Dear Commons Community,

I have just spent much of the past week with a Middle States Accreditation Team visit to a university in Pennsylvania.   We made the usual evaluation of the university using a list of fourteen standards  and sent our report to the Commission on Higher Education.  However, our evaluation would never have uncovered a success story as told by Frank Bruni in his column in today’s New York Times.  He covers a lot of ground and some heavy issues (being gay, religion, abortion, overseas volunteer work, female circumcision) as seen through the eyes of a devout Catholic for whom college changed his life.

“College, he recently told me, had not only given him a glimpse of how large the world was but also shamed him about how little of it he knew.”

It is a resounding affirmation of a college education’s purpose.

Bruni juxtaposes this man’s life with Rick Santorum’s assertion last month that college is too often godless and corrupting.

This column is  a good read and important commentary about what we do in higher education.

Tony