Shameless Boosters and a Loyal Critic: Two Takes on the Ivory Tower

Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds: Universities, Leadership, and the Development of the American State. By Mark R. Nemec. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 312p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.The end of the Civil War ushered a new era in American state-building as the government sought to reshape the structure and identity of politics, group formation, and individual identity. During this period, nongovernmental agencies became central to disseminating and legitimating state authority. Although universities have been recognized as influential agencies, Mark R. Nemec argues that prior works overlooked the process by which they gained this influence. In Ivory Towers and Nationalist Minds, Nemec illuminates the rise of American universities as active partners and independent agents of state building from 1862 to 1920. Universities provided services to national development through promoting democratic ideals, industrial competitiveness, and intellectual vanguardism. Primarily through the “institutional entrepreneurship” of university presidents, American universities rapidly expanded their role and influence in society. Rather than the government, it was the university leaders who took the leading role to define what their universities would become.

Big Man on Campus?Hitler and the American University Robert Cohen (bio) Stephen H. Norwood . The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ix + 350 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.99. The cover of Stephen H. Norwood's The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower shows a mortarboard bedecked with a Nazi flag. This image linking U.S. campuses to the swastika is dramatic, but it is also tendentious and unbalanced—and so is Norwood's historical narrative, which has at its core a scathing indictment of Depression-era America's universities for cozying up to Nazi Germany. Norwood contends that U.S. universities helped to legitimate Hitlerism by maintaining amicable relations with Nazi Germany long after the barbarous nature of the Nazi regime had become apparent. Although accurate on many of the particular incidents with which it deals, this study is misleading on account of its narrow scope and failure to confront a large number of actions by American academic leaders that challenge the author's claims. Norwood's indictment of American academics starts at the top—with Harvard University. He portrays Harvard President James B. Conant as playing a key role in this legitimization process. Conant welcomed representatives from Nazi Germany to Harvard's ceremonies, including its tercentenary celebration in 1936, and in turn supported Harvard's participation in academic processions hosted by Germany's Nazified universities. Norwood accuses Conant of repeatedly missing opportunities to criticize the Nazi regime and saying nothing about its increasingly brutal anti-Semitism. Conant also proved indifferent to efforts to rescue persecuted Jewish scholars from Germany. A chapter on Columbia offers a similar indictment of its president, Nicholas Murray Butler, with the added accusation that he sought to suppress anti-Nazi dissent on his campus and punished students and faculty who engaged in such dissent. The elite women's colleges of the Northeast known as the Seven Sisters—Vassar, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, and Barnard—come off on Norwood's pages as embracing Nazi Germany through exchange programs that sent students to Germany and had them returning to sing Hitler's praises. He condemns the University of Virginia for allowing its [End Page 163] Institute of Public Affairs Roundtable to give a "respectful hearing for Nazi Germany's apologists" (p. 133). Norwood depicts the American universities' German departments as "Nazi nests" (p. 158) and U.S. Catholic universities as engaging in a "flirtation with fascism" (p. 196). After more than 200 pages depicting academe's callousness and stupidity in refusing to think critically about Nazi Germany, there seems a hopeful sign of change. Norwood begins his last chapter on the Nazi era by stating that, "only in late 1938, after the Kristallnacht pogroms in Germany, did American universities become significantly involved in protest against Nazism" (p. 220). Yet even here Norwood finds academic community leadership wanting because the "initiative" behind these protests "came largely from students" rather than faculty or university presidents (p. 220). He chastises campus officials for not going far enough in their anti-Nazi actions, since they "remained unwilling to press for strong retaliatory measures against Germany" and refused "to assume much responsibility for raising funds to bring refugees from Nazism to their campuses" (p. 220). To his credit, Norwood roots his narrative in extensive evidence from university archives. His indictment is at points powerful, as The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower offers the most detailed and devastating account ever written on American university ties to Nazi Germany. A jury reading only this prosecutor's brief against the university for complicity with the Nazis would surely bring in a guilty verdict. But Norwood's brilliantly provocative book—despite its valuable revelations about academic indifference to Hitlerism—is in its way a kind of case study of the historiographical problems that emerge when a historian assumes the role of prosecutor. It is at times breathtakingly one-sided, argumentative, selective in its use of evidence, chronologically constricted, and out of touch with the political dynamics of isolationism, the American Left, and the Popular Front—which did so much to shape campus discourse on the international crises...

