Education May 2024

Education May 2019 – March 2024

19 May
Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato
By Ezekiel J. Emanuel, professor and the vice provost for global initiatives, and Harun Küçük, associate professor of the history and sociology of science, University of Pennsylvania
(NYT guest essay) … The problem is that higher education is fundamentally misunderstood. In response, colleges and universities must reassert the liberal arts ideals that have made them great but that have been slipping away.
By liberal arts, we mean a broad-based education that aspires to send out into society an educated citizenry prepared to make its way responsibly in an ever-more complex and divided world. We worry that at many schools, students can fulfill all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without having had a single meaningful discussion that is relevant to one’s political life as a citizen.

13 May
Hold On to Your Hats, America
If you were giving a graduation address, what would you say?
By Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
… Think of TikTok as your generation’s cocaine and get off it. Work hard on keeping a few good friendships, not gaining thousands of followers. Eschew envy, cynicism and virtue signaling. Ponder the meaning of the word “hineni.” Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much. Preserve an independence of mind and spirit, and nurture a contrarian opinion or two, especially if it goes against your own political side. …

11 May
A Way Back From Campus Chaos
In the longer term, a lack of clarity around acceptable forms of expression and a failure to hold those who break those norms to account, has opened up the pursuit of higher learning to the whims of those motivated by hypocrisy and cynicism.
(NYT Editorial board) Protesting the world’s wrongs has been a rite of passage for generations of American youth, buoyed by our strong laws protecting free speech and free assembly. Yet the students and other demonstrators disrupting college campuses this spring are being taught the wrong lesson — for as admirable as it can be to stand up for your beliefs, there are no guarantees that doing so will be without consequence.

8 May
Universities must move past research and teaching, and do more to help society
By Sandra Lapointe
They don’t do nearly enough to actively transfer the talent and knowledge needed to make our communities, our country and the world a better place.
(Policy Options IRPP) Universities have three missions. Research and teaching are the better-known. Together, they underpin the third, equally important one – contributing to overall economic and social prosperity by producing talent and knowledge to address societal issues and socio-technological challenges through innovation.
Canadian universities are certainly doing more than their fair share of research and teaching. However, they are not doing nearly enough to actively transfer the talent and knowledge needed to make our communities, our country and our world a better place.
This problem is especially pronounced for social sciences, humanities and arts (SSHA) programs.
If the third mission is to be woven into the fabric of our SSHA programs in higher education institutions, then SSHA talent, knowledge and practices need to be better outfitted for innovation and channeled into the correct outlets.
There is no simple way to achieve this. But a good step forward is to have our universities identify needs, institutionalize new knowledge co-creation approaches and expect public and private funders to require innovation partnerships to leverage the wealth of expertise of our social partners.