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January 30, 2009

Intereview with Vartan Gregorian

BILL MOYERS: Last week, students at the Las Vegas campus of the
University of Nevada came out to raise hell because Nevada’s governor,
Jim Gibbons, has just proposed slashing the state budget for higher
education by a whopping 36 percent.

STUDENTS: No more cuts! No more cuts!

NEVADA CHANCELLOR JIM ROGERS: God, I’m glad to see you.

BILL MOYERS: The chancellor of the system was incredulous.

NEVADA CHANCELLOR JIM ROGERS: These budget cuts are not acceptable,
and I will not support them.

BILL MOYERS: For students, that could mean a possible tuition increase
of 225 percent. That’s right, 225 percent!

STUDENT: I’m here to support the cause, man. I can’t believe the
governor’s thinking of cutting education.

MAN: We just want to be able to show our support, let the governor
know and the legislators know that we’re serious about education, and
that we don’t want the budget cuts.

BILL MOYERS: All across the country it’s the same. State governments
are staring down the barrel at $300 billion worth of deficits for the
next two years. Twenty-six states already have either cut their
budgets for higher education, raised tuition fees, or done both. When
it comes to college affordability, this report from The National
Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gives a failing grade of
"F" to 49 of the 50 states. Tuition at public four-year colleges is
up an average of more than $6,500, at two-year schools, almost
$2,500. Yet even with the increases, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
reports that many college buildings are outdated, inefficient, even
crumbling. So what’s to be done? Some took hope when President Obama
spoke up for higher education in his inaugural address.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And we will transform our schools and colleges
and universities to meet the demands of a new age.

BILL MOYERS: If the colleges and universities do wind up big winners
in Washington, no one will be happier than this man, or more
responsible. Long a dynamo for the cause of public education, Vartan
Gregorian bears testament to the value of a lifetime of learning. Born
to Armenian parents, Gregorian grew up in Iran and Beirut, Lebanon. He
came to the United States in 1956 to earn a Ph.D. in history from
Stanford University and launched a career in higher education. He
perhaps is best known for his eight years as the innovative president
of the New York Public Library, followed by nine years as president of
Brown University. For almost a dozen years now, he has been president
of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation
for education and citizenship.

Vartan Gregorian is an erudite charmer, a master of the handshake and
bear hug, a consummate fundraiser and champion of the public good. His
passion for education, philanthropy and friendship is contagious. Last
October, Gregorian convened a group of educators to urge whoever would
become our next president to invest in higher education. Their meeting
later resulted in this two-page newspaper ad, an open letter to then
President-elect Obama asking that whatever economic stimulus package
comes out of Washington, five percent of it – around 40 to 45 billion
dollars – go to higher public education.

Vartan Gregorian, welcome to the JOURNAL.

Your ad claims, "Today, only the federal government has the resources
and vision to meet these threats to education." But the fact is that
everybody, and I mean everybody, has both hands out, hoping that
Barack Obama’s stimulus spending will fill those hands. I mean, the
highway industry, the automobile industry-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Everybody.

BILL MOYERS: -the steel industry. I mean, are people like you living
metaphorically in an ivory tower? Why should education be privileged
when all these other priorities are pressing against the window?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: That’s an excellent question. I don’t have a
complete answer, but I can tell you this one: Adam Smith will roll in
his grave to see that capitalism says, "When I make money, it’s mine;
when I lose money, you have to rescue me." Right?
Businesses. Business, when it becomes very big for the country, the
country cannot afford for them to collapse. And that’s what has
happened. All the mergers that happened have come to roost now. We’re
too big. We may be inefficient, but we’d like you to rescue.

Education is different because you’re investing human resources that
are necessary to change a society, a system. Even retraining some of
these people who are let go, is through education. Education is very
central to our democracy. You can neglect it, you can get it on the
cheap, and you get what you pay for. And if you think education is
costly, try ignorance, because that will be far more costly.