Author's Response

Executive Summary America's colleges and universities have contributed significantly to civic virtue and the common good of democracy. College presidents undergird this heritage by affirming the relationship of education to fundamental civic virtues and values of democracy. Contemporary presidents and their actions navigating controversies and issues are exemplary of this continuing commitment today despite the challenges of increasing pluralism and diversity. The argument presented is that presidents can and should use the values of the academy to express their voice to respond to these situations and to recreate a civil religion capable of maintaining the civic virtue and common good of democracy. ********** The history of the relationship between higher education and democracy in America is a long one, traceable to the founding of colonial colleges and of the Republic. Despite their enormous variety, America's colleges and universities, both private and public, have from colonial times enjoyed close ties and contributed significantly to civic virtue and the common good essentially embedded in democratic society and the nation. As the leaders of the academy, college presidents have with remarkable consistency affirmed the important relationship of a college education to fundamental civic virtues and values, and the civil demands and responsibilities of democracy. Presidential appeals and actions have underscored the engagement of colleges and their students in upholding the critical social and civic virtues engrained in American society and fundamental to the formation of democracy. At times this has required firm criticism and disagreement with national and state policies, yet still underscoring the high ideals of a deeper democratic spirit. For example, in 1970, John Kemeny, President of Dartmouth College, responding to protests of the Vietnam War and the killings of two students at Kent State argued before his campus community that the nation was facing nothing less than a constitutional crisis. He proceeded to liken the circumstances facing the College--his decision to suspend the remainder of the term in order for students and faculty to examine the issues of provoking that crisis--to those of the Revolutionary War. (1) But whether as critic or servant, presidents have educated and challenged both college communities and the public about civic duty and about the values critical to democracy. Presidents regularly exert leadership directing the attention of their communities to civic life beyond the gates of the academy. The civic duty of the educated is rooted in expectations about the contributions students should be led to make to society, to the nation, and to the world. It is in this realm of the values and spirit of democracy that presidents make the case for the crucial connection between the ivory tower and the world outside the gates. As they do so, presidents tend to stress two major themes--the importance of education to democracy and to the development of the civic virtues--both of which are crucially linked to the aforementioned fundamental principles of the American nation. (2) The rhetoric and actions of college and university presidents about civic virtue and democratic principles are also substantially shaped by three concomitant elements. Presidential philosophy about the relationship of the academy to democracy nearly universally reflects these political and educational assumptions. First is that the democratic heritage of the nation is imbued with fundamental moral, religious, and spiritual beliefs. Second is the notion that America's colleges have an incumbent duty to nurture the principles underlying civic virtue and democratic values, and that the students' education should inspire the upholding of those values. Lastly is the Jeffersonian tradition that educated citizens are crucial to maintaining democracy. Public education is federally established and funded because a literate citizenry is essential to the health of democracy. …

