Higher Education at America’s 250th
As America turns 250, leaders of our colleges and universities have been wringing their hands, wondering how higher education will fit into the future of the nation. Has scholarship grown too political? Have schools lost their way because they have resisted—or failed to resist—authoritarian demands from the White House? Is the educational enterprise doomed because of new technologies? As we celebrate the founding of this nation, it’s a good moment to recall what the founders had in mind.
The founders believed strongly in the importance of higher education. A healthy Republic depended on having citizens who could exercise judgment in public matters, and if the country was going to thrive, it would need citizens who had access to learning. George Washington, worried that regional forces would pull states away from one another, advocated for a national university that would produce leaders who could discern and be motivated by the common good.
Thomas Jefferson, in founding the University of Virginia, saw the university as a place for freely exploring a variety of subjects much greater than typically on offer. As he wrote to John Adams in 1823: “We shall have our follies without doubt…But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry...Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.” Jefferson knew that a liberally educated citizenry is better able to recognize and overcome our distance from, our strangeness to, one another. We learn to recognize that people and ideas that at first seem foreign may indeed have much to teach us.
The Civil War is America’s “second founding,” and, as part of that, Abraham Lincoln took decisive action in support of higher education on a national level. Although he famously had little formal schooling himself, Lincoln was devoted to education as "the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in," as he said early in his career. The Morrill Act of 1862 didn’t establish the centralized school that Washington supported, but it did use the power of the federal government to create land-grant colleges “to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts…in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
Liberal and practical education went together in the early years of our nation, and today the development of AI is bringing their relationship into a new era. Clearly AI is a threat to those aspects of the educational enterprise that can be automated: the transfer of information, the application of sets of rules to defined data domains. At the same time, the efficiencies of our machines only underscore the importance of developing the capacities in students for independent judgment, creativity and the deep learning and the discovery of common purpose that comes from collaboration in diverse groups. These are the very capacities our founders valued. In colleges and universities around the country, undergrads may indeed use AI for tasks that they would rather not do themselves, but strong teachers will turn students’ minds and hearts toward strenuous effort in which they find meaning and direction. Students still find freedom in the challenge of intense work that allows them to discover their own passions and talents; they still find that the process of genuine inquiry can be liberating.
It’s that taste of freedom in combination with challenging work that first sold Americans on the idea of a liberal education. Since our double founding in the late 1700s and the mid 1800s, American higher education has expanded the boundaries of knowledge for its own sake while recognizing that this work will have strong practical benefits—from commercial success to military might; from artistic innovation to the cultivation of well-roundedness through athletics and civic purpose.
This expansive view of higher education has always had its critics, but the current White House has been unusually hostile, attacking universities for having expanded access to underserved groups or for simply having failed to fall into line with the priorities of this administration. Now even fearful faculty want to reduce the scope and ambition of higher education. But the celebrations of the Declaration of Independence should be a reminder of what its primary author exclaimed to the young nation: “Preach,” Jefferson wrote, “a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people.” His “frenemy” John Adams wrote: “Wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people… arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion.” It’s become increasingly clear that would be authoritarians attack education for the same reasons Adams defended it. Colleges and universities serve the nation, and they often do so by cultivating oppositional trends to those currently in power. In the words of philosopher Richard Rorty, they “incite doubt and stimulate imagination, thereby challenging the prevailing consensus.”
On July 4th I’ll participate in a public reading of the Declaration, and I’ll thank my lucky stars that I live in a country where the links between learning and civic participation are broadly valued and where freedom of speech—linked to freedom of thought—is still cherished. These values have been essential to our nation since it was born 250 years ago. If we work at it, we can ensure that this remains the case for generations and generations to come.
