The Clark University Higgins School of Humanities will launch the Spring Dialogue Symposium, Embracing Failure, with a Community Conversation facilitated by Professor Eric DeMeulenaere (Education) at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 28, in the Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons.
“We live in a society that strives to measure our performance in every conceivable way,” writes DeMeulenaere. “Failure, we intimately know, can have very real consequences on not only our academic trajectories, but our psyches. Yet research has revealed the importance of failure in the development of character traits essential for later success.”

What does it mean to fail in school, the marketplace, life? Who sets the criteria for evaluation? When is failure an opportunity, when is it a constraint, and how can we tell the difference? And what of the failures that one cannot overcome through hard work and determination; what do they teach about fairness, humility, and grace?
The symposium will explore these and other questions. To view the full program, click here.
“Too often we contemplate failure alone,” writes Higgins School of Humanities Director Amy G. Richter. “It is the stuff of late night anxiety, pressing deadlines, and broken hearts. This semester, we take our time and embrace failure together.”
For more information, call 508-793-7479 or email HigginsSchool@clarku.edu.
Founded in 1887 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Clark University is a liberal arts-based research university addressing social and human imperatives on a global scale. Nationally renowned as a college that changes lives, Clark is emerging as a transformative force in higher education today. LEEP (Liberal Education and Effective Practice) is Clark’s pioneering model of education that combines a robust liberal arts curriculum with life-changing world and workplace experiences. Clark’s faculty and students work across boundaries to develop solutions to complex challenges in the natural sciences, psychology, geography, management, urban education, Holocaust and genocide studies, environmental studies, and international development and social change. The Clark educational experience embodies the University’s motto: Challenge convention. Change our world. www.clarku.edu