#70 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow: The Value of College Education, Investing in the Future

What this episode is about

In a conversation with Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, he reflects on the intrinsic value of a college education, emphasizing its role in shaping lives and futures, particularly for individuals like himself who are descendants of immigrants. Bacow discusses the evolving landscape of education and the importance of investing in educational institutions to prepare for future challenges.

Key takeaways

• Harvard's president sees education as the ultimate immigrant success story, turning adversity into opportunity.
• Higher education faces scrutiny; are we preparing students for life, not just exams?
• Larry emphasizes values over grades: compassion and kindness unlock real success.
• Amidst college skepticism, Harvard's mission remains: nurturing future leaders to serve society.
• The real currency? Love and respect. Degrees mean little without meaningful connections.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Thomann (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Lawrence Bacow (Guest) · 17 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Harvard University, World War II, Pontiac, Michigan
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Harvard University
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Harvard University
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Harvard University, Dan Bou
5. 20:00 – 23:58: Harvard University

Notable quotes from "#70 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow: The Value of College Education, Investing in the Future"

• Of a college education and looking ahead what he thinks education will look like Larry is a native of Pontiac Michigan and the son of immigrants he attended college at Mi and…

  about Pontiac, Michigan · at 0:35

• Refugees from Europe after World War II with one suitcase and in one generation to become the president of Harvard so I owe my life to higher education I think it's been an…

  about Harvard University · at 2:15

• Ask new questions and to not let existing structures be constraints on your ability to do so I'm sometimes asked what are the similarities differences between Harvard and MIT…

  about MIT · at 13:51

• Accomplishment far from it but I'm proud of the fact that at Harvard well for example two of the three vaccines currently in use in the United States that are helping us find…

  about COVID-19 pandemic · at 18:41

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Larry Bacow — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions
  Interview subject discussing the value of higher education, free speech, democracy, and Harvard’s role in research and public service.
  I'm delighted to be with Larry Bacow, the president of Harvard University...
• Derek Rossi — Person · Referenced expert · 2 mentions
  Cited by Bacow as the Harvard Medical School researcher whose lab produced foundational work leading to an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, illustrating Harvard’s research impact.
  A vaccine came out of Derek Rossi's lab at Harvard Medical School...
• Dan Bou — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 19:02
  Mentioned by Bacow as the Harvard Medical School scientist associated (in the episode’s telling) with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, supporting the point about university research benefits.
  Heart Mna vaccine came out of Derek rossy's lab at Harvard Medical School and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine came out of Dan bou's at Harvard Medical School I'm proud of the…

Companies & orgs

• Harvard University — Company · Main focus · 21 mentions · first at 0:18
  Primary institution discussed, with insights into its role in education and research.
• MIT — Company · Referenced institution · 2 mentions
  Mentioned in the context of the guest's career and comparison with Harvard.

Places & events

• COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Key topic · 2 mentions
  Discussed in the context of Harvard's contributions to vaccine development.
• World War II — Event · Historical context · 1 mention · first at 2:15
  Mentioned in the context of the guest's family history and immigration.
  This country my father was born in Minsk came to this country before the war to void pums Eastern Europe my mother was a survivor of aitz she was the only member of her family…
• Pontiac, Michigan — Place · Personal background · 1 mention · first at 0:40
  Mentioned as the guest's hometown, providing personal context.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn to and welcome to another episode today I'm delighted to be with Larry BAU the president of Harvard University I'm excited to learn how he sees the value of a college education and looking ahead what he thinks education will look like Larry is a native of Pontiac Michigan and the son of immigrants he attended college at Mi and went on to earn three degrees from Harvard including a doctorate in public policy he spent 24 years on the faculty of MIT rising to Chancellor of MIT and then 10 years as

0:58 president of toughs about three years ago he was named president of Harvard Larry welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today good to be here with you thanks for the invitation I'd like to pick up on a conversation that you and I started on the day that you assumed the presidency of Harvard about the value and perception of a college education but before we get to that though I'd like to start by asking you why did you decide to become president of Harvard you'd already had a full career as ch Chancellor of MIT and then president of Tufts well it was not a job that I went looking for but when my colleagues asked me if I would consider it I also couldn't say no I feel I owe my whole life to higher education as you noted my parents were both immigrants they're actually both refugees coming to this country my father was born in Minsk came to this country before the war to void pums Eastern Europe my mother was a

1:56 survivor of aitz she was the only member of her family to survive and actually the only Jew from her Town who survived the war I've often said there are very few places in the world where one can go literally in one generation from off the boat with nothing and my mother comes here as an orphan she was 19 years old on the second Liberty ship that brings refugees from Europe after World War II with one suitcase and in one generation to become the president of Harvard so I owe my life to higher education I think it's been an engine of opportunity for so many and I took on this job part to ensure that future Generations would have the same kind of opportunity as I had I was under No Illusion that it would be hard as you know this is a time in which higher education has been under intense and sometimes withering criticism for being too costly for being too politically correct for leaning too

