It is Super Tuesday, and a helpful word or two addressed to the next president of the United States, whomever she or he may be, seems appropriate. Here, then, is an open letter, adapted from an article I wrote for a recent issue of Currents, published by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education:
To the President:
The most important thing you can do for U.S. higher education is to demonstrate, by your actions as much as your words, that you truly understand and cherish how consequential the contributions of our colleges and universities are to the well-being of our republic and democracy.
Many of my colleagues might offer you specific advice about making Pell Grants more generous; or making it easier for foreign scholars to teach and study here; or about increasing funding for research and fellowships at universities, particularly through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
But what higher education needs most from you are personal, visible, and frequent displays of love of learning, a respect for scholarship, and an understanding of what professors and students — and those of us who support them through administration — do.
A speech about the importance of education — especially one that cites the higher salaries of college graduates — is harmless, but it risks sounding like a platitude, however earnestly meant. That college graduates earn more money is a truism. It might be better to state that education is essential to citizenship, U.S. policy, and leadership.
I do value and comprehend your appreciation and understanding of higher education, but I want something more from you. I want your energetic enthusiasm.
It’s melancholy to think that, while a case can be made for Bill Clinton, the last U.S. president to show memorable joy for the blessings of scholarship may have been John F. Kennedy, 45 years ago. He invited 49 Noble laureates to dinner at the White House in 1962, looked at the assembly, and announced, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” That witty line underscored Kennedy’s serious affection for, and determined confidence in, learning and intellectual achievement. It was symbolism accompanied by action.
Since then, it has become common for politicians to behave and speak as if they had never been inside a schoolhouse, let alone a university. I doubt, however, that populist syntax and meandering sentences are the indented legacies of Jacksonian democracy. The allusive eloquence of Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Kennedy demonstrated that a learned leader (self-taught in Lincoln’s case) could be a great leader and, by being so, set an example for the good of learning — but not as a mere example of learning as a marketable good.
Higher education is not the handmaiden of higher earnings and competitiveness. Turning our colleges and universities into trade schools would diminish their possibility. Training is good, but education is not training, at least not exclusively. Education enables us to make the acquaintance of our own minds and minds of those who went before us. I think there is no harm in adding that learning for its own sake is a delight and, because of the serendipity of discovery, often produces an unexpected payoff.
What more can I say? I hope that your words and actions will show your enthusiasm for and commitment to higher education. Let me end with a cautionary note, from H.G. Wells’ writing 90 years ago: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
