Who Taught the People in Charge to Think?
We spend years debating which universities our children should attend. Perhaps we should ask what kind of civilization those institutions were established to build, and what they teach their graduates to overlook.
“The tragedy of modern leadership is not a lack of intelligence. The tragedy is that we have become exceptionally skilled at answering questions that are far too narrow.”
The conversation began, as it often does on a warm evening, with the quiet pride of a father. We were sitting on my back porch. Four of us had gathered to share a bottle of bourbon, a few cigars, and the kind of unguarded fellowship that requires a history of mutual trust. My friend Marcus leaned back in his chair and announced that his eldest daughter had just been accepted into one of the most prestigious public policy programs in the country.
We celebrated. We raised our glasses. We acknowledged the extraordinary financial sacrifices Marcus and his wife had made to position her for this moment. For a Black family in America, a letter of admission bearing a centuries-old crest is rarely interpreted merely as an academic achievement. It is interpreted as a generational victory. It is the realization of a promise made by grandparents who worked double shifts in factories or cleaned homes so their descendants might one day walk through doors that had been violently barricaded against them.
But as the evening stretched on and the smoke drifted toward the ceiling, the conversation shifted. Another friend at the table, a man who had immigrated from Jamaica three decades ago and spent his career navigating the sharp elbows of corporate finance, asked a question that brought a sudden stillness to the porch.
"It is a brilliant school," he said, turning his glass in his hand. "But what are they going to teach her to see? And when she graduates and sits at a table making decisions that affect our neighborhoods, what are they going to teach her to ignore?"
We have become exceptionally proficient at measuring the external value of a university education. We compare acceptance rates, endowment sizes, starting salaries, and the prestige attached to the name printed across a diploma. But we rarely pause to ask the most consequential question of all.
What kind of mind was that institution originally designed to cultivate?
Universities are not neutral sorting machines that rank young people by intelligence. They are deliberate instruments through which societies decide what kind of human beings will govern their future. And the people who emerge from those institutions do not remain on their campuses. They become our elected officials, business executives, judges, physicians, engineers, and community leaders. They allocate capital, establish policies, and make decisions that dictate how millions of other people live.
Which brings me to the question that has haunted my thinking ever since that evening on the porch. When we look at the people in charge of our society today, we must ask: Who taught them how to see the world?
The Deep Architecture of Learning
Long before there were brick campuses in Cambridge or New Haven, ancient civilizations understood that education was a matter of survival. They did not build schools simply to provide individuals with upward mobility. They built them to sustain the social order.
In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, scribal schools were the administrative spine of the empire. They taught mathematics, record-keeping, and logistics because someone had to measure the grain, predict the flooding of the Nile, and manage the wealth of the state. They were producing the earliest Builders and Stewards of civilization. In ancient China, the grueling civil service examinations rooted in Confucian philosophy were designed to produce a governing class bound by moral duty, filial piety, and bureaucratic harmony. They were answering a specific question: What kind of character is required to maintain a massive, complex society?
Across the African continent, indigenous educational traditions did not separate learning from the daily survival of the community. Knowledge was transmitted through elders, apprenticeship, and initiation. A person was not considered educated simply because they possessed information. They were educated when they understood their obligations to the collective. In the Islamic intellectual centers of Timbuktu, and at the ancient Indian university of Nalanda, thousands of scholars gathered to study theology, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. They were Preservers of sacred memory and Questioners of the natural world.
The medieval European universities that eventually shaped the American system carried their own specific mandates. Bologna organized around the study of law. Paris became the center of theology. When the first colonial colleges were established in North America, they inherited this posture. Harvard was founded in 1636 partly to prevent an "illiterate ministry" from governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yale and Princeton followed with similar mandates. They were built to produce the Stewards: the clergy, jurists, and elites entrusted with maintaining the moral and political architecture of a young republic.
But a society cannot survive on classical rhetoric alone.
In 1862, in the middle of a catastrophic civil war, the United States Congress passed the Morrill Act. This legislation granted federal land to states to fund colleges dedicated to agriculture, engineering, and the mechanic arts. America was industrializing, and it needed Builders. It needed people who knew how to bridge rivers, extract minerals, and increase crop yields.
