Founding Director's Statement
Dr. David Tripp
I knew as an undergraduate that I wanted to someday teach at the university level.  My own education was broadening my limited horizons in ways that challenged me, excited me, and caused me enormous growing pains.  Coming from a background of mill workers and copper miners I was ill prepared for university life and bungled my way through several years of college not really understanding what a college education was or how it might change my life.  Late in my junior year I realized that the only reason I was in school was that I loved my philosophy and religion courses (though at one time or another I had majored in just about everything else), and more than that, that I loved the men (and they were all men at that time) who taught them.  I loved that they thought about life and lived in ways that had never occurred to me, left me with questions that I had no real answers to, and that they genuinely cared about their students and worked to make a difference in the small community of Bowling Green, Kentucky.