Active learning is the simple idea that people learn better when they use the material than when they are sitting and passively receiving it. Active learning has sometimes been characterized as “learning by doing,” but I do not think that is quite right. For example, just discussing something aimlessly is not likely to enhance learning. Using information can mean answering a question, debating a point, designing an experiment, applying an idea to a new case, or any number of other activities. I have a detailed taxonomy of types of active learning at the end of my book Active Learning Online. There are literally scores of different types. What it does not mean is listening to a lecture or watching a video. Decades of research have established this comprehensively, but most teaching at most universities still relies primarily on lectures.My focus on this in the last fifteen years comes from a frustration with that gap. We have a robust science of how people learn and remember, and we know that the traditional lecture-and-exam model squanders much of what students could be getting from their education. I joined Minerva in 2013 to help design a university built from the ground up around active learning. I have since worked on doing the same thing at Taejae University in South Korea, in online courses, in AI-driven programs, and in workplace training. The principles travel. The hard part is changing the culture of how teachers teach.

Two types of reasons: pushes and pulls. The first was that I had been at Harvard for thirty-four years and had served at every level from associate professor through Dean of Social Science. I had run out of new ways to be useful inside that institution. And then when I moved to Stanford to run the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, I discovered that my passion was in applying cognitive neuroscience to education, which I could not really do there.The second set of reasons was more positive. Ben Nelson, who founded Minerva, was building something genuinely new, designed from first principles around the cognitive science of how people learn. The chance to design the academic program of a university from scratch, applying everything the field had learned over the previous fifty years, was not something that comes along often.Minerva is now an established institution with a strong record of placing its graduates. The pedagogy we developed there has influenced programs at a number of other universities. I am very proud of what we accomplished, much of which is summarized in the book we wrote, Building the Intentional University.

In the 1970s, when I started my career, there was a real argument in cognitive science about whether mental images existed at all in any meaningful sense, or whether everything in the mind was essentially language-like. The question sounds abstract, but it has practical consequences. If images are real, then certain tasks, such as visualizing a map, rotating a shape in your head, or picturing a face, work in particular ways and can be supported or trained in particular ways. If we do not in fact use such mental images, those tasks rely on entirely different machinery and we should be teaching them differently.Over thirty years, work in my lab and in others provided solid empirical evidence that visual mental images are genuine depictive representations that share neural machinery with vision itself. To the extent that the debate can be truly settled, we did it. The practical consequences have shown up in education, in clinical work with people who have suffered brain injuries, in design and visual communication, and in our understanding of what happens in the visual cortex when we are not actually looking at anything.

Epstein funded research in my lab for several years, ending in 2002, and I developed a friendly intellectual relationship with him during that time, which I maintained sporadically for some years after. I did not witness or participate in any of Epstein’s misconduct. I did not even know about the allegations against him until they were reported in the press. If I had known what he was doing, I would have had nothing to do with him.There is also a separate allegation that I have addressed at length elsewhere on this site. An early draft of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir included my name. I never met her and never had relations with her. Her own lawyer wrote to a journalist in 2020 to confirm that I was not someone she had had sex with; her own court filings called the naming a “scrivener’s error” (i.e., she wrote down the wrong name, apparently confusing me with someone else); she answered “No” under oath in her 2016 deposition when asked directly whether she had had sex with me; and my name was not included in the published version of her book.I have put the full statement and the relevant court documents in one place so that anyone who wants to read the record on this matter can do so.