American Higher Education: Issues and

Questions
— Jim Windham November 1, 2005

“We have a responsibility to make sure our higher education system continues to meet our
nation’s needs for an educated and competitive workforce for the 21st century.”—Margaret
Spellings, Secretary of Education.

In this excerpt from the announcement of the Secretary’s appointment of a commission to study
and make recommendations on the future of American higher education, I have emphasized
“educated” because, while we are appropriately very concerned with our nation’s competitive
strength, its research and technological leadership, and providing its succeeding generations with
the tools to excel in a globalized environment, we should also be concerned with the education of
our youth, properly understood.

G. K. Chesterton understood education this way: “Properly speaking, there is no such thing as
education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously,
and that transition may be called education.”

Continuing in this context of defining education, when we contemplate the mission of higher
education, I am attracted to the statement recently adopted by Students for Academic Freedom:
“The central purposes of a university are the pursuit of truth, the discovery of new knowledge
through scholarship and research, the study and reasoned criticism of intellectual and cultural
traditions, the teaching and general development of students to help them become creative
individuals and productive citizens of a pluralistic democracy, and the transmission of
knowledge and learning to a society at large. Free inquiry and free speech within the academic
community are indispensable to the achievement of these goals. The freedom to teach and to
learn depends upon the creation of appropriate conditions and opportunities on the campus as a
whole as well as in the classrooms and lecture halls. These purposes reflect the values—
pluralism, diversity, opportunity, critical intelligence, openness and fairness—that are the
cornerstones of American society.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in its 1998 booklet, “What Every Educated
Person Should Know”, reminds us that the foregoing principles underscore a belief that a shared
understanding, a shared knowledge, help unify and advance civilization, and that, indeed, the
American system of self-government is uniquely premised on the need for a citizenry so
educated in order to sustain it.

Regrettably, over the past several decades, there has been a breakdown in this commitment to a
shared common core of learning and understanding—of our culture, our ideas, our ideals, our
history—in short, of the foundations of our civilization and how we can sustain them.

It is in a spirit of hopeful revival of this commitment that I suggest the following questions and
the issues raised by them for serious consideration by the commission:
• How should academic freedom be defined, and how has the concept evolved over the past
century, particularly as to its intersection with intellectual diversity and free speech, properly
understood? Has this evolution been beneficial?

• What should be the future of academic tenure?

• In the wake of the Gratz and Grutter Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action, absent
legislative or judicial correctives, what should be the future of race-neutral admissions,
enrollment diversity, and minority access to highly selective public institutions?

• What has been the value of the trend toward the “elective system”, and should we return to a
universal core curriculum grounded in the Western intellectual tradition?

• What should be the obligation of higher education for the standards and accountability of
elementary and secondary education to produce college readiness?

• How can we establish a system of K-12 teacher education and preparation in our public
universities that will produce a sufficient quantity of highly qualified teachers necessary to
revitalize elementary and secondary education?

• Considering the significant criticisms in the 2001 Knight Commission Report on Intercollegiate
Athletics and its predecessor ten years earlier, what should be the proper relationship of major
college sports with the mission of the NCAA Division I universities?

• What are the major drivers of the accelerating costs of higher education, and what can be done
to mitigate them and slow the growth?

• How should the cost of publicly supported higher education be allocated among its primary
constituents—students, the public sector, and the private sector?

Secretary Spellings has selected an outstanding group of scholars and education policy veterans
for the commission, with a visionary leader as Chairman in my friend, Charles Miller. The
subject matter could not be more urgent, and it is my hope that this group will produce a product
that will engage all of us in an overdue and much-needed dialogue on the future direction of this
institution that is so critical to the continuing success of the American experiment.