[music playing] Higher education to me has both a traditional and contemporary meaning.

Higher education is a place that everyone can aspire to, everyone can partake in.

A university is for not just getting a job, being employed, but helping people enter professions and build society by expanding and communicating knowledge.

It's a wide range of things, everything from university to standalone colleges, and there are even some other postsecondary education.

It's an incredibly diverse landscape that is not often understood in that way.

Most of the coverage of American higher education tends to focus on the most elite schools, the ivy league, and the ivy league.

But within that public private distinction, there is even more variety, it's an amazingly decentralized system.

Academia, higher education, it's a place for us to engage with others, to learn from people different than ourselves, and to also find a way to make the world a better place.

[music playing] When we advance learning, free men enter a new world of opportunity and experience.

If we reject learning, we render ourselves dead to the past and lost to the future.

Higher education in the traditional or even classical sense was conceived of as liberal arts education.

Liberal arts education, meaning broad exposure for any student to a number of different subject matters so that they could not just be knowledgeable in a specialized field, but knowledgeable as a citizen and activate that knowledge in conceivably any important conversation.

In addition to that traditional or classical definition, I think higher education has been associated in important ways with modern democracy, particularly in Western states.

If you have significant portions of your population trained in advanced education, then you have people ready to enter into different professions and make decisions on behalf of civil society in a fact based way, rather than, say, based on mere beliefs or ideologies or partisan politics.

Early on, universities and for a long time were for training the elite, sons, by and large, of the elite.

And they were also to support the major institutions of medieval and postmedieval society, such as the Roman Catholic church, various monarchy states and so forth.

They were teaching a very restricted classical curriculum, and they were any place but what you would imagine the current vibrant university is.

Starting around the middle part of the 19th century, a group of universities roughly in Germany began to have a very different relationship with society.

They started to open their doors to more and more people from different walks of life, women, for example.

It also started to merge the idea of training of education with knowledge production science, but also in humanities.

And this was really the birth of what I would call the modern university.

As of 1900, most Americans weren't even graduating from high school.

Very, very few went to college.

And then you had the Morrill Land Grant Act enacted in 1862.

On the walls of old main, administration building of the Pennsylvania State University are to be found a series of frescoes on the theme of the Land Grant Act.

And from that point on, you have the expectation that every state will have a public university.

Some states had universities before they became states.

I think the most dramatic example is Oklahoma, its university dates from 1890, the state dates from 1907, and this was supposed to jumpstart the Industrial Revolution.

It was an incredibly farsighted piece of legislation.

Johns Hopkins University helped to set the pattern for graduate education in America.

It wasn't until Johns Hopkins adopted a German model of higher education that you had a research university.

The idea where everyone from physics to philology would engage in fundamental research, ostensibly for the common good, for the betterment of society, for the expansion of human knowledge, and also for the economic returns that it might produce.

Seeking this ideal, many American universities developed and helped America achieve scientific leadership.

One uniquely American aspect is a collision of two cultures of higher education or perhaps an ongoing debate between them.

On the one hand, we do have the classical liberal arts tradition, but modern American universities have also adopted the German idea of Wissenschaft, which is specialized knowledge that a university should be a quasi scientific research institution.

This model has now spread, could call it a university knowledge production model where it combines both education mission and knowledge production mission, and that's spread all over the world.

So it's really the foundation for what's called the knowledge society.

And it's more than just producing facts or factual analysis of a archive of art or archive of antiquity.

It's really helping people to think about those things.

And this is where humanities plays such an important part in the modern research university.

[suspense music] Today is never before do we realize that the liberties of free men go hand in hand with institutions of higher learning which are free to seek and to teach the truth.

The humanities, in a sense, is about building up knowledge of who you are as a human being and who other people are as human beings.

It's about understanding history, culture, diversity in the human experience, literature, art.

They teach us about what it is and what it has meant to be human.

We have devised a great deal of ways of being human, and studying the humanities is one way to show, I think the best way to show.

It hasn't always been this way, and it might be otherwise.

They teach you to think, they teach you to persuade, they teach you to analyze.

They teach you to take lots of information and distill it into thinking what is the best way to handle something?

How can I work with people in a diverse background?

How can I show respect for elements that I know are different than me?

Science can tell us how to build something, but the humanities tell us what to do after we build that and why do we build it?

So the humanities are things that are essential.

The skills of critical thinking and communication and selfdevelopment and professionalism.

Mrs. Oren, how can we be sure that the teacher's thinking on all these things is right?

Right?

What do you mean by right?

These are controversial subjects, and the teacher's job is not to decide them, that is a job for all the people.

The teacher helps students learn how to think, not what to think about them.

You can track pretty closely the health of the humanities and the health of a democratic state.

They seem to have something to do with each other.

As more and more people get education and advanced education, they don't necessarily become more liberal or more conservative, that's what all the data show.

However, they become turbocharged in terms of what they know to do politically.

They become much more active, they tend to have a much more complex idea about what they're for or what they're against.

