When my children went off to college, I had the parental role of assisting them with their respective moves into the freshman dorms on campus. Two colleges, two experiences. But since both children were healthy and able-bodied young men, the heavy lifting was kept to a minimum, allowing me to mostly observe rather than schlep.

Observation #1 – Freshman dorms have not changed very much in 50 years. Anxiety fills the faces of all the freshmen; parental expressions range from relief (children are now out of the house!) to ambivalence (children are now out of the house?) to concern (who will be watching the children who are now out of the house?). The kids can’t wait for their parents to leave.

Observation #2 – As with many things in life, size doesn’t matter. Dorm rooms are small and getting smaller, or perhaps they remain the same size but more people fill them, I’m not sure. But sure...

The Final Four have played their last games of the season with fierce competitive spirit, the contest won by the men from Kansas and the women from Tennessee. But the madness of mid-March and early April is not only reserved for the NCAA — for this season is also lead-up to commencement and the sprint to secure the ultimate graduation speaker is underway.

“Back in the day,” a phrase I have grown fond of saying now that I’ve entered the current stage of my career, commencement ceremonies were pleasant affairs, designed to honor the students who had completed their course of study and earned their degrees with a modest, if classic, celebration: lines of graduates in academic regalia, processing two-by-two along with members of the faculty and staff, led by the head marshal and her mace, flags waving and Sir Edward Elgar’s music echoing from the instruments of the school’s marching...

Amidst all the chatter about the anxiety of admissions and the challenge that colleges and universities have deciding which students ought to be allowed to attend their institution or alternatively matriculate at Harvard, we seem to have overlooked that it is rating season once again.

U.S. News and World Report’s April 7-14 issue tells us about “America’s Best Graduate Schools” and provides a roster of law, business, medical and other professional schools listed 1,2,3 and 100 in the case of the law schools and other numbers for other disciplines. Just as the high school seniors and applicants to graduate and professional schools have been wringing their hands waiting to hear if they got the fat or the thin envelop, the green light or the red light, are they going to New Haven next year or who knows where, the schools...

Two decades ago when I first began as president of George Washington University, I looked for a way to reach out to the people of the city in which my institution is located. I wanted to demonstrate that GW was of Washington as well as in Washington, where it had been sited since 1821.

Following advice I received from the late legendary President Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, about how to introduce oneself to the African-American community, I attended Sunday services at many black churches on a regular basis for several months. I soon got to know lots of people and made friendships that continue to this day. Pastors would regularly introduce me to the church at the conclusion of the service and ask me to say a few words. Although the congregants represented all socio-economic backgrounds, there was a proportion that might not necessarily find their way to attend GW with its...

Media coverage about the American perspective on higher education is making me a little itchy. For example, this week’s (April 4, 2008) issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has an above-the-fold front page story that reports a national split on government control of tuition. The sub-head talks about dealing with “college costs.” We have to understand that the words “price” and “cost” are not interchangeable.

When Harvard buys a book for its library, allowing for special circumstances, it pays more or less the same price to the publisher that a small community college pays. And this is true about all the stuff that universities need for their laboratories, their studios, and so on. Equipment and chemicals have a market price. In the case of Harvard the price, also known as tuition, doesn’t reflect the cost because the...

A few weeks ago, I suggested that it might be useful to consider whether we really had to use eight years, four undergraduate and four graduate, to turn a high-school senior into an M.D. I pointed out a variety of programs around the country that had successfully achieved the goal in six or seven years with no apparent diminished quality.

Today I want to propose that we may be taking too long to educate lawyers. There was a time in the not terribly distant past when it was possible to enroll in law school without having to complete a bachelors degree. Indeed, there were some states where one could sit for a bar exam without having attended to law school at all; you simply had to clerk for a designated period of time in a law office under the supervision of a member of the bar.

Within my lifetime, graduates of law schools received bachelor of law degrees. Andthen one day the...

Spring has hit Washington with the opening of cherry blossoms, signaling the onset of the tourist season. People come in droves, often in buses, usually in groups from schools across the country, Boy and Girl Scout troops, church affiliations, garden clubs, professional and trade associations, marathon runners, and early retirees — all ready to get a crash course on American history, democracy, the founding fathers and mothers. They look at documents, art, walk the Mall, stare at Lincoln, Jefferson and climb the Washington Monument. And if they are clever, they get off the Mall and see some of Washington’s great neighborhoods filled with historic houses, museums, restaurants and self guided tours. You can check it all out at Cultural Tourism DC’s web site.

Another group traveling the town are prospective college freshmen and their...

The following is reprinted from the March 18, 2008 issue of the Baltimore Examiner.

I recently concluded a 30-year period as a university president. If my own recent experience is telling me the truth, the departure of a university president combines the joyful and the bittersweet. The retiring president feels the joy in accomplishments over the years and liberation from a demanding job while the bitter sweetness is the loss of defining and rewarding work and of fellowship. The university community’s feelings mirror the president’s, joy for the liberation and success, sadness at losing him or her. I imagine this is how Bill Brody and the Johns Hopkins community are feeling now.

President Brody’s successes, especially in opening up the university to the...

Days after 9/11, George Washington University, located only minutes from the Pentagon decided that in addition to its conventional campus police, it needed a full-time person thinking about security in the cosmic sense. We recruited a retired Navy captain who had during his career been among other things responsible for the administration of the Norfolk Naval Station. A Ph.D., he has both an academic and applied sensibility and brings us a perspective that goes far beyond the historic protect and serve that we had looked to from our own university police department and the city’s Metropolitan District Police. Our campus is near the State Department and the White House, each with their own security people, which provides a comfort factor.

Reader’s Digest recently released a ranking of some of the “safest and least secure” college campuses — this followed on the shooting at Northern...

When I was growing up there seemed to be newspapers everywhere. There were morning newspapers and evening newspapers. My mother read one newspaper; my father read another. In addition to multiple daily papers that were sold from newsstands, candy stores, and subway kiosks everywhere, there were weekly newspapers. Kids on bicycles tossed papers at the front doors and upstairs porches of houses all over town. Some papers had a liberal view, others a centrist bent, and still others a conservative direction; and they were published in many languages, serving the melting pot of the city. My grandparents read in Yiddish in addition to English; my neighbors found the ones in Polish. Newspapers were part of the fabric of the city, holding neighborhoods together and giving the city its texture. For the large immigrant community, reading newspapers was an introduction to America — to politics, ...