The Chronicle of Higher Education

How One College Leader Knows When It’s OK to Speak Out — or Keep Mum

November 01, 2018

Raynard S. Kington, president of Grinnell College (IA), writes: During my first year as president of Grinnell College, I needed guidance. I was an outsider to the world of elite liberal-arts college presidents in many ways, including that I came from the fields of medicine and science policy, and that my academic experience had been entirely in large, research-intensive organizations. As soon as it was available, I read Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President, by a former president of Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation, William G. Bowen.  One idea that he put forth was especially relevant to the challenges I was facing — that colleges should exercise "institutional restraint" in speaking out on matters of public debate to preserve those institutions as "the home of the critic, not the critic itself" and to allow them to be places where all ideas may be debated and assessed. 

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