And that, one hopes will promote the creation and sustaining of informed citizenry, of people who actually have some idea how to sort out good information from bad, how to prioritize different competing social goods.

The big ones, for example, being say, freedom and equality, which can be in conflict.

Imagine what social practices and policies might work for the common good.

Education is essential to participate in that and to be an effective citizen in that, more so than ever.

Look at all the different information that's out there now.

You need a fairly sophisticated mind to think through a lot of these things.

And the data we have on folks who've been to college have college degree, they are very different political animal.

They are far more engaged.

For democracy, active citizens are crucial and the university and postsecondary education has made huge impacts on that.

When people criticize, particularly the humanities in American higher education, another conversation that we need to have is why aren't the humanities embraced in more authoritarian nations?

Would be authoritarians want to control truth and fact?

They don't want to have other centers of power in society that can dispel the propaganda that they rely on, myths about the greatness of the people, about the greatness of themselves as leaders, mythologies about historical destiny, as well as fundamentally unscientific ideas about race and human hierarchy.

And universities are antipropaganda machines at their best.

Authoritarians attack such competing centers of power.

Power being understood here as power over truth and fact and the ability to disseminate accurate versions of reality.

Civil society thrives on, in democratic contexts, new ideas, different ideas, many different cultural perspectives.

The ideal of the United States is e pluribus unum, one from many, which is a signifier of cultural diversity or democratic pluralism.

So exposure to that pluralism through the humanities, I think works on a lot of practical but also idealistic levels that are very helpful for an open society.

And so if it works right, you've got yourself an unruly but functioning democracy.

And I think it's no accident at all that the rise of authoritarian regimes in the 21st century, I'm thinking Turkey, Hungary, China, Russia.

One of the first things they do is turn on the universities.

Russia and other countries in the former orbit of the Soviet Union have reverted to authoritarianism, and they're very aggressively trying to export antidemocratic ideas, antihumanist, antipluralist ideas back to the west.

And one of the key ideas that they've been pretty successful in exporting is the idea that the university is a cause of social and political evils, that it's silly, it's excessive, it trains people in radical ideologies and foments disruption rather than helping society.

By empirical measures, these claims are not true, but that's been a very successful propaganda and it's revenue generating, it's entertaining, it's sensational.

And so it very easily shows up in both hyperpartisan media and theatrical mainstream coverage as well.

If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

They're popular targets because they've changed so many things.

That creates a lot of turmoil.

And so I'm not surprised that politicians, by the way, who are all highly educated, of course, use that as a foil for talking about the loss in economic and social well-being.

If a politician in a democratically elected system is using their platform to gin up manufactured outrage about what's allegedly taught in certain university classes or the private political beliefs from certain students and faculty, if they're doing that, then they're no longer working in a democratic way.

Their use of restrictions on budgets to force changes in university systems is a pretty open political strategy, and it's one that's been refined over 2 or 3 generations now in modern US politics.

Politicians are asking for pretty severe cuts to mostly multicultural programs or programs for marginalized students, but asking for those cuts and those ideological changes by holding up state budgets that universities need to function.

So I think it's been a conscious political strategy to first cut back dramatically on public funding.

It makes higher education tuition skyrocket, makes it much less affordable, adds all burdens to getting one's degree.

And it also makes the university not run as well.

What we've seen in this Commonwealth in the legislature in Harrisburg, has actually been a game of disinvesting from higher education.

And because of that, our Commonwealth has sadly been playing a game of subtraction when it comes to higher education, subtracting resources, subtracting services, subtracting access for all Pennsylvanians.

And as a result of that, over the last 30 years, we have seen enrollment decline and we've seen the cost of attending Pennsylvania colleges and universities skyrocket.

We have absolutely defaulted on a key provision of the social contract in redefining higher education where it once was considered a public good.

And now we consider it a private investment made by individuals and families.

We have also withdrawn public support from universities.

Penn State receives less than 5% of its budget from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And so we've offloaded all those costs onto individuals and their families, and the result is skyrocketing tuition.

On top of that, a predatory student loan industry, you absolutely prioritize students earning potential immediately upon graduation.

We've collectively created a condition that provides profound disincentives for people to study the life of the mind or the life of creative expression.

And they say that education is a commodity.

You can commoditize it, you can charge for it, you can raise tuition.

It's just another thing out there, it's a barrel of oil, it's an ounce of gold, it's a stock.

It's anything.

[music playing] The truth is that higher education is eminently fundable in many of these public systems because in the '60s and '70s it was that's what states predominantly did.

But in the later desegregation era, we started to see these political strategies to keep those institutions much more the provenance of privileged or elite social classes.

The heavy use of the acronym DEI in a pejorative way, I think really is a catch all for attacks on some parts of the social sciences, but also the humanities.

Universities across the us are facing intense scrutiny over efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI for short.

With critics blasting DEI initiatives as unnecessary, harmful, discriminatory, even racist.

Since 2023, more than 70 bills targeting DEI in academia have been introduced in more than two dozen states, becoming law in six states.

