Frank Rhodes Lecture on the Creation of the Future, Arizona State University, Phoenix, Arizona. February 24 2026
From John Dewey to Zohran Mamdani — The Future of Higher Education in America
By Gerald Chan
I am honored to be invited to give the Frank Rhodes Lecture. I met President Rhodes in Ithaca in 2003 and he gave me an autographed copy of his book The Creation of the Future, The Role of the American University. I doubt that either one of us in that meeting had any inkling that two decades later I would be speaking here in his honor.
By accepting this invitation, I am subjecting myself to be measured by the stature of giants who had taken to this podium before me. Scanning that roster of speakers, many of them luminaries in higher education, I wonder why am I invited since I do not work in this sector. And yet, perhaps that is exactly the reason. Knowing the iconoclast that President Crow is, and being of kindred spirit, I am quite sure he didn’t invite me here to sing harmony to the mainstream of today’s American higher education, a refrain that is too replete with platitudes and banality. Indeed, the landing page of the website for the Frank Rhodes Lecture Series has a large banner on the top of the page that reads Challenge the Status Quo. That, I understand, is my remit.
Let me also state from the outset that my remarks in this talk pertain to the teaching function of universities and not the research function, hence, undergraduate education. I want to remind everyone of President Rhodes’ words that teaching is a moral vocation.
Frank Rhodes came into the orbit of ASU when President Crow enlisted his advice in creating the New American University. Turning the clock back twenty years, to assert that there was the need for a fundamental reconceptualization of the American university was a radical statement. Today, it no longer feels outrageous because it has become apparent to the American people that our model of higher education is broken. The call for fundamental rethinking has now become a widely acknowledged imperative. For higher education not to change, or merely to adopt incremental changes on the margin to prolong the status quo is no longer a viable proposition. What is at stake is existential for many colleges that are teetering on the brink of financial insolvency due to insufficient enrollment. For the nation, rather than launching more assaults on higher education as part of a cultural war, it behooves us all to see that the future of higher education in America is critically consequential to the future of the nation — politically, economically, technologically and culturally, especially as it pertains to the competitiveness of America in the world.
In one sentence, the problem with American higher education is that it has not changed much while America has changed a lot, and the world has changed a lot.
Since the end of WWII, it has been taken for granted in America that the path to a better life for individuals and to a better society at large is for more people to be college educated. The grateful nation could not have found a better way to express its gratitude for the young people who had served in WWII than to create the GI Bill to enable them to go to college. That would give them a golden ticket to middle-classhood, to do better than their parents who did not go to college. When the cost of a college education escalated beyond the affordability of the average American household, Congress created student loan programs. The message was that even if one had to incur debt to acquire a college education, it was still worth it.
As in any credit transaction, both the lender and the borrower have to have faith that the use of the loan proceeds will result in an ability to repay the loan. This unquestioned belief in the financial benefit of a college education has led to a run-away train of student loans. Today, the federal government is sitting on $1.8 trillion of student loans. According to Education Data Initiative, as of the second quarter of 2025, approximately 11.3% of those loans were delinquent. For comparison, the percentage of all housing loans in America that was delinquent in the run-up to the Great Recession of 2008 was 4.5%. Commercial banks typically have 1 to 2% of their loan book ending up as bad debt. Any bank with loan delinquency rates above 3% would be considered as a problem bank by the FDIC or other banking regulators.
The borrowers who are delinquent in repaying their student loans are not crooks who are milking the system. Rather, the delinquency comes from a structural gap between their earnings and their cost of living. America’s great success in convincing so many young people that they must go to college, regardless of what they study and where they study, has resulted in a surfeit of graduates whose education is mismatched with the job skills required by the market. They end up being employed in jobs for which a college degree is superfluous. As a case in point, I used to go to a coffee shop in my neighborhood where all the servers were college graduates. I knew what college each one of them attended and what majors did they study. That information left me rather unsurprised that their job prospects were not bright.
