One of the biggest draws during Alumni Weekend in May was “Looking to the Future: The Role of Higher Education in Society.”

Before a packed crowd at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures’ Breasted Hall, three University of Chicago deans addressed the topic at hand: Melina Hale, PhD’98, dean of the College and William Rainey Harper Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy; Nadya Mason, dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Robert J. Zimmer Professor of Molecular Engineering; and Deborah L. Nelson, dean of the Division of the Humanities and the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of English.

Moderating was Arne Duncan, LAB’82, distinguished senior fellow and special advisor to the dean at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, former US secretary of education, and former chief executive of Chicago Public Schools. Their discussion has been edited and condensed.

Arne Duncan: As we know, there’s a backlash against higher education. Over the next five, 10, 15 years, how do this university and others continue to prove their value and demonstrate how important it is to continue to create these opportunities for young people?

Nadya Mason: It’s incredibly important for universities to think deeply about problems that maybe other people aren’t thinking about—this is what UChicago is known for—but also to lead in solving global problems that are challenges to humanity and society as a whole, problems like climate change, energy efficiency, global hunger. I don’t see how universities can educate future generations without addressing these existential issues. UChicago did a great job of this by starting an engineering school.

This is not the only way to move forward. But it is important to continuously ask ourselves, “How are we having impact? How do we want to have impact?” Then make a plan.

Deborah L. Nelson: I’ve thought a lot about this because I teach postwar US culture, after 1945. In 1940, 4 percent of Americans went to college. After World War II, there was a massive increase because of the GI Bill. Then the Cold War produced a massive investment in higher education. Higher education was affordable.

Since the 1980s we have stopped investing in higher education, even though the United States has the greatest system the world has ever known. People from around the world come here. I just saw a list of the top universities in the world. Among the top 12, two of them were Oxford and Cambridge—and the rest were in the United States. We will be tremendously impoverished if we give up on that jewel of our own country.

The elite universities have the highest price tags, the flashiest credentials, but that is only part of higher ed in the United States. Eighty percent of US citizens who go to college go to a public university. And to undermine the good work of this big system educating people is—it’s really heartbreaking to me. I think it requires all of you and your communities to be a bulwark against the nonsense about higher ed. What is it for? Why are we doing it? Why do you want your children to have a college education? There are things beyond your child getting a job. I’m not indifferent to that; no one is indifferent to that. But there is a sort of basic foundation of citizenry that requires some advanced knowledge. We live in a very complex world, and you are going to have a hard time navigating that world without some fluency across disciplines and basic scientific, mathematic, humanistic, and social scientific knowledge. You use it every day, whether you recognize it or not.

Melina Hale: Yes, and one of the things we need to keep doing is what we’re doing now with the College’s Core curriculum, leaning into teaching students to argue rigorously, think deeply, look at primary sources of information, and evaluate these sources for themselves. We are completely committed to doing what we’re doing now, and the importance of that.

There are a lot of ways that we can engage more students and engage more broadly with our community, and we absolutely need to do more of that. I think a lot about Chicago as our home and our community, and we send lots of students out into that community. A sustainability club, for instance, will go and actually be advisers to local businesses about how they can improve sustainability.

Duncan: What role should UChicago play on the South Side and in the city of Chicago?

Hale: Speaking from the College viewpoint, we’re educators and we want students to succeed at K through 12 and go to college, whether they come to UChicago or not. A lot of us do outreach in the schools around us, which are incredibly underresourced. During the pandemic, high school seniors were having a hard time applying for college. So our admissions office started hosting Zooms and sending people out to talk to students. They’ve impacted over 20,000 students in the local community through a program called UChicago Promise. They also help train high school counselors to advise students on their applications and strategy. We have made a difference for these kids and these schools, but there are so many more ways we could help.

Mason: Within the sciences and engineering, we have community college programs, and we do outreach to local students. But one of the most important things we do for the community is to serve as a bridge to entrepreneurial activity.

I was told that some years ago this would have been anathema to the UChicago community. But there’s growing recognition of the importance of start-ups. How do you build the local economy unless you create jobs in the local economy? How do you create jobs in the local economy unless people create businesses or unless you train people in ways that they can contribute or build things? So we’ve partnered with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to train students in starting companies.

We want students to do fundamental research. But when they make discoveries that can have impact, they need to bring that out into the world. You may not see the impact this year or in five years. But in 10, 20 years, you’ll see this vision transform. It will create businesses that will impact the local economy significantly.

Nelson: Starting next year, the Division of the Humanities will be called the Division of Arts and Humanities. The arts faculty are already in the Humanities Division, so it makes sense to shine a light on that.

We have Arts + Public Life, a beautiful strip of buildings that houses a theater, art-making facilities, and a music pavilion on Garfield Boulevard, just past Washington Park. One of the programs brings local people in to perfect their art and then helps them start an online business. The arts fellows are not just focused on self-expression but also on learning basic business practices.

Washington Park has been depopulated down to 10,000 people. There’s so much empty real estate there, but that will soon change. UChicago Medicine is setting up a training center and a lab right where we have this beautiful arts block, as well as partnering with the City Colleges. There’s going to be an influx of people, right where we have this beautiful performance area. That’s remarkable.