2:48 far left for all sorts of things I thought it was important that given the opportunity that I should take advantage of the bully pulpit that's afforded to the president Harvard at times to speak on behalf of all of higher education that's why I took the job on in preparation for our conversation today I read all the speeches that you've given to Harvard students and faculty since you became president interestingly to me they focus on what I would call values of the heart as opposed to the mind for example in your morning prayers on the first day of school you talked about being quote open generous and understanding unquote and you also talked about quote kindness and respect unquote and applying kindness and respect to the everyday moments not just the big moments in your 2021 borea you exhorted students and I quote again first do not hesitate to connect second do not hesitate to love third do not

3:54 hesitate to live unquote and you talk later in the backat about being grateful in your convocation for the class of 2025 you talk about students seeking meaning and happiness both at Harvard and wherever life takes them to me what you focused on in many of your speeches at Harvard are values of the heart what do you hope that a Harvard student gains from their four years of college well I think we are blessed with extraordinary students at Harvard and these are students who have achieved at every level that they've already been at they were spectacular students in high school that that's how they got to Harvard during the time at Harvard they drive themselves very very hard in part because I think almost everybody who comes to Harvard worries about whether or not they are worthy of being there and it's true not just of students it's also true of faculty and staff and others so in part when I speak to

4:48 students especially I try to get them to pull back and ask themselves what's really going to make them happy how do they want to be thought of when they're gone what does it mean to lead a meaningful life I think that for those of us who are blessed and fortunate to be able to study at places like this I think we bear a special responsibility to try and leave the world a better place than we found it and I want students to understand that they bear that responsibility themselves it's not all about them in the end it's all about what they do for others I don't know if you encountered it but I also once gave a speech Balor speech in which I told students that it was most important that they be rich and the only currency that really matters and that is the love and respect that they might enjoy from their friends their colleagues and their family and other things pale in comparison to that so partly I'm trying

5:51 to get them to reflect in ways that I think we're more likely to do when candidly we're in middle age than when we just leaving the hallowed Halls of college and going off into the world on the day of your installation as president of Harvard you and I talked about and you said in your speech that for the first time in your lifetime people are actually questioning the value of sending a child to college there's no required curriculum at Harvard or many other us colleges nor does the United States have a comprehensive final test unlike some other countries the result is that there's no body of knowledge that students are expected to have mastered when they graduate so what do you see is the value of a college education at Harvard or elsewhere First i' Take issue with your initial premise we do have requirements of all we have general education requirements we require students to sample broadly from

6:51 different ways of knowing different intellectual reals if you will so there are language requirements there requirements for students to study quantitative methods in a variety of forms so we do more than say come take whatever we want the value of a liberal education I think has never been higher in part because well first the data will actually show that if you take a look at the lifetime earnings college graduate versus a high school graduate the gap's never been larger than it is right now but what we really seek to teach students is how to think critically and at a time in which we are assaulted by information at a time in which techn ology has basically eliminated the editorial function anybody can publish any idea that they wish it's never been more important for students to be able to understand how to differentiate the signal from the noise what is fact what is truth the two are not the same and I

7:46 think that in the end that's what a liberal education does is that it helps students to understand both how to ask hard questions and how to bring to bear data and evidence to understand choices that they will make choices that Society will make that ultimately is the function of a liberal education which is what I think we do not just at Harvard but many colleges and universities throughout the country all right I hope you don't mind if I ask you hard questions please as you have noted and again I quote you at a time of rising populism worldwide of skepticism of Elites and of elite institutions universities are criticized for being islands for leaning left for being politically correct and more intolerant of some ideas unquote is there truth in this well there's perception and there's reality look as a group I would say college professors are more liberal than let's say corporate CEOs or those that

8:52 you might find in most corporate board grps but I think the notion that we brainwash our students is gross ly incorrect if you take a look at the United States Senate for example I think they're 15 or 16 believe it's 16 Harvard alumni in the United States Senate nine of them are Republicans six of them are Democrats if you take a look at the composition of the Supreme Court yes we've got Steve Brier and Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court but we also have chief justice Roberts we have know Justice kog at the Harvard Law School we've got many others so I think though that we as academic institutions and I talk about this and you've seen this no doubt in reading some of my speeches if we truly embrace the notion of veritas which is our motto our truth then we need to be willing to test ideas truth is to be distinguished from facts facts are incontrovertible or at least they used to be but truth truth has to be tested

