Why I Changed My Mind About Anonymous Donations

By Howard Gardner

In 1990, in Boston, I attended a conference on school reform. At the end of the last session, a courteous gentleman, clearly from out of town, asked in a tentative manner if I could give him a lift to his hotel. As it was convenient, I readily agreed. At the conclusion of the ride, the man said that he represented a foundation that might want to support some of our research on what makes for effective K-12 education.

Needless to say, I was delighted—except for one thing. The gentleman—whose name was Ray Handlan—indicated that the philanthropy was anonymous; and, as a condition of funding, my colleagues and I would have to agree to keep the source of support secret.

At the time, as a fairly inexperienced researcher, I did not know how to react. So I checked with my Dean, who ultimately checked with the University president, and we were told that it was OK to accept the funds, which we happily did—launching a relationship that lasted for over 15 years.

We got a bit of a kick out of this arrangement. We nicknamed the funder “AF”—for “Anonymous Funder.” We christened Ray Handlan as “Rex Harrison” and his helpful colleague Angela Covert (itself a coincidentally apt last name) as “Agatha Christie.” And so things went smoothly for a while.

Then, one day, everything changed. In January 1997, on the front page of The New York Times, we learned the name of both the foundation—the Atlantic Philanthropic Services—and the funder—Charles (Chuck) Feeney, a very wealthy man who, shortly after WWII, had opened the first duty free shops in airports. Feeney had already given away over half a billion dollars and now, over twenty years later, he has given away almost his entire fortune of several billion dollars—and APS is about to sunset.

Once APS and Chuck Feeney had been unmasked, and no scandal ensued, I felt content with my earlier decision to accept anonymous funding.

Anonymous gifts have a charmed history. The great Jewish sage of the 12th century, Moses Maimonides, declared that anonymous charity was the highest form of philanthropy—especially when donor and recipient were not personally known to one another. The anonymous person would receive no kudos, and the recipient would not feel any obligation to the donor. This characterization seemed valid, even praiseworthy. And so, in the ensuing years, when individuals or philanthropies have requested anonymity, as they occasionally do, I have readily granted it.

But recently I have changed my mind—and here is why I will no longer accept anonymous gifts.

I begin with the practical. Until the rise of the free press, and, more recently, the advent of social media, it might have been possible to request and maintain anonymity indefinitely. But now, when everyone with a keyboard or a cell phone in effect has a megaphone, it’s virtually impossible to retain anonymity. (As was learned in the case of Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts to the MIT Media Lab, a lot of people who were knowledgeable about the arrangement had in effect to take an oath of silence.) Even worse, should an anonymous funder be erroneously unmasked (for example, Funder A is wrongly identified as Person B, then Person B has been inappropriately praised or vilified, and the actual donor—Person A—has the unpalatable option of in effect permitting a false story to circulate unchallenged or losing his/her anonymity.)

But over and above this practical consideration, I contend that there are principled reasons for abandoning anonymity. In this era, thousands of organizations—tiny and gigantic—are attempting to survive by raising funds, and many individuals of wealth have motives for supporting such organizations. Sometimes those motives are idealistic (I believe in a free college education, and I want to support deserving youth who can’t afford tuition); sometimes those motives are dubious (I am involved with fossil fuels, and I want to support individuals who cast doubt on the consensus around climate change for personal benefit); but almost always, courtesy of “the human condition,” motives are mixed—as, indeed, are the motives for anonymity.

The same analysis should be applied to the recipient of funds. Nearly all of us engaged in fundraising for putatively worthwhile causes think of ourselves as praiseworthy. But examined more closely, fundraisers, including myself, have a mixture of motives, some more praiseworthy than others. (As an example, should I receive a sizable grant, I get appreciation from many quarters and, perhaps as well, favorable publicity for our work.) Moreover, nearly everyone involved in fundraising feels pressured to achieve the explicit or implicit goals of the donor. Accordingly, the recipient is confronted with a moral dilemma when, for whatever reason, the program or project has not sufficiently fulfilled the funders’ goals.

I think that this calculus should apply not only to individual donors but also to foundations. Foundations typically describe themselves in praiseworthy terms, and sometimes that praise is well merited. (I have been dependent on, and grateful for, the generosity of foundations for decades.) But when one takes a closer look at foundations—for example, the sources of funds (“Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime” -Balzac), the ways in which they are invested, the salaries of top executives, and the composition and mode of operation of the board—a more complex picture typically emerges.