I think the issue here is that there's a lot of commentators and hyperpartisan political actors who are promoting an idea of what DEI stands for without being fully informed themselves or fully honest about what we mean by that phrase.

It's more like a philosophy.

It's saying on a regular basis in a university, what are we doing to make sure we're living up to that postsegregation era promise that these publicly funded institutions by constitutional law should be equally accessible for everyone?

So a lot of these things are reaction to the cultural strength of universities, and you don't have pushback against forces in society that don't matter much.

The universities matter a lot and people will react to that.

But it is a reaction to the strength of the university, not to its weakness.

I think attacks on higher education, particularly where it concerns the humanities, are attacks on academic freedom, both for students and faculty.

Qualities like kindness and compassion, honesty, hard work, they often matter more than technical skills or know how.

[applause] But when our leaders express a disdain for facts, when they're not held accountable for repeating falsehoods and just making stuff up, well, actual experts are dismissed as elitists, then we've got a problem.

Academic freedom depends on the development of expertise.

There's a really deep tension at a public university on the one hand being answerable to the public, we are partly funded by the public.

And on the other hand, the idea that we don't put knowledge and research up for a plebiscite.

So I think especially public higher education is defined by that tension of being answerable to the state and answerable to the public while not being intellectually beholden to them.

Let's not quibble, teach communism, teach about communism.

We want to know what you teach, what books you use.

Academic freedom is a two sided coin.

On the one hand, it's the freedom for students to go to an institution and to learn what they want within the course offerings that have been approved by that institution already.

The other side of the coin is the freedom not to fear that the state is monitoring what you do in the classroom, that the public at large, as well as the state legislature trusts you to use your expertise in your chosen field of knowledge in a productive way.

If you like living in a society where people are free to explore their ideas with maximum choice, then what people do in well-supported university systems even if you don't like or like what they're doing on a case by case basis, they're one of the best signs that you do live in a free society by that measure.

It is so important to distinguish academic freedom from free speech because free speech does not have to be well-informed.

Free speech can be whatever crackpot theories, anyone might espouse, for any reason in almost any context except for threats of imminent harm, defamation, things like that.

We fold the two concepts together in the United States because we believe that no professor should give up their first amendment rights upon taking an academic job.

Most important difference between academic freedom and free speech is precisely that academic freedom requires a degree of scholarly expertise.

So academic freedom has a much higher bar for what counts as legitimate knowledge and free speech does.

And that's why confusing the two can lead to a free for all, where academic freedom lets people do and say whatever they want, which is not what it's supposed to mean.

So class of 2016, let me be as clear as I can be.

In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.

It's not cool to not know what you're talking about.

We as a society devalue the humanities because we look at them as useless, or we say you can't get a job because you majored in English or philosophy or theology.

That's a false narrative that we need to step forward and try to combat all the time.

When we devalue the humanities for anything else, we devalue ourselves as human beings.

Some of the more challenging, and even in some ways revolutionary knowledges of the past 50 years have come out of the humanities.

Those are the things that make us distinct, that literally make us human.

And I know we'll continue to do them, but I think if there's a dwindling appreciation of what those knowledges and practices are and dwindling interest in them, we will diminish ourselves.

The humanities is where ideas about democracy, about open society, about reinventing ourselves as human beings, about thinking and interacting creatively, are most directly experienced.

I wouldn't like to think of a version of our society without a robust commitment to the humanities and higher Ed.

They're essential, and we can't lose sight of the fact that the humanities bring us the essential skills that we need to thrive as a society and that students and other professionals need in order to do not just their jobs, but to be successful and to support a vibrant economy.

Over the last 50 years, we've had a shift from where somebody ends up in terms of their job and their economic success and even social status used to depend a lot on their family.

This is almost been completely erased by education.

Once into college, what you major in, what you learn, what you do to actively engage with the institution.

These matter much more to where you start and where you end up in the adult world, and that's a major shift.

Support for universities in this time in the early 21st century, I think really is support for a truly merit-based system, for a truly egalitarian vision of society and for something that gets much closer to a permanent multicultural democracy.

If you're in America that made higher education more accessible for all, you wind up not only I think with a more eventually equal society, but a society more intellectually innovative, a society in which people were willing to take chances on the humanities and the performing arts and speculative things that may not pay off in the short run.

You eventually, I think, would have a society that is more free, more interesting, and less cruel.

That would be my hope.

When we step back and have that long range lens that lets us see into the future, I hope that what we see is even more individuals taking things from the humanities and showing the viability and the success that they can bring into society.

I still see the colleges and the universities and higher education being a critical part of who we are as human beings because we learn from Everyone.

There's value in just learning something new.

And that experience is something that I hope higher education continues to bring to individuals and to the community at large.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.

If democracy is to survive, it is the task of men of thought as well as men of action to put aside pride and prejudice and with courage and single-minded devotion, and above all, with humility to find the truth and teach the truth that shall keep men free.

[upbeat music]