BILL MOYERS: But this country’s lost two million jobs in the last
year.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: There are millions of families out there losing their
homes to foreclosure. And you’re asking them to be taxed more or to
print more money to support higher education, which may prove too
expensive for their kids when they get there?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Maybe. Maybe. But as an immigrant I have a different
view of America. I see America in perspective. As a historian, I see
the depth of it as well. And there are great moments in American
history. Since President Obama is fond of Abraham Lincoln, so I’ll
start with Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the Civil War, worst
tragedy that happened to America, Abraham Lincoln signed Morrill Act,
established land grant universities. Imagine now any president doing
that in the middle of all the calamities we have, Afghanistan, Iraq,
economy, and Iran and the Middle East, somebody spending that much
effort on – because he wanted to see the future of America.

In the middle of Civil War, Lincoln established a National Academy of
Sciences, 1863, because he wanted to see the future of America. In the
middle of Civil War he established a commission to study the merits of
metric system for America. Because he wanted to see not one year, one
to four year; he wanted to see 20, 30, 40 years. Second thing that
happened in the middle of the war. World War II, ’44, Japan is still
fighting, Germany’s still fighting, Roosevelt established Servicemen’s
Act, which later became GI Bill, to see what will happen if ten to
eleven million soldiers return without jobs. Would it unleash a new
major depression? What? Came up with this brilliant idea to give them
opportunity to be educated.

BILL MOYERS: My brother went to college after coming out of the Navy
on the GI Bill and so did millions of others.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Millions of others. Brilliant. In the middle of the
war, 1945, ’46, Roosevelt established Vannevar Bush commission for
future of science in America, which then Truman adopted. It said
science should not be based in institutions like European and Soviet,
you know, these institutes. It should be based in universities. Then
we have, of course, Senator Pell who just died-

BILL MOYERS: Claiborne Pell from Rhode Island, who established the
Pell Grants-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Pell Grants. Greatest democratization of process of
access to higher education in our country’s history. So we made many
strides in the middle of adversity.

BILL MOYERS: And yet you say in this ad, America’s losing ground on a
number of these very fronts.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Number of it, because we see education as an
expenditure rather than as investment. And let me just give you a
couple of reasons why. My fundamental problem has been with public
institutions that somehow they have come to accept the fact that
democracy and excellence, public sector and excellence are not
mutually compatible, that public excellence belongs to the private
domain. And all my career I have fought against that concept. Whether
it’s New York Public Library, whether it’s railway stations, whatever
it is, these are monuments built in honor of democracy, 19th century,
these institutions. And so one of the main things that I worry about
public higher education: What is going to happen to public higher
education? States’ support is dwindling. Yet public has the impression
that the land grant universities are providing free education to the
public. That’s not the case. So public higher education, most of
them, cannot compete with private universities in the United States or
abroad. I was worried that great universities like Michigan,
University of California, University of Texas, and so on, put them in
the disadvantage.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: I think all of them are on the defensive because
public expects them to accommodate them; at the same time, states see
as a cost. And then they’re subjected to deferred maintenance, which
in my book means planned neglect. And for twenty years these have been
neglected.

University of California has one of the great universities in the
world. Still has in many units. University of Texas has, Penn State,
Michigan, Indiana. But lack of support is going to bring them
gradually to be not excellent.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: America’s greatness in higher education has been its
diversity and its private-public arrangement. And if we force
everybody to go to private domain, then tuitions will definitely
increase. Some of them will collapse.

It pains me to see all of these great universities struggling to keep
their reputation. And, ironically, even though I have two sons who are
journalists, one of them sports writer – if a football team loses in
one of these state universities, for two or three years it affects
also their funding in the legislature, which is crazy.

BILL MOYERS: Guarantee a winning football team.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: It’s crazy. It does not make sense.

BILL MOYERS: But why have the costs of higher education risen so fast?
I mean, you say in this ad, since 1986, that’s just 22 years, college
tuition and fees have risen nearly three times as fast as the median
family income. Why? And where has that money gone?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Okay. Take any university of your
choice. Universities are small city-states. You have from 5,000 to
50,000 students-

BILL MOYERS: My alma mater, University of Texas, 50,000 students.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes, 50,000. Yes.

BILL MOYERS: It’s larger than the town I grew up in.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes. Dormitories, feeding, health, entertainment,
physical education, all of this. And then you have also to hire
professors. You have governmental relations, development office, all
of this. So, these universities, everybody wants everything from the
university. It’s fascinating. All the failures of K through 12,
university has to fix. Everything is put at the doorstep of the
university to solve, but without adequate funding.

