Dear Commons Community,
The Harvard Crimson yesterday reported that Drew Faust, President of Harvard since 2007, would be stepping down. As Harvard’s first woman president, she guided the school with skill and grace. She led Harvard during some difficult times especially with regard to its endowment losses during the Great Recession of 2008. She was fond of saying she was a good listener.
“Listening is always an essential part of what I try to do. So I say that’s a key part of it,” she said. “I also think that you can be very tough and very gentle at the same time, that being tough doesn’t mean being noisy or cruel or aggressive, it just means standing your ground and pursuing your goals, and being equitable and decent to people.”
Faust has emerged as a major leader for higher education. I have used her positions in my own work especially her views on the future of American higher education. For example:
“The major forces that will shape the future of higher education:
- the influence of technology
- the changing shape of knowledge
- the attempt to define the value of education.”
She went on to extol the facilities that digital technology and communications will provide for teaching, learning, and research. She sees great benefits in technology’s ability to reach masses of students around the globe and to easily quantify large databases for scaling up and assessment purposes. On the other hand, she made it clear that “residential education cannot be replicated online” and stressed the importance of physical being interaction and shared experiences.
On the nature of knowledge, she stated that the common organization of universities by academic departments may disappear because “the most significant and consequential challenges humanity faces” require investigations and solutions that are flexible and not necessarily discipline specific. Doctors, chemists, social scientists, and engineers will work together to solve humankind’s problems.
On defining value, she accepts that quantitative metrics are now evolving that can assess the importance of meaningful employment and life-long fulfillment in a career. But she also believes that higher education provides something very valuable; that it gives people “a perspective on the meaning and purpose of their lives”; and that it was not possible to quantify this type of student outcome. She concluded that:
“So much of what humanity has achieved has been sparked and sustained by the research and teaching that take place every day at colleges and universities, sites of curiosity and creativity that nurture some of the finest aspirations of individuals and, in turn, improve their lives—and their livelihoods. As the landscape continues to change, we must be careful to protect the ideals at the heart of higher education, ideals that serve us all well as we work together to improve the world.”
Best wishes to Drew Faust!
Tony
