“I can’t breathe.”
The words of George Floyd as he lay dying under the knee of a police officer echoed those of Eric Garner who perished years earlier in a police chokehold.
Those haunting words, those tragic moments, captured on video, taught us all far more than what the pixels showed us. They taught us about race, prejudice, and the painful residue of slavery and segregation that linger in ways that privilege often prevents us from seeing.
These moments also teach us the most important thing of all: that we know far less than we think we do.
In colleges and universities, this is often referred to as “Socratic wisdom”— knowing that we don’t know, learning that we have yet learned very little. It is a fitting place to begin an education. A humble place.
It is this kind of intellectual humility that can offer a glimmer of hope in a moment when our nation is riven by racial divisions. Learning how very little we know about the experiences, the history, the struggles of others has a powerful effect on the mind. It triggers curiosity, it opens us up, and it gives us the chance to literally change our minds through education.
After all, that’s what education is—changing minds. And if the past week has shown us anything, it is that we need to change minds in order to change the world. That’s why I believe so firmly in the power of education, and why I’ve made it my life’s work to help students find their way to the best education possible for them. Because education changes minds and changes lives.
I’m heartened to see that colleges and universities are changing and adapting in these unprecedented times. The UC system has recognized the racial inequities in existing standardized tests and become test-optional with breathtaking speed. And Ivy league campuses — Dartmouth College, Cornell University and Columbia University — have announced they will be test-optional for 2021 applicants, in hopes of lowering the barrier for students of all background effected by test cancelations and COVID-19. Colleges have gotten creative in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
And students and professors alike are taking to the streets to demand change.
Bringing light to dark times, bringing humility to hard moments—this is what higher education can do, and has done so many times throughout history. In uncertain times, we don’t need certainty—we need people and institutions that are capable of understanding uncertainty and working with it and through it. That’s what colleges and universities—and students—do well. They breathe life and meaning into hard places and hard moments and help us learn from them. And that’s exactly what we need right now.
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