Unintended Consequences or Deliberate Bias?
The two keynote speakers at the 2007 Pope Center Conference agreed that U.S. higher education seems lost and adrift when it comes to the crucial task of transmitting cultural knowledge and morality. But they offered very different explanations for this confusion and different approaches to restore the missing sense of purpose.
One of the speakers, a consummate Ivy League insider, believes that the problems are mainly the result of “unintended consequences” and that the academy can redeem itself. The other, who left his tenured faculty position to concentrate on working for the reform of academia, believes the problems are ideological in nature, and the initial drive for reform must come from outside the educational establishment.
The insider is Harry Lewis, the former dean of Harvard College, a Harvard computer science professor, and author of . He is troubled by the relativism that pervades the academy and its failure to establish educational priorities for students. “[W]e offer little guidance or structure to suggest what is important, little suggestion that anything is more important than anything else,” he told the audience at the Hilton RDU Airport at Research Triangle Park on October 27.