Duncan: It’s a difficult time to be a university administrator. There are protests going on as we talk today. What’s it been like to not just live through this but to lead?

Hale: I can speak to the College. I work with all of our undergraduates, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with students, with small groups, and with parents: answering their questions and being open and transparent and up front about our principles, explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing.

We want our students to be able to use their voices and stand up for what they believe in. Free expression is so important for protecting marginalized people, but there are protests, and then there are disruptive protests—a very different thing.

It’s been important to stand back and see this as a learning experience for our undergraduates. But it’s been so emotional. I heard from students that it separated friends. Over the winter, I think that leaning into dialogue improved—trying to understand where each other was coming from and to talk about it. But it’s been a tough year.

Nelson: The thing that’s been on my mind a lot is, free speech is not free. It’s very costly. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. But sometimes we have a bit of happy talk about free speech: “Oh, free speech, it’s free, yay, we all get to say what we think.”

That’s true, but it makes demands. In a free speech environment, you have to be in a headspace of curiosity. That is hard to do when you’re in a lot of pain, when everybody’s in a lot of pain. To take a deep breath and listen—that has been the challenge, and it has been really hard. There’s been a lot of discussion and dispute among the faculty as well. People feel very, very strongly and make impassioned, reasoned arguments. But I do feel like it’s hard to listen.

But those are the capacities of free speech that you have to cultivate. The University has the advantage of norms of deliberation, norms of reason and evidence that are part of the classroom, part of the scholarly community. They’re tested during difficult times, but they are a bulwark against chaos. Having those norms deeply held, believed in, and practiced has been the foundation that has gotten us through some very tense and difficult moments. The Kalven Report and its declaration of institutional neutrality has been incredibly important. The institution cannot have a position, because it makes it impossible for a multiplicity of thinking to flourish.

Mason: It’s definitely been a challenging time. Of course UChicago is known for freedom of expression, but this year it’s been put in the forefront. What does free speech mean? Why does it matter? You might think, “Engineers, why would they need free speech? They’re just working on making stuff.” But when we talk about science, that includes climate change and vaccines. And at the University of Chicago we want our students to go out and be leaders and be able to engage in conversations about things that matter to people. If someone says, “Vaccines are not important” or “I don’t believe in climate change,” I want our students to be able to answer with reason, with scientific proof, with evidence. That’s what will make them leaders in the way that we want them to be, and it starts here.

Hale: A few weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with a junior faculty member, relatively new to the University. He said, in the context of the protests and the encampment and everyone being angry at each other, “The University will never be the same again.”

But actually, go back and look at the ’60s, at the early ’70s, when I was a graduate student in the ’90s, the 2000s. And we all grow and learn and continue as a University, because the Kalven Report and our principles keep us on track.

Audience member: What’s the future of the Core curriculum, the magnet that brought me here?

Hale: Well, we love the Core. And as you know, when the Core first started in the 1930s, it was an earthquake in higher education. It was new, it was different. It was not great books. It was discussion and digging in and having this consistent education across our students.

The Core is as important today as it was a decade ago, 20 years ago, and back to the ’30s. It is not a static thing. It continues to evolve and change with the times, and sometimes swerves, and sometimes moves back. It’s a dynamic conversation among our faculty. In the last year or so, we started what are called Core Conversations for the first time, where faculty are getting together quarterly to talk about hard things about the Core. So we’re even having the Core conversation ourselves, in order to keep the Core curriculum lively and strong. The Core will not go away. I think it will be even more important for our students as we move forward.

Nelson: I’ve taught in the Core for many years. With a very diverse student body from around the world and around the country, the Core produces common touch points of knowledge and reference that are really absent among students. They haven’t read the same things. They don’t know the same things. We have micropublics. So to give them a set of things they all know and can discuss is an absolutely valuable thing for College students today—I would say absolutely more so than 50 years ago, when there was a more consistent curriculum across high schools and when the student body was more homogenous and knew more of the same things.

Audience member: One of the panelists mentioned certain skills being essential for visibility in the modern world. Is the traditional higher education model the best way to achieve that?

Mason: We’re not trying to create people who can just get a specific job. We’re trying to produce leaders and innovators who will bring us into the future. And to innovate, you have to understand a lot of things. You have to understand the past, you have to understand your society, you have to understand the pull of psychology, you have to understand a little math and a lot of science. Everything is connected together, and it’s things like the Core, combining deep knowledge and breadth of knowledge, that allow people to lead effectively into the future. That’s what we want for our students.

Nelson: We don’t have a higher education system in this country. We have a higher education market. And there should absolutely be massive experimentation around forms of higher ed. For a large number of students, it’s not reasonable to leave the workforce. They don’t have the money to leave the workforce for four years of concentrated study. But it should be possible for them to get a degree in a reasonable amount of time. There can be many, many more forms of delivery that would allow more students a more successful path to a college degree.

I did my graduate teaching at Queens College in New York. And you know, my students were working 40 hours a week in a job. I can torture the students here with assigned reading, and I do, because that’s their job—to read what I’ve told them to read. But at Queens I had to moderate the amount of work because my students had full-time jobs, and many were parents. You have to have many, many, many ways of educating people in a pluralistic society. This is one way of educating people. It’s a very valuable way. But it by no means should determine all the ways people can get the benefit of a college education.