[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 197 (Tuesday, December 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18431-S18433]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   ERNIE BOYER--A GIANT IN EDUCATION

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the death of Ernie Boyer last week has 
deprived the Nation of one of its greatest leaders in education. 
Throughout his long and distinguished career, Ernie was unsurpassed as 
a champion of education, and I am saddened by the loss of a good friend 
and great colleague.
  In the history of modern American education, Ernie Boyer was a 
constant leader, working to expand and improve 

[[Page S18432]]
educational opportunities for all Americans. His breadth and depth of 
knowledge and experience in all areas of education was unsurpassed.
  As Commissioner of Education under President Carter, he helped to 
focus the attention of the entire Nation on these critical issues. He 
wrote numerous books in support of improvements in elementary, 
secondary, and higher education. He was a key member of many national 
commissions, and was a constant source of wisdom and counsel to all of 
us in Congress concerned about these issues.
  Ernie once said he wished he could live to be 200, because he had so 
many projects to complete. He accomplished more for the Nation's 
students, parents, and teachers in his 67 years than anyone else could 
have done in 200 years. They may not know his name, but millions of 
people--young and old--have better lives today because of Ernie Boyer. 
Education has lost its best friend.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article about Ernie 
Boyer from the New York Times and excerpts from the Current Biography 
Yearbook 1988 be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Dec. 9, 1995]