I am not so naïve as to think that any of us—employee, fundraiser, researcher, NGO executive board member, philanthropoid (the allocator of gifts), or philanthropist (the source of gifts)—is beyond sin. Indeed, if we all had to pass a screening—and who would do the screening?—the entire philanthropic sector would likely cease to function altogether.

And so I recommend a different tack: instead of unachievable and often problematic anonymity, complete transparency. Those of us who work in mission-driven organizations—whether scientific, educational, or charitable—should make public all of our funders. And by the same token, those who work in philanthropic organizations should make public the source of our funds, how they are invested, and how they are distributed. In this way, interested parties can render a holistic judgment about the merits, or lack of merits, of the funding arrangements—just as we routinely make holistic judgments about the institutions concerning which we have some knowledge.

You may wonder, “Well, isn’t this already done?” It’s true that the largest foundations in the United States are obliged to fill Form 990, which reveals some of this information. But the vast majority of funders—whether organizations or individuals—operate below the radar screen. I can tell you from personal experience that it is virtually impossible to find out the information that I have just itemized.

To sum up: Since we live in a time when efforts at secrecy almost invariably fail, it’s better to be “up front” about one’s goals and one’s finances, and let the philanthropic chips fall where they may.

So what should I do, in the future, if asked by a potential philanthropist to provide anonymity? I would listen carefully and sympathetically to their rationale. But then I would respond in the following manner: “I have no intention of broadcasting your generosity if you would prefer that I don’t. But on my website, I do list all of those who generously support my work. I hope that you will understand and accept these conditions—and if you do not accept, I respect and will not challenge your decision.”

Note: I thank Lynn Barendsen, Sissela Bok, Wendy Fischman, Kirsten McHugh, Danny Mucinskas, Mal Salter, Dennis Thompson, and Ellen Winner for comments on an earlier draft.

© 2019 Howard Gardner

What Is A Profession? A Tip

By Howard Gardner

Early September 2019. My wife and I have a free day in Zurich. From a menu offered by our hosts, we decide to take two tours. In the morning, we elect to tour the old city by foot—visiting buildings, gardens, squares, historical landmarks, and shops both old and contemporary. We have a terrific guide, who provides a splendid tour. She is filled with information about the city, past and present. She displays and draws on maps from different historical eras, speaks several languages, and tolerates the range of questions from our group—whether appropriate or foolish, terse or verbose.

After a light lunch, we proceed in the afternoon to our second tour: a walk through the art museum. There, after a brief introduction from an administrator, we pass through several selected galleries—spanning the art world from the middle ages to the contemporary era, from jewels to paintings, from Swiss artists to ones from different corners of the world. Again, we have a terrific guide, who provides an excellent tour. Armed with art books, she makes appropriate references to works that are not in the collection, and also to artists from other art forms. She impresses us with her ability to shift languages, invoke diverse terminology, and draw on appropriate examples from a range of art forms.

We express our gratitude to the guides, who welcome our approbation. But then, a crucial difference emerges. With respect to the first guide, we ask whether we can offer her a tip. She graciously says that the tip is not necessary, but she happily accepts the tip and places it in her hip pocket. A few other members of the tour follow suit.

With respect to the second guide, we do not make a similar gambit. Indeed, it does not ever occur to us. Rightly or wrongly, we believe that the guide would be insulted, and others in our small touring group would question the appropriateness of the gesture.

Why this differentiation? And is it appropriate?

The short answer: the guide in the art museum presents herself as a professional, in her dress and demeanor. She is introduced to us by an administrator at the museum, who calls her “Doctor,” and who describes her educational background. And she treats members of the tour—whose backgrounds as educators are known to her—as peers.

In contrast, the guide of the city simply appears without introduction and is dressed informally. She does not indicate anything about her educational background, nor does she signal any knowledge of the identities of the tourists. And the book of maps to which she occasionally refers appears to have been assembled by herself.

In the cultures with which I am familiar, we tip individuals who serve us, and we don’t tip individuals who present themselves as peers and whom we regard in that way. Just as my wife and I, as professors, would not expect a tip were we to lead a delegation from Colombia or China around campus, so, too, the guide in the art museum might feel belittled if we offered her a tip—though not, perhaps, if we invited her for coffee after her job has been completed.