Yet the Morrill Act reveals a terrifying contradiction at the heart of educational capability. The land that financed these new universities did not simply appear from nowhere. It was expropriated from Indigenous nations. Millions of acres were seized, sold, and converted into endowments for institutions of higher learning. The land-grant system expanded democratic access to education for working-class citizens, but it did so through profound violence.
This is the ultimate historical warning about the limits of technical proficiency. A system can be brilliantly designed to solve an engineering or economic problem while remaining entirely blind to its own moral atrocities. The Builders acquired immense capability, but capability without justice is simply a more efficient form of destruction.
The Seven Missions and Their Blind Spots
If we look closely at the history of higher education, we can identify at least seven distinct civilizational missions. Institutions have been built to act as Stewards governing society, Builders constructing its infrastructure, Questioners challenging inherited assumptions through research, Multipliers training the teachers who educate the next generation, Preservers protecting cultural memory, Liberators expanding power to the marginalized, and Healers caring for human life.
A healthy civilization requires all seven. The danger arises when a society begins to value only one or two of these missions, or when an institution forgets its purpose and defaults to treating education merely as a credentialing factory for corporate employment.
An institution built to train business executives will teach a young mind to view the world as a landscape of capital allocation, efficiency, and market returns. An engineering school will teach someone to see reality as a problem of optimization and systems throughput. A school of public administration will train a graduate to view society through the lens of bureaucratic compliance and service delivery.
None of these frameworks is inherently malicious. But what happens when people become extraordinarily proficient at succeeding within these institutions without developing the intellectual independence to question the frameworks themselves?
Consider the theoretical neighborhood we discussed on the porch that night. Imagine a historic, working-class community experiencing economic stagnation. Five highly educated professionals are dispatched to offer a solution.
The corporate developer sees an undervalued real estate asset ready for rezoning and luxury density. The city planner sees an opportunity to expand the municipal tax base. The school board administrator identifies a neighborhood where closing a school will streamline the district budget. The civil engineer sees a corridor perfect for a new transit artery.
Each person is intelligent. Each person is applying the exact metrics they were taught to value in graduate school. But what happens when nearly everyone with the authority to act has been trained to answer questions that are entirely too narrow?
They celebrate rising real estate values as a neighborhood revitalization victory, deliberately looking away as the working families who anchored the community for three generations are priced out of their homes. They declare the school closure a triumph of fiscal prudence, ignoring the fact that removing a neighborhood anchor shatters the social trust of the surrounding blocks. They report their successes to their boards, collect their bonuses, and move on to the next city.
They are not evil people. They are deeply educated people applying the definitions of success they have inherited. The tragedy is that their education taught them to measure everything on a spreadsheet and nothing on a human face.
The Liberators and the Tension of Success
For Black Americans, these questions of educational purpose have always carried the weight of survival. Historically Black Colleges and Universities were not founded merely to replicate the Ivy League in a different demographic color. They were founded as Liberators. They existed in direct tension with a society that had legally violently restricted what Black people were permitted to learn or become.
But the men and women who shaped these institutions did not always agree on the primary mission.
Booker T. Washington, formed by his experiences in slavery and his time at Hampton Institute, embodied the Builder. He looked at a devastated post-Reconstruction South and determined that political agitation without economic muscle was a dead end. At Tuskegee, he emphasized agriculture, brickmaking, and industrial trades. His educational philosophy was anchored in the belief that practical capability and institutional self-reliance were the prerequisites for respect.
W. E. B. Du Bois, educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, was the quintessential Questioner. He found Washington's concession to industrial training intellectually suffocating and politically dangerous. Du Bois argued that a people could not secure their freedom merely by learning to plow a field or lay a brick. They required a "Talented Tenth" educated in history, sociology, and moral philosophy, minds capable of dismantling the intellectual justifications of white supremacy.
Shirley Chisholm carried the mission of the Multiplier into the halls of power. Educated at Brooklyn College and Columbia University Teachers College, she did not view education as a retreat into the academy. She viewed it as a tool to pry open democratic institutions, becoming the first Black woman elected to Congress and fighting for the working families her education had prepared her to see.
Their contributions did not look alike. But they shared a fundamental understanding: education carried a collective obligation. A degree was not an exit visa from the struggles of the community. It was a mandate to return to the community with new tools.