       Ernest L. Boyer, who helped to shape American education as 
     Chancellor of the State University of New York, as United 
     States Commissioner of Education and as President of the 
     Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, died 
     yesterday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 67.
       Dr. Boyer had been treated for lymphoma for nearly three 
     years, his assistant, Bob Hochstein, said.
       Dr. Boyer also was the author of a number of reports for 
     the Carnegie Foundation, a nonprofit policy study center in 
     Princeton that has often set the nation's education agenda.
       In 1987, when he detected that one of the major ills of 
     higher education was that research was elbowing aside 
     teaching, he wrote, ``College: The Undergraduate Experience 
     in America'' (Harper & Row), in which he argued that ``at 
     every research university, teaching should be valued as 
     highly as research.'' The book stimulated the present college 
     movement that holds that much research is pointless and even 
     harmful insofar as it distracts teachers from students.
       In 1990, Dr. Boyer developed this theme in another book, 
     ``Scholarship Reconsidered'' (Carnegie Foundation), in which 
     he maintained that teaching, service and the integration of 
     knowledge across disciplines should be recognized as the 
     equal of research.
       Another of his reports, ``High School: A Report on 
     Secondary Education'' (Harper & Row, 1983), had an impact 
     even before it was published. When officials at the United 
     States Department of Education learned that Dr. Boyer, a 
     former Federal Commissioner of Education, was working on a 
     report describing the inadequacies of secondary public 
     education and proposing a series of changes, they decided to 
     start their own study, which came to be called ``A Nation at 
     Risk.''
       Published a few months ahead of Dr. Boyer's report, ``A 
     Nation at Risk'' was frequently described as a national wake-
     up call, spelling out the failure of the public high schools 
     to provide students with basic knowledge and skills.
       Dr. Boyer's report helped focus the ensuing discussion on 
     specific plans like raising requirements for high school 
     graduation, improving teacher certification and lengthening 
     the school day.
       Because the Carnegie study had been underwritten by a 
     sizeable grant from the Atlantic Richfield Foundation, Dr. 
     Boyer was able to back up his ideas with financial rewards 
     and incentives. In 1983, he dispersed $600,000 to 200 schools 
     that were seen to be striving for ``excellence'' and two 
     years later, he awarded grants of $25,000 to $50,000 to 25 
     high schools that were perceived to have improved their 
     curriculums, teacher training and community ties.
       Dr. Boyer believed the nation's most urgent education 
     problem was high schools. Pointing to the high dropout rate 
     among minorities, he expressed fear that ``the current move 
     to add more course requirements will lead to more failure 
     among inner-city students unless we also have smaller 
     classes, better counseling and more creative teaching.''
       He also felt that education improvements were bypassing too 
     many impoverished children, with consequences for the future 
     of the country. He advocated programs in nutrition, prenatal 
     care for teen-age mothers, and more day care with summer 
     classes and preschool education.
       Among his other books, whose titles reflected his concerns, 
     were ``Campus Life'' (1990), ``Ready to Learn'' (1991) and 
     ``The Basic School'' (1995), all published by the Carnegie 
     Foundation.
       Dr. Boyer had been working on a book, ``Scholarship 
     Assessed,'' in which he was attempting to establish a means 
     of measuring successful teaching and service so that they 
     could be better rewarded.
       In a statement released yesterday, President Clinton said: 
     ``The nation has lost of its most dedicated and influential 
     education reformers. Ernest Boyer was a distinguished scholar 
     and educator whose work will help students well into the next 
     century.''
       A compelling orator who never tired of his role as an 
     evangelist of education, Dr. Boyer was a sought-after 
     lecturer on such issues as the need for adult education away 
     from a campus, overbearing academic management ("Bureaucratic 
     mandates from above can, in the end, produce more confusion 
     than programs"), and the decline of teaching civics and 
     government in schools ("Civics illiteracy is spreading, and 
     unless we educate ourselves as citizens, we run the risk of 
     drifting unwittingly into a new Dark Age").
       He was also a busy consultant, in recent years having 
     advised governments like the People's Republic of China on 
     educational policy.
       Ernest LeRoy Boyer was born in Dayton, Ohio, on Sept. 13, 
     1928, one of the three sons of Clarence and Ethel Boyer. His 
     father managed a wholesale book store and ran a mail-order 
     greeting-card and office-supply business from the basement of 
     the family home. Dr. Boyer once said that the most 
     influential figure in his early life was his paternal 
     grandfather, William Boyer, who was head of the Dayton 
     Mission of the Brethren in Christ Church and who directed him 
     toward ``a people-centered life.''
       Dr. Boyer attended Greenville College, a small liberal arts 
     school in Illinois, and went on to study at Ohio State 
     University. He received his master's and doctoral degrees 
     from the University of Southern California. He was a post-
     doctoral fellow in medical audiology at the University of 
     Iowa Hospital.
       He then taught and served in administrative posts at Loyola 
     University in Los Angeles, Upland College and the University 
     of California at Santa Barbara. At Upland College, he 
     introduced a widely emulated program in which the mid-year 
     term, the month of January, became a period in which students 
     did not attend classes but pursued individual projects. It 
     was at Upland that he decided to devote his career to 
     educational administration.
       In 1965, he moved east to join the vast SUNY system as its 
     first executive dean. Five years later, he became Chancellor 
     of the institution and its 64 campuses, 350,000 students and 
     15,000 faculty members.
       His 7-year term was a period of innovation. He founded the 
     Empire State College at Saratoga Springs and four other 
     locations as noncampus SUNY schools at which adults could 
     study for degrees without attending classes. He also set up 
     an experimental three-year Bachelor of Arts program; 
     established a new rank, Distinguished Teaching Professor, to 
     reward faculty members of educational distinction as well as 
     research, and established one of the first student-exchange 
     programs with the Soviet Union.
       Dr. Boyer served on commissions to advise President Richard 
     M. Nixon and President Gerald R. Ford. In 1977, he left SUNY 
     after President Jimmy Carter appointed him to lead the United 
     State Commission on Education, thus becoming the agency's 
     last Commissioner before Congress elevated the position to 
     cabinet rank.
       Toward the end of the Carter Administration, disappointed 
     that Congress had failed to elevate the Commission on 
     Education to a cabinet-level department, Dr. Boyer accepted 
     an invitation to succeed Alan Pifer as president of the 
     Carnegie Foundation. He expanded the scope of his position to 
     go beyond the study of higher education and to study 
     education at every level, bringing the resources of the 
     foundation to bear on the earliest years of a child's 
     education.
       Even when confined to a hospital bed last month, Dr. Boyer 
     continued to keep up on developments in education, reacting 
     to an announcement by the University of Rochester that it was 
     downsizing both its student body and faculty in order to 
     improve quality and attract better students.
       ``I think we're headed into a totally new era,'' he said. 
     ``After World War II, we built a nation of institutions of 
     higher learning based on expansion. Research was everything, 
     and undergraduates were marginalized. Now, time is running 
     out on that.''
       Later in November, responding to the appointment of William 
     M. Bulger, the longtime president of the Massachusetts State 
     Senate, as President of the University of Massachusetts, Dr. 
     Boyer deplored the trend of naming prominent politicians to 
     lead colleges and universities.
       ``It is disturbing to see university leaders chosen on the 
     basis of their political strengths,'' Dr. Boyer said. ``A 
     university president with strong academic credentials is a 
     symbolic figure who can speak out on the great issues in a 
     way that a political leader cannot.''
       ``If you appoint political figures to these offices,'' he 
     continued, ``you have more political voices being heard, but 
     they're being heard already. You need the other voices. 
     Without the voices with strong academic credentials behind 
     them, you can even imagine a time in the future when a 
     politicized university administration and a politicized board 
     of trustees would be hugely impatient with academic 
     freedom.''
       Dr. Boyer held more than 130 honorary degrees, including 
     the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities, a Presidential 
     citation.
       He is survived by his wife Kathryn, and four children, 
     Ernest Jr., of Brookline, 

[[Page S18433]]
     Mass., Beverly Coyle of Princeton, N.J., Craig of Belize and Paul, of 
     Chestertown, MD.

