From the President
At this writing (December, 2021), almost two years after the first cases of Covid-19 were identified in the United States, we remain in a struggle between the resilience of human beings and the resilience of the virus. Sooner or later, the former will prevail over the latter. But while we wait, some of the damage the pandemic has inflicted on students, faculty, and institutions of higher learning is becoming clear:
- The pandemic has greatly accelerated the stratification of U.S. higher education. What was already a gap between have- and have-not institutions has widened into a gulf. Elite private—and some flagship public—institutions have combined austerity measures with unprecedented gains in endowment returns (sometimes in the billions of dollars) and have emerged with an array of opportunities to invest in current services and new initiatives. By contrast, fragile liberal arts colleges as well as public open-access institutions suffered debilitating tuition losses as enrollments declined. These institutions now face significant—even existential—financial challenges.
- The pandemic has intensified the mental health crisis among college students. Students enrolled in college during the period of “Zoom” and “social distancing” have been battered by feelings of isolation and anxiety, while many high school juniors and seniors who had expected to move on smoothly to college have either postponed their dreams (enrollment in community colleges fell around 10%) or arrived at college with deficient preparation—sometimes severely so—both academically and psychologically.
- The pandemic drove a great deal of teaching out of the physical classroom into the virtual classroom. Many questions remain about which aspects of this transformation are temporary or permanent—or, more likely, some complex and unstable combination of the two.
In the face of these realities, we at the Teagle Foundation remain resolute on behalf of our mission to advance the cause of liberal education for all students, with special attention to those who face limited opportunities that have been further limited by a disease that is, among other things, exposing cruel inequities in our society.
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One way we seek to serve underserved students is through our effort to establish a national network of Knowledge for Freedom (KFF) programs. These programs invite high school students from low-income families to engage with humanity’s deepest questions about leading lives of purpose and civic responsibility. KFF provides college-level summer seminars on classic texts led by college faculty with the assistance of undergraduate students who serve as tutors and mentors, as well as academic year programs that help with the college-preparation and application process that can be daunting to students whose families have not previously sent a child to college. Many excellent “bridge” or “pipeline” programs exist in our country with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)— and while we applaud all efforts to achieve greater equity, diversity, and inclusion in these increasingly important fields, there is an equally urgent need to promote educational opportunity in history, philosophy, literature, and the arts. Young people need to become informed about how human beings have debated and developed ideas about meaning, responsibility, beauty, and value. These are among the issues at stake in the fields we call the “humanities,” and they must be part of the education of as many young people as possible if we are to sustain a healthy democracy.
A second Teagle initiative entitled Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts, in partnership with the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, is designed to broaden opportunity for students whose chances to experience a liberal education are too often blocked by limited resources or simply by a lack of reliable information. Working with consortia in eight states, we are seeking to facilitate transfer from community colleges to four-year private liberal arts colleges for the many students who dream of going on from the A.A. degree to earn a baccalaureate degree. All too often, such students believe that private colleges are beyond their reach. Those who hope to make the leap are often discouraged by impediments such as course alignment, credit loss, and other bureaucratic obstacles that become financially burdensome by lengthening time to degree, and can be eliminated without compromising quality or institutional autonomy.
Under the rubric of our initiative on Education for American Civic Life, we are giving careful thought to how our colleges can help to counter the polarization, anger, and intolerance that are poisoning American civic life. These grants reflect our conviction that a major purpose of college is to help students comprehend the promise, however unfulfilled, of our nation’s founding ideals—representative government, individual liberty, the rule of law—and that such comprehension requires a grasp of the lived experience of people who may live in physical proximity to one another but who inhabit vastly different social, cultural, and economic worlds.
In partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, we are also pressing forward with our Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative—an ambitious effort to promote the reform and revitalization of General Education as an indispensable part of every student’s college experience. Since its inception roughly a year ago, 30 institutions around the country—from Stanford University to SUNY Onondaga Community College—are in the planning or implementation phases of adapting the Cornerstone model pioneered at Purdue University, whereby first-year students, most of whom aim for a technical or pre-professional degree, encounter the salutary shock of great works of literature, philosophy and art under the guidance of faculty devoted to broadening their minds and helping them develop as whole persons. As my colleague Loni Bordoloi Pazich and I wrote in Inside Higher Ed, we feel that the Cornerstone initiative is more urgent than ever. The pandemic has vividly confirmed how urgently faculty are needed to engage undergraduates with humanistic questions. We are encouraged not only by the large student interest in Cornerstone: Learning for Living, but by early signs that it is creating new teaching opportunities for recent humanities Ph.D.s, who have been facing long odds against achieving careers in teaching and scholarship.
It would be a great national misfortune if the pandemic were to persuade yet more students, faculty, academic leaders, and legislators of something that too many already believe: namely, that liberal education is a luxury that should be reserved for the privileged few. In fact, the imperative of liberal education has never been more evident—and no one should be foreclosed from experiencing it. The pandemic has raised not only scientific and technical questions about the etiology, behavior, and treatment of disease, but also equally difficult moral, political, and historical problems about how to comprehend and respond to its effects: How should the risk of illness be balanced with the cost of quarantines and closures? How can individual liberties be reconciled with the public good? What is the meaning of national sovereignty when pathogens cross borders in a flash? How can we explain the history of our own nation’s savage inequities in healthcare and quality of life? These are humanistic questions, and we must prepare young people for thinking about such questions without ignorance, rancor, or prejudice.
No one should doubt that the aftermath of this crisis will be the prelude to the next. Whether in normal times or times of emergency, a collective reckoning on what we value as a society will be impossible without the context and capacities cultivated by a liberal education. We at the Teagle Foundation believe that our colleges and universities must recommit themselves to sustaining hope, and to defeating the universal human temptation to seek hope in one kind of absolutism or another.
--Andrew Delbanco, President