Sometimes life comes full circle. Saturday night I found myself sitting in a tuxedo, drinking a glass of red wine, and looking out at the New York skyline from the Great Room on Ellis Island. Yes, that Ellis Island. The evening’s event was a fund raiser for an organization established in 1986 known as the National Ethnic Coalition (NECO). Each year the group honors about 100 people, paying tribute to the many groups that compose the American population. The organization raises money and tries to do good, building as they put it, “strong leaders for the future,” they support the educational programs at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, ethnic and cultural events around the country, health and education services for children and emergency relief efforts worldwide.

They celebrate the immigrant experience and they actually do...

Make a list of the constituencies on most college or university campuses by their population size, and you’ll find students at the head of the list, representing the largest component, followed by the faculty, then staff, and at the tail will be the administrators, the smallest cohort. Rank the various groups by their visibility in the media, and you’ll find the smallest group — the administrators (most often represented by the president) — is at the head, a result no doubt of the rephrased quip, “here is where the buck stops and the headlines begin.” Most often the president, as the official spokesperson of the campus, is the one quoted in a campus story — in part because of the media’s search for a reliable (accountable) source and also because campus directors of public affairs are well trained to put the face and word of their president out front. Read about Harvard, and Drew Faust...

It has been recently observed that as newspapers downsize their budgets reporting on education has been suffering. There are fewer and fewer reporters whose beats are institutions of learning. Coverage of education, including schools as well as colleges and universities, is increasingly thinner on the ground. And, the truth be told, except for a few places like Boston, where higher education is a local industry, or New York City and Washington (cities were multiple colleges reside), the coverage has never been all that good.

For many years, a troika of women have been writing cogently about education in those three cities: Marcella Bombardieri, The Boston Globe; Karen Aronson, The New York Times; and Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post. On too many papers, all too often, editors view education as an entry-level position. Likewise, the reporters covering education often view...

Recently, the Wall Street Journal posted a list of the 20 most influential “gurus” (a word used interchangeably with “thinkers”) in the business world, the 19 men (and one woman) that CEO’s and other business executives say they have found give them “easily digestible advice,” primarily on three hot themes, “globalization, motivation and innovation.”

For those of you who also like easily digestible tidbits and may not have time to click on the link to read the full article, here are the top five on the list and their latest books: Gary Hamel, The Future of Management; Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded (out this summer); Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought; Malcolm Gladwell, Blink; and Howard Gardner, Responsibility at Work (editor).

Included as a sidebar is an explanation of the methodology...

Almost all of us can remember America’s reaction to 9/11. In the days following the horrendous event many defensive initiatives were taken and, since two of the perpetrators were foreign students, one reaction was to restrict access to America’s colleges and universities. Barriers were imposed overseas, visas became difficult if not impossible to get. Personnel in American embassies were frosty, if not outright rude, to inquiries from those interested in enrolling as undergraduate or graduate students. While traveling in China numerous students told me about their visa problems. Later, in a meeting in Beijing with our ambassador he acknowledged the unusual circumstances and the problems they were causing both for his staff and Chinese nationals.

I myself received calls from several Middle Eastern ambassadors to the U.S. asking if I couldn’t be helpful to their constituents. The...

Last week I commented on students’ demands for “more” — greater and immediate access to faculty, more choices in residential living and dining, and better support services. The more students pay in tuition and fees, the greater the sense of entitlement.

But lately I’ve started to be concerned about something students don’t seem to want and that is, to use a vernacular phrase, homework. For the most part, students don’t mind coming to class but what they aren’t too keen on is reading.

My standard is my own freshman year, and the rigors of Columbia College’s core curriculum, the heart of which is Contemporary Civilization. We read continuously for 30 weeks, day and night, weekends included, in order to keep up with the syllabus. Devouring the classics (alas, in translation, though a few classmates, like...

Almost all of us can remember America’s reaction to 9/11. In the days following the horrendous event many defensive initiatives were taken and, since two of the perpetrators were foreign students, one reaction was to restrict access to America’s colleges and universities. Barriers were imposed overseas, visas became difficult if not impossible to get. Personnel in American embassies were frosty, if not outright rude, to inquiries from those interested in enrolling as undergraduate or graduate students. When I was traveling in China, numerous students told me about their visa problems. Later, in a meeting in Beijing with our ambassador, he acknowledged the unusual circumstances and the problems they were causing both for his staff and Chinese nationals.

I myself received calls from several Middle Eastern ambassadors to the U.S. asking if I couldn’t be helpful to their constituents....

Each year at the Passover Seder I take our family through a service that recalls the story of Exodus. And as many of you will recall, Moses led his people out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the desert and to the edge of Canaan. Because of misdeeds committed along the way, Moses is denied access to his people’s future homeland. Its story has been told religiously for millennia, and cinematically for over half a century. This year, the modern Moses died; Charlton Heston has finally entered the Promised Land.

Biblical epics orchestrated by Hollywood are indelibly etched into the psyches of movie-goers. Pyramids and Tutankhamen’s tomb aside, it remains difficult to visualize a Pharaoh who doesn’t resemble Yul Brenner or a Moses other than Heston, as portrayed in the 1956 film, The Ten Commandments. The story continues with Steven Spielberg’s 1981 story of Indiana Jones and the...

If you follow the media coverage of campuses from day to day, you find two alternative realities in conflict. We want it cheap. We want it gold-plated.

On one side, the students and their families appear to be overwhelmed with tuitions and the student-loan crisis. Who can blame them for expressing their concern? Lenders are tightening up the cash, tuition and fees for next fall are due to the bursars in only a couple of months, and the students have no place to turn. The Chronicle tells us that we are experiencing the highest level of anxiety over college prices in the past 35 years. Even with the relief offered by a handful of the wealthiest colleges to families earning six figures a year, the middle class is clearly caught in a vise. Congress is in the midst of trying to pass loan-guarantee legislation to protect lenders...

ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, recently hosted a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. for people interested in education issues within the local public policy community. In the audience were folks from special-interest groups, think tanks, government agencies, non-government organizations, the media and others. The announced agenda was “Higher Education Governance: Stewardship or Sham?”

The preface to the agenda reminded us of an assortment of controversies which arose in the last couple of years on America’s university campuses that gained national attention. Cited were the usual: the famous resignation in 2005 over the use of university funds by American University president Benjamin Ladner; the struggle over the governance of Dartmouth College, in which the board of trustees disputed the size and role of their membership; and, most...