But is this right? Just because we distinguish traditionally between “service worker” and “peer,” should we? If the competence and essential performance are identical, should we make a distinction based on social labels?

I have no desire to cause an upheaval of the social order—even if I could. (There’s enough of that going on in the world these days!) But there’s a lesson that can be drawn from our experiences in Zurich.

It may well be the case that professions, as we know them, are disappearing from the work landscape. So many roles that used to be carried out by trained professionals are now carried out by paraprofessionals, if not by “bots” or other artificial intelligence devices. To be sure, there may well be physicians and physicists for a while longer; but even these individuals may be trained quite differently—perhaps no longer going to professional schools, perhaps no longer placing a few letters of the alphabet before or after their proper names.

What do I hope will remain? A sense of what it means to be a professional: to be well educated, to treat all individuals with dignity, to be proud of the work role that you have adopted, and—most crucial—to recognize ethical dilemmas, to ponder them, to try to do the right thing in difficult circumstances, and, whatever one decides, to seek to learn from one’s mistakes and to do better the next time. Traditionally we expect this kind of deportment from those who are called professionals; but I would like this set of attributes to be expected equally from both of our guides, and therefore, to be able to think of and treat them equivalently.

I would be saddened if we lost a sense of professionalism.

On Securing Support for Research: Should One Hit the Pause Button?

By Howard Gardner

Those of us who conduct research in psychology, education, and related fields are dependent on external support to cover our expenses. For half a century, my colleagues and I at Harvard Project Zero have been fortunate to receive funding from various sources. In most cases, the funding process has been smooth and unproblematic; but in at least three cases, we have decided not to accept further funding.

Here I describe our overall history with fund raising; share three discombobulating experiences; and suggest some general guidelines.

First, the good news. From 1970-1980, almost all of our funding came from the federal government—The National Institutes of Health, The National Science Foundation, and a now defunct educational funder, The National Institute of Education. Then Ronald Reagan became president and made known his conviction that “social science is socialism.” Confronted with that dismissive attitude, we showed little hesitation in shifting our requests to large national foundations—The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and The Spencer Foundation (which focuses on educational research)—just to name a few. These foundations followed widely accepted peer review methods with respect to requests for funding; they did not attempt to micro-manage or redirect the research; and we never worried that any of the funding would be considered suspect. Whatever the value and attitudes of the original philanthropist (e.g. Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller), the foundations by that time conduced business in a professional manner.

The bad news about funding from private foundations is that most program officers (the individual who control the purse strings) get bored with funding the same old institutions and causes—no matter how worthy. (And of course, we thought all of our causes were supremely worthy!) Accordingly, these philanthropoids (as the dispensers of funds are sometimes called) want to move on to support new and more exciting (and perhaps more needy) projects; it proved difficult to obtain continuation funding indefinitely.

Starting 25 years ago, we were saved by three factors:

1) Funding from a long-time anonymous funder, whose “cover” was eventually blown by The New York Times—the Atlantic Philanthropies, bankrolled completely by Charles Feeney. (Despite the fact that we received several million dollars from AP, none of us ever met Mr. Feeney.)

2) Smaller foundations, family foundations, and wealthy individuals. As these funders were less likely to follow standard peer review processes, a lot of this funding depended on good personal relations with the funders or with their designated program officers.

3) Our own honoraria and gifts that we were able to direct toward our research.

Also, somewhat to our surprise, and to our delight, we began once again to receive funding from some large national foundations. The previous project officers had resigned or retired and, in the absence of flawless institutional memory, our requests for funding were treated as “new” opportunities.

I am very pleased to say that, in my memory, no funder ever pressed us to come up with certain results, rather than others. Also, before accepting money from the anonymous foundation, we confirmed its trustworthiness with knowledgeable leaders at Harvard.

Yet, on three occasions alluded to above, we made the difficult decision not to receive any further funding from a source:

1) A funder insisted that we be prepared to travel long distances, without little or no prior warning. And these demands proved exhausting.

2) A funder was carrying out work of which we did not approve and yet wanted to have our imprimatur on that work.

3) A funder was convicted of a crime. I let the funder know that under no circumstances would or could I accept any further funding.

