Higher Education’s Role in History

College professors are the ones most likely to be sifting through history’s remains for meaning and contemplating the future for human direction, which means that Universities are not merely places to get an education, they represent institutional memory, seats of reason and places of planning. So what happens if we begin to judge the merit of these intellectuals on the basis of whether their students get high paying jobs or give fortunes back to the university? To put it bluntly, we may well start to lose our “collective mind”. No other segment of society is as dedicated to cataloguing, criticizing, calculating and codifying human understanding. Journalists, historians, psychologists, and various groups of scientists working outside academia are certainly allies in these efforts, but they are products of universities; where they gradually accumulate their expertise. We must not lose perspective on what we do in our profession. That’s what I wanted to say, I guess. Have a great day!!