The president of Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Greg Weiner, is one of the most interesting and wise voices these days about higher education. He joined me earlier today for a conversation that I really enjoyed and learned from.
Some highlights:
On the power of ideas: “The founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption, Father Emmanuel d’Alzon, when he founded the order, one of his most important priorities was to found a university. And he wrote in a letter that you must never forget that the world, even in a decadent state, is governed by ideas.”
On the strengths of today’s students: “I think 18-year-olds have a lot more to teach folks our age than the other way around about this—who are also deeply moved by the relationships in their lives, by things like goodness and beauty and awe and curiosity… these young people are extraordinary. They are curious, they are motivated at Assumption, they are un-entitled, and they are gritty.”
On Worcester: “Even in the brief time since my family moved here in 2011, in that 15 years or thereabouts, there has been a real renaissance in Worcester economically with healthcare and biotech. Culturally, the restaurant scene is great here. We have the AAA affiliate of the Red Sox, of whom Assumption is proud to be a founding partner. There’s a lot going on here. And I think some of those impressions of Worcester as post-industrial or whatever else are really outdated. This is a very vibrant community.”
On higher education: “You mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that polling indicates we’ve lost a lot of public trust. We have to be able to ask ourselves why that is and not simply point fingers or deny that it’s a problem.”
There’s lot’s more interesting stuff in the conversation, about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (about whom Weiner has written a book, “American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan”); about the difference between New Deal Liberalism and the Great Society; about Assumption bringing on board a former U.N. official, Alice Nderitu, who objected to the U.N.’s obsession about Gaza at the expense of other actual genocides; on Moynihan’s view that “social science is good at evaluating policy, but not at crafting it.”
Thanks to those readers who tuned in for the live conversation. If you missed it, you can watch or listen by clicking above. There’s also a computer-generated transcript that I cleaned up a bit but not entirely.
