Ideas. Questions. Answers. Honors | Envisioning the Next 60 Years of Honors

Date: November 11-14, 2026

How should we understand the nature of this enterprise we know as honors in the future? Anniversary time periods are essential points for reflection. For examining our goals as an organization, for considering whether we have made the mark of our own expectations, and just as anniversaries can be moments of profound celebration, they call us to reassess and thus to ask ourselves whether we truly find ourselves where we thought we’d be or to what extent we have moved away from our own goals. These times allow us, most deeply, to consider whether what got us here will continue to take us further down the line, or if something new is required.

Ideas shape our world. They define how we live in the world with other people. We live in a world of ideas. They are often some of our most cherished possessions.

Questions are the primary means for contributing to our corpus of knowledge as individuals, and as a species.

We can ask. We do exist.

The act of asking questions allows us to forge connections with the world. The act of asking questions allows us to forge connections with each other.

Through the asking of questions we refine what we don’t know, bringing into sharp relief what we can claim to know, such as further ideas and nascent answers. Questions allow us to reach beyond our own knowing. Questions make possible time travel before time travel. Questions allow us to engage with and ponder what we think of machines that think (AI), and what they may one day think of us (AGI). I wonder.

Questions define us. The questions we ask are arguments for how we should exist, for how we should be connected to our fellow human beings. Or not. Questions are secular prayers for human understanding. Questions are a request for meaning. And questions can be the reminder of why we find ourselves in a current predicament, why we are isolated, why we are at odds with one other, why we struggle to recognize in ourselves the faces and basic needs of our enemies and those around us. Questions can be timeless. They are eternal.

Who am I? Why am I here? What can I contribute? (A verse.)

Questions, however, when we are fortunate, when the conditions are favorable, when knowledge aligns, when there is fuel, ignition, oxygen, when there is world enough and time, can lead to answers.

Answers are solutions, they are hypotheses come to life. Answers are ideas that have been, for now, fully questioned. Answers are a future direction. They are certainty. Answers are an unknowing of a previous understanding, a revision, a course correction of what we thought we knew. Answers are bonds. They are the intellectual bonds that connect idea elements into knowledge compounds. They are also the melody, and the backbeat of life’s rhythms of understanding. They are the tune of our discovery. Answers are our home. They are where we nurture the future thoughts made whole, made real.

Your ideas are the matter out of which the future will be made. Your ideas also matter. You matter. If you have a great idea during this conference, share it with another person. Share it with a new friend. Share it with me, please! If you have a question. Questions occur to us, you know. Ask it. Ask it of a new friend. Ask your directors. Ask me. I love questions. And of course, if you have the answer, share it with the world. During this conference, I wish you a world of ideas, I wish you a galaxy of questions, and a multiverse of answers. Be inspired by ideas, questions, and answers. Be inspired by each other. Be honors.