Reviewed by: Universities in the Marketplace, and: Academic Capitalism, and: Remaking the American University: Market Smart and Mission Centered Adrianna Kezar Universities in the Marketplace, by Derek Bok. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Academic Capitalism, by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Remaking the American University: Market Smart and Mission Centered, by Robert Zemsky, Gregory Wegner, and William Massy. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Is There a Way Out? Examining the Commercialization of Higher Education In recent years, a variety of books have been published on the commodification and commercialization of higher education and the shift in the mission of higher education institutions from serving the public good. These texts synthesize and investigate a critical challenge that has been emerging over the last few decades, one that most commentators agree is changing the values and practices of campuses (Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005). For example, in previous decades, presidents reached out to communities and were critical commentators; student affairs administrators focused on student development. In more recent years, student affairs administrators wrestle with demands to become more market smart and to create revenues from student housing and bookstores. College presidents contend that they have more conflicts of interest because of research partnerships with the business sector and describe the intense demands of having to be entrepreneurial and raise money for the campus to supplement declining public funds and support. In this book review, I critique three recent books that address the commercialization of higher education, two of which suggest ways that leaders can confront this challenge. Each book describes the way in which commercialization has affected campuses and the factors that have contributed to this changed environment, and each examines the costs and benefits of commercialization. While all three books have a relatively similar message (we need to do more than allow a laissez-faire system of capitalism to prevail in the academy), I believe they all miss the mark by offering oversimplified solutions to the challenges confronting higher education in serving the public good. I highlight the need for scholarship on commercialization from a systems and cultural perspective in order to address one of the most compelling challenges that higher education has ever faced. So, what is "the public good," and how is it being threatened by commercialization? Interestingly, each of the authors says little about the notion of the public good.1 Other recent commentators have noted that higher education's public role includes educating citizens for democratic engagement, supporting local [End Page 473] and regional communities, preserving knowledge and making it available to the community, partnering with social institutions such as government or health care in order to foster their missions, advancing knowledge through research, developing the arts and humanities, broadening access to ensure a diverse democracy, developing the intellectual talents of students, contributing to community and economic development, and creating leaders for various sectors (Kezar, Chambers, Burkhardt, 2005). While Derek Bok does not address the concept of the public good in his current book, his earlier book, Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Social Responsibilities of the Modern University (1982), addressed this issue. Since this earlier text provides context for Bok's latest book as well as for the other two books on commercialization, it is important to briefly review Bok's argument in Beyond the Ivory Tower and to understand the notion of the public good. Many societal stakeholders attacked higher education in the 1960s for failing to truly meet the public interest, claiming that it had been unsuccessful in creating access for certain groups, had become too involved with classified research related to the war efforts, was not involved in international humanitarian efforts, and was not involved enough in broader political engagement. In this landmark book, Bok attempts to provide a framework and rationale for how, why, and when universities should be involved in meeting societal needs and how they can best serve the public good. He notes that the task has become increasingly complex since higher education has had increased opportunities to serve society since World War II, but he does not feel that universities should respond to every opportunity or demand. In contrast to earlier perspectives...

Introduction and Overview During the latter half of the 20th century, Black women achieved dramatic progress in institutions of higher education. Despite the pervasive, interactive effects of institutionalized racism and sexism, these women made tremendous strides as students, faculty, and administrators. Out of the intense struggles of the civil rights and women's movements, they currently occupy leadership roles in the academy that were once formally denied to-them. For example, since 1986, the percentage of women college presidents rose from 9.5% to 19% while the percentage of minority presidents increased from 8% to 11% (American Council on Education, 2000). By 1998, 6% of all minority college presidents were African Americans, and minority presidents were more likely than White presidents to be women. Notwithstanding these advances, confronting inequities and making colleges and universities more inclusive and hospitable for Black women continue to represent ongoing struggles as the new millennium begins. As Benjamin (1997) maintains, the ivory tower, the voices [of Black women] are shrouded beneath a racist and sexist cloud that is often chilly at White institutions and lukewarm, at best, in Black ones (p. 211). The idea for this special issue of the Journal of Negro Education (NE) arose from our own personal recognition of the struggles and triumphs of Black women in the academy and from the many similar victories and setbacks that were brought to light during the Black Women in the Academy II: Service and Leadership Conference held in Washington, D.C., in June 1999.(1) This special issue serves not only to highlight some of the issues discussed at that international gathering but to document the continued oppressive experiences of Black women in the academy while accentuating the lessons of survival, strength, and resilience gained from adversity. We hope that the perspectives put forth will help readers of this JNE issue to better understand the totality of Black women's experiences in the academy. We hope also that these articles will make readers be aware of the many ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity intersect and define these experiences. The contributors cover a variety of areas and contexts. Unifying themes among the articles are their attention to institutional climate, support systems and networks (or the lack thereof), role ambiguity and role overload, the connections between racism and sexism, and other systemic barriers facing Black women faculty in the academy. In considering articles for this issue, our aim was to be as inclusive as possible-to bring together a diversity of voices, perspectives, and backgrounds to address the conditions, challenges, and opportunities faced by and available to Black women in the academy, not only in the United States but also abroad. Therefore, we divided this issue into two major sections. Section One focuses on African American women in U.S. colleges and universities. In particular, the articles in this section provide insights into the historical and contemporary status of African American female faculty members, students, and staff in higher education and their continuing struggles for institutional change. Sheila T. Gregory gives special attention to the thorny issues of appointment, promotion, and tenure as well as to the more macrolevel issues such as institutional culture and systemic barriers. Veronica G. Thomas examines the motivators, obstacles, and support systems of reentry or older college women, highlighting the special challenges faced by older African American women who return to undergraduate school. In another article, Cheryl Evans Green and Valarie Green King share findings from an Africentric leadership development program for Black women in the academy that utilizes a collective mentoring process. …