This is where the conversation on my porch became difficult.
For generations, educational opportunity represented a profound collective achievement for Black families. We have good reasons to celebrate admission to prestigious universities, executive appointments, and financial independence. But we have to ask ourselves a painful question: Have our increasingly individual measures of success displaced our understanding of collective responsibility?
We are raising children to gain access to rooms where power is held. We want them to secure their economic futures. But are we spending enough time discussing the consequences of the power they will eventually wield?
What does an educated person owe the community that invested in their development? Can a community reasonably expect service without treating successful individuals as its property? What happens when financial advancement and moral responsibility collide?
We cannot place all the blame on distant university administrators. We have to examine our own complicity. Some failures of leadership arise not from ignorance, but from an unwillingness to act upon what is already known. A person can recognize that a corporate decision will impose brutal costs on vulnerable families and still support the decision because their career demands it. Intellectual capability is useless without moral courage.
The Questions We Pass Down
We are not separate from American society, observing it from the outside. We help build it. Black Americans have governed, taught, constructed institutions, advanced science, and shaped moral philosophy. We are not merely people who experience the consequences of decisions made by others. We are also among the people who make the decisions.
This means our responsibility extends far beyond helping the next generation secure admission to elite schools. We have to be intentional about the intellectual environments they enter.
When we visit a college campus with our children, we need to ask more than where its graduates work. We must ask what the institution teaches its students about power. How does it define human progress? Are students exposed to competing ideas, or are they merely trained to master the assumptions favored by their chosen industry? Will they leave with the intellectual independence to recognize when the tools they have been given are inadequate for the human suffering they encounter?
An education can be economically valuable and intellectually limiting at the exact same time. A diploma can open doors without teaching its recipient to question what lies behind them.
Representation matters. But access should not be the final question in our examination of leadership. If a person who looks like us enters a boardroom and adopts the same narrow, extractive assumptions that have always governed its decisions, what has actually changed besides the identity of the decision-maker?
Conversely, if someone whose background differs from ours possesses the intellectual breadth, integrity, and willingness to consider the full human consequences of a decision, that judgment must matter when we assess their leadership. We should care deeply about who is present when decisions are made. But we must care just as much about what the people in that room have been taught to recognize as important.
The End of the Evening
The bourbon was gone. The cigars had burned down to ash. The conversation on the porch had quieted, leaving only the sound of the cicadas in the warm night air. Marcus sat looking out into the dark yard, thinking about his daughter.
We had all worked extraordinarily hard to ensure our children would one day possess the freedom to become whatever they wished. We wanted them to be safe from the indignities our parents had endured. We wanted them to walk into any room in the world and know they belonged there.
But in our desperate pursuit to secure their access to those rooms, I wondered if we had forgotten to prepare them for what they would find inside.
We had taught them how to succeed within the systems they were inheriting. We had taught them how to master the metrics, pass the examinations, and acquire the credentials. But did we spend enough time helping them consider what their communities, their country, and the wider world might actually need them to become?
Because the true measure of an education is not found in the doors it opens for the person who receives it. It is found in the courage they summon when it is time to hold those doors open for someone else, or the wisdom to recognize when the building itself needs to be torn down.
Sources and Historical Context
- Ancient and Indigenous Educational Traditions: Research on Egyptian scribal administration, Mesopotamian bureaucratic schooling, the ancient Indian monastic university of Nalanda, and the Islamic scholarly networks of Timbuktu.
- The Morrill Land-Grant Act (1862) and Indigenous Dispossession: Historical documentation regarding the seizure and sale of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land to endow the American land-grant university system.
- European and Colonial University Charters: Foundational histories of the University of Bologna, the University of Paris, Harvard University (1636), and Yale University (1701).
- The Research University Model: Wilhelm von Humboldt's establishment of the University of Berlin (1810) and its influence on Johns Hopkins University (1876).
- Black Intellectual History and Leadership: Biographical and philosophical works concerning Booker T. Washington (Hampton Institute, Tuskegee Institute), W. E. B. Du Bois (Fisk University, Harvard University; The Talented Tenth), Martin Luther King Jr. (Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary), and Shirley Chisholm (Brooklyn College, Columbia University Teachers College).
