Fostering Curiosity and Openness
You could say that Harry Smith has made a career of being curious. A celebrated journalist with experience on several news networks, he covered stories in all 50 of the United States and on every continent. In his years as a reporter he spoke with witnesses to history, community shapers, students, celebrities, conservationists, history makers, trauma survivors, and big-dreamers.
After retiring from the Today show nearly two years ago, he returned to his alma mater, Central College in Iowa, to teach a course on curiosity. His presentation for the Calvin University January Series on Friday, Jan. 23, he said, was a sort of memoir, reflecting how his own curiosity and openness to new opportunities helped to shape a life rich with experiences and a desire to share stories with others.
Smith began by telling his audience, “One of the first things you need to know is . . . I’m Dutch.” He explained that he grew up in Lansing, Ill., descended from Dutch immigrants who had arrived in the 1880s and early 1900s. Somewhere along the immigration journey, he said, the family added an ‘h’ to their last name, and the Smits became the Smiths.
As part of the Dutch community, Smith said, “I grew up in the Reformed Church. Most of the people on my mother’s side of the family were Christian Reformed. My father’s family was Reformed, so I am a product of a mixed marriage.”
He described a childhood familiar to many Dutch immigrant families in the U.S. and Canada, attending church twice on Sundays and then again on Wednesday evenings, not playing outside or going to movies or restaurants on Sundays, and not having much fun in general, it sometimes seemed. “I often describe it as being a teetotaling Southern Baptist without a sense of humor,” he said.
As a young man, when he visited New York City, Smith said, he would make his way to Battery Park in Manhattan to sit on a bench and stare at the Statue of Liberty, reflecting on the courage of his ancestors who had left everything behind. “They did it because America held the promise of opportunity, the vision of a better life. . . . Sitting on that bench over a number of years, I came to understand why they came. They did it for me. I was the embodiment of their American dream.”
Smith said his grandparents and parents had two beliefs: God and hard work. From these family members, he said, he learned the value of both. His father sent him to work at a young age for a produce farm at the edge of town, he explained. Smith said he hated that job at first, but now he acknowledges that it was where he learned to work hard and to take pride in his work. In retrospect, he said, it was a gift.
His father read two afternoon newspapers every day and watched the 6 o’clock news on television, Smith said. That was so important to his dad, said Smith, that his mother needed to back-time dinner to correspond with the end of the news broadcast. Though he and his father didn’t really get along well, Smith reflected, “It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I figured out my career path came from his influence.”
Smith described his mother as a saint, a woman who loved Jesus and showed it in her actions. During the Depression in the 1930s, he said, she would take some extra pennies on grocery day to buy more flour so that she could bake enough bread to share with any people who came to their door asking for food. She raised her eight children with love, knew no prejudice, and taught all of them the values of cleanliness and godliness.
Smith said that he credits a distant relative, “Big Bill” Smit, with turning him into a talker. Big Bill was larger than life, said Smith, due not only to his great size but also to his storytelling. He would visit the Smiths a few times each year, telling stories and making Smith’s mother laugh. In a world, said Smith, where it was exciting that his dad, a part-time policeman, parked a squad car in the family driveway, and that an aunt occasionally invited the family over for cake on a Sunday evening, Big Bill was mesmerizing.
In high school, Smith said, he was a slacker. Instead of doing homework, he would page through encyclopedias in his room, because his older brother sold sets of them. “I was curious about a lot of stuff. I was interested in Bertrand Russell, Buckminster Fuller, and William F. Buckley, but that didn’t help me in algebra or trig, which I flunked,” he said. One of his seven older siblings went to college, Smith added, but higher education was not a high priority in the Smith family. In his younger days, said Smith, his aspiration was to drive an 18-wheel semi-trailer truck and see the country.
“But things do happen,” he said. Smith said he played football in high school, was good at it, and was offered scholarships. Then, in his senior year, Smith said, while he was dating the star of the speech team, she and the team’s coach persuaded him to quit the varsity basketball team and join the speech team. There he excelled, he said, especially at radio speaking, which involved crafting radio reports in a specific time frame, including news and magazine-style content.
