Recipient's Response

by William G. Bowen
President Emeritus, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
President Emeritus, Princeton University
Winner of the 2008 Albert Einstein World Award of Science

(Princeton University, November 11, 2008)
Thank you. I am humbled and honored to accept the 2008 José Vasconcelos World Cultural Award of Education.

It has been my great privilege to study, to learn, to write, and to teach alongside wonderful colleagues from all over the world. Having grown up in Southern Ohio in a family that had no real experience of higher education, I was fortunate from an early age to have not only the encouragement of my parents, but also the support and guidance of wonderful teachers at Wyoming High School. This school was diverse, and I had classmates and friends from all backgrounds.

My father died when I was a high school senior, and our family had essentially no money. But, once again, I was fortunate, in that I won various scholarships that allowed me to attend Denison University in central Ohio, where I also worked to cover some of my costs. One of my great friends was the cook in a kitchen where I both ate well and became adept at cleaning up. One of my classmates was a young woman from South Korea who was a brilliant mathematician. Another (who remains a close friend to this day) was the son of a Denison college dean. My professors took a genuine interest in me, and it was in that setting that I decided I wanted to study economics and become a college teacher. I then went on to Princeton where, yet again, I found wonderfully supportive faculty members and fellow students. It was at Princeton that I learned the satisfactions to be derived from engagement in serious research and was privileged to form fast friendships with individuals from different races and many countries.

As a young faculty member I was privileged to have great colleagues, including William J. Baumol, who became a life-long friend, and to benefit from the example of my predecessor as president, Robert F. Goheen. The rest is, as they say, history. I recount these brief biographical details because in some measure they explain my life-long interest in education and, especially, in extending educational opportunity.

You will see that the word “fortunate” keeps appearing in these remarks, and that is not inadvertent or an accident. My days at Princeton, and in the president’s office, were in many ways tumultuous, marked as they were by the agonies of Vietnam and the excitement of the Civil Rights revolution. How fortunate I was to see, close up, the value of educational diversity and this country’s great need to get past its “unlovely” racial history. Those experiences played a major role in my writing, with Derek Bok, the Shape of the River: The Long-term Consequences of Race-sensitive Admissions, a book which I am proud to say played some role in the monumental Supreme Court decision upholding the right of colleges and universities to take race into account in crafting their classes. It was gratifying last Tuesday to see one product of those days of greater inclusiveness elected president of the United States, and to recall that his wife was a Princeton undergraduate at that time.

As those of you who were present yesterday for my lecture know, I continue to explore ways of improving the educational system in the United States, so that it can become even more inclusive and more all-encompassing at the same time that it celebrates scientific and scholarly accomplishment. We are, in fact, not doing all that well in the United States today, and educational systems in many other countries have not only caught up with the record of educational progress that the US established historically, but in some cases are achieving more today than those of us in this country to educate a sizeable fraction of the population to a high level.

Educational attainment is important, of course, for economic competitiveness, material progress and the achievement of higher standards of living. But it is also important for far more than merely the pursuit of such mundane goals. It is important for health and well-being. It is important for social mobility and for the belief that anyone, with sufficient talent and determination, should be able to achieve almost anything. Note the extraordinary response of people all over the world to the election of Barack Obama. Beyond that, there is, at least for me, great resonance in the power of ideas per se, in the liberating influence of new ways of thinking, and in the stimulation that comes from intellectual exchange.

I had a great teacher at Princeton named Jacob Viner, one of the most distinguished economists of his or any day, and a person of such breadth that he could enliven any conversation, whether the subject was the theory of comparative advantage or Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. Professor Viner had no patience with what Jeremy Bentham called “nonsense on stilts”—the sometime tendency in the academy to make much of nothing. But he exulted even more in making the positive case for scholarship. In addressing a graduate student convocation some years ago, he said:

“All that I plead on behalf of scholarship…is that, once the taste for it has been aroused, it gives a sense of largeness even to one’s small quests, and a sense of fullness even to the small answers to problems large or small which it yields, a sense which can never in any other way be attained, for which no other source of human gratification can, to the addict, be a satisfying substitute, which gains instead of loses in quality and quantity and in pleasure-yielding capacity by being shared with others—and which, unlike golf, improves with age.”

So, today, we thank the World Cultural Council for allowing us to celebrate once again the power of science and of learning in a world badly in need of individuals from many backgrounds and places committed to pursuing humanistic ideals.

William G. Bowen
November 11, 2008