This kind of underemployment has quietly fomented a nascent political force in this country. It reared its head for the first time in the last New York City mayoral election where Zohran Mamdani won handily. Mamdani won 50.8% of all the votes in a three-way race, but among the young college graduates aged 18 to 29, 81% voted for Mamdani. That percentage was even higher at 84% among young female college graduates. Among the young voters who were non-college graduates, Mamdani only got 40% of their votes. The percentage of votes Mamdani got decreased progressively with voters’ age and with household income. Among voters who had been living in New York City for less than ten years, Mamdani got 81% of their votes. The young voters’ turnout for this election was 3.5 times the historical turnout of this voter block. No mayoral candidate in New York City had gotten more than a million votes since John V. Linsey won the election in 1969.
Putting the New York City voting data together, the picture that emerged is that for a large contingent of young college graduates who moved to New York seeking opportunities, their version of the American dream has not panned out. It was this disillusionment that made the a 34-year old avowed socialist who had never run anything feel messianic. Two weeks after the New York election, the people of Seattle, by a majority of 58%, voted in as mayor a socialist who has never held public office.
When the rewards of a capitalistic system are thought to be unattainable, socialism begins to look appealing. In late twentieth century, a triumphal moment in American history, there was a flurry of scholarly works on why socialism did not take root in America such as the Harvard sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset’s book entitled It Didn’t Happen Here, subtitled Why Socialism Failed in America. A highly influential paper was written by the historian Eric Foner entitled Why is There No Socialism in the United States. These authors argued that socialism did not take root in America in part because of copious opportunities and of social mobility being available in America. Not only did the Marxist brand of socialism not take hold, even the democratic variety of socialism adopted by Western European countries after WWII did not find hospitable ground in America. All that is changing before our eyes now.
Today, the unemployment rate of young college graduates in America is higher than that for all American workers. More alarming is the underemployment rate of young graduates. In 2025, the New York Federal Reserve estimated that 41% of new college graduates were underemployed, meaning that they were doing work for which a college degree was not necessary. The New York mayoral election signaled that when it comes to the swing to socialism, the absolute level of people’s income matters, but so does the gap between expected and actual income. Social and political dislocations are fueled by the perceived irreconcilable gap between expectation and reality. The young college-educated voters in New York were saying that their income expectations, shaped by observing their immediately preceding generations of college graduates, had become irreconcilable with their financial reality, both present and foreseeable. When outstanding student debt is taken into account, many college graduates now have a negative net worth. They have joined the ranks of the proletariat, the group to whom socialism looks most compelling as a quick fix.
Drilling down further to understand the young college graduates, two surveys last year are revealing. One is the Cengage Group’s 2025 Graduate Employability Report which sums up surveys of recent college graduates, employers and college educators. Published in September of 2025, the report shows that only 30% of 2025 graduates had found jobs in their field of study. The most shocking disconnect is that while 48% of graduates felt unprepared to apply for an entry level job, nine out of ten educators felt their students were prepared for employment. Is it the students or the educators that are out of sync with reality here?
The second survey conducted by the Hult International Business School surveyed 800 human resource managers and 800 employees in U.S. organizations. 85% of the employees agree with the statement ‘I wish my college had better prepared me for the workplace’ while 55% affirmed ‘My college education didn’t prepare me at all for my job.’ 77% agreed with the statement ‘I learned more in 6 months on the job than in my entire 4-year education.’ 94% agreed with ‘I have regrets about my degree.’ From the side of the employers, 75% of the HR managers surveyed agreed with the statement ‘Most college educations aren’t preparing people at all for their jobs.’
The complaint that college education has become irrelevant to the graduates’ job preparedness is one that can no longer be ignored. Employers have begun to take things into their own hands. Ever the avant-garde among companies, Palantir started its Meritocracy Fellows program last year to recruit high-performing young people directly from high school into a four-month fellowship. In addition to classes on history, international relations and leadership, the fellows work as members of the company’s regular work teams. They are paid as employees. At the end of the fellowship, if they perform well, they will be offered a permanent job. With time, it is conceivable that a Palantir fellowship would become as powerful a signaling mechanism as a degree from an elite university.
How did American higher education and the job market drift so far apart from each other?
