Tuesday Mar 06, 2007
The Leadership Impact of Higher Education
Larry Summers who is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University recently visited NC State and spoke at the Emerging Issues Forum. His focus was on the Importance of Higher Education in Today's world, and I walked away realizing what I had already known, but never really acknowledged. His talk has plenty of common sense that brings things together for those of us who are grounded in both leadership and higher education. Here is an excerpt from the talk.
"Should it really surprise us, that in a society where it all too frequenty, like it was at Harvard before I came, for 90 % of students to graduate with honors, and for more than 50% of the students to be given grades that suggest that their performance was extradonary. Should it surprise us, if that is what is happening in our Unversities, that those same people 25 years later report the earnings of the corporations with a certain degree of inflation that needs to be restated for honesty... what happens in our universities, what and how they teach, who they take, what new ideas they develop, what tone the set, is over decades as important as any other question that a society answers."
Posted at 12:57PM Mar 06, 2007 by mowen in General |