Amid growing negative perceptions of higher education, Colgate University hosted a discussion Tuesday, Feb. 25 with the presidents of three other leading liberal arts institutions to examine the challenges confronting higher education today. Moderated by Colgate University President Brian W. Casey, the panel featured Grinnell College President Anne F. Harris, Lafayette College President Nicole Hurd and Hamilton College President Steven Tepper.
The event was part of this spring’s Presidential Speaker Series, “The University and the Public Good: The Role of the American College in Our Time.”
The presidents described how shifts in public opinion reflect a broader disillusionment with universities — institutions that were once viewed as pillars of opportunity and progress.
Harris opened the discussion with a bleak reminder of the current cultural climate.
“We’re living in the catastrophe,” Harris said.
She reminded the audience of the history of higher education, noting how universities are still tainted with a 19th-century sense of isolationism — especially given her college’s rural location in Grinnell, Iowa.
“It’s not monastic, but it’s a little medieval — the retreat from the world, and then back out into it,” Harris said. “I think that, structurally and historically, we have had this withdrawal from the world that makes us look elitist, elite, disconnected, when in fact now, we’re fully permeable with social media.”
Tepper expanded on some of the misconceptions about higher education.
“We are in a place where neoliberalism has left a lot of people behind and frustrated, and instead of universities and colleges being this great hope for transformation and social mobility, they are perceived to be oppositional to that,” Tepper said.
The public, he noted, has a much different perception of what college students are actually learning in liberal arts classrooms.
“We need disruptors and critics — and they are on their campuses, and they should be. But we are noisy places with lots of ideas. We are not cathedrals, we are bazaars,” Tepper said. “The mischaracterization that there’s this orthodoxy and everybody has to agree and we all pray together in the same direction — it’s just not true”
The panelists agreed that accessibility and the high perceived cost of higher education have added to these mischaracterizations.
“It makes people feel like they have imposter syndrome before they even get to a campus — that’s a problem,” Hurd said.
Some of the presidents’ opinions escalated into more forceful rebukes of how these mischaracterizations have evolved into federal actions.
“It would be a critique if we were in dialogue. It’s an attack when we’ve got the deployment of laws and regulations that we’re seeing,” Harris said.
One such attack came in the form of a Dear Colleague letter published Feb. 14 by the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights. The letter accused educational institutions of racial discrimination in violation of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that ruled race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The letter, which interpreted the ruling to extend to all aspects of student life, specifically denounced diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and threatened to withdraw federal funding from institutions that don’t remove such programs.
While the letter caused uncertainty amongst university leaders who wondered whether they would need to change their schools’ curricula and programs, the panelists emphasized that it carries no legal weight. Tepper referred to it as a piece of “political theater.”
“There’s nothing in there that has been adjudicated in a way that suggests that we’re doing anything wrong or anything against the law,” Tepper said.
Casey agreed with this assessment.
“One of the ways in which you garner power is to perform power,” Casey said. “Isn’t that what it was?”
Junior Natalie Yale found the discussion of the letter particularly significant given its timely relevance and felt the conversation offered much-needed clarity in the midst of the uncertainty it has caused.
“I appreciated President Casey’s reference to the letter as both a real threat that should be approached with cautious intentionality and essentially a performance of theater that used sweeping and ambiguous rhetoric to inspire fear,” Yale said. “His insistence that it didn’t carry actual legal weight also helped to clarify the University’s posture toward the letter. I’m glad that Colgate seems to be committed to prioritizing diversity and academic freedom amidst the barrage of executive orders and letters from the Trump administration.”
The panelists also rejected claims that university curricula are stagnant and biased. Harris, noting that many see higher education as “assimilationist,” argued that universities are responsible for promoting curiosity.
“I think about our curriculum really being about search and research,” Harris said.
To counter the distortions of higher education, which Tepper said can sometimes feel like a “house of mirrors,” the presidents emphasized the importance of reclaiming the portrayal of universities and reminding the public of its proven benefits.
“Higher education remains the best avenue for social mobility and liberal arts colleges probably outperform any other college in terms of social mobility for those who get a chance to go and get scholarships and transform their lives,” Tepper said. “That’s not a story that we’re telling very successfully.”
Hurd focused heavily on the potential impact of higher education.
“It’s because of the transformative power that happens when you go through a higher education institution — and that is real data, and we don’t talk about it,” Hurd said.
Casey asked whether the common stereotype of liberal arts colleges admitting mainly higher-income students might be distorting this idea. In response, Tepper noted that education can actually be “a great process for redistributing wealth.”
“Every full-paying student and family is paying for another student at our colleges, and that is a good thing, because we have created something so powerful,” Tepper said. “There can’t be power dynamics at work, there can’t be exclusion at work — that’s the great project, that’s what our DEI project is. How do you actually make the pluralism work for every single human that comes to our campuses?”
Despite these challenges, the panelists remained hopeful, drawing inspiration from their students who continued to motivate them to push forward.
Hurd reflected on what she learned about leadership from her time as an education professor.
“Do you have the courage to pause, do you have the courage to tell the campus you’re going to figure this out together and do you have the ability to inspire optimism? Because I don’t think you can be an educator unless you’re an optimist — I really don’t. It’s an act of optimism to be an educator.”
Tepper expanded on the necessity of courage.
“I think there’s so much courage on our campuses, whether it’s the courage to put an original idea out into the world but also the courage of what you’re sacrificing to come to college,” Tepper said. “It’s such a privilege and an honor for us to be stewards of institutions that allow people to bring that kind of courage in order to have an impact in the world and transform their lives. We can’t mess that up.”
