If human beings were angels, we would cheerfully focus on long-term goods. We would invest enthusiastically in schools and colleges for our own children and for everybody else’s children, so that they could become productive, engaged citizens in the future. We would happily support speculative research projects so that we could reap the benefits of discovery and innovation. We would gladly nurture humanistic inquiry because it provides an essential foundation for understanding what makes life meaningful and sustains the wellsprings of civil society.
Indeed, we need not be angels to do these things. We would do them if we were perfectly rational investors, because economists like Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have shown convincingly that education and research are powerful drivers of economic prosperity.
But we are not perfectly rational any more than we are angels. We live embodied in the present, sensitive to short-term pleasures and pains. Notions of the common good and promises about future returns feel abstract and feeble by comparison to the intensity of immediate experience.
This bias seems especially fierce in America today. Our world features a non-stop news cycle, continuous political campaigns and an obsession with quarterly earnings statements. We demand that messaging be instant, and we talk in tweets.
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In so doing, we risk squandering a national treasure. America’s colleges and universities are a beacon to the world. Parents around the globe dream of sending their children here, scholars dream of landing a place here, and nations dream of creating universities like America’s. Yet, here at home, we see a parade of reporters, politicians and pundits asking whether a college education is worth it — even though the economic evidence for the value of a college education is utterly overwhelming.
-- from Eisgruber's installation speech
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