Letter from the President
Acknowledging That We “May Be Mistaken”: The Heart of a Liberal Arts Education
For me—and I’m sure for many of you reading this letter—the academic year 2023-24 year was a split-screen experience. On one side were the sounds and images of civil discussion of the kind I’ve been grateful to witness in classes led by teachers supported through one Teagle grant initiative or another. On the other side were slogans and insults hurled from this or that social media platform, amplified in the press, and yes, heard on the lawns, or (more typically) outside the gates, of the university where I teach as well as many others. It’s difficult to merge these conflicting impressions into a coherent picture.
I had this divided experience on my own campus on the last day of classes—Monday, April 29, 2024. I was teaching in Hamilton Hall, the main classroom building of Columbia University’s main undergraduate college. Except for the protest encampment visible through the windows, accompanied by sporadic speechmaking and snatches of music, the day didn’t feel unusual. I knew that my students held divergent views—some very strong, even passionate—of the terrible war in Gaza and of the protests it provoked. But all of them behaved respectfully toward one another as we discussed, also from divergent perspectives, the issues at stake in the course—namely, the history, present state, and prospects of equity and access in U.S. higher education.
The next day, Hamilton Hall was broken into by a group of protesters, who renamed it “Hinds Hall” in honor of a Palestinian child killed in Gaza. A few hours later, at the request of the university president, the New York Police Department cleared the building. Several dozen persons were arrested, of whom perhaps half were Columbia students. The university enrolls roughly thirty-five thousand students, but the small number got big headlines.
Much of the internal response to these events has been unworthy of an academic community. There’s been too little acknowledgment that the institution has been inflamed by a combustible mix of idealism, outrage, ignorance, conformity, fear, and compassion. One side says it’s been a great awakening to crimes against humanity in which our nation and our institutions are complicit. The other side says it’s an outburst of antisemitism, which is always latent, needing only a thin pretext to become virulent again. There have been voices of moderation and reason as well, but they get much less notice than the shouters on both sides.
As for the external response, there are many press reports that universities are riven between “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Israel” factions. I understand the intended meaning of those terms, but they encourage the inference that one cannot be pro-Palestine and pro-Israel at the same time. In fact, we all know thoughtful and informed people with a wide range of convictions about the tragic history that has led to so much suffering on both sides, and with a wide range of ideas about how to alleviate the suffering, who count themselves as pro-both.
It is irresponsible to fling around slogans like “from the River to the Sea” or “Zionism is racism” without a good-faith effort to imagine how those words sound to Jewish students who may have had friends or family murdered or kidnapped in the atrocity of October 7, or whose grandparents or great-grandparents, after a major European power attempted to eradicate them, found hope in a hopeless world when the state of Israel was established as a sanctuary for the Jewish people. It is also true that the reflexive charge of antisemitism against protestors and their supporters is an inadequate, and sometimes slanderous, account of what’s been happening on our campuses. Many young people of diverse backgrounds and convictions, including Jewish students, are searching, without animus or prejudice, for ways to express their sense of helpless outrage at the death and mutilation of innocent Palestinian children.
Columbia University has been my academic home for almost forty years and a conspicuous site of “radical” student action for more than half a century. So, looking for help in trying to understand what’s been happening, I found myself going to back to a great Columbia historian who lived through the last major episode of campus unrest. In June, 1968, a few weeks after police had cleared an earlier occupation from Hamilton Hall, Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a broken university. He defended the freedom of protestors to confront “difficult and inflammatory things,” including “the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” He also warned that “the very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken.”
That injunction—to consider that we “may be mistaken”—is perhaps the best short statement I know of the meaning and purpose of a liberal arts education, one that fosters humility by encouraging the recognition of how much we have to learn about the world and about ourselves. This kind of education—we might call it education for democracy—stresses the imperative of listening to multiple points of view on difficult questions, including those of people whom we distrust or even detest. While the furor was building over the past few months, we at the Teagle Foundation have had the honor of working with educators and institutions committed to this kind of education. The urgency of the work has only been confirmed by recent events.
I am grateful to report that despite all the bitterness and bewilderment, the ideal of liberal arts education is alive and well at many institutions throughout the United States. Evidence of its good health was supplied in abundance over the same months that the furor was building. To mention just a few examples (any selection leaves out much more than it includes), I think of the convening that took place at Stanford University last fall of Cornerstone: Learning for Living grantees, where I heard several extraordinary talks from faculty engaged in revitalizing general education—that portion of the curriculum through which incoming students, before committing to a specialized major, are invited to think about what they hope to discover in their college years about themselves and the world. We heard from grantees within big systems such as Penn State and from community colleges such as Austin Community College who are all engaged in the work of introducing their students to enduring humanistic questions of the sort that are at stake in powerful texts—questions about rights, responsibility, love, suffering, beauty, conflict—all within the context of coherent general education programs. A few weeks later faculty from across the country ranging from George Fox University in Oregon to Kent State University in Ohio gathered in New Haven for a convening of grantees in our Knowledge for Freedom initiative, co-hosted by Professor Bryan Garsten, founder of Yale’s Citizens, Thinkers, Writers program, which serves rising high school seniors from the New Haven public schools who come onto campus for intensive study of major texts that raise enduring human questions.
A few weeks after that I attended a discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, featuring two of our Cornerstone leaders, professors Noah Strote, historian at North Carolina State University, and Rewa Burnham, literature scholar at Trinity Washington University, who described how they engage students in civil dialogue across lines of difference. Professor Strote spoke of how novel it is, in these angry times, for students to discover that “arguing is not fighting.” Professor Burnham spoke movingly about how she uses texts to bring together students from Washington’s longstanding African-American community with students who have arrived recently as immigrants, and to show that cultural differences need not be barriers to mutual understanding. Finally, I think of a riveting panel discussion at the AAC&U conference in Providence, RI, on the future of general education, in which attendees heard infectiously upbeat accounts from several of our Cornerstone leaders—Sarah Igo of Vanderbilt University, Cassandra Newby-Alexander of Norfolk State University, Amanda Tucker of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and Melinda Zook of Purdue University—of how faculty colleagues at their home institutions have rallied to the cause of teaching powerful primary texts in an accessible way, and how responsive students have been.
This rapid survey of a few highlights of the past year necessarily leaves out a great many other encouragements. I should not conclude without noting that our collaboration with the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations as part of our Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts initiative reached an important milestone with an agreement—co-funded with ECMC Foundation, Belk Endowment, and Gates Foundation—for North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities to serve as a testbed for new technology to facilitate transfer from community colleges to independent colleges. The goal is to widen the range of options for community-college students seeking to earn a four-year degree.
Finally, I can’t fail to mention the visit I made on a stormy day last spring in New York City to another grantee, the Moynihan Center at City College, where I met with a diverse group of young people of incandescent intelligence who could not have been more civil, engaged, and excited as we worked our way through a text by Herman Melville that raises hard questions about suffering, care, and responsibility. The weather that day did a good imitation of a monsoon. The classroom windows rattled, my (putatively storm-proof) umbrella was destroyed by the wind on my way uptown, and on my return trip downtown the subway flooded—but I felt exuberant all the way home. It was a soul-bracing reminder that we don’t really grasp the value of our work until we meet the students whom we serve.
In sum, yes, academia is under unprecedented attack from within and without. Some of the reasons are substantive and arguably legitimate, some are cynical and manifestly opportunistic. Yet I have no doubt that we will get through these dark times, and that the wonderful faculty with whom we work, and the students whom they serve, will lead us out of the darkness.
—Andrew Delbanco, President