[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 15763-15764]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




   PRESIDENTIAL INSTALLATION: THE IDEAL OF A LIBERAL ARTS UNIVERSITY

                                 ______
                                 

                             HON. RUSH HOLT

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, October 11, 2013

  Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to bring to the attention of the 
House the eloquent remarks of Dr. Christopher Eisgruber at his 
installation as President of Princeton University, September 22, 2013.

       Friends, colleagues, students, teachers, Princetonians:
       I am honored to be standing here this afternoon and I am 
     very touched, indeed a tad bit overwhelmed by the generosity 
     of the remarks delivered by the speakers who have preceded at 
     this podium. I am grateful for their gracious words. I am 
     also honored by the presence here on stage of three great 
     presidents of this University, Bill Bowen, Harold Shapiro and 
     Shirley Tilghman.
       In the past weeks, people have occasionally asked me 
     whether I could have imagined, in the days when I was a 
     student here, that I might someday be the university 
     president. I reply very honestly that it never crossed my 
     mind, not when I was a student and not, for that matter, when 
     I returned to join the faculty in 2001. My dream job, both as 
     student and a faculty member, was to be a Princeton professor 
     teaching about the Constitution. And, when my dream came 
     true, when I came back to Princeton as a member of the 
     faculty, I reckoned that I had been very clever. I thought 
     that by becoming a law professor at a university without a 
     law school, I had reduced if not eliminated any chance that 
     large administrative assignments might ever distract me from 
     the teaching and research that I loved.
       Of course, by returning to Princeton, I had also come home 
     to a university that I loved more than any other, and where 
     the responsibilities of administration would be more 
     meaningful to me than anywhere else. Princeton's wonderful 
     19th president, Shirley Tilghman, realized that before I did, 
     and she changed my life by offering me the opportunity to 
     become her provost.
       I suppose that all of us, as we move through this 
     complicated world, require some time to realize what matters 
     most in our lives. The path to and through adulthood takes 
     unexpected turns. Childhood heroes show hidden flaws; 
     youthful causes lose their luster. If we are lucky, though, 
     we find certain ideals from which we can draw enduring 
     inspiration and to which we can commit our life's energies. 
     In my life, there have been two: constitutional democracy, as 
     manifested personally for me in the American constitutional 
     tradition, and liberal arts education, as exemplified 
     especially by the blend of research and teaching at this 
     great University.
       The iconic building behind me combines these traditions. 
     Nassau Hall was once all of Princeton University, and this 
     University's alumni still regard it as the symbolic heart of 
     their alma mater--even if it has now become an administrative 
     office building into which few students ever venture. Nassau 
     Hall was also briefly, in 1783, the home of the Continental 
     Congress, and so the seat of this nation's government. And 
     Nassau Hall was, as Hunter Rawlings has so movingly 
     described, the site where James Madison (undergraduate Class 
     of 1771, graduate Class of 1772) acquired the learning that 
     eventually made him the father of America's Constitution.
       Constitutionalism and liberal arts education also have 
     deeper connections, ones that depend not on the contingencies 
     of history and geography but on their relationship to human 
     nature. Both of them are long-term institutions that 
     recognize simultaneously humanity's virtues and its 
     imperfections, and that aim to cultivate our talents, orient 
     us toward the common good, and make us the best that we can 
     be.
       In one of the most famous passages from his extraordinary 
     arguments on behalf of constitutional ratification, Madison 
     wrote, in Federalist 51, ``What is government . . . but the 
     greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were 
     angels, no government would be necessary.'' [Madison, Fed. 
     51; Rossiter ed. 322] Madison used gendered language, but I 
     have no doubt that in this respect at least James Madison was 
     a feminist: He meant his skepticism to apply equally to both 
     sexes. If people were angels, they would cooperate, look out 
     for one another, and generally do good deeds. They would need 
     no laws, no courts and no constitutions. But people are not 
     angels, so they need constitutions that create institutions, 
     define processes and separate powers.
       We might equally well add that if people were angels, they 
     would have no need for teachers. Students would need no one 
     to inspire their studies or correct their errors. If students 
     were angels, they would need, at most, a few syllabi, a 
     library, some laboratories, a computer and perhaps a few 
     Massive Open Online Courses. They might then all be more or 
     less self-taught, as were Benjamin Franklin and Abraham 
     Lincoln, those almost superhuman, if not quite angelic, 
     heroes of the American constitutional tradition.
       But people are not angels, and very, very few students are 
     like Franklin and Lincoln. The generations of students who 
     have come to Nassau Hall, including the great James Madison, 
     have wanted teachers to fire their imaginations, dispel their 
     misconceptions, explode their prejudices, stir their spirits 
     and guide their passions. And students have found mentors 
     here, not just in professors and preceptors, but also in 
     chaplains and coaches, counselors and graduate students, 
     conductors and directors, deans and administrators.
       I expect that all of you in the audience today can look 
     back upon your lives and identify teachers whose support and 
     guidance were valuable beyond measure and without whom you 
     could not have achieved the successes that matter most to 
     you. I am especially pleased that in attendance today are two 
     teachers whose mentorship has guided me throughout my career: 
     Mr. Pat Canan, who taught me physics at Corvallis High 
     School; and Professor Jeffrey Tulis, who taught me about the 
     Constitution and political theory when I was an undergraduate 
     at this University.
       I have kept in touch with both of these teachers for more 
     than 30 years now. Thirty years is a long time. As I have 
     already said, education, like constitutionalism, is a long-
     term enterprise. Great teachers, and great universities, make 
     extraordinary investments in students and research in 
     anticipation of future benefits that are usually unknowable 
     and occasionally implausible. Perhaps the seeds you plant in 
     the mind of 19-year-old students today will guide careers 
     that blossom and mature many decades hence. Or, to take an 
     example from our Department of Chemistry, perhaps your 
     curiosity-driven research into the pigmentation