Beyond the Ivory Tower: Confronting Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and Free Speech Through Firsthand Observation and Engagement

Cualquiera que haya experimentado la vida académica de los Estados Unidos, en la última década, sabe que el campus se ha convertido en un campo de batalla de las llamadas “Guerras Culturales.” En su vida política y social, los Estados Unidos han sufrido grandes tensiones debido a su carácter multiétnico. Más especialmente, se han enfocado en las “guerras por la verdad sagrada”: la controversia sobre jerarquías previamente asumidas sobre el trabajo literario e intelectual de ciertos individuos que ha sido acuñado como valor nacional. En México donde la educación superior es más especializada y con un enfoque más profesional, se discute muy poco sobre cuestiones de esta índole, a pesar de las diversidades lingüisticas y culturales de este país. Sin embargo, en los Estados Unidos, las tensiones sociales son generadas o influidas, en muchas ocasiones, por la naturaleza académica liberal de las universidades norteamericanas.

Overhaul or Overload for French Science?

‘Every generation re-writes history in its own way’. Re-writing History applies Collingwood’s dictum to a series of topics and themes, some of which have been central to prehistoric and protohistoric archaeology for the past century or more, while some have been triggered by more recent changes in technology or social attitudes. Some issues are highly controversial, like the proposals for the Stonehenge World Heritage sites. Others challenge long-held popular myths, like the deconstruction of the Celts and by extension the Picts. Yet some traditional tenets of scholarship have gone unchallenged for too long, like the classical definition of civilization itself. But why should it matter? Surely it is in the order of things that each generation rejects received wisdom and adopts ideas that are radical or might offend previous generations? Is this not simply symptomatic of healthy and vibrant debate? Or are there grounds for believing that current changes are of a more disquieting character, denying the basic assumptions of rational argument and freedom of enquiry and expression that have been the foundation of western scholarship since the eighteenth century Enlightenment? Re-writing History addresses contemporary concerns about information and its interpretation, including issues of misinformation and airbrushing of politically-incorrect history. Its subject matter is the archaeology of prehistoric and early historic Britain, and the changes witnessed over two centuries and more in the interpretation of the archaeological heritage by changes in the prevailing political and social as well as intellectual climate. Far from being topics of concern only to academics in ivory towers, the way in which seemingly innocuous issues such as cultural diffusion or social reconstruction in the remote past are studied and presented reflects important shifts in contemporary thinking that challenge long-accepted conventions of free speech and debate.

In One Hundred Semesters , William Chace mixes incisive analysis with memoir to create an illuminating picture of the evolution of American higher education over the past half century. Chace follows his own journey from undergraduate education at Haverford College to teaching at Stillman, a traditionally African-American college in Alabama, in the 1960s, to his days as a professor at Stanford and his appointment as president of two very different institutions--Wesleyan University and Emory University. Chace takes us with him through his decades in education--his expulsion from college, his boredom and confusion as a graduate student during the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, and his involvement in three contentious cases at Stanford: on tenure, curriculum, and academic freedom. When readers follow Chace on his trip to jail after he joins Stillman students in a civil rights protest, it is clear that the ideas he presents are born of experience, not preached from an ivory tower. The book brings the reader into both the classroom and the administrative office, portraying the unique importance of the former and the peculiar rituals, rewards, and difficulties of the latter. Although Chace sees much to lament about American higher education--spiraling costs, increased consumerism, overly aggressive institutional self-promotion and marketing, the corruption of intercollegiate sports, and the melancholy state of the humanities--he finds more to praise. He points in particular to its strength and vitality, suggesting that this can be sustained if higher education remains true to its purpose: providing a humane and necessary education, inside the classroom and out, for America's future generations.