BILL MOYERS: You convened in August these leaders of higher education.
And they came to the conclusion that, quote, "We’ve fallen from first
place among nations to tenth in the percentage of our population with
degrees in higher education." What does that mean practically?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Practically it means research universities in other
countries are catching up. We’re not falling behind as much as others
are catching up, whether it’s Singapore, whether it’s China, whether
it’s India. And second thing is many of our students, thanks to Pell
Grants and others who go to university do not finish, because of
either ill preparedness or lack of resources for them. We’re not
talking about just educate. We’re talking about how to build next
generation of our youth to be able to compete globally and to
re-engineer our nation’s reemergence in the next phase of the global
competition.

We need all the infrastructure. We need all the engineers, all the
doctors, all the computer specialists, all kinds of work. So we can no
longer allow 50 percent of our students not to graduate from high
school or 30, 40 percent drop out from our universities, especially
minorities and others. Because in the past 19th century we have
industrial backbone that you could send all of this to
manufacturing. We don’t have it. So result, it’s gone.

BILL MOYERS: Shipped abroad.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: It’s a knowledge society now in which you need all
the talent that you can.

BILL MOYERS: Why are we in such trouble right now? What has happened
to the country that brought you here in 1956, that offered so much
promise to a young Armenian Iranian immigrant arriving here? What is
your own personal conclusion about why we are in such trouble?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Well, for several reasons. I guess, first, lack of
knowledge about rest of the world. Another one, media that was asleep
when all kinds of decisions were made. Along with independent
judiciary, executive, we need also independent media. And also we
don’t have the kind of individuals which I came to know. And
I.F. Stone on the left, "I.F. Stone’s Weekly", did more about Korean
War and other things, so forth.

BILL MOYERS: One of the great investigative journalists- VARTAN
GREGORIAN Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -on the left, as you said.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes. Bill Buckley I met when he just launched the
"National Review". Where are those independent-minded people, whether
they’re conservative, liberal, radical?

BILL MOYERS: Well, some people would say they’re on the internet, that
the internet has become the great conversation of democracy.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Well, let’s hope so. Let’s hope so. But internet has
to provide common vocabulary. I don’t want to be picking a piece here,
a piece there, and so forth, construct my own hut. I want to have a
national significance.

BILL MOYERS: You want an editor?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Editor, national editor

BILL MOYERS: I’d like to be your editor.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Because-

BILL MOYERS: You’re saying you want a professional class of
disinterested people who help you assemble how the world looks like
every day?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Well, the synthesis you mentioned is missing. What I
want is the institution of journalism, institution of news,
institution of education, institutional values, the ones that promote
to be a durable, predictable tying tradition, past, present, and the
future. That’s my prejudice because I come from a print side. And
every Sunday I read eight British and French newspapers, plus three
American ones, in order to have – not to be manipulated, in order to
understand what are nuances and ambiguities, who’s pushing opinion,
who’s pushing fact, who’s pushing what ideology, so I can accept
knowingly, rather than be manipulated. I learned that first lesson at
Stanford when I came in 1956. There was an ad. They were showing
Hamlet, and on television this small animal ran. And it said,
"Burgemeister Beer. Have a Burgy," in the middle of the thing. First
time I saw-

BILL MOYERS: A commercial?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: A commercial. Right on the screen.

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to America.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: So we left. Yes, we left. We were upset. French
arrogance and so forth. Two weeks later I went to a bar. We said,
"Well, we’d like beer." "What kind of beer?" I said, "Burgy."

BILL MOYERS: The ad worked. You remembered the ad-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes. Imagine that happening on a national scale.

BILL MOYERS: It does happen, don’t you think?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes, it does.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: I want us to accept, consciously, things, not to be
manipulated in acceptance. I still believe in intelligence, in
knowledge, independence, should not be just reserved or elite but for
the public, too. We should educate the public what’s in the public
interests. They may like it or not. They may accept it or not. But my
conscience I want to be clear that I did my duty as an educator while
you did your duty as a journalist to educate the public. That’s our
obligation.

