Education Of A University President

Preface

p r e f a c e Harry Golden, the late publisher of the Carolina Israelite, titled one of his books Only in America. His title fits my story. I was born to immigrant parents from Eastern Europe who had little formal education, yet I graduated from college and became first a professor and then president of two unique and distinguished American universities. While teaching and serving as an administrator, I had the good fortune to live and work in Western Europe andtospendtimeinEasternEurope,Africa,andpartsofAsia,includingJapan, mainland China, and Taiwan. I owe all these rewarding opportunities to the happy accident of having been born and educated in the United States. I have often felt frustrated by America’s seeming inability to live up to its lofty ideals – for example, in delivering civil rights and fostering equality of opportunity for all citizens. Also, at times, I have had serious reservations about our foreign policy. But compared to the alternatives (past as well as present), this is a progressive country. Scratch beneath the surface of those foreign critics who scold Americans as arrogant, self-centered, conceited, and chauvinistic and you will often find envy, jealousy, and a yearning to visit the United States or live among us. For more than eighty-five years I have dwelt in a world in which change was a constant. Born during World War I, I grew up and attended college during the Great Depression of the 1930s, fought in World War II, lived through the Korean and Vietnam wars, democracy’s Cold War with Soviet communism, two Persian Gulf wars, and three different types of revolutions: in civil rights, sex, and communications. I taught in and managed several colleges and universities from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century. At one of these – Lincoln University in the 1960s – I found myself leading a historically black college at the peak of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. At Temple University, in the 1970s and early ’80s, I managed a very large urban university during the ups and downs of enrollments, crises in finances, and rocky race relations. Through all these events I often felt that I was receiving a greater education than my students were. My ability to survive and even flourish through these chaotic times can be attributed, I believe, to the intellectual anchors acquired during my early [xvi] preface years at home and then in high school and college: such liberal concepts as secularism, relativism, multiculturalism, open-mindedness, and a belief in human progress. My concept of secularism does not preclude – indeed, it embraces – the notion of the sacredness of human beings and the critical importanceofintegrityamonghumansandtheirinstitutions.Onlywhenthese ideas are reflected within a body of laws can individuals function freely. My relativism is based on the role of reason – that is, the notion that no one owns a monopoly on truth or justice (including, of course, liberal relativists). My sense of multiculturalism grows out of the same notion: We must respect and accept other racial, ethnic, and religious groups – for our own benefit as well as theirs. All of these principles, to my mind, fall under the rubric of “Liberalism.” Yet there was a time when I resisted as too confining formal classification as a conservative or liberal. Only during the so-called Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, when liberalism came under widespread attack, did I begin openly identifyingmyselfasaliberal.ItstruckmethatthekindofliberalismIstoodfor was the philosophy upon which the United States was founded and continued to exist, and those of us who subscribe to that philosophy should be proud to assert it. The educational system in which I have spent my adult life has, I believe, played a major role in fostering the unique dynamism of American society and government. That dynamism stems from the conviction that we can always make our democracy more effective and productive for those who live under its umbrella. It has been my privilege to play a small role in this unending process through most of the twentieth century. I offer my experiences and insights here for the benefit of those who will continue the work long after my contemporaries and I are gone. ...