Re: What is your counsel?

Description: Tilghman says that collectively we should be talking, globally, to improve understanding, to cooperate and collaborate to find common ground. Individually we should be educating ourselves about the issues to being understanding about our differences and come together.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: Talking. I think what we need to be doing globally is talking to one another. I think there needs to be a great deal more global understanding. I think that is the only way in which we can get to a place where we understand that we are not going to be able to solve some of these global problems alone, individually as separate countries. We’re going to have to find ways of cooperating, collaborating so that we can see that we’re all in this mess together. So I think that what we are not doing enough of is finding the common ground that will bring us together.

Question: What should we be doing as individuals?

Transcript: I think the most important thing that each one of us can do individually is to educate ourselves about what the issues are – stretch ourselves so that we, like the students at Princeton, encounter the “other” so that we begin our process of understanding why people who live in Egypt, or in Saudi Arabia, or in Iraq fundamentally think differently than we do; and understanding the history of that and why that is true. So I think we have an obligation to understand why there is so much difference in the world today, and then get to the point of understanding that despite those differences, we’re not going to change those differences. How we are going to come together and unite to solve some of the horrible problems that we face.

Recorded on: 8/7/07