Mark C. Taylor

On his book Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities

Cover Interview of October 10, 2010

Lastly

Effective transformation requires a new vision for higher education. It is obvious that the world is becoming ever more interconnected and that the rate of change is accelerating.

And yet, our colleges and universities are mired in the past—they are rigid structures that resist change. The vested interests of tenured faculty make it virtually impossible to bring about the reforms that are necessary.

The future of our children and grandchildren depends on creating a global education network that is as flexible and adaptive as the world we live in.

polemics / academia / united states / economics / economic crisis / higher education / debt / graduate study /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009