Colgate’s spring 2025 Presidential Speaker Series, “The University and the Public Good: The Role of the American College in Our Time,” launched on Jan. 23 with a Q&A session led by President Brian Casey featuring New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens and former Chronicle of Higher Education senior writer Goldie Blumenstyk ’79. The live-streamed event, which took place at the New York Historical, explored the evolving responsibilities of higher education and the challenges colleges and universities face in today’s rapidly changing political and cultural landscape.
The significance of higher education
The session began with the basics: why would journalists dedicate their careers to covering higher education? From their perspective, events on college campuses can say a lot about what's happening on the national stage. While covering state politics, Blumenstyk found that a lot could be understood about an area’s political climate by examining its universities, “Higher education systems in states are a reflection of the state, the state’s politics, the state’s history, culture, and their economics,” Blumenstyk says.
Similarly, Stephens shared that campus happenings are a reflection of larger national trends.
“When I look to what is happening on college campuses and when I interact with recent graduates, I see a lot of what ails and what is going to ail the United States,” Stephens says. “I think the dogmatism, ignorance, and self-certainties that have typified American politics were incubated on campuses a generation or two ago and continue to be incubated now.” The question then becomes, what is happening on campuses to create such an effect on the nation?
Campus crises
While both journalists agree that the nation is facing a great threat to democracy, they offer different perspectives on how universities contribute to the problem. For Stephens, the main issue lies in the curriculum. While students are gaining more choice in what they study, they are losing fundamental knowledge that impairs their ability to be well-educated citizens — including ancient philosophy and epistemology. “What universities have to do is to prepare their students to have a common set of ideas and intellectual touchstones that make them understand what it is that they are doing in their lives, in their countries, and in the world,” Stephens says.
Blumenstyk disagrees. While tuitions continue to rise and the value of college education is being questioned, the loss of the traditional curriculum of the past is not the most pressing problem of colleges today.
“You can develop an education without having this common core of classics; I don’t think that's the definition of an educated American right now,” Blumenstyk says. “You can develop critical thinking skills and develop your passions and interests in a lot of topics by taking things through all different kinds of disciplines.”
Concerning fall 2023 protests
The nation began to question the role of higher education as college protests and encampments caught the attention of the national media in the fall of 2023 when many denounced administrations for disappointing responses to the events on their campuses. Blumenstyk criticized the failure of universities to provide meaningful guidance during those volatile moments, “The place where I think higher education failed the most during this period is it didn’t teach,” Blumenstyk says. “Everything became so polarized, some of the most knowledgeable people didn’t want to step into the fray so it became much more ideological instead of educational.”
The events highlighted shortcomings in higher education and emphasized a need for universities to rethink their approach to education.
What universities must do
As the discussion came to a close, Stephens and Blumenstyk called for universities to reflect on their responsibilities to their students and society as a whole. While returning to a focus on teaching and research, Blumenstyk asks that universities begin to lean more heavily into public service, “Universities actually have the capacity to serve society in great ways,” Blumenstyk says.
In order to move forward, administrators must ask themselves if they are aligned with their core mission and evaluate the strength of their teaching. “How do we produce students we are going to be proud of in 40 years? That’s the question,” Stephens said.
