Jonathan R. Cole > Quotes

“extend that to undergraduate education. The century-old style of the almighty professor lecturing to the passive students should increasingly be rare. Instead, we should encourage interactive experiences between undergraduates and professors as well as among students—”
― Jonathan R. Cole, Toward a More Perfect University

“The movement at many universities, spurred on by those who think of the outputs of universities in terms of jobs rather than analytic skills, takes us in precisely the wrong direction.”
― Jonathan R. Cole, Toward a More Perfect University

“These labels, often applied to students at an early age, stick with people for the rest of their lives, affecting their own definition of self as well as how they are viewed by others.”
― Jonathan R. Cole, Toward a More Perfect University

“Eliot, Hutchins, Conant, Terman, and Kerr—created a system that worked. They laid a foundation on which great structures could and would be built. The core elements fit well with the conviction that the system should be detached from government bureaucratic control, and with the sense that competition among the universities to be considered the very best was healthy for the system. In short, the founders put into”
― Jonathan R. Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected

“Drew Faust, Harvard University’s president and a historian, said: “When we define higher education’s role principally as driving economic development and solving society’s most urgent problems, we risk losing sight of broader questions, of the kinds of inquiry that enable the critical stance, that build the humane perspective, that foster the restless skepticism and unbounded curiosity from which our profoundest understandings so often emerge.”
― Jonathan R. Cole, Toward a More Perfect University

“The modern view sees the liberal arts as, literally, liberating, as freeing the mind from unexamined opinions and assumptions to think independently and exercise critical judgment, to question conventional doctrines and inherited claims to truth, to gain some skill in analysis and some capacity to deal with complexity, to embrace a certain skepticism in the face of dogma, and to be open to many points of view. These ideas came increasingly to shape the directions of liberal education in the universities and colleges.”
― Jonathan R. Cole, Toward a More Perfect University