9:50 it has to be revealed and we do that through vigorous debate if we truly believe in truth we have to be willing to engage with people who think differently from us we have to be willing to be persuaded by a better argument by new facts so I think that this is in fact what what we do it's what we need to do and if people actually spent time on our campus they would realize that there are far more lively intense debates that occur routinely than some may be willing to recognize how do you see free speech and public discourse there have been some controversies on campus and elsewhere all too often I think people seize on a few cases of intolerance and then they're willing to paint with a very very broad brush and you know we have all sorts of speakers who come to our campus routinely who speak routinely now does that mean that they are all warmly embraced does that mean that they're challenged yes does it mean that there

10:52 are protests yes that's a form of exercise of free speech as well what we should not do is to tolerate people who are willing to exercise The heckler's veto that has no place at an institution like ours and I think we have some affirmative obligation to ensure that we bring to campus speakers who represent the broad range of views across the ideological Spectrum I often say that issues on which reasonable people can differ the function of a university is to promote debate not to silence it by embracing one Orthodoxy over another Larry you have said that universities play an important role in supporting our democracy how do they do that people should never forget that the original function of the University was to educate citizens for democracy and so we do that in a variety of ways we do that by conveying to our students that they have a responsibility to get involved I've also spoken about the Civic and

11:53 social responsibilities universities but also of our students and of our graduates one thing which I routinely do is each year that's in an election year I make a point of giving entering students their first homework assignment and that is if they're eligible to vote they're obliged to register to vote to inform themselves about the candidates and the issues and to cast a bow it's not a political statement it's one of Engagement and so I think creating expectations is important I think it's important that we encourage students and our graduates to pursue careers of Public Service both in electoral politics but also in Civil Society in a variety of ways makes no difference in my mind what your profession is there are opportunities to become an active and engaged Citizen and we need people to do that I often say I've yet to meet anyone who believes the world that we live in is perfect this is equally true

12:45 of Democrats and Republicans liberals and conservatives if we don't think it is perfect the only way it gets better is that good people across the ideological Spectrum are willing to work hard to improve it and that's a responsibility that we all bear it's a special responsibility for those who have the privilege to get a college education to engage let's pivot and talk about the future of education so much of the world's greatest areas of focus now are interdisciplinary such as climate or health and they are not housed in individual departments or in individual schools how do you see the future of individual departments and schools and if you were creating a university now from scratch would it have individual schools and departments it would schools and departments serve incredibly useful purposes in the context of the university the trick is as in any organizational structure to be able to

13:47 find ways to address new challenges to ask new questions and to not let existing structures be constraints on your ability to do so I'm sometimes asked what are the similarities differences between Harvard and MIT since I've spent so much time at both and my flip response is that organizationally and culturally they're identical with the sign change Harvard is the most decentralized University on the planet MIT is arguably the most centralized University on the planet but each of these two institutions are among the greatest academic institutions in the world which says to me that Excellence is tap independent of organization and culture similarly I think that there are lots of different strategies in different approaches to ensure that faculty are able to organize and self-organize in some cases to do work that lies at the boundaries of disciplines or at the edges of disciplines and you see different

14:42 approaches to doing that taken by different institutions there's no one way of doing it one right way of doing it one of the things that makes higher education in the United States as strong as it is as vibrant as it is is the different approaches different strategies that in fact are adopted by different kinds of Institutions who are competing in so many different ways they competing to make advances in knowledge they're competing for resources the students are competing for faculty that competition ultimately is healthy and we all watch what everybody else does and I have no qus of saying this that if I see another University that's figured out a better way to organize to attack a problem than we have I'll try and steal and copy and improve upon it here at Harvard this is clearly a pivotal moment in education one full of extraordinary possibilities to educate people remotely as well as to pursue new knowledge

15:38 education has been a uniquely stable field almost unlike every other field and the leading educational institutions have been largely the same for the last one could argue 50 plus years or even hundreds of years and what a college education entails has also been remarkably stable at least compared to other fields or Industries what do you see as the future of colleges and a college education what do you think education will look like in 10 or so years I actually think that colleges and universities change far more than people give us credit for changing and in fact if you look at Harvard right now we're in the process of developing almost a whole new campus in all we're making major investments in technology in recognition of the fact when I say in technology in expanding our School of Engineering and applied sciences which previously was just a division of the faculty of Arts and Sciences now it's

16:36 its own School we've allocated lots of new space to it we're growing it this is in recognition that if we're going to have the same kind of influence over the next 385 years as we've had over the previous 385 years we need to increase our footprint in technology we're making important investments in things like Quantum science engineering artificial intelligence machine learning so I mention this because it's not just true of Harvard it's true of many institutions and in fact if you go back and take a look at these places while the buildings may look a lot alike most institutions have really evolved quite substantially over the last 50 over the last hundred years they do so perhaps at a slower Pace than other kinds of Institutions or companies that leaves and I would say that that's actually not all bad because one of the things that we do is that we are repositories for knowledge and culture