From the founding of the American republic, there has been an unwavering belief that education is critical to the health of the nation’s democracy. Education was seen as a public good. I chuckled when I saw the title of Leon Botstein’s book Jefferson’s Children, Education and the Promise of American Culture. The gravitational pull between education and democracy is so strong that students are not so much their parents’ children as Jefferson’s children. One can see why school choice is such a big political issue in this country. John Dewey entitled his magnum opus Democracy and Education. One would be hard pressed to find a grander statement on education than the words of John Dewey, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”
The inspiration for the modern college curriculum in America came from the so-called Harvard Red Book, a set of recommendations published in 1945 under the title General Education for a Free Society. Written by a Harvard University committee of faculty members, the recommendation was for all college students to receive a general education which includes exposure to the natural sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. For the students, such a general education would avert the fragmentation of knowledge. For society, such a general education would provide a common foundation for citizenship in a shared democracy. The prevailing world view was one of education being in service to the project of democracy. While the Committee did recognize the need for professional education, it was eclipsed by the grander ambition of education producing a free society, so much so that professional education was consigned as a coda to the student’s total education journey.
Everywhere in the world, young people go to university to enter a profession. Only in America is there a perennial tension between higher education being vocational or liberal. America has always had a nagging fear that a narrow vocational education would lead to mutual incomprehensibility among citizens in different walks of life, a view epitomized by C.P. Snow’s book The Two Cultures. Hence, the style of education we call liberal arts education is an American artifact. The Association of American Colleges and Universities defines a liberal arts education as “a philosophy of education that empowers individual with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of value, ethics and civic engagement.”
Proponents of liberal arts education argue that such an education prepares the whole person of the learner and not merely giving them job skills. The preparation of responsible citizens would require no less. Every few years in recent decades, a senior professor or a liberal arts college president, would publish a book lauding the virtues of a liberal arts education. These writers mostly come from the humanities. After all, shaping and enriching the inner life of the learners is what the humanities purport to do. These writers’ defense of the liberal arts inevitably comes with a dose of anti-vocationalism. Given the subject matters of the humanities, it is also not surprising that there is always an undertow towards the past. An extreme form of the liberal arts education is the study of the Great Books, what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” The claim is that the best way to develop the whole person of the learner is by studying great literature, history and the classics.
John Dewey considered this view of liberal arts education as elitist and rooted in the class divide in society — the leisure class against the working class. In the lecture I gave in Berkeley last year, I voiced my objection to the claim that a true liberal arts education can only be practiced in certain fields of study. I said that liberal arts is an educational aim and a matter of pedagogy. With full disclosure of my own profession, I submit that business is a more relatable subject than the classics in which the aims of a liberal arts education can be achieved. I am pleased to have recently met an accounting professor who teaches in a small liberal arts college. He said that because of his commitment to a liberal arts education, learning accounting in his course is very different from taking accounting in another nearby college that teaches strictly business and nothing else. I think of him as a shining example of using something as practical as accounting to achieve the aims of a liberal arts education.
In 1944, John Dewey wrote an article entitled The Problem of the Liberal Arts College which I find to be very clarifying. I quote Dewey here:
Nothing is more striking in recent discussions of liberal education than the widespread and seemingly spontaneous use of liberating as a synonym for liberal. For it marks a break with the traditional idea that a certain group of studies is liberal because of something inhering in them — belonging to them by virtue of an indwelling essence or nature — as opium was once said to put persons to sleep because of its dormitive nature. This latter view of the liberal arts has the merit, for some writers and educators, of rendering it unnecessary to inquire closely into what the subjects actually accomplish for those who study them. If a particular group of studies is “liberal” in and of itself, such an inquiry is irrelevant. Failure to exercise a liberating educative effect in given cases is not the fault of the studies but of external conditions, such, perhaps, as the inherent incapacity of some students to rise to a truly “intellectual” level. To define liberal as that which liberates is to bring the problem of liberal education and of the liberal arts college within the domain of an inquiry in which the issue is settled by search for what is actually accomplished. The test and justification of claims put forth is found in observable consequences, not an a priori dogma.
If we do make such an inquiry and objectively assess how has higher education performed in America, the results are far from measuring up to the lofty vision. The democracy of this country is more frayed than ever. The culture on college campuses is intolerant. The cancel culture is coercive. It is anything but liberating. Meanwhile, too many graduates are ill-prepared for employment.
In reality, the rhetoric of higher education in service to democracy has long ago lost any authenticity. By the states progressively defunding the public universities over the last few decades, this country has long ago stopped treating the teaching function, as distinguished from the research function, of universities as a public good to be paid for by the public sector. It is now a private good to be paid for by the consumers. If the loan that a student incurred to finance his college education was a commercial transaction, so too is the education that he purchases with the borrowed funds.