[[Page 15764]]

     of butterfly wings will, 50 years later, produce a drug that 
     improves the lives of cancer patients.
       If human beings were angels, we would cheerfully focus on 
     long-term goods. We would invest enthusiastically in schools 
     and colleges for our own children and for everybody else's 
     children, so that they could become productive, engaged 
     citizens in the future. We would happily support speculative 
     research projects so that we could reap the benefits of 
     discovery and innovation. We would gladly nurture humanistic 
     inquiry because it provides an essential foundation for 
     understanding what makes life meaningful and sustains the 
     wellsprings of civil society.
       Indeed, we need not be angels to do these things. We would 
     do them if we were perfectly rational investors, because 
     economists like Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have shown 
     convincingly that education and research are powerful drivers 
     of economic prosperity.
       But we are not perfectly rational any more than we are 
     angels. We live embodied in the present, sensitive to short-
     term pleasures and pains. Notions of the common good and 
     promises about future returns feel abstract and feeble by 
     comparison to the intensity of immediate experience.
       This bias seems especially fierce in America today. Our 
     world features a non-stop news cycle, continuous political 
     campaigns and an obsession with quarterly earnings 
     statements. We demand that messaging be instant, and we talk 
     in tweets.
       This short-term perspective threatens America's colleges 
     and universities. Already it has done significant harm. Our 
     nation has reduced its support for public colleges and 
     universities, and it has squeezed the funding needed for 
     research, innovation and scholarship.
       In so doing, we risk squandering a national treasure. 
     America's colleges and universities are a beacon to the 
     world. Parents around the globe dream of sending their 
     children here, scholars dream of landing a place here, and 
     nations dream of creating universities like America's. Yet, 
     here at home, we see a parade of reporters, politicians and 
     pundits asking whether a college education is worth it--even 
     though the economic evidence for the value of a college 
     education is utterly overwhelming.
       People discount this evidence because they worry, quite 
     understandably, about the cost of college. They say that 
     higher education should be more efficient so that it can be 
     cheaper in the short term and equally valuable in the long 
     term.
       Make no mistake about it: Those of us who lead universities 
     must make our institutions as efficient as possible. We must 
     also ensure, through financial aid and other programs, that 
     our colleges are accessible and affordable to students from 
     every sector of our society. But there is a difference 
     between expense and inefficiency. Expensive investments can 
     be both efficient and valuable if their returns are 
     sufficiently high.
       When professors provide individualized attention to 
     students, their time is expensive and valuable. When scholars 
     strive day and night to enhance our understanding of the 
     world, their activity is expensive and valuable. Great 
     colleges and universities are not cheap. They require big 
     investments, and they are also among the very best 
     investments that this nation, or any nation, can make. And, 
     as I have said in the past, great universities are also 
     places where the human spirit soars. They are special 
     communities where students, teachers and researchers strive 
     to transcend their limitations and, on occasion, to expand 
     the boundaries of human achievement.
       I am grateful to be joined on this stage by Princeton 
     alumni, and by former Princeton faculty members and 
     administrators, who now serve as presidents of an 
     extraordinary range of colleges and universities from 
     throughout the world. Their presence here today symbolizes 
     our need to work together on behalf of higher education. It 
     also reminds us of Princeton's obligation and opportunity to 
     play a leadership role in public discussions about the value 
     of research and collegiate education today. Those debates are 
     urgently important to the nation, to the world, and to this 
