Dive Brief:
- Cornell University’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett, says it’s time to look at higher education through a lens framed by freedom and responsibility — two qualities she says are inseparable.
- In a piece for The Washington Post, Garrett writes that research universities operate with a level of freedom — in what they teach and research and do — thanks to public tax dollars that fund grants, financial aid, and philanthropy.
- The responsibilities on which she says research universities must focus “even more intently” are to faculty, students, and the public, including educating students in supportive, diverse learning environments, teaching them not just facts, but skills they can use throughout their whole lives.
Dive Insight:
Garrett’s description of responsibilities to faculty include providing proper funding and creating an environment that supports freedom of inquiry, nurtures graduate students and early career professors, and leaves them to their best teaching and research work without the interference of politics or prejudice. Besides sending highly equipped students back into the world, she said research universities owe the public a commitment to both applied research as well as more abstract work, whose application may only be discovered decades later.
In the conservative political push for higher education to become a job training center, this type of research is particularly important to continue to support, as it has supported immeasurable progress by being ahead of its time.