and teachers with the man who is the very reflection of Principle, the divine Mind, which is God. This man is spiritual, eternally unmixed with material elements. This more profound view of intelligence as sound and undivided, of man as "perfect and entire, wanting nothing,"James 1:4; anchors us in solid reality, which neither fashion, envy, pride, nor a merely personal sense of our academic role can shake or shatter.