                 [From Current Biography Yearbook 1988]

                            Boyer, Ernest L.

       Sept. 13, 1928- Educator. Address: b. Carnegie Foundation 
     for the Advancement of Teaching, 5 Ivy Lane, Princeton, N.J. 
     08540; h. 222 Cherry Valley Rd., Princeton, N.J. 08540.
       One of the most influential and respected members of the 
     American educational establishment is Ernest Boyer, who since 
     1970 has served successively as chancellor of the vast State 
     University of New York (SUNNY), as United States commissioner 
     of education, and as president of the prestigious Carnegie 
     Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Along the way, he 
     has managed to accumulate more than sixty awards, 
     trusteeships, and honorary degrees. Since 1983 he has been 
     Senior Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton 
     University. As the head of the Carnegie Foundation, he 
     automatically assures that any topic he may choose to address 
     will achieve a prominent place on the national educational 
     agenda.
       Boyer's concerns range beyond the confines of the classroom 
     to such urgent issues as the need for child care in the 
     workplace and for adult education away from the campus. Under 
     his leadership, the Carnegie Foundation has issued two major 
     critical studies, both written by him, on American high 
     schools and colleges. Boyer is now training his sights on the 
     earliest years of a child's education, including 
     prekindergarten, as the target of the next important project 
     of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. * 
     * *
       While a graduate student Boyer worked as a teaching 
     assistant at the University of Southern California and as an 
     instructor at Upland College, where he became chairman of the 
     speech department. After a year spent at Loyola University 
     (Los Angeles), where he was director of forensics, he became 
     professor of speech pathology and audiology and academic dean 
     at Upland in 1956. His postgraduate research in medical 
     audiology confirmed the effectiveness of a new surgical 
     technique for treating otosclerosis, a disease of the middle 
     ear.
       In 1960, reaching what he later recalled as one of the 
     ``crucial crossroads'' in his life, Boyer switched from 
     teaching and research to administration when he accepted a 
     position with the Western College Association. The California 
     Board of Education had ordered all public schoolteachers to 
     obtain a degree in an academic discipline--a decision that 
     proved to be unpalatable to teachers' colleges--and Boyer was 
     appointed director of the commission that was charged with 
     carrying out the directive. Two years later, he became 
     director of the Center for Coordinated Education at the 
     University of California at Santa Barbara, administering 
     projects to improve the quality of education from 
     kindergarten to college.
       In 1965 Boyer moved east to Albany, New York, joining the 
     State University of New York as its first executive dean for 
     university-wide activities--a title created especially for 
     him. In that position he developed an impressive range of 
     intercampus programs, including one providing for scholars-
     in-residence and another that established the SUNY 
     chancellor's student cabinet. He became vice-chancellor of 
     SUNY in 1968, a post in which he presided over large staff 
     meetings, moderated discussions, and summarized them for 
     Chancellor Samuel Gould, to whom he also made 
     recommendations. Boyer's colleagues praised him for his 
     organizational ability, and one university official 
     described him as ``an unassuming man with a firm streak. 
     He's nobody's patsy. But he is a good listener.''
       On July 30, 1970, Boyer was appointed to succeed the 
     retiring Samuel Gould as the administrative head of a complex 
     system of sixty-four campuses, hundreds of thousands of 
     students, and about 15,000 faculty members. In his inaugural 
     address' which he delivered on April 6, 1971, Boyer proposed 
     that as many as 10 percent of the freshman class of 1972 be 
     allowed to take an experimental three-year program leading to 
     a degree. That initiative was adopted at several SUNY 
     institutions within the year. He also called for the creation 
     of the new rank of university teacher. His proposal was acted 
     upon in 1973 with the introduction of the new rank of 
     distinguished teaching professor in order to reward 
     educational distinction as well as research.
       Also quickly put into effect was the establishment of 
     Empire State College, in response to a directive from the 
     SUNY board of trustees to Boyer to investigate new methods of 
     education that would enable mature students to pursue a 
     degree program without having to spend their full time on 
     campus. Such a program, as Boyer noted, would have the 
     advantage of avoiding heavy construction and maintenance 
     costs. Empire State College was established in 1971 with a 
     small faculty core at Saratoga Springs, and with leased 
     faculty at four other locations. Under the general guidance 
     of a faculty member, students were able to work for a degree 
     without attending classes, by means of reading, listening to 
     tapes, watching television, following previously prepared 
     lesson plans, traveling, or doing field work. * * *
