Colgate University’s Presidential Speaker Series is back for the Spring 2025 semester. The first installment of the spring series, “The University and the Public Good: The Role of the American College in Our Time,” took place in New York City on Jan. 23.
The new series aligns with recommendations by the Task Force on Institutional Voice, which considered whether the University should issue official statements about current events, according to a Dec. 18 email update addressed to the Colgate community.
The live-streamed discussion between Colgate University President Brian W. Casey, Bret Stephens of The New York Times and Goldie Blumenstyk ’79, a recently retired senior editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), aimed to understand and unpack the theories and practices of higher education.
“The speaker series we begin tonight is designed to consider the Colgates of the world, most especially in this time: this historic and rapidly changing time,” Casey said. “We will bring to our wider Colgate community speakers who hold strong ideas about what the University is, and what the role of the University should be in a democracy and in our culture.”
Stephens is an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner for Distinguished Commentary, former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post and current editor-in-chief at Sapir. In the discussion, Stephens discusses the trouble liberal democracy faces in the modern day.
“Universities have abandoned the idea of what is required to be a well-educated citizen and human being, and what universities have to do to prepare their students to have a common set of ideas and intellectual touchstones to make them understand what it is they are doing in their lives, in their countries and in the world,” Stephens said.
Blumenstyk, a veteran CHE reporter, contributor for The New York Times and USA Today and author of “American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know,” is a proud Colgate alumna.
“I think higher education should prepare people to live in society. Society is not necessarily an individualistic thing,” Blumenstyk said. “That’s one of the things that colleges should do — to prepare students to live in the pluralistic society that we live in today.”
Following the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, many heads turned to American institutions of higher education for official statements on the conflict in Gaza.
“These protests, these moments, play out on the front pages of The Journal and The Times and The Chronicle, and the notion that the schools were lost, [that] they had moved into chaos, was quite profound,” Casey said.
Stephens then turned to the question of the role of liberal arts institutions in the face of conflict and a period of geopolitical upheaval.
“[The purpose of a liberal arts education] is to cultivate the capacity for mature and independent thought,” Stephens said. “How do we produce students that we are going to be proud of in 40 years? That’s the question,” Stephens said.
While Blumenstyk would challenge Stephens’s claims, they both arrived at a similar conclusion on the role of higher education officials when contextualizing the issue around last fall.
“I would add the one place where I think higher education failed the most during this period is that it did not teach,” Blumenstyk said. “Everything became so polarized, and I’ve talked to a lot of college presidents during this period, and some of the most knowledgeable [professors] didn’t want to step into the fray.”
“How do we produce students that we are going to be proud of in 40 years? That’s the question,” Stephens said.
The Presidential Speaker Series continues on Thursday, Feb. 20, at 5 p.m. in Olin Hall’s Love Auditorium, featuring a discussion with Eddie R. Cole, author of “The Campus Color Line.” This installment will be led by L. Hazel Jack, vice president and chief of staff to President Casey.