In a CNBC poll in October 2025, 63% of those surveyed feel that a college education is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” That number was 47% in 2017 and 40% in 2013. The rate at which that number has shot up is shocking. There is no getting around the fact that enrolling in college is now a consumer decision where there is a weighing of cost and benefit. More than ever, higher education today looks no different from any industry with products to offer to potential consumers. Arthur Levine, the former President of Teachers College of Columbia University went so far as to call American higher education a mature industry. What typically happens to mature industries is that the number of customers dwindles and the number of players in that industry shrinks through closure or consolidation. This is exactly what is happening in American higher education today. Survival tactics include cutting headcount and salary of faculty and staff, eliminating or combining departments, selling real estate assets, or merger with another university with a stronger brand, enrollment or finance. The financial sustainability, not to say the morality of colleges offering degree programs of questionable value to students and are being kept afloat by students incurring debt is highly problematic.
Throw into this mix the advent of AI which is now displacing entry level jobs. AI is not going away; it will only get better. Colleges will have to produce graduates who can do what AI cannot, or do something better than AI. They will, of course, have AI as a tool at their fingertip. I do not have a crystal ball of how the job market will look like, but I do not for a moment think that all jobs will be displaced by AI. There will still be jobs, the bar is just higher now. Ironically, and this may be counterintuitive, my hunch is that in order to produce workers that can surmount the higher bar, a dose of liberal arts education will serve the students well.
My observation over the years is that people who graduate with a good liberal arts education may have a slower start as they enter the job market, but in the long run, they are more likely to be able to go farther. This is indeed the power of an education that leaves the student with thinking skills and learning habits that serve them well even as the skills and contents they learned in college become generic or obsolete over time. The future workers will have to continuously evolve; they will have to be doers who can think and thinkers who can get things done.
I wish that no students will have to confront a binary choice between pursuing a liberal education and a vocational one. This mutual exclusion is not necessary. In the same essay on liberal arts colleges, John Dewey wrote:
The outstanding need is the interfusion of knowledge of man and nature, of vocational preparation with a deep sense of the social foundation and social consequences of industry and industrial callings in contemporary society.
This word interfusion is particularly striking to me. The elements of a liberal education should be interfused into a vocational education. We must find ways to deliver the value of a liberal education within the teaching of what is vocational. I do not believe such an education is broadly available today because the vocationally oriented educators have considered the aims of a liberal education as not applicable to their work while the practitioners of the liberal arts education have shun the teaching of vocational skills. This is a false dichotomy. We must have education that integrates across fields of study, across educational objectives and across different dimensions of human experiences.
The accounting professor that I mentioned is able to convey the values of a liberal arts education in his teaching because he is himself a beneficiary of a liberal arts education. After working in public accounting and as a partner in a law firm, he returned to his alma mater to teach. His exposure to humanity did not come only from studying the classics, but from observing and working with humanity in the real world. His life experience prepared him to deliver the interfusion of a liberal education within a vocational education. I was blown away by how he weaves the objectives of a liberal arts education into the teaching of accounting skills.
In the same passage, Dewey continued.
I lately received from a man distinguished in public life, not a professional educator, a letter in which he writes: “Millions of our soldiers are coming back reactionaries of a kind through their lack of cultural education to appraise their surroundings and the events that are taking place.” I would add that there are at home many other millions who are confused and bewildered, at the mercy of drift and of designing “leaders,” because of their lack of an education that enables them to appraise their surroundings and the course of events. The present function of the liberal arts college, in my belief, is to use the resources put at our disposal alike by humane literature, by science, by subjects that have a vocational bearing, so as to secure ability to appraise the needs and issues of the world in which we live. Such an education would be liberating not in spite of the fact that it departs widely from the seven liberal arts of the medieval period, but just because it would do for the contemporary world what those arts tried to do for the world in which they took form.”
For Dewey, the goal of a liberal education is that the student would be able to “appraise their surroundings and the course of events,” or have the “ability to appraise the needs and issues of the world”. Being the pragmatist, Dewey’s goal of a liberal education is not something highbrow like a cultural taste or something abstract like the meaning of life. It is rather that the student would be able to make sense of the world, be able to decipher the world’s events and be clear-eyed about the world’s needs and issues. This is a broad and ambitious goal, but one that should be attempted for every student today to whom the world must feel perplexing and fraught with uncertainties.