       Just before the inauguration of Jimmy Carter as president 
     of the United States, Boyer was named federal commissioner of 
     education, responsible for administering education programs 
     involving billions of dollars. The appointment appeared to be 
     ideal for Boyer, even though it meant taking a pay cut from 
     $67,000 to $47,500 a year, since Carter had been the first 
     presidential candidate ever endorsed by the National 
     Education Association and was on record as favoring a 
     cabinet-level department of education. The new department was 
     not established until 1980, however, and in the meantime 
     Boyer found himself under a boss--Secretary of Health, 
     Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr.--who did not 
     welcome independence from his subordinates and opposed the 
     creation of a department that would diminish how own agency. 
     * * *
       In October 1978 unnamed sources confirmed that Boyer had 
     accepted the position of president of the Carnegie Foundation 
     for the Advance of Teaching, beginning in 1980. * * *
       At the Carnegie Foundation, Boyer took the helm of an 
     organization that, in 1985, held income-producing assets 
     worth more than $35 million. ``My top priority at Carnegie,'' 
     he told George Neill in an interview for Phi Delta Kappan 
     (October 1979), ``will be efforts to reshape the American 
     high school and its relationship with higher education. . . . 
     I'm convinced that the high school is the nation's most 
     urgent education problem.''
       On September 15, 1983, Boyer released the results of a $1 
     million, fifteen-month study of the nation's high schools 
     that was conducted by twenty-eight prominent educators, each 
     of whom visited high schools in several cities. The report 
     estimated that although 15 percent of American high school 
     students were getting ``the finest education in the world,'' 
     about twice that number merely mark time or drop out and that 
     the remainder were attending schools ``where pockets of 
     excellence can be found but where there is little 
     intellectual challenge.'' Among the study's recommendations 
     were adoption of a ``core curriculum'' for all students, 
     designation of mastery of the English language, including 
     writing, as the central curriculum objective for all 
     students, requiring mastery of a foreign language for all 
     students, a gradual increase in teachers' pay of 25 percent, 
     after making up for inflation, and mandatory community 
     service for students as a requirement for graduation.
       The report was issued in book form as High School: A Report 
     on Secondary Education in America (Harper & Row, 1983), with 
     Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation listed as its authors. The 
     academic book-reviewing publication Choice (January 1984) 
     called it ``an important contribution to the coming 
     educational policy debate of the 1980's,'' and, in 
     Commonwealth (April 20, 1984), the reviewer John Ratte wrote, 
     ``It is not damning with faint praise to say that Ernest 
     Boyer's book is remarkably clear and well written for a 
     commission study report.'' Andrew Hacker, writing in the New 
     York Review of Books (April 12, 1984), assessed the report as 
     ``less a research project than Boyer's own book'' and 
     credited him with trying ``to define how education can 
     contribute to a more interesting and thoughtful life--and not 
     just a more competitive one.''
       In his follow-up interviews and speeches, Boyer stressed 
     the urgent need for better teaching in American high schools. 
     He told Susan Reid of People magazine (March 17, 1986) that 
     ``by 1990, 30 percent of all children in the public schools 
     will be minorities,'' noted the high dropout rate among 
     minorities, and expressed the fear that ``the current move to 
     add more course requirements will lead to more failure among 
     inner-city students, unless we also have smaller classes, 
     better counseling, and more creative teaching. . . . To my 
     mind, teaching is the nub of the whole problem. . . . All 
     other issues are secondary.'' * * *
       In December 1987 Boyer and Owen B. Butler, vice-chairman of 
     the Committee for Economic Development, addressed the 
     University/Urban Schools National Task Force, organized by 
     the City University of New York. The two leaders noted that 
     the movement for educational change was bypassing many 
     impoverished children, with consequences that could threaten 
     the future of the United States. To alleviate the situation, 
     Boyer proposed, among other things, improvements in 
     nutrition, prenatal care for teenage mothers more effective 
     day care, including summer programs, and preschool education.
       The success of Ernest Boyer's career owes much to a work 
     week that customarily extends to eighty or ninety hours. 
     Although he is a quick study who is adept at drawing out 
     other people and grasping their ideas, he rarely advances 
     into the firing line, preferring to stay a half step behind 
     some of his peers. ``He has an unusual ability to bring 
     people together,'' a former colleague told a reporter for the 
     New York Times [March 16, 1977]. ``It's a gift for finding 
     consensus among a diverse group of people where none appeared 
     to exit.'' * * *

                          ____________________