News & Events
Penn GSE’s Dean Katharine Strunk and McGraw Center Executive Director John Wilson on the Past and Future of Higher Education
Moderated by Graduate School of Education (GSE) Dean Katharine Strunk, the May 15 panel “Higher Education in the United States: From Origins to Outlook” featured John Silvanus Wilson, Jr., executive director of the McGraw Center for Educational Leadership at Penn GSE, as well as other academic leaders Mark Yudof, Elaine Maimon, and Nicholas Lemann.
The panel reflected on higher education’s historic role in advancing American democracy and innovation while confronting a present reality in which institutions are under pressure to demonstrate their public value amid rapid social, political, and technological change.
Panelists suggested it was essential to prepare students not only for careers, but also for thoughtful citizenship and democratic participation, which is even more important in the age of AI. “We need to be training students at every level, starting in kindergarten, about AI literacy and what that means,” said Strunk.
Drawing on his experience as former president of Morehouse College, Wilson, who guides educational leadership initiatives at the McGraw Center, discussed the importance of historically Black colleges and universities and broader questions of equity in higher education.
“HBCUs went on a deliberate and aggressive quest to shape the foot soldiers and the generals of a civil rights movement that, with the Voting Rights Act, gave birth to Democracy in America,” said Wilson, who suggested other universities could follow their playbook.
Wilson later elaborated, “We will soon celebrate our 250th year as a country, but we should remember that in just another decade, American higher education will celebrate 400 years of existence. We should also remember what John Dewey said in 1916: ‘Democracy must be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.’ If Dewey was right about that, then America would get a failing grade, based on any reasonable assessment of the health of our democracy today. In fact, Black colleges are the only sub-sector of higher education that ever took Dewey's mandate seriously.”
The event at Perry World House launched Penn’s broader “‘A Republic, If You Can Keep It’—Ben Franklin: A Celebration as America Turns 250” initiative, which continues throughout fall with programs tied to Penn founder Benjamin Franklin.