I consider myself very fortunate not to have encountered more difficulties of this sort. At the same time, I have to add that at various times, I’ve made a decision not to pursue a funding opportunity; and I have advised colleagues and friends to refrain as well. It’s much easier not to become involved with a dubious source of funding than it is to establish ties that one subsequently has to break. The dubious source of funding can be from a corporation (e.g. a gun manufacturer, a cigarette company) whose products make me uncomfortable; or, for instance, from a source that has no apparent interest in the research per se but just wants to have a connection to the university.

In the current funding climate, where government funding is insufficient and the once dominant foundations are being dwarfed by individuals who are as wealthy or wealthier than Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller, the temptations are great to ignore these warning signs and simply accept funds. This is especially so if one’s own salary or the salaries of close associates are at stake. That’s why I hope that more disinterested (neutral, objective) parties—for example, the government or foundations or individuals who are genuinely interested in the research but disinterested in the specific results—will re-emerge. And I hope that these entities will follow peer-review procedures in considering proposals and will give the researchers latitude in how they proceed. In return, the researchers must strive to carry out work of high quality; inform the sponsors of significant changes in procedures; and, of course, make the findings available promptly and publicly, while also crediting the sources for their support.

To phrase it in the spirit of this blog: Research is most likely to work well if all parties act in a professional manner.

The Place Model: Are Inclusive Professionals an Ideal or Oxymoron?

In developed countries, few institutions have been as powerfully challenged as the professions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, professions like law, medicine, education, and the clergy were considered to be the gold standard of occupations; talented young people aspired to join their ranks. But in the last few decades, due to a range of factors, professions have become far less attractive occupations, and some experts question whether they can—or should—survive.

In this context, Linda Clarke’s blog post, which we are happy to publish below, is timely and useful. She has developed a scheme, called The Place Model, that delineates factors that influence the status of candidate professions. In applying The Place Model, she points out a variety of professional niches that are currently occupied.

Like many who study the professions, Clarke is skeptical about their claims to be highly respected—in the way that they were a half century ago. Indeed, though she does not go so far as Richard and Daniel Susskind, who wonder whether the professions as we know them are even viable, she is agnostic on the issue.

I also worry about whether, in the future, there will be recognizable professions, with the concomitant status and expertise. But I very much hope that we will continue to value individuals who behave in a professional manner. As we all know, there are certified professionals who disgrace their chosen professions, even as there are workers who may have little status but who behave in responsible and disinterested ways. I want to live in a world where it’s an honor to say of someone, “He or she is behaving like a true professional.”

-Howard Gardner

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By Linda Clarke

‘Professional’ is a slippery and overused term, but there are two essential features of what it means to be a professional.

The first of these fundamental characteristics is expertise, which includes both specialized knowledge and skills and trustworthiness. The second, which is often consequent to the first, is esteem. Professionals are learned and are not amateur, their behavior is reliably moral and not capricious or dishonest, and they are, therefore, able to be trusted to carry out complex and important roles.

In order to compare and critique these features, the Place Model (Clarke, 2016) combines:

1. The Geographer’s view of place as an expanding (learning) horizon of developing expertise; and,

2. The Sociologist’s notion of place as public esteem.

In what follows I briefly outline and exemplify the components of the Place Model, which resembles a graph. The sub-heading of the Model asks ‘Who is my professional today?’ 

Figure 1. The Place Model (Clarke, 2018)

The horizontal axis represents a cumulative, career-long professional learning journey which combines local and global understandings. Crucially, this axis is not a history (not merely a question of time spent on the job).

The vertical axis is based on public perceptions of the esteem in which professionals are held, ranging from low to high.

The intersection of these axes affords the creation of four quadrants, which represent four types of professional workers: proto-professionals, precarious professionals, the deprofessionalised, and the fully professional. A fifth element of the Model sits outside the axes, where the answer to the question ‘Who is my professional today?’ is ‘No one.’

It is possible to populate each of the five sections of the Place Model using illustrative examples drawn from a range of professions in order to bring the model to life and to provoke questions (Clarke, 2016, a workshop for professional educators and their students).

No professional: Outside the axis of the Place Model, there is place to consider, inter alia, areas in which professional expertise is lacking. Consider the plight of the 57 million learners without access to a teacher, the approximately 517 million people in developing countries who are visually impaired because they do not have access to corrective treatment from a doctor, street purveyors of pharmaceutical products from a bucket… and also the current proliferation of ‘virtual’ professionals trained fully online.