17:32 literally for society and that should change slowly that said we've learned a lot over the last 18 months through the pandemic about how to reach people remotely how to open the aperture that is the lens for all of our institutions and I think you're going to see far more of that going forward we're going to be reaching a lot more students in a lot of different ways that never could have imagined being able to Ben benefit the kind of educational opportunities that are provided by colleges and universities throughout the world I think the residential college experience will still be prized and will continue to look a lot like what it is right now there's a reason why students and faculty want to be together magical things still happen in the conversation that occurs naturally at the end of a class that don't occur over zoom and so we'll try and preserve those opportunities as well I could go on we

18:28 could spend hours talking about what the future of fire education Larry what are you proudest of accomplishing at Harvard well I'm proud of the fact that and again I wouldn't say that this is my accomplishment far from it but I'm proud of the fact that at Harvard well for example two of the three vaccines currently in use in the United States that are helping us find our way out of this pandemic were in fact created at heart Mna vaccine came out of Derek rossy's lab at Harvard Medical School and the Johnson and Johnson vaccine came out of Dan bou's at Harvard Medical School I'm proud of the fact that our faculty have been on the front lines in helping people to understand what this virus means to the world they've been rolling up their sleeves and Michelle wsky went from the medical school to run the Center for Disease Control I'm proud of the fact that at a time in which we've been wrestling as a nation with

19:25 how to address issues of racial Justice and inequality that faculty in all of our schools have been focused on these issues for many years whether or not it's inequality in healthare outcomes inequality and access to Justice in access to education in access to housing wealth or income inequality we've been focusing on these issues for years trying to shed light on them try to inform the public debate so I think this is an institution which is remarkable in its bread in the capacity to generate knowledge which I think informs and helps shape the world and I'm proud of all the people who make that possible certainly our faculty but our students and our staff who enable their work Harvard is indeed an extraordinary institution I had no idea that the two vaccines originated in Harvard Labs yes and not only that but the basic research which made these vaccines possible which was done 40 50 60 years ago in some cases curiosity

20:32 based research was also done some of it was done at Harvard but it was done in research universities around the world and that's why I believe institutions like ours not just heart but research universities more broadly have never been more important to society Larry before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today is there anything else you'd like to mention that you haven't or already touched upon no I think I've covered it thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation with you thank you Larry what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with first just building on my last comment I think we as a nation need to keep investing in the future we need to keep investing in curiosity based research which creates opportunities for us that we could not have imagined again the vaccines which have recently been developed in record time will made possible because people

21:30 were curious about what is the role of RNA of messenger RNA and they could not have imagined it would lead to what it has led to now we need to continue as a nation to invest in the future especially in our research in Fr the second takeaway that I would like to lead people with is something which I said in my inaugural address but I think it bees repeating Talent is flatly distributed but opportunity is not there are as many brilli young people in the poor parts of this country in poor cities in poor regions as you will find in the wealthiest parts of this country it is up to us as a nation to ensure that this Talent does not go to waste to seek out these people and to give them the kind of opportunity which they need to flourish it will inure ultimately not just to the benefit of those individuals but to society more broadly so that's an obligation we all bear universities I would tell you of a special

22:34 responsibility and then the last takeaway is actually a quotation from my mother my late mother I spent my whole life on college campus lots and lots of interaction with young people all of whom seem to want to change the world God bless them for wanting to do it but my mother used to say that at some point in a young person's life everyone should have to work behind a counter and to serve the public to serve everyone who walks in and I think that that's a wonderful piece of advice because it teaches one a lot about human nature but also it gives one a sense both the Dignity of honest work and what it means to serve others and as you alluded to previously I think that's a responsibility we all been thank you Larry this has been terrific thank you for our conversation today and for your leader ship of Harvard thank you ly thanks for the opportunity to have this conversation if you enjoy today's

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Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#70 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow: The Value of College Education, Investing in the Future"?

Lynn Thomann (Host), Lawrence Bacow (Guest).

What is "#70 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow: The Value of College Education, Investing in the Future" about?

In a conversation with Harvard President Lawrence Bacow, he reflects on the intrinsic value of a college education, emphasizing its role in shaping lives and futures, particularly for individuals like himself who are descendants of immigrants. Bacow discusses the evolving landscape of education and the importance of investing in educational institutions to prepare for future challenges.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Harvard University, Larry Bacow, COVID-19 pandemic, MIT, Derek Rossi, World War II. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#70 Harvard President Lawrence Bacow: The Value of College Education, Investing in the Future"?

The episode runs 24 min; the transcript is about 4,039 words in 25 timestamped sections.

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