In a recent article in The Washington Post, Cornell University President Elizabeth Garrett states that “it is time to look at higher education through a different lens – one framed by the inseparable qualities of freedom and responsibility.”
President Garrett discusses what she believes is the faculty’s responsibilities to their students and the institution’s responsibilities to the public. She writes, “We need to teach reasoning and communication skills in an environment that includes people of wide-ranging values, lifestyles, heritage and opinions. We aim to teach them to argue forcefully but with civility for what they believe and can support with reason.”
And to society, she notes, “Our responsibility to the public also includes pushing the frontiers of research, through work with direct applications to real-world problems and through pure discovery for its own sake.”