November 6, 2004
Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota
It is with pride and pleasure that I welcome all of you this evening to the concluding event of our fall 2004 Project Pericles conference - pride in Macalester's participation in this great and admirable fellowship and pleasure in seeing so many from our community and across the country in this room. Many people have worked very hard to make this conference a reality, and I want in particular to thank Karen Holt, Executive Director of Project Pericles, and Karin Trail-Johnson, Director of Community Service and also Co-Director of Project Pericles at Macalester. Karin Trail-Johnson in particular has labored mightily at putting all of this together, and I want to express my own appreciation and gratitude. As always, we have also to thank Gene Lang, though I will get my crack at him a little later in this program.
The goals of education at any level are myriad, but three seem to me of particular and abiding importance. The first is to provide practical and tangible benefit - often defined in economic terms - to those who are being educated. Here and throughout the world, education is the key to better and more lucrative jobs and both to security and mobility within society. The second is to provide what one might style a "richer life" in non-economic terms, that is, to enable one to appreciate art and philosophy more fully, to think more creatively, and ultimately to approach more closely that elusive quality we think of as wisdom. The third - and the one that has I think been especially important to the history of higher education in the United States - is to serve the common good by creating an educated citizenry, for without such a citizenry civil society in general and democratic society in particular cannot survive. Thomas Jefferson noted in 1816 that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." It is for this reason that we have devoted so much energy and so much capital in this country to the creation of a strong and accessible system of higher education and in particular to the development of the liberal arts college, a uniquely American institution that serves as an incubator of citizen-leaders.
Project Pericles is Eugene Lang's passionate gesture of support for this third purpose of higher education. It is a reminder that colleges and universities in this country exist not just to drive the economy or enrich the individual but to serve the public good by strengthening democracy and raising the level of public discourse. It is a necessary reminder at a time when all of us in higher education are driven to prove our usefulness and measure our outcomes. How does one measure such an outcome as the broadening and deepening of commitment to political engagement or social service? How does one correlate the extraordinary political, economic, and technological accomplishments of this country in the past century with the quality, variety, and accessibility of our system of post-secondary education? Even as we calculate test scores, track graduate schools placement results, and gauge student satisfaction, these are questions we would do well to ponder.
The special genius of Project Pericles is the recognition that civic engagement, if it is to lie at the heart of higher education, must be embedded in the academic programs of our institutions and not relegated to the periphery - that, perhaps above all, it is the faculty who must think in a serious and sustained way about the social dimensions of the important work they do. What is most admirable about the schools represented in this room is the willingness of the faculty to do this thinking , of the administrations to commit the time, energy, and resources of the institution to this effort, and of the students to respond with intelligence, enthusiasm, and maturity. For this I salute and congratulate you all.