Proto-professionals: The term proto–professional has been used here to indicate that this quadrant is home to those aspiring professionals in the first stages of their learning journey or sectors that have not fully achieved professional status. Some professionals may (whether by compulsion or choice) be limited in their learning journey to this quadrant, which can include craftworkers or technicians, increasingly liable to replacement by robots.

Precarious Professionals: At least two worrying and quite contrasting categories of professionals are found in this quadrant: those who might be described as ‘unprofessional’, and those who are unlikely to remain in their profession, the ‘transitory.’ The former engage in a wide range of destructive veniality but may find themselves in this quadrant only if this behavior is exposed. The latter may have limited support or incentive to enable them to remain or progress in their profession.

The Deprofessionalised: This ever- expanding quadrant is also home to strange bedfellows. As retirement ages increase sometimes (and vanishes), it may include ever more of the inveterate cynics whose words and attitudes can discourage both colleagues and clients. In this quadrant, we also find those senior professionals who have been cast down to this place by those who disparage the professions (for example, senior teacher education academics in the UK, dismissed and headlined as ‘the enemies of promise’ by the Secretary of State for Education as he sought to create rhetorical space for reform). The quadrant may also be considered the locus of those migrant and refugee professionals who find that their previous qualifications and experience count for little in their new home; in a world where 1 in every 131 people is a refugee, this is a widespread problem.

Exclusive and Inclusive Professionals: In the original version of the Place Model, the professional quadrant was designated as the home of the virtuous professional who was expert, yet still learning, and likely to be a highly esteemed role model. However, it is more realistic to see this quadrant as also being a smug and snug home to the learned but exclusive professionals, critiqued most thoroughly by Bourdieu and seen by George Bernard Shaw as conspiracies against the laity. We can also construct, at least in theory, a more virtuous conception of inclusive professionals (whilst being aware of the potential for this to be an oxymoron). Thomas More’s concept of Utopia has room for both—in the original Greek, it may mean either ‘no place’ or ‘good place’; of course, reality may be less accommodating. Nonetheless, the other parts of the Place Model point towards potential characteristics of inclusive professionals, for example:

• Including those most able but least likely to join the professions;

• Professional associations and, indeed, individual professionals choosing to help bring an end to the ‘no professional’ sector or standing up to government ministers who seek to de-skill, technicize and disparage their younger colleagues.

• Those working to extend and enhance career trajectories.

• Those emphasizing professions (and even ‘new’ professions) to do things which robots do not do well, such as tasks requiring caring and creativity.

In sum, the Place Model is an analytical tool which can be used for re-imagining and comparing all professions, past, present and future. Like all models it is limited, like all maps it is subjective. Nonetheless, in mapping both the varied dystopias of professionals, and identifying an alternative, thinkable utopia (inclusive professionals), the Model provides a useful taxonomy which affords room for both criticality and optimism.

Questions about professionals of course remain, not least whether they are necessary, luxurious, or irrelevant.

Linda Clarke is Professor of Education and Research Director for Education in Ulster University in Northern Ireland.

The Professions: Can They Help Us Invigorate Non-Professional Education?

This post also appeared on Howard Gardner’s blog Life-Long Learning.

For many years, within the United States, the phrases “higher education” and “the professions” have evoked different associations. When you go to a four year college to pursue higher education, you are supposed to sample broadly across subject matters and disciplines; hone your speaking and writing abilities; and master critical (and perhaps creative) thinking.

In contrast, when you seek training for a profession or vocation, traditionally after you have graduated from a four year college, you master those skills and make those networking connections that will help you to succeed as a physician, lawyer, professor, social worker, or architect. Of course, in many other countries, you typically choose a profession after completing secondary school; and it is assumed (rightly or wrongly) that you have already accrued those skills and understandings that many Americans pursue in college.

Indeed, this “division of labor” has occurred in my own thinking and my own blogging. Until this past spring, I wrote a bi-weekly blog called “The Professional Ethicist.” In mid-2017, I suspended that blog so as to a launch a new one called “Life-Long Learning.” Ultimately, this new blog, which you are reading, will focus increasingly on higher education, and specifically higher education of the non-vocational variety—think Princeton, think Pomona.

