Equity and excellence in American higher education

Shortly after the University of Virginia Press published Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, Bill Bowen, Martin Kurzweil, and I participated in a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution. One of our colleagues on the panel, Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, and a distinguished political philosopher who has written widely about education, democracy, and human rights, prefaced her remarks by referring to a New Yorker cartoon portraying a little boy tugging at Thomas Jefferson’s coattails, looking up at Mr. Jefferson and saying: “If you hold these truths to be self-evident, then why do you keep harping on them so much?”