Centenary University president connects with Harvard researcher who studied his early childhood speech

HACKETTSTOWN, NJ (Warren County) — When Centenary University President Dale Caldwell was a toddler, his parents recognized that he had remarkable language skills for such a young child.

So, they enrolled him in a study measuring how children acquire language. Professor Roger Brown of Harvard University’s Psychology Department and his team tracked the language development of “Adam” (a pseudonym for Dale Caldwell), along with two other children, “Eve” and “Sarah” (also pseudonyms), from the ages of 2 to 5.

Voluminous transcripts of their speech were created. Using these transcripts, Ellen Winner, one of Brown’s doctoral students, analyzed the types of misnomers that Adam created. In most cases, these were not mistakes at all, but intentional metaphors based on a perceived likeness between two very different things. Two charming examples: At age 2, he tied some tape around a microphone and said, “Microphone need a bib,” comparing the microphone, with tape around it, to a child wearing a bib.

At age 4½, while putting the paper cover back on a crayon after it had slipped off, he said, “I’m putting on your clothes, crayon.” Winner, who is now a Ph.D., concluded that “this early capacity for renaming objects may be a necessary investment for later, full-blown forms of metaphor, many of which are, in fact, constructed along the same lines as child metaphors.” She titled her article about Adam “New Names for Old Things.”

Six decades later, Dr. Caldwell and Dr. Winner unexpectedly reconnected when the Centenary president set out to quantify the foundational educational practices at the University that were having the most success in educating students. He quickly aligned with the Multiple Intelligences Theory, proposed by influential Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, Ph.D., in his book Frames of Mind. Dr. Gardner is married to Dr. Winner.

“That was certainly a surprise,” recalled Dr. Caldwell, who, as an undergraduate at Princeton, had also come across a reference to the study in one of his textbooks. “I had been speaking to the famous Dr. Howard Gardner about more formally embedding the Multiple Intelligences Theory into Centenary University’s culture. When I mentioned that I grew up in Boston and participated in this study, Dr. Gardner’s wife ran to the computer screen and said, ‘I wrote my dissertation about you!’”

Dr. Winner commented on their chance encounter: “Though I never met Dale when the study was carried out (as it was conducted before I became a doctoral student), I was thrilled to meet Dale and to see what Adam had become!”

Today, as a college president, Dr. Caldwell has developed a reputation as a visionary leader who is reinventing higher education, both at Centenary and in the broader marketplace. True to “Adam’s” early language abilities, Dr. Caldwell often crafts acronyms to brand innovative new programs that introduce higher education to a broader pool of students, including traditional college and graduate students, vocational students, veterans, and others.

In his quest to define Centenary’s unique brand identity—WeCU—Dr. Caldwell came across Dr. Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory, which acknowledges that people have different ways of learning. The theory concludes that providing a holistic, experiential, and personalized education for students with differing learning styles requires institutions to emphasize eight core multiple intelligences: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, musical, and visual-spatial.

“The Gardner Multiple Intelligences Theory aligns perfectly with Centenary’s WeCU brand, which sees each student’s unique intelligence and customizes higher education to enhance student learning and growth,” said Dr. Caldwell. “Centenary has been informally utilizing Dr. Gardner’s eight multiple intelligences in our curriculum and campus life programs for many years. Through our WeCU brand, Centenary sees each student’s distinctive learning style and customizes our education to enhance student growth and success.”