"A very important study that will appeal to a disability studies audience as well as scholars in social movements, social justice, critical pedagogy, literacy education, professional development for disability and learning specialists in access centers and student counseling centers, as well as the broader domains of sociology and education." ---Melanie Panitch, Ryerson University "Ableism is alive and well in higher education. We do not know how to abandon the myth of the 'pure (ivory) tower that props up and is propped up by ableist ideology.' . . . Mad at School is thoroughly researched and pathbreaking. . . . The author's presentation of her own experience with mental illness is woven throughout the text with candor and eloquence." ---Linda Ware, State University of New York at Geneseo Mad at School explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Much of the research and teaching within disability studies assumes a disabled body but a rational and energetic (an "agile") mind. In Mad at School, scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind? Mental disability (more often called "mental illness") is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly privileged "able mind," and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world. Mad at School is the first book to use a disability-studies perspective to focus on the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture at institutions of higher education. Individual chapters examine the language used to denote mental disability; the role of "participation" and "presence" in student learning; the role of "collegiality" in faculty work; the controversy over "security" and free speech that has arisen in the wake of recent school shootings; and the marginalized status of independent scholars with mental disabilities. Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College.

Reviewed by: The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom by Eddie R. Cole Randal Maurice Jelks The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. By Eddie R. Cole. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 358. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-691-20676-9; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 978-0-691-20674-5.) Benjamin E. Mays, the sainted president of Morehouse College and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., once observed, “‘To be president of a college and white is no bed of roses . . . . To be president of a college and Black is almost a bed of thorns’” (p. 63). Eddie R. Cole deserves all the accolades he has received for confirming Mays’s statement. Cole’s research into the Black freedom struggle broadens our historical understanding by exploring the involvement of college presidents across the country from the 1940s to the 1978 Bakke v. California ruling. Cole’s contributions to the history of U.S. higher education and the Black freedom struggle in the twentieth century will be discussed for some time. This book is a reminder that the Black freedom [End Page 385] movement challenged U.S. apartheid at all institutional levels. It also reminds us that predominantly white institutions of higher education were institutional guardians of apartheid in the postemancipation era. These reminders should hardly come as a surprise since historians such as Craig Steven Wilder have detailed the bloody economic investments in the buying and selling of enslaved people by both public and private institutions during the antebellum era. What Cole thoroughly documents is that the twentieth- century challenge to the ruling order was led by presidents of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) alongside the mobilization of student activists. Black college presidents did the behind-the-scenes negotiations that supported students, who used a variety of mobilizing tactics to demand social justice. Cole’s book expands the historiography on Black student activism found in Stefan M. Bradley’s Harlem vs. Columbia University: Black Power in the Late 1960s (Urbana, 2009) and Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power and the Ivy League (New York, 2018) as well as in Jelani M. Favors’s Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered a Generation of Leadership and Activism (Chapel Hill, 2019) and Donna Jean Murch’s Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, 2010). Cole mines HBCU archives and the papers of both southern and northern university presidents. He describes how confining these jobs were, and he details the political pressures and bureaucratic limitations each president faced as they tried to open their campuses to racial integration or keep them closed after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Cole illuminates that the presidents’ approaches varied from institution to institution, and that their priorities differed, in terms of keeping racial integration at bay or assuring that their urban locales remained class-bound white spaces. These presidents, including Black college presidents, also faced increased pressure from students as activists sought to expand democratic freedoms to benefit their communities. The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom is outstanding. My chief criticism is it does not explore the history of athletics enough. Black sports history and the history of athletics at HBCUs must be added to this research. Here Cole might have explored Derrick E. White’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football (Chapel Hill, 2019) to tie athletics to the politics of the Black freedom movement. The period Cole covers in The Campus Color Line coincided with the rise of legendary athletes—Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor), Jim Brown, Althea Gibson, Madeline Manning-Mims, Wilma Rudolph, Cazzie Russell, Bill Russell, and Wyomia Tyus. The most significant and ironic moment in the history of sports and racial integration came in 1970, when the University of Southern California (USC) destroyed the University of Alabama in a nationally televised football game led by freshman sensation Sam “Bam” Cunningham. The irony of that win was that USC...

