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November-December 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 At institutions like Harvard and its peers, this revolution has been built on the notion that access should be based, as Jefferson urged, on talent, not circumstance. In the late 1960s, Harvard began sustained efforts to identify and attract outstanding minority students; in the 1970s, it gradually removed quotas limiting women to a quarter of the entering college class. Recently, Harvard has worked hard to send the message that the College welcomes families from across the economic spectrum. As a result, we’ve seen in the past three years a 33 percent increase in students from families with incomes under $60,000. Harvard’s dorms and Houses are the most diverse environments in which many of our students will ever live. Yet issues of access and cost persist—for middle-class families who suffer terrifying sticker shock, for graduate and professional students, who may incur enormous debt as they pursue service careers in fields where salaries are modest. As graduate training comes to seem almost as indispensable as the baccalaureate degree for mobility and success, the cost of these programs takes on even greater importance. The desirability and the perceived necessity of higher education have intensified the fears of many. Will I get in? Will I be able to pay? This anxiety expresses itself in both deep-seated resentment and nearly unrealizable expectations. Higher education cannot alone guarantee the mobility and equality at the heart of the American Dream. But we must fully embrace our obligation to be available and affordable. We must make sure that talented students are able to come to Harvard, that they know they are able to come, and that they know we want them here. We need to make sure that cost does not divert students from pursuing their passions and their dreams. But American anxiety about higher education is about more than just cost. The deeper problem is a widespread lack of understanding and agreement about what universities ought to do and be. Universities are curious institutions with varied purposes that they have neither clearly articulated nor adequately justified. Resulting public confusion, at a time when higher education has come to seem an indispensable social resource, has produced a torrent of demands for greater “accountability” from colleges and universities. Universities are indeed accountable. But we in higher education need to seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for. We are asked to report graduation rates, graduate-school admission statistics, scores on standardized tests intended to assess the “value added” of years in college, research dollars, numbers of faculty publications. But such measures cannot themselves capture the achievements, let alone the aspirations, of universities. Many of these metrics are important to know, and they shed light on particular parts of our undertaking. But our purposes are far more ambitious and our accountability thus far more difficult to explain. Let me venture a definition. The essence of a university is that it is uniquely accountable to the past and to the future—not simply, or even primarily, to the present. A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia, learning that shapes the future. A university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that must—and even ought to—conflict with a public’s immediate concerns and demands. Universities make commitments to the timeless, and these investments have yields we cannot predict and often cannot measure. Universities are stewards of living tradition—in Widener and Houghton and our 88 other libraries, in the Fogg and the Peabody, in our departments of classics, of history, and of literature. We are uncomfortable with efforts to justify these endeavors by defining them as instrumental, as measurably useful to particular contemporary needs. Instead we pursue them in part “for their own sake,” because they define what has, over centuries, made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness. We pursue them because they offer us as individuals and as societies a depth and breadth of vision we cannot find in the inevitably myopic present. We pursue them too because just as we need food and shelter to survive, just as we need jobs and seek education to better our lot, so too we as human beings search for meaning. We strive to understand who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and why. For many people, the four years of undergraduate life offer the only interlude permitted for unfettered exploration of such fundamental questions. But the search for meaning is a never-ending quest that is always interpreting, always interrupting and redefining the status quo, always looking, never content with what is found. An answer simply yields the next question. This is in fact true of all learning, of the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities, and thus of the very core of what universities are about. By their nature, universities nurture a culture of restlessness and even unruliness. This lies at the heart of their accountability to the future. Education, research, teaching are always about change—transforming individuals as they learn, transforming the world as our inquiries alter our understanding of it, transforming societies as we see our knowledge translated into policies—policies like those being developed at Harvard to prevent unfair lending practices, or to increase affordable housing, or avert nuclear proliferation—or translated into therapies, like those our researchers have designed to treat macular degeneration or to combat anthrax. The expansion of knowledge means change. But change is often uncomfortable, for it always encompasses loss as well as gain, disorientation as well as discovery. It has, as Machiavelli once wrote, no constituency. Yet in facing the future, universities must embrace the unsettling change that is fundamental to every advance in understanding. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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