I will now venture a list of suggestions for how higher education can change and be prepared for the future. Garnering insights from my own lifetime of learning and working and from having been a consumer of talents educated in different parts of the world, I will be provocative, reiterating that I didn’t come here to sing harmony to the current mainstream. It will require no less if we want better learning outcomes and life outcomes for today’s young people. It is a long list and not every point will be appropriate in a given situation. It is up to the educators to decide on adoption and adaptation. Much of my thinking incorporates the potentialities of generative AI.
1. An undergraduate education must become more affordable for the average American family. Colleges will have to find ways to lower the cost of a degree, otherwise, they will just price themselves out of business.
In 2025, an undergraduate student at Brown exposed the University’s bloat of 3805 non-faculty, administrative staff in relation to the School’s 7300 undergraduates. AI is a powerful tool for performing many of these administrative functions. On the instructional side, AI will enhance what professors can do with students and must be adopted. Higher education cannot be immune to the disruptions unleashed by the power of AI; it should be empowered by it.
2. There is nothing sacrosanct to college being four years. With the use of AI, learning can both be personalized according to the competency of each student and accelerated. I propose to change undergraduate education to consist of three years of classroom learning and one year of experiential learning. In some schools, this is known as the co-op program where the student works in his field of study. The leader in practicing experiential learning is Northeastern University. Their co-ops are paid, semester-long work experiences. Students have to apply for a co-op opportunity much like applying for a job. Their ability to secure a co-op position in their field is a bellwether for them of whether that field of study is promising for future employment.
It is widely reported that entry level jobs are being eliminated by AI. The first rung of the career ladder is being yanked out. Where there are entry level jobs, their applications are often screened by AI. This makes job applications so difficult and ineffective. In contrast, co-op positions are pre-arranged by the university with the employers. Co-ops are a way to help students secure entry level positions.
For most colleges, the career services office is an afterthought. The function of that office should be expanded to secure co-op, internship or apprenticeship opportunities for students. This requires the participation of a large number of employers who will have skin in the game as they have to pay the co-op students. For the same reason, the co-op student must provide value to the employer even though the co-op is a short-term engagement. The employer benefits from having access to talents and trying out their abilities in a low-stake environment. If they are good, they may be offered permanent employment upon graduation. This takes away much of the guesswork inherent in hiring. It is well said that hiring is guessing and firing is knowing.
3. Use AI to deliver content and flip the classroom so that class time can be used to make the material relevant to the students. The future pedagogy is one of human-AI collaboration.
Flipping the classroom is an excellent way to blend the objectives of a liberal education with a vocational education. The content and skill part of the vocational education can be delivered through AI with the instructor acting as a learning coach. This is supplemented by class time used for projects and applications. The goal is mastery of skills. The liberal education part is where the instructor takes the content beyond mastery to higher order learning objectives. This is where meaning, context, connections, ramifications, social consequences etc. are brought into the picture. Turning the classroom from a didactic venue to a participatory discourse is how students can learn thinking skills and communication skills in addition to subject matter skills.
4. Bring in people that have worked outside academia to teach, or co-teach. Academia should not be an ivory tower apart and aloof from the outside world. Students must have access to people who have worked in the outside world.
Likewise, faculty who come up through the academic route should be encouraged to have work experience outside academia, so to speak, there should be co-op experiences for faculty. If they cannot find co-op opportunities in their field, neither will their students. A co-op opportunity has to be a value proposition for someone.
5. Be intentional in separating research faculty from teaching faculty. The former is primarily for the benefit of graduate students, the latter, for undergraduates. In the 1930s and 1940s, University of Chicago adopted this practice. Some schools today do this well such that both the research agenda and the teaching agenda of the university perform well. The math department of Carnegie Mellon is a school that comes to mind.
6. All students should be facile in using AI. This skill is foundational today. Schools should abandon the thought that AI is a tool for cheating. I get it that there is a place for learning the basics without the aid of AI, just as children should learn to manipulate numbers in their head without the aid of a calculator.