BILL MOYERS: The scholar Charles Murray-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -back in December argued in an op-ed piece in THE NEW
YORK TIMES that we should have more vocational schools and stop using
college degrees as a requirement for jobs. That we need more
mechanics, more carpenters, more electricians, more machinists. And
that our high schools should be used for that purpose and not the
traditional educational-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: He has a very good point. Our community colleges,
some of them are doing exactly that. Community colleges provide now
task forces or workforce for our medical schools, hospitals, and
others. They are happening. But where he’s right that we have always
looked down upon vocational institutions, whatever vocation in the
United States is antiquated. We still have maybe World War II or World
War – Korean War, whatever, equipment and others. It does not have the
respect the way it has in Germany.

We need vocations. We need the best plumbers. We need best
electricians. In Germany and elsewhere vocational schools prepare
workforce. We have switched that to our community colleges, some of
it. But we have not formally introduced it into our high schools. In
Germany when you finish you have – you can go either route. You can go
vocational or you can go into academic sector. And somehow we have to
revisit that whole issue of vocational education because we need the
manpower for that. And we cannot just import immigrants to do that
from countries who invest in vocational education.

BILL MOYERS: There is an argument today that colleges and universities
should continue to turn out generally educated, liberally educated,
critical thinkers. But that we should take the people who want to be
mechanics and electricians and plumbers and let them go to vocational
school and not pretend to want to study "Beowulf" or "Macbeth."

VARTAN GREGORIAN: I think you’ll have two sets of problems. You’ll
have a well-educated private university, some select, and they’re the
cultured ones. And the others are specialists who can only do. And
that will be terrible in my opinion because even the plumbers should
know about American history. Not "Beowulf" necessarily. They should
know about Constitution. They should know about American
history. They should know about Civil War. They should know about
Depression.

I mean, we live in a country we cannot just say we’re citizens but we
don’t know anything about our country. Yet we’re the greatest country
in the world. Well, on what basis? Just economy does not make that
right. We need also values. We need also to participate as citizens in
the fate and future of our country. So we cannot have a democracy
without its foundation being knowledge, in order to provide
progress. And knowledge does not mean only technical knowledge. But
also you need to have knowledge of our society, knowledge of the
world. If we’re a superpower, world’s greatest power, we should know
about the rest of the world.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, both candidates said during the campaign, they kept
saying over and over again, this is the greatest country in the world.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: It is.

BILL MOYERS: You hear that. And then you read what you conclude in
your report-

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -and that’s a different picture.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Yes, different picture because it’s greatest country
in terms of potential, opportunity. But if the pipeline is not
working, you may not be able to keep it.

BILL MOYERS: And your thesis is the pipeline of education from pre-K
right on up through graduate school is broken?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Absolutely. The point I’m saying, that America
should not take anything for granted anymore. We cannot afford any
more mistakes. We cannot afford duplication. We have to bring
collaboration and twenty-year vision, twenty-year plan, how to bring
higher education of United States, both public and private, to help
re-engineer, re-ignite, and keep the momentum of the United States and
its progress by educating its workforce, by educating its leadership.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think merit still counts today in a society where
so much wealth buys both power and policies and laws and places that
it wants?

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Merit always counts, especially when economy tanks.
You find true values of individuals. I can’t tell you how many people
are calling me about going to non-profit business rather than Lehman
Brothers or so forth. People suddenly have stopped in their
tracks. And they’re looking to see what they could do
otherwise. Economic crisis, you find not just poverty, not just human
condition, also people confront themselves, their values. It’s like
when you leave a hospital with catastrophic news, you see the world
differently. The same thing when you’re humiliated, you’ve lost
everything. You cannot go home to face your family, that you lost
everything. You confront you what holds you together as a family, as
an individual.

So, many individuals now are questioning whether their chosen business
was the right thing to go. Hope is built in expecting that something
can happen. If that hope does die, if that trust dies, then we’ll be
very big trouble.

BILL MOYERS: Vartan Gregorian, thank you very much for this
discussion.

VARTAN GREGORIAN: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

STUDENTS: No more cuts! No more cuts!

BILL MOYERS: A footnote to my conversation with Vartan Gregorian. The
stimulus plan passed this week by the House provides considerable
assistance to higher education. So the plea by Gregorian and his
colleagues may come to pass. But this bill still has a long way to go.