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Opening Remarks of: Thomas P. Foley
President, Mount Aloysius College Good afternoon all. Please allow me to begin my part of this program by thanking our panel moderator, the President of Cedar Crest College, Dr. Carmen Twillie Ambar, and the President of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in PA (AICUP), Dr. Don Francis, and indeed his entire AICUP Executive Team who put this program together. I think we all understand why this is an important session for college Presidents and we are grateful for the 50 Presidents who have joined us here today. Thank you. We are especially grateful for the time and attention of my two colleagues on this panel. Gene Barr is now the President of the PA State Chamber of Business and Industry, where he represents more than 9,000 businesses spread across this Commonwealth. He brings 40 years of experience with the intersection of education and employment to the table, and is himself, as you just heard, a graduate not only of one of our AICUP member institutions, but more importantly a classmate and fellow commuter of my wife Michele. They have both certainly made the most of the liberal arts and values-based education that St. Joe’s gave to them. And thank you to Kathy Pape, another outstanding graduate of multiple Pennsylvania institutions of higher education (undergraduate, masters and law degrees!) and now head of one of our largest employers in the State and a national leader in the utilities field as the CEO of the Pennsylvania American Water Company. Like Gene, Kathy worked her way up from an entry level position, and understands well the importance of connecting higher education with workforce development. -----------------------------------------------------------------Let me see if I can do three things to close out the panel part of this discussion. First, let me try to state the challenge in our charge from a slightly different perspective, and that is from the perspective of 50 Presidents sitting here in front of us. Second, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the language that we deploy in this conversation. I think that some of the things that Gene and Kathy said absolutely resonate with us, but we might use different language to circumscribe those notions. I want to see if I can do a quick definitional exercise, so that we might all be on the same page in this discussion.
And finally, picking up again on instructive comments from both Gene and Kathy, I would like to suggest a couple of quick examples (in a generic way) of the approaches that are being taken at higher education that fuse workforce development with traditional higher education. I hope this framework will be useful to our further discussion. The Challenge First of all, what is this challenge that sits in front of us? What is the appropriate connection between workforce development and higher education? Are these two concepts in competition or can they be collaborative ideas? How should they connect, one to the other? Back when I was Secretary of Labor and Industry (in the last century!!), the average person was expected to have four to five jobs in their lifetime--as opposed to the generation before that, where the expectation (and the hope) was that the average working person would have one or two jobs in a lifetime. My father and his two brothers put in 120 years between the three of them on the same shop floor of a large electronics plant, and moved only when the company itself moved from an urban location to one of the first industrial parks in America. The presidency of Mount Aloysius College is my eighth job (and fourth career of sorts). My father and uncles were typical of their generation. I am absolutely typical of mine. Today’s millennials might have 15 jobs in a lifetime, and that may well be an understatement. (I see Gene shaking his head in agreement). At the end of the day higher education is not—and this is our challenge—I repeat NOT about preparing somebody for their first job. Our challenge truly (and I’m not the first person to say this), is about preparing them for that sixth, seventh or eighth job. Are we giving them those kinds of skills? I believe that the foundational liberal arts are a fundamental part of that challenge, and I think that we—all of us, our panelists and our presidents—can agree to that proposition. Naturalist and author E.O. Wilson said a long time ago (way ahead of his time), that “we are drowning in information while we’re starving for wisdom.” He realized early in his career (and I want to quote his lines exactly because I think he caught it so well) that the world would “be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it and make important choices wisely.” Wilson was and is right, and his dissection of our challenge is seminal—able to put together information drawn from diverse sources perhaps even diverse cultures, think critically about it and the make decisions, make choices, get the job done.