This item "First Woman takes Reins at Harvard" is an interesting read, in conjunction with my talk from yesterday, where I argued that actually understanding the true meaning of "being human" would, in fact, dramatically increase our ability to survive in the global era -- although not by "being more competitive" but by understanding at last what it means to be cooperative.
New York Times
Oct 13, 2007
excerpts (highlights added)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 12 — Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s first female president, was inaugurated Friday and offered a spirited defense of American higher education against demands that it quantify what it is teaching and focus primarily on training a global work force.
“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,” said Dr. Faust, 60, a Civil War historian and the former head of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at the university.
“A university is not about results in the next quarter,” Dr. Faust said. “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.”
In clear opposition to pressure from the federal government for universities to prove they are accountable by quantifying how well they teach, she called on higher education institutions themselves “to seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for.”
In an interview before the inauguration ceremony, Dr. Faust faulted a federal Commission on the future of Higher Education empanelled by the Bush administration for its focus on training a competitive work force for the global economy. While higher education makes “a fundamental contribution to training a work force,” she said, it should strive to be far more than that.
She paraphrased W. E. B. DuBois: “Education is not to make men carpenters so much as to make carpenters men.”...
Dr. Faust’s speech offered a ringing defense of the traditional role of universities as “stewards of living tradition,” as places for “philosophers as well as scientists,” where learning and knowledge are pursued in part “because they define what has over centuries made us human, not because they can enhance our global competitiveness.”
...Dr. Faust also signaled that universities like Harvard had to diversify their ranks.
...She noted that American colleges had served as “both the emblem and the engine of the expansion of citizenship, equality and opportunity — to blacks, women, Jews, immigrants, and others who would have been subjected to quotas or excluded altogether in an earlier era.”
She added: “My presence here today — and indeed that of many others on this platform — would have been unimaginable even a few short years ago.”...
“It is urgent,” she said, “that we pose the questions of ethics and meaning that will enable us to confront the human, the social and the moral significance of our changing relationship with the natural world.”
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