From earliest childhood, I wanted to be a scientist. “Santa” brought me an inexpensive microscope when I was 7. I drove my parents crazy, dragging them over to the microscope to see a succession of samples that I had positioned under the 25x lens. Later in my childhood I had a chemistry set; I collected rocks (too many of which I neglected to take out of my pockets before my shorts went into the wash, to the great consternation of my mother); I pursued frogs and chipmunks with reckless abandon; I had a small telescope and almost froze in the Canadian winters, staring at a clear sky in subzero ..read more

Animal behaviorists and psychologists tell us that athletic competitions are symbolic warfare. In a simplistic parallel, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees (substitute the name of your favorite teams as you wish) are today what Athens and Sparta were in ancient Greece, or Venice and Genoa were in the Renaissance, or any number of Central and South American city-states were in the years before colonization by Europeans. Sports teams are tribal identifiers, uniting their “fans” (allegedly an abbreviation of “fanatic”) into an “army.” Members of the “army” often display their support by ..read more

(My essay in the Sunday Providence Journal, June 3, 2018) By now, many millennials and members of Generation Z are accustomed to being labeled as lazy, entitled, self-absorbed. But as we conclude another graduation season here in Rhode Island, I’m reminded that those generalizations overlook the idealism and drive, the passion and compassion of the young graduates I see crossing the stage to get diplomas. Case in point: Roger Williams University students are taking on the hard and thankless task of challenging totalitarian governments by advocating for scholars who have been thrown in prison o ..read more

A recent trio of announcements relating to higher education emerged separately but deserve to be linked. By connecting these breaking news stories, we can see just how insidiously the quest for “excellence” has eclipsed every other competing social value, even in the world of higher education. First are the annual reports of high-achieving students being crushed by learning that they were not offered admission to the elite colleges they had chosen — and that represented the essential next step toward the successful lives they had imagined for themselves. (This year’s letters to the editor ..read more

Part 8: Forging a New Social Contract For the past several weeks, I have endeavored to provide a guided tour to the history of higher education in America, and its connection to the national economy. It has been a bumpy ride. Expectations for higher education have waxed and waned over the years, as higher education policy and practices on the one hand, and economic aspirations and requirements on the other hand, have been thrown out of equilibrium because they were changing at very different rates. But there is no question that we are, today, at a moment of serious disequilibrium. In Part 6 of ..read more

A growing number of colleges and universities are sending words of assurance to next year’s freshmen, some of whom have expressed concern that their participation in peaceful demonstrations against gun violence could somehow lead to the withdrawal of offers of admission at the college of their choice. Roger Williams University has a long and strong commitment to social justice. Accordingly, I want to assure today’s high school students that your participation in peaceful protests not only is an appropriate exercise of your First Amendment rights, but also in no way jeopardizes your acceptance ..read more

Part 7: We Have the Skill — But Do We Have the Will? For the past six weeks, these essays have been examining the relationship between our national economy and the level of educational attainment of our national workforce. But before we transition from what we need to change to how we can actually achieve our higher education goals — which are both to strengthen the national economy and to provide better-paying jobs for many more people — let’s review just why this issue is so important. As I noted earlier in this series, the percentage of adult Americans with a four-year degree at the end of ..read more

Part 6: What We Need to Do - Working Backward from Desired Outcomes So let’s take stock of where we stand. About 32 percent of the American adult population (36 percent of the workforce) has at least a bachelor’s degree, and that percentage has been increasing steadily since 1960, growing by about 0.5 percent per year. But according to Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce [1], our economy needs more than 70 percent of the workforce to be educated at the bachelor’s degree or greater. At the current rate of growth, it will take us more than 70 years to hit that tar ..read more

Part 5: Is There a Disconnect between What America Needs and What Colleges Actually Do? In my previous essay, I cited an op-ed by Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, in which he called for a doubling of the number of college graduates, in order to close the skills gap and produce the educated workers needed by today’s economy. Mr. Bok urged a massive expansion of public institutions (and their funding) to achieve this ambitious goal. But it’s well known that almost all states have been moving in the opposite direction for many years. State appropriations for higher educ ..read more

Part 4: How Many American Adults Should Have a College Education — and How (and by Whom) Is That Question Answered? A quick history of education The history of education is fascinating, if only because it can be seen as evidence of how the powerful have repeatedly used limiting access to education as a weapon to deny rights and opportunities to the underclass. Let me restate that point, because it is important: Historically, the expansion and enhancement of literacy rarely resulted from a deliberate policy of benevolence but instead occurred because at various times expanded literacy ..read more