From the Chair
DEDICATION: Soon I will conclude ten years of service on the Teagle Foundation’s Board of Directors, including serving as chair since 2021. I want to dedicate this last “From the Chair” letter to Judith Shapiro, former president of the Teagle Foundation, who in spring 1995 was in the first year of her presidency at Barnard College. In April of that year, she offered me the position of Provost and Dean of the Faculty. Accepting her offer was an enormous honor then. It has made me grateful to her for every day since.
From the start, Judith and I shared a belief in the power of women’s colleges and the distinctive character of Barnard, a liberal arts college located in New York City and affiliated with Columbia. The College had been rescued from absorption into Columbia by Judith’s predecessor, Ellen Futter, but there were many challenges to face. Perhaps because we had training and mindsets that had been shaped by our respective disciplines, we came to see our differences in approach as our strengths. With the strong group of other senior administrators she assembled, we made measurable progress towards better financial security and admissions results, improved records of tenure for faculty, especially junior women faculty, and many capital projects.
After she retired from Barnard in 2008, we kept in touch about the topics, people and causes about which we cared. Those conversations continued as she became a member of the Board of Directors of the Teagle Foundation. Then came the surprise call from her with an inquiry as to whether I would be interested in being nominated to the Teagle Board. “Wow,” I thought, “What a wonderful opportunity for us to be working closely together—again—this time for a foundation that invests in higher education.” In due time, the Board considered my candidacy and votes were taken. I then joined the Board soon after Judith became Teagle’s new president.
Our professional and personal lives have been intertwined for almost thirty years now, and very full years they have been. I will always be most proud of the shared trust and respect we had for each other during our Barnard years as we carried out the roles of president and provost.
The years we overlapped on the Teagle Board have also been very meaningful and icing on a many-layered cake. I am very grateful for this additional chapter in my life where we have worked to advance the Foundation’s mission with our dedicated and insightful Teagle colleagues on the Board, including the current president, Andy Delbanco, and our resourceful and imaginative staff.
Throughout these years, Judith’s reservoir of curiosity and enjoyment about all the peoples of the world were hallmarks of her agile mind and a reliable source of infectious humor and optimism that lifted the spirits of so many every day. Thank you, Judith, many times over, for inviting me to ride the wave with you.
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I wrote this chair’s message for the 2024 annual report while my husband and I uprooted ourselves from our multi-storied home of 40 years and right-sized ourselves into a lovely, bright apartment on one floor, only five miles away. While it has been a stressful period, we have been delighted to find many artifacts of our previous lives. For me, this has meant items from my early years as a faculty member (grade books and exams from classes I taught and publications from my lab), and later, some of the many reports of task forces and planning committees for which I had been responsible.
After our move, I also paged through the binders containing the speeches I had given during my sixteen years as Barnard’s Provost, at the occasional retirement parties and memorial services for faculty whose lives we celebrated to the honors events where individual achievements of faculty were recognized. Across them there were common themes: a focus on the many roles the faculty played and the purposes of a liberal arts education -- in the context of Barnard College. Along with its motto, “Following the Way of Reason,” Barnard’s mission affirms that graduates are “prepared to lead lives that are professionally satisfying and successful, personally fulfilling, and enriched by a love of learning.” Here’s where there is such consonance between Barnard College and the Teagle Foundation. Both institutions wonder and worry about the deliverables of a liberal arts education, the multiple responsibilities that faculty take on as they attend to teaching and mentoring their students, and the imperative of contributing to the American higher education community and American society.
To further the point of consonance, let me expand upon an event in March 2000 when I was introducing the winner of the coveted Emily Gregory Award, given “for excellence in teaching and for devotion and service to the students of Barnard College.” The setting was a candlelit dinner where the award citation was authored and read by a student. My remarks included words from Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet, first published in the US in 1923 when he was about 40.
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The winner of the 2000 award was an exemplar of wise teaching, of leading her students to the thresholds of their own minds. She intentionally supported them to creatively use their minds and empowered them to go beyond. By “beyond,” I mean to take responsibility for their accumulated learnings and to put them into practice, as this faculty member demonstrated when she invited her students to take formal roles in an academic conference Barnard sponsored on campus.
The open question for higher education, then and now, is how does the wise teacher empower her students? And what environments make the promise of independent thought a reality, supporting a threshold crossed or a dawning of new knowledge?
As noted in the Dedication which began this message, I owe so much to Judith Shapiro who was instrumental in my joining the Teagle Foundation’s board in 2014. I was drawn immediately to the Foundation’s mission statement which reads: The Teagle Foundation works to support and strengthen liberal arts education, which we see as fundamental to meaningful work, effective citizenship, and a fulfilling life. I have found abundant stimulation and deep satisfaction from serving on Teagle’s board and on its program committee. Becoming chair of the board in July 2021 was an enormous privilege.
We at Teagle remain convinced that, in a time of intense polarization, the humanities are essential for promoting the open, informed dialogue and critical thinking that characterize a liberal arts education and that power a healthy democracy. While today’s universities often find themselves portrayed as battlegrounds of unrest, they are, in truth, essential incubators for the empathy and understanding needed to bridge divides across diverse perspectives. And while there is intense focus on today’s elite colleges and universities, in reality, those institutions only serve about one percent of U.S. undergraduates. To meet the broader needs, the Foundation’s intentions are to engage all types of institutions: private and public; research universities; four-year liberal arts; and community colleges—in all regions and across the rural and urban continuum.
We are investing in institutions to support faculty, enabling them to acquire the skills and mindsets of a “wise teacher.” Such “wise teachers” concentrate on guiding students to the thresholds of their own minds—to acquire knowledge and experience that will equip them to live lives of purpose and kindness, of consequence and cooperation, and of honor and humility.
Our mission is to change expectations and behaviors that have been modeled on an all-knowing “teacher” who imparts fixed “truths” to students perceived to be “empty vessels.” This of course is an extreme caricature, but one with enough truth in it that we must start where we are and dismantle the longstanding systems that have perpetuated the status quo. This construct has not served us well, not the students and not our society either.
Teagle grants are provided to equip institutions to transform their classrooms and campuses into sites of intellectual curiosity and debate, where diverse ideas are not just welcomed, but are expected and explored, wrestled with and celebrated. The students are, by definition, active participants who have a stake in their own learning and that of everyone else in the classroom.
The Teagle Foundation is prepared to lead a charge to revitalize the humanities and to promote a more thoughtful, engaged, and empathetic society. The moment is ripe for action. We invite our fellow travelers in higher education, philanthropy and elsewhere to work together with us to address the most pressing needs of our time and to seize this opportunity to create a brighter future for all.
It is with my deep gratitude to colleagues at Barnard College and the Teagle Foundation and with excitement about what the future may bring that I welcome you to read this 2024 annual report of the Teagle Foundation, as it strives further toward education in service of meaningful work, effective citizenship, and a fulfilling life.
—Elizabeth S. Boylan, Chair