Ivory Tower Page #2

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I remember those times,

and it just makes me

all the more grateful

for the things I do have now.

Before I came here

I hadn't had a bed for over a year,

and so, like, coming into my dorm,

I legit jumped on my bed.

That was something

that meant a lot to me.

It's a real blessing.

Just being here alone

has already changed my family dynamic.

I always told them,

"In order for us to get ahead as a family,

"each generation

has to do better than the next."

David was, like, "Mom, how are we

going to pay for college?

"What happens if I get in

and I can't pay for it?"

I said, "Trust me. God will make a way."

You should see the

video when we first got it.

He was sitting there looking at

the camera like he gonna be a star.

When we got on Harvard's campus,

I mean, I was just like,

"My baby is at Harvard."

The first American college,

Harvard College,

was a child of

the University of Cambridge in England.

The Puritans had come over

to New England in the early 1630s,

and after they settled the basics

of food and shelter,

they turned their attention

to starting a college.

In that sense the college

was an offshoot of the Church.

The lecture,

so central to college education,

is really a kind of modern version

of the sermon.

It was a commitment to the idea

that students could be transformed

to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

Harvard is the source of DNA

for almost all of higher

education in America.

It laid out the model

that a university needs to emulate

in order to get better resources,

better professors,

better credentials, better students.

As Harvard passed that DNA

down to everybody else,

it created a race.

When the colonial colleges

started to become universities,

and when brand-new institutions

were founded as universities,

you begin to see a tension developing

between the mission

to educate young people,

and the competition for prestige,

to out-build your rivals.

American colleges are driven

by the pursuit of prestige.

And the way you get prestige

is that you get the highest ranking,

which expands your market,

and allows you to charge more.

So, in order to go up the ladder,

everybody has to keep adding more

programs and more facilities

at a faster rate than the competitors.

This really was the most

sort of grandiose vision

of what a university could be,

that it was a place of higher learning,

it was a place of research.

It covered every single discipline

under the sun,

and there really

was no end to its expansion.

And that became the model,

you had to integrate doing research.

You needed to provide the housing,

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