     University's mission, and Princeton University must be boldly 
     active within them.
       Long-term institutions, be they educational or political, 
     can flourish only if they inspire energetic commitment in the 
     short term. Madison knew this. Even ``the most rational 
     government,'' he said, must have the ``prejudices of the 
     community on its side.'' (Fed. 49, Rossiter 315).
       In his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln 
     called attention to this country's annual celebrations on the 
     Fourth of July. He insisted that the ``cannon which thunders 
     [the] annual joyous return'' of our independence serves to 
     remind us of the basic principles upon which this country is 
     founded and which unite us as a people. [P. Angle, Created 
     Equal: the Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, at 130 
     (Ottawa); see also id., at 40 (Chicago)]. Civic pride, and 
     the colorful and noisy celebrations that go with it, can 
     reshape self-interest and motivate people to care about their 
     collective future.
       We, too, at Princeton have traditions of joyous return. We 
     even have cannons--though our most famous one is buried deep 
     in the ground behind Nassau Hall and none of them thunder 
     anymore. But joyous return: We do that very well. ``Going 
     back to Nassau Hall'' is woven into the music and the soul of 
     this place. We go back to Nassau Hall for Reunions, for 
     Commencement and Baccalaureate, for Alumni Day and the 
     Service of Remembrance, and occasionally for special 
     ceremonies like this one. In so doing, we renew the 
     camaraderie that enlivens our commitment to this University, 
     and we rededicate ourselves to the principles for which 
     Princeton stands and upon which it depends.
       I would not presume to enumerate all of those principles, 
     but prominent among them are these basic convictions:
       That liberal arts education is a vital foundation for both 
     individual flourishing and the well-being of our society;
       That residential and extracurricular experience both 
     supplement and reinforce the lessons of the classroom, 
     building character and skills that last a lifetime;
       That rigorous research and scholarship are indispensable 
     for understanding the human condition and improving the 
     world;
       That learning, discovery and understanding are valuable not 
     only instrumentally but also for their own sake, as sources 
     of the joy and fulfillment that make a human life worth 
     living;
       That scholarship and teaching are mutually reinforcing 
     activities--that scholars learn from their students' 
     questions, and that students learn best when they are exposed 
     to, and can participate in, research that extends the 
     frontiers of knowledge;
       That we must cultivate new generations of talent 
     enthusiastically and unselfishly;
       That all social and economic groups should have access to 
     the educational resources of this great University and to 
     higher education more generally;
       That we as a University, and we as alumni, must constantly 
     rededicate ourselves to the nation's service and to the 
     service of all nations; and last, but most certainly not 
     least,
       That a great university can and should be the heart of an 
     alumni community that not only engages in a lifetime of 
     learning, leadership and service, but that continues to do 
     all it can to sustain, strengthen and nourish this 
     University--ensuring that it can live up to these principles 
     and achieve its highest aspirations through all the 
     generations yet to come.
       I am honored to accept the presidency of this, our beloved 
     University, and I will work with you enthusiastically to 
     sustain the excellence of what we are doing now, to realize 
     more perfectly the ideals to which we are committed, and to 
     demonstrate by argument and deed the extraordinary value of 
     Princeton University, and of all the colleges and 
     universities that help to bring out the best in the people of 
     this country and this world.
       Thank you for welcoming me so warmly this afternoon, thank 
     you for coming back once more to Nassau Hall, and thank you, 
     most of all, for your sincere commitment to this place and 
     this community that matter so deeply to all of us. Thank you!

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