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My last column (10/23), “The Ivy League Brand Blew It,” opened up a floodgate of responses — not along party or religious lines, but rather socioeconomic. It was bizarre.
Some readers fiercely defended the Ivies (not even the issue at hand), and others furthered the case of Ivies being a waste of money.
And it didn’t take analytics to figure out that the defenders were alum of or have kids at an Ivy and the others who do not for a multitude of reasons, most being they could not afford it.
A GRUELING WEEK AND A HALF
Since its publication, I spent the next 10 days attempting to find any educator whose actions modeled incredible thought and example for their students rather than “just saying the right thing.” Close to calling it quits, I found what is one of the best essays/papers/blogs/tweets ever written by a higher ed leader – on any topic.
MY HERO
And thank God (no pun intended) I found my forever hero of higher ed, President Patricia McGuire of Trinity Washington University.
Her pedigree clearly doesn’t emanate from a slew of letters after her name but rather from a place of true heart and soul and the true purpose of higher ed. If there was ever seemingly a mensch in a president’s office, it is she. (Some of this column is comprised of excerpts from her essay.)
THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES
Higher ed trustee backlash ignited when Harvard students signed a pro-Palestine letter shortly after the Hamas attacks.
Eren Orbey at the New Yorker notes over thirty student organizations signed a letter that said, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
The letter was immediately condemned across social media, including by former Harvard President Larry Summers, who blasted current administrators for their “failure to disassociate the University and condemn this statement” and asked why Harvard could instantly condemn the murder of George Floyd, the Roe vs. Wade decision and Russia invading Ukraine, but not Hamas’s attack on Israel.
President Summers would have loved President McGuire’s perspective which I call:
ADULTING FOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
“Modeling examples of compelling speech can be good pedagogy, but higher education imposes paradoxical rules about who may speak. We claim to promote freedom of speech, but some of the best practitioners of effective speech — college presidents — are told to remain silent on the most important issues of the day lest we chill, if not intimidate completely, the free-speech rights of our students and faculty members.
Calls for presidents to remain silent have grown louder with rising contentiousness over their statements about the Middle East crisis. This line of thinking infantilizes both presidents and our constituents and debilitates the ability of the academy to respond to the crises we must face together.
We need student voices to be loud and courageous in the contemporary debates about their education; if we expect them to learn how to advocate before governors and legislatures, we should not assume that students are too fragile to hear the president’s voice as well.
Presidents betray their responsibilities when they remain silent in the face of these grave threats to our students, our faculties, and the very purpose of our work in higher education. Presidents must exercise their freedom of speech — prudently but purposefully as advocates for our students and as stewards of our mission.
Presidential voices can be even stronger when they join in solidarity with students who have so much to lose in the current dystopian struggle for control of our intellectual enterprise.”
ACTUALLY DOING IT
But it’s one thing to talk the talk but another to walk it. President McGuire said: “There can be no justification for the deliberate infliction of so much suffering; the Jewish community has borne the evil consequences of virulent antisemitism for centuries, and still it continues. We must stand firmly and clearly in solidarity with our Jewish sisters and brothers, and we must continue to confront and root out the racial and ethnic hatred that has consumed and debilitated so many lives.”
You can easily tell this came from the heart and not the PR Department.
She received messages of thanks from Jewish members of the Trinity community, but several students also wrote to condemn her statement as lacking any acknowledgment of the suffering of Palestinians.
She then QUICKLY followed up with a more complete blog statement that “acknowledged the disagreement, quoting one of the students with her permission.
THE MODEL FOR HOW TO MODEL
“Following that, we also had a virtual town-hall meeting during which students and faculty members engaged in the debate robustly. Publicly modeling the management of even passionate disagreement is an important part of presidential leadership on free speech.” “For me, part of modeling good free speech is also modeling how to accept the criticism that comes with it.”
My favorite comment from her brilliant essay says it best: “When we teach students to raise their voices, we have to be willing to live with the noise.”
President McGuire gives me faith (pun intended) that University leaders can get it right when they want to.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder/CEO of the non-profit The Student Success Project. He can be reached by email at ritchie@studentsuccessproject.org and on Facebook as The Student Success Project.
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