Good morning. I want to add my words of welcome to all of you participating in this forum. My topic today is the value of a college education. Even though I come before you as a person with a background in the arts, I want to speak not as an artist, but simply as someone who has a profound appreciation for the values of higher education. This is a subject which is dear to my heart, for you see, I am a third-generation American, the only member of my family to attend college, much less receive a degree. College literally changed my life - it gave me my career, my wife, and so much more. It changed my very experience of life, and I suspect the same is true for many, if not all, of you here.

Everything we are discussing today is of vital importance to the future of higher education, but it is my purpose to focus on that inspiration to which Tom Sherman alluded in his opening remarks this morning. It is my belief that a college education is so obviously and intrinsically valuable that we often take its value for granted when we discuss how to improve it, how to pay for it, or when we try to justify its extravagances to the taxpayers. I believe that Dante had it about right when he wrote, "the intellect, approaching the object of its desires. . . becomes so deeply absorbed that memory cannot follow it all the way." Let us be sure that our memories are active and alive, for it is in the state of forgetfulness that we run the risk of making short-sighted decisions. I invite you now to exercise your memory - to focus for the next few moments on what your college education means to you.

Remember now, if you will, yourself in college. Better yet, go back to the time before you went to college. Would anyone here be willing to trade what you learned from your college experience, to go back to being the person you were before college? I, for one, would not. I'll admit to sometimes having wished I had attended Yale or Harvard instead of a small public college in Western Kentucky, but I cannot even imagine what my life would be like had I no college education at all. For me it is easy to divide my life into two parts: B.C. and A.G. - before college and after graduation, with the four or so years in between lingering in my memory as a time when Possibility was the stuff of my dreams, both waking and sleeping.

If you, too, are unable to imagine your life without a college education, then we have ample testimony to its value. But what is that value? We all know the importance of going to college in preparation for the job market or in coping with the rapid changes in technology. Yet while a higher income, better standard of living, and technological literacy might be the most obvious reasons for attending college, they are not necessarily the best, the most reliable, or the most enduring. These things are not what colleges do best, nor are they, in my estimation, where the true value of a college education lies.

What colleges do best is bring people, smart people, together in an environment where they have time to read, reflect, explore, listen, argue, and especially, stretch their known boundaries. As Anne Matthews has written in her book Bright College Years, "an undergraduate education is not so much a pile of notebooks moldering in the bottom drawer, but learning to talk in front of a group, to read and to summarize, to reason on demand, to push yourself late at night. To live and work with people you might never speak to in ordinary life. To think against the grain. To manage time. To not be afraid or rejecting. To not say, every other sentence, "In my high school, we . . . " The goal of a college education ought to be to prepare people for the wise exercise of the personal freedoms we so richly enjoy. Knowing how to live up to our highest aspirations - how to choose well what we want to be and do, this is the opportunity that college offers us as individuals. As for society, no society that values freedom can afford to underestimate, even for an instant, the value of higher education. As University of Virginia faculty member Mark Edmundson pointed out in a recent article, "A democracy needs to constantly develop, and to do so it requires the most powerful visionary minds to interpret the present and to propose possible shapes for the future." College is where visionary minds go to be challenged, grow, and mature. It is also where people go who aspire to have visionary minds.

Lest I sound too idealistic, I will confess that there have been many times when, confronted with unmotivated or poorly prepared students, I have been tempted to say something like "Leave this place; go to trade school or get a job, just stop wasting my time." At just such times a little voice goes off in my head. "Wait a minute" it says, "we live in a democracy, and democracy requires that the people, as many people as possible, be well educated, whether it's convenient or not."

Seventeen years of college teaching has taught me that its not always possible to predict who will succeed: sometimes it is the most difficult students who go on to become real visionaries, real leaders. Often, just when we think we're not getting through at all we experience a wonderful epiphany. Earl Shores, author of a soon to be published book, New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy, related in a recent Harpers Magazine article an experience with a student in an experimental college equivalent course for the down-and -out of New York's lower east side. Shores wrote: One Saturday morning in January, David Howell telephoned me at home. "Mr. Shores," he said, Anglicizing my name, as many of the students did. "Mr. Howell," I responded, recognizing his voice.

"How you doin', Mr. Shores?"

"I'm fine. How are you?"

"I had a little problem at work."

Uh-oh, I thought, bad news was coming. David is a big man, generally good- humored but with a quick temper. According to his mother, he had a history of violent behavior. In the classroom he had been one of the best students, a steady man, twenty- four years old, who always did the reading assignments and who often made interesting connections between the humanities and daily life. "What happened?" "Mr. Shores, there's a woman at my job, she said some things to me and I said some things to her. And she told my supervisor I had said things to her, and he called me in about it. She's forty years old and she don't have no social life, and I have a good social life, and she's jealous of me."

"And then what happened?" The tone of his voice and the timing of the call did not portend good news. "Mr. Shores, she made me so mad, I wanted to smack her up against the wall. I tried to talk to some friends to calm myself down a little, but nobody was around."

"And what did you do?" I asked, fearing this was his one telephone call from the city jail.

"Mr. Shores, I asked myself, 'What would Socrates do?'

David Howell had reasoned that his co-workers envy was not his problem after all, and he had dropped his rage. A college education may teach us to place our faith in reason, it may give us the insight and the courage to choose to be our better selves, it may support our basic freedoms, but it is not a guarantee of any of these things. Colleges are not particularly efficient, as we all know. While striving to improve efficiency in the areas of quality, access, and financing, we should not loose sight of the basic values of a college education.

Sustaining such values is a costly enterprise, not without its share of risks. Joining the education business, it has been said, is as risky as staring into the sun. So it is. But as we debate the future of higher education, we should be mindful not only of the risks, but also of the promises, of the values. We are called upon to have vision, not just prudence. As Blake so eloquently cautioned,

We are made to believe a lie

When we see not 'Thro the eye.

Anne Matthews, Bright College Years, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 205.

Mark Edmundson, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students," Harpers Magazine (September, 1997), p. 49.

Earl Shorris, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor," Harpers Magazine (September, 1997), p. 58.

William Blake, The Auguries of Innocence. One who has a profound appreciation for the values of higher education.