Each year, as summer fades, Dunedin becomes something like itself again.
Residential colleges fill, flats reawaken, lecture theatres hum back into life. Thousands of students arrive, some for the first time, others returning, bringing with them not only energy and hope, but questions about who they are becoming and what kind of world awaits them.
Much is made, understandably, of the economic value of higher education. Degrees are framed as pathways to employment, skills acquisition, and productivity.
In an uncertain global economy, this utilitarian view has a certain force. Students invest heavily in their education; they are right to expect that it will help them earn a living.
But education, at its best, has always been about more than employability. Universities exist not only to transmit information or train specialists, but to cultivate wisdom: the capacity to think critically, judge well, and act responsibly in a complex world.
That aspiration is captured in the University of Otago’s motto: sapere aude, "dare to be wise".
Daring to be wise is a summons to intellectual courage: the willingness to question assumptions, resist easy answers, and think beyond the pressures of fashion, ideology, or self-interest.
In a time when speed and certainty are often rewarded more than reflection, wisdom requires nerve.
This idea is hardly new. In the biblical tradition, wisdom is not abstract knowledge or technical mastery, but a way of living attentively and responsibly.
"Wisdom," says the book of Proverbs, "is more precious than silver, and yields better returns than gold." It is prized not because it is useful in the narrow sense, but because it shapes character, judgement, and care for others.
This matters now more than ever.
The students arriving in Dunedin today are inheriting a world marked by overlapping crises: climate disruption, widening inequality, political polarisation, technological acceleration, and global conflict.
These challenges cannot be solved by technical expertise alone. They require moral imagination, historical memory, and the ability to ask difficult questions about values, power, and responsibility.
Knowledge tells us how things work. Wisdom asks why they matter — and what ought to be done.
This is where the humanities come into their own. Disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, theology, languages, and the arts are sometimes caricatured as luxuries or indulgences.
In fact, they are training grounds for wisdom. They teach students how to read carefully, interpret evidence, recognise bias, and hold competing perspectives in tension.
They expose us to voices from other times and cultures, expanding the horizons of our understanding.
In a digital age saturated with information and misinformation alike, critical thinking is essential. Democracies weaken when citizens lose the capacity to distinguish argument from assertion, truth from convenience, persuasion from manipulation.
Universities play a quiet but essential role in sustaining this capacity by modelling disciplined inquiry and evidence-based research.
Yet sapere aude is not a call to contemplation alone. Wisdom has consequences.
Throughout history, students have often been catalysts for social change, pressing societies to confront injustice, exclusion, and environmental harm. From movements for civil rights and decolonisation to contemporary climate activism and struggles for equity, education has frequently spilled beyond the classroom.
When activism is grounded in learning rather than outrage alone, it can be a mature expression of wisdom. Universities should not be factories producing compliant workers, but communities that encourage informed dissent, ethical courage, and public responsibility.
The task is not to tell students what to think, but to help them learn how to think, and how to act when knowledge demands a response.
This balance is delicate. When education is reduced to credentials, wisdom withers. When activism is detached from careful thinking, it hardens into sloganism.
To dare to be wise is to hold knowledge, humility, and responsibility together, and to accept that wisdom often involves uncertainty, patience, and costly choices.
Dunedin, with its long academic traditions and distinctive civic culture, offers a fertile setting for this kind of formation. The university does not exist apart from the city; it shapes and is shaped by it.
Students learn not only in lecture theatres, but in colleges, flats, libraries, cafes, workplaces, faith communities, and conversations late into the night. Education happens wherever curiosity is taken seriously.
To students beginning their studies: your time here is not simply about acquiring answers. It is about learning to live with better questions.
You will encounter ideas that unsettle you, challenge your certainties, and perhaps even change your direction. That is not a failure of education; it is its calling.
To the wider community: welcoming students is more than an economic transaction. It is an investment in the intellectual and moral life of our society.
In a world tempted by short-term thinking and narrow interests, sapere aude remains a quiet but radical invitation, not only to grow in knowledge, but to dare to be wise.
• Graham Redding is the Douglas Goodfellow Lecturer in Chaplaincy Studies, Theology Programme, University of Otago.