Yet, nowadays, as I have detailed on both blogs, the educational and vocational landscapes are undergoing tremendous changes, at a very rapid pace. In the case of the professions, an ever increasing amount of the routine work is now being executed by smart apps or programs or by trained paraprofessionals; accordingly, the survival of “professions as we have known them” is by no means assured. With respect to higher education, the costs are so great, and the anxieties about finding work post-college are so acute, that the very phrase “liberal arts” is considered toxic. The search for vocational justifications of curricula (and even of extra-curricular activities) is ubiquitous.

Amidst this rapidly shifting domain, an understanding of professions may prove helpful to both sectors. On my definition, professionals are individuals who have acquired expertise in a practice valued by a society; are able to make complex and often vexing judgments in a fair and disinterested way; and, as a consequence of their expertise and their ethical fiber, are offered and merit trust, status, and reasonable compensation.

Though professions were at one time cordoned off from the rest of society, that situation no longer obtains. We can argue about whether that shift constitutes a desirable state of affairs. But I’ve come to realize that ultimately we would like expertise and ethics from every member of society, from every citizen. The phrases, “She is acting like a professional” and “How professionally done!” should be applicable to any worker, whether a plumber or waiter, a minister, musician, or mogul. Indeed, I would not want to live in a society where the notion of “behaving professionally” had lost its meaning.

How does this formulation link to higher education? Under reasonable conditions, any young person who has succeeded in secondary school and is attending college should be on her way to disciplined thinking—that is, being able to analyze issues and think in the way of a scientist (e.g. a biologist, a chemist), a social scientist (e.g. an economist, a psychologist), a thinker in the humanities (e.g. a historian, a literary or artistic connoisseur). Mastering a particular discipline is not nearly as important as apprehending the ways in which various spheres of scholarship make sense of the world. College should be the time at which—and the place in which—students acquire ways of thinking that are elusive for most individuals until later adolescence. As possible candidates for these modes, I would suggest philosophical thinking (what are the enduring conundra that humans have struggled with, how have we done so, and how have we fared), interdisciplinary and synthetic thinking (how do we combine insights from, say, history and physics, in thinking about the concept of time); and an understanding of semiotics (what are the different symbol systems, ranging from written language to computer codes, by which individuals have captured and communicated their knowledge and how do those symbol systems work). In future writings, I’ll flesh out these requirements.

By the completion of such a secondary (high school) and tertiary (college) education, students should know what these forms of expertise are like and also know, if not have mastered, the sector(s) where they would like to be employed, at least for a while. They are on the way to achieving one leg of professionalism—call it relevant knowledge and skills.

Which leaves the second facet: being aware of vexing problems, having the motivation to tackle them, and being committed to doing so in a disinterested and ethical manner. One established way of gaining this expertise is to work as an intern or apprentice in an office or company that exemplifies and transmits an impressive professionalism. (Conversely, an internship or apprenticeship where professionalism is routinely flouted portends future failure in thoughtful tackling of tricky dilemmas.)

My “modest proposal” is that the college itself should serve as a model of professionalism. Teachers, administrators, and other adult members of the institution should hold themselves to high standards, expect those standards to be observed by others, and hold accountable members of the community who disregard or undermine the standards. And going beyond specific individuals, the rules, structures, practices, and—an important word—the norms of the college community should capture and embody the values of a profession. In this case, the profession happens to be education and/or scholarly research. But colleges are inhabited by a range of professionals (from lawyers to engineers to ministers to nurses and physicians); accordingly, the community should model the stances of professions in general, and, equally important, what it means to behave in a professional manner.

This last paragraph may sound idealistic, if not “holier than thou”; but I mean it, seriously and literally. I have observed enough workers in numerous institutions over many years to feel confident in saying that some embody professionalism, while others flout it, knowingly or unknowingly. Moreover, ill-chosen leadership can rapidly undermine the professionalism of an institution (and if you think I have in mind the current executive branch of the federal government, I won’t dissuade you), and it’s much more difficult to resurrect professionalism than to wreck it.

The very fragility of many of our professions and many of our colleges may harbor a rare opportunity. If we were to take (as a primary mission) crafting our institutions of higher education as laboratories for the professions, we might end up strengthening both. And, indeed, if we look at the earliest years of our colleges in the United States, the picture I’ve presented here would be quite familiar. It’s perhaps worth noting that in the 17th century, it was the ministry for which college students in the American colonies were being prepared.