On most American college campuses today, students enjoy the same rights to free speech as do all citizens. They are free, for example, to raise money and distribute literature on behalf of political causes. But in the early 1960s these rights were still routinely denied collegians. When, in the fall of 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley sought to attract campus support for the civil rights movement?which was working to end racial discrimination and segregation in America?they encountered opposition from the university's president and deans. These university officials, citing a formerly unenforced school regula tion which prohibited campus political advocacy, told students they could not raise money or distribute literature on campus for the civil rights movement or any other off-campus political cause. Students at Berkeley united in October 1964 to fight these political restrictions. Their successful campaign to gain free speech rights at college became known as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It was the first major cam pus rebellion of the turbulent 1960s. The first major confrontation in the Berkeley free speech controversy occurred on October 1, 1964, when student ac tivists set up tables on university property to raise donations for civil rights organizations. This defied the ban on campus political advocacy. The students had decided to defy the ban because they viewed it not only as an infringement on their free speech rights, but also as an attempt to undermine the growing involvement of Berkeley students in the civil rights movement.

As long as schools of education attempt to dance to the cacophony of tunes played by hundreds of special-interest pipers, they will always be judged wanting, Mr. Lynch avers. It is again time for schools of education and their host universities to lead the education debate with research and reason and to advocate for principle without the prejudice of special-interest politics. IN HIS letter to the Graduate School of Education and Human Development (GSEHD), President Trachtenberg reminded me less of Paul Revere's fabled ride and more of our university's namesake during the winter at Valley Forge. General Washington remained with his troops in the frosty Pennsylvania countryside to encourage and bolster the rebels through the rebellion's darkest hour. But it wasn't just concern for the troops that motivated him; politics played a role as well. The effect that the tenacious survival of the Colonial army would have on the British Parliament and on the French would mean the difference between defeat and victory. The parallels between the politically astute leadership of the nation's first President and that needed from our university's president to meet the challenge confronting education are obvious and much more significant than any likeness to the aborted warnings of a Boston silversmith. The task at hand is one of leadership. The faculty of the GSEHD is composed of professional educators and scholars who are well versed in research literature, public policy debates, media reports, and popular culture as these pertain to our fields of study. But education is a broad field with room for many players. Within the university, it is our colleagues in the humanities, the sciences, business, law, medicine, engineering, and public affairs who should hear the clarion call and be encouraged to join our noble challenge. Outside the university's gates, other constituencies also need to be addressed; it is proper and heroic for the university to assume a leadership role in education at all levels and equally proper for the university's president to lead the effort. I can only assume that President Trachtenberg sent the letter to our school to make sure he got the message right before carrying it to the world. President Trachtenberg wrote that during the 1960s and 1970s universities were forced to give up their Ivory Tower pretensions. I submit that not all the university's towers were ivory. Indeed, many professional schools and colleges, including schools of education, have been socially active and committed to progressive social change and relevance during much of the 20th century. The social and intellectual leadership that universities once provided, however, does seem to have diminished. Much of the kind of activity that President Trachtenberg is seeking has been lost to economic necessity, but the desire to play a significant role in public policy and cultural evolution remains. To reestablish such a role will require resources, to be sure, but, most important, it will require the will of the university to put its formidable reputation on the line. This effort will take nothing less than the clear vision and forthright leadership of our president. It is exciting indeed that education is rising in importance and that the role teacher of will be receiving the kind of high-level attention usually reserved for national defense and the economy. GSEHD prepares professionals in education and human development, only some of whom will become classroom teachers, but all of whom are important to the future of education and training. The reality of our school's diversity of focus is important because education is not limited to the rather narrow concept of schooling. There can be no doubt that our society requires a work force that can compete globally, but achieving that goal certainly extends far beyond better preparation of teachers for public schools. …