The practice of assessment is one that needs to evolve. Some instructors are resorting to oral exams, or pen and paper writing of essays without access to a computer, or project based assessment. These are all valid assessments to test for certain outcomes of the student’s learning. These modalities of assessment raise the bar beyond mere recollection of learned material.
7. Broaden the students’ exposure to diverse fields of learning. With AI and online resources, one can learn anything, but the learner has to know what he needs to learn. What a broad exposure does for the student is to increase the amount of known unknowns and reduce the amount of unknown unknowns. Whenever a student is aware of a known unknown, he can use an AI tutor and learn it on his own. In other words, broaden the intellectual horizon of the student in school and stimulate him to deepen his learning on his own.
I propose a new configuration of courses. Take for example the distribution requirements. As an undergraduate in engineering, I had to take eight quarter-long courses in a variety of fields. Instead of eight ten-week courses, have sixteen five-week courses. Much of creativity and innovation is about connecting the dots, sometimes unexpected connections. It would serve the students well if they has more dots to connect.
8. Develop diverse modalities of thinking. Much emphasis has been given in education today to problem solving, hence analytical thinking which operates largely by reductionism. But not all problems are deterministic enough as to render reductionism feasible. In dealing with more complex or messy problems, a higher order of thinking begins with deciding what problem to solve. What is needed is in the realm of design thinking which operates by observation and reframing of problems. The originality in the solution comes from reframing what problem to solve. When AI can supply answers, what is valuable is the ability to ask good questions.
Other modalities of thinking include abductive thinking or inference, quantitative thinking, probabilistic thinking, systems thinking, entrepreneurial thinking, etc. These modalities are, of course, never distinct and separate in a person’s intellect. They are attributes of ability and habits of mind. When we say that a liberal education trains the student how to think, we must give form to what is thinking.
9. Develop the students’ social skills. The work of David Deming, the current Dean of Harvard College, showed that since 1980, the growth in the labor market has been for jobs that require social skills. Before 1980, people with quantitative skills but not social skills fared better than people with social skills and not quantitative skills. That market has flipped. For people with quantitative skills, social skills act as a multiplier for their technical ability.
10. Every student should have some experience in doing a startup, at the least in plan if not in actuality. This involves identifying an unmet need, conceiving an approach to address it, designing solutions, marshaling resources and working with others to execute a plan. With AI when anyone can learn anything, the fruit of an education is not what you know but what you can do with what you know. Entrepreneurship is a consummate expression of this active knowing. Instead of a backward-looking, literature-based undergraduate thesis, a forward-looking start-up business plan will do the student more good.
11. Stop coddling the students by grade inflation. The news that broke recently of students at UCSD who had passed high school math and yet cannot do college math is unacceptable. Creating the illusion of accomplishment by lowering standards does not do any good for anyone. Hold the standards high and work with the students to rise up to it.
I recognize that there are students whose educational foundation is weak. I recently visited a school where they take students from all kinds of backgrounds and transform them into competent learners. The head of the school told me that their secret is to go forward by constantly going backward, backfilling any deficiencies that the student may have in his former training. With AI, this is more feasible than ever. It is never too late.
12. Pay attention to the student’s character. I know this sounds old-fashioned. I have never had a good worker who does not have a good character. If the student did not get it from his family, the school can still make it up through expectations, rules and codes of conduct, traditions, and school culture.
I know this list is long. These suggestions are clues to what the future of higher education may look like. There is a high probability that in the not too distant future, the university will evolve to look very different from what we have become accustomed to for the longest time. We are at an inflection point from which the trajectory of higher education will diverge from the trajectory of the past. I am a venture capitalist; I invest in what does not yet exist. I put capital at risk to bring it into being. I submit that we are at a juncture that university leaders will have to be venture capitalist. They will have to lead their institutions into uncharted waters. As we consider qualities of people to assume leadership positions in higher education, I urge search committees to look into the future and not only to the past.
I will conclude, as I began, by paying tribute to Frank Rhodes. As President of Cornell University, he led with clarity of vision, and with grace, brought everyone along with him to realize that vision. He is a textbook case of how leadership makes all the difference to the institution. The actions of today’s leaders will determine how the next chapter of higher education in America will be written. The stakes are high for our young people, for the professoriate, for the institutions of higher learning, and for the future of the nation.