Word: cannot
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...pencil-necked paper-pushers exist to serve undergraduates, not to tell us how to behave.By abrogating our right, as citizen-scholars, to participate in running the College, Pilbeam has signed his own death warrant as a Harvard administrator. Academics like Pilbeam, decades removed from their undergraduate years, cannot be trusted with the stewardship of citizen-scholars during their most important formative years. Such an antique administrator telling real, live undergraduates that they can’t use Harvard’s money to pay for other, underage, undergraduates’ alcohol is flabbergasting. “Perhaps this might...
...this marriage of a new president to a venerable institution. As our colleagues in anthropology understand so well, rituals have meanings and purposes; they are intended to arouse emotions and channel intentions. In ritual, as the poet Thomas Lynch has written, “We act out things we cannot put into words.” But now my task is in fact to put some of this ceremony into words, to capture our meanings and purposes...
...desirability and the perceived necessity of higher education have intensified the fears of many. Will I get in? Will I be able to pay? This anxiety expresses itself in both deep-seated resentment and nearly unrealizable expectations. Higher education cannot alone guarantee the mobility and equality at the heart of the American Dream. But we must fully embrace our obligation to be available and affordable. We must make sure that talented students are able to come to Harvard, that they know they are able to come, and that they know we want them here. We need to make sure that...
...seize the initiative in defining what we are accountable for. We are asked to report graduation rates, graduate school admission statistics, scores on standardized tests intended to assess the “value added” of years in college, research dollars, numbers of faculty publications. But such measures cannot themselves capture the achievements, let alone the aspirations of universities. Many of these metrics are important to know, and they shed light on particular parts of our undertaking. But our purposes are far more ambitious and our accountability thus far more difficult to explain...
...millennia; learning that shapes the future. A university looks both backwards and forwards in ways that must—that even ought to—conflict with a public’s immediate concerns or demands. Universities make commitments to the timeless, and these investments have yields we cannot predict and often cannot measure. Universities are stewards of living tradition – in Widener and Houghton and our 88 other libraries, in the Fogg and the Peabody, in our departments of classics, of history and of literature. We are uncomfortable with efforts to justify these endeavors by defining them...