Of all the challenges to higher education that occurred this past year — and there were many — I think the greatest, and the one with perhaps the longest-term implications for Colgate and for other colleges and universities, has been the sharp drop in the public’s regard for American higher education.
We live in a time when regard for many of our most important institutions — the U.S. presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the national press — is falling, sometimes dramatically so. It might not be surprising to see the same trends are affecting our colleges and universities. Are we simply victims of the larger trends of a more suspicious and cynical time?
Of course, so much of the news about higher education has not been good. Admissions scandals, athletics programs seemingly fully in the thrall of huge financial arrangements, unclear responses to the pandemic — all contributed to the sense that our nation’s colleges and universities are not well run, or have drifted from some set of important governing principles. In the past year, questions about what can be said on a campus and what beliefs are promulgated rocked institutions and put our nation’s colleges and universities on the front pages of newspapers for weeks.
What is telling is that there appears to be no person who is explaining to the nation the value of what happens on a campus and why we need our colleges and universities. There appears to be no leader of American higher education whose thoughts are well-circulated and whose opinions are sought and almost universally accepted.
In the past, Derek Bok (Harvard’s president from 1971–91), Bill Bowen (Princeton 1972–88), Father Ted Hesburgh (Notre Dame 1952–87), and Kingman Brewster (Yale 1963–77) could command the opinion pages of Time or the New York Times. They were symbols of the place higher education held in the nation’s collective regard. More recently, Ruth Simmons (Brown 2001–12) and Bob Zimmer (University of Chicago 2006–21) were thought to be spokespeople for “American Higher Education” — Simmons speaking forcefully about access to elite institutions and Zimmer about the centrality of free and unfettered debate and discourse on the campus.
Today no one seems to have assumed the role of speaking nationally about the nature and purpose of the American college and university. This past academic year, in fact, was seen by many as the moment when college presidents were seemingly revealed to be fully without leadership capacities. The job itself was no longer thought desirable. (I was recently on an airplane and my seat row companion — an elderly, elegant woman — asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was a college president. She put her hand on my forearm and said, “Oh, dear.”)
We gather on campus in pursuit of truth, obtained through study and research, through questioning and debate.
President Brian W. Casey
Perhaps the challenge is that there is no system of American higher education. Unlike the situation in most European and Asian nations, there is no central body that regulates and thus speaks for all 4,000 American colleges and universities. We all act separately — competing for students, faculty, and staff as well as for acclaim and regard.
But we are joined by a set of beliefs — or should be. That we gather on campus in pursuit of truth, obtained through study and research, through questioning and debate. That our work on a campus demands rigor. That education remains the most powerful tool designed to free a person from the limitations of their particular circumstances. That a rigorous form of education is a necessary ingredient for a functioning democracy. That a degree can be completed in a set amount of time, but an education starts at a college and continues through a life marked by curiosity and engagement. That a campus is a place where one is called upon to think, and thus is a place where, person by person, the nation forms its sense of itself.
So, next time I am on an airplane, and someone wonders what I do, I can, and should, honestly say that I am fortunate enough to be charged with a nearly sacred duty to serve a college that, through the assemblage of a faculty and a student body, engages in the hard work of learning and truth seeking, and that because of this work, it serves a nation.