He turned down a football scholarship to a state university, he said, since he was concerned that he would become corrupted there. Instead, he enrolled in the Reformed-church-affiliated Central College in Pella, Iowa. “And there,” said Smith, “I was corrupted in the best possible way. I fell in love with learning: the professors, the variety, the reading, the ideas. I did play football, but I also sang in the choir. I was on the campus church committee. . . . I got a high from the learning, and the exploring, and the transcendence of the experiences that just would put goosebumps on your arm. So I ended up chasing that high through my [college] life, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.”
When Smith announced his retirement on the Today show in March 2024, the episode included a segment looking back at some of the places he and his team had been and on some of the people they had met. “I was thankful for the unbelievable opportunities that I’d had,” he reflected. And when his colleagues asked what was next, he told them he planned to return to Central College and teach a course on curiosity.
Smith continued, “Now, I had been in talks with Central College for weeks about [this idea, but . . .] I did not alert them to my announcement on TV. And the phones at Central melted. The television audience went crazy. And it seemed like every person over 50 years old in the United States wanted to take the course.” When he later asked his first class why they had registered for this particular class, almost all of them said that their parents had told them they should take it.
Smith’s first class on curiosity had 25 students, all “GenZers,” he said, and the first thing he did was to disallow phones and devices during classtime. Students could take notes with paper and pen, he said, and participation was mandatory. He informed them that, statistically, half of them would never spend one minute working in their field of study. But he explained next that while mentoring new writers at NBC, he had come up with a list of things that he knew would help his students wherever they went after they graduated, and that he would share those things with them over the course of their semester together.
Smith said he explained to his students: “These are things that have professional and personal relevance. Stuff to stick in your tool belt as you cross the commencement stage. Number one, you need to be curious, crazy curious. We’ll learn about resilience, adaptability, how to be a sponge, mindfulness without meditation, being willing to make mistakes.”
Smith said, “I declared to them, ‘Being interested makes you interesting.’”
In the class, Smith recalled, they watched and discussed clips of films, chose and shared poetry and why they had chosen each piece they read, lay under a grand piano while a pianist played Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” and polkaed to “Roll Out the Barrel,” played by an 86-year-old accordion player after learning about the value of music to mental health.
“One of the other things that we talked about in class was the idea of saying yes to things,” said Smith. “And this woman (who had played the accordion for us) was amazing. I called her up, and I said, ‘I have this crazy idea. I want to do this in my class.’ She said, [snaps fingers] yes! Immediately. You know, in our lives we don’t – these opportunities come into our lives all the time, and – we just don’t say yes enough.”
Today Smith describes himself as something of an antitech evangelist. He said he acknowledges that technology can be great and do some amazing things – for example, some of the stories Smith covered during his Today show career were about telescopes in the Chilean desert that can see deep into space, and students contacting the International Space Station – but he also sees that social media and artificial intelligence are capturing the attention and time of a generation of young people.
Smith said he is concerned that social media, with its algorithms and echo chambers, is accelerating polarization, and that artificial intelligence is replacing real friendship: “The number of teenagers right now who have romantic relationships with AI bots is about 1 in 5. Can you even imagine that? The number of teenagers that find companionship with artificial intelligence . . . is somewhere like 60 to 70 percent. We need to talk to each other. We need to touch each other. We need to shake hands, even if it’s a reach.”
Smith encouraged his audience of all ages to put away their phones and devices, engage with the world, pay attention to people, ask their stories, be open to trying new things, and find the real, the genuine.
Closing a lively question-and-answer session after the presentation, Shirley Hoogstra and Smith offered this benediction for the audience: “May you leave this place with lighter hands and clearer hearts, released from the need to carry everything, to chase every headline, or to prove your worth by the weight of your days. May you discover that a simpler life is not a smaller one but a truer one, where time is received as a gift, relationships are tended with care, and what matters most is given room to breathe. May you have the courage to let go of what clutters your life, the wisdom to hold fast to what gives it meaning, and the grace to walk at a human pace in a hurried world. And may you go from here attentive to the quiet gifts of ordinary days, grateful for enough, present to one another, and at peace in the life you are called to live.”
