In early June 2017, Harvard College rescinded the admission of at least 10 students who would have been members of the Class of 2021 in response to extremely offensive memes that these individuals had shared in a Facebook group. Harvard’s actions prompted controversy; while some believed it was appropriate to punish the students, others saw […]
Author Archives | Howard Gardner
Higher Education Today: Lessons from History and Challenges for the Present
In the mid-1830s, Greek letter social clubs (fraternities) were launched in the small colleges of New England. In 1845, a scant decade later, the president of Amherst College wrote a letter to the president of nearby Williams College in which he mused, “Would it be desirable to have the societies cease in our colleges?”[1] As […]
Three Messages on the “MI Front”
Nowadays, most of my energies are devoted to new projects. With Wendy Fischman and other colleagues, I am studying higher education in the United States. And with Lynn Barendsen, Danny Mucinskas, and other colleagues, I am continuing work on The Good Project. In particular, we’re focused on the fostering of good work and good citizenship […]
Mind-Changing Books: The Mind on Paper
In the first blog of this series on education, I wrote about Werner Jaeger’s Paideia. This three-volume work from the 1930s and 1940s details the invention in the Greek era of the kind of “question-pondering” education that I value. I recently read through these volumes for the first time, and they made a deep impression […]
Mind-Changing Books: Paideia
Which books influence us the most? Sometimes they are books that grab our interest initially and hold it firmly until we have finished the last sentence—and we then tell others about the book and, before too long, we re-read the book and discover far more than we had initially believed to be there. (Recently many […]
