Letter from the President
I find that a good antidote to anxiety in these fraught times is to spend time with resilient students and the passionate faculty who teach them. This was confirmed for me on a recent visit to one of the Knowledge for Freedom programs supported by the Teagle Foundation. On a hot July morning under a tent on a venerable urban campus, I joined a group of rising high school seniors from low-income families who gathered to discuss Plato’s Crito and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Anyone present that day heard free yet disciplined debate in which texts were read closely (students, teaching each other, cited passages to bolster or challenge assertions by their peers), claims of self-interest were posed against those of the public good, both merits and defects of democracy were examined, and issues from the past came alive as urgent questions in the present. No one could have walked away from that experience with a shred of cynicism about what higher education, at its best, can mean for individuals and for our society.
Colleges and universities and the dedicated people who make them rise or fall face daunting challenges: systemic inequities, anti-intellectualism, public distrust, financial and emotional stress, to name just a few. Nothing is to be gained by pretending that these challenges are transient or easily manageable. But as I enter my fifth year as president of the Teagle Foundation, I am more convinced than ever that with personal leadership from powerful educators, we can overcome them.
As for the specifics of Teagle’s approach to these challenges, we remain committed to—
-
the growing network of more than 20 institutions now hosting Knowledge for Freedom programs;
-
the expanding cohort of institutions (also more than 20, representing some 15,000 students) seeking, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, to revitalize General Education through Cornerstone: Learning for Living;
-
Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts, developed with colleagues at the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, intended to facilitate transfer for students who hope to move from two-year community colleges to four-year liberal arts colleges (Transfer Pathways now reaches into 12 states);
-
our Education for American Civic Life initiative, which seeks to engage with students during their college years on fundamental questions about American democracy in the context of such disparate communities as Philadelphia, Boulder, Chicago, and Wilmington, NC.
These efforts are growing because of irrepressible faculty who, with support from their deans and presidents, are pressing on to make a difference in the lives of students, i.e., in our collective future.
These colleagues embolden me to say that we are at a turning point—a point, that is, where each of these instances not only represents a model for how to deepen and expand access to liberal education but belongs to what now may be called an incipient movement. We thank everyone who has joined us and look forward to much more collaborative work ahead.
Finally, I want to say that the Teagle Foundation is expanding its commitment to its hometown—New York City—through a range of grants, including, for example, the New York City Leaders Fellowship recently launched at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership at the City College of New York (CCNY). We look forward to following these present CCNY students as they study the history of democracy and the civic structures of New York City and become the future leaders of New York and beyond.
I am greatly privileged to be working with so many tireless educators who share our aims and hopes.
--Andrew Delbanco, President