America at 250: How Higher Ed Can Cultivate Citizenship

Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm David Young, the president of The CEO Center, which was founded in 1942 as the Committee for Economic Development, and now is also the public policy center of the Conference Board, and I'm delighted to be the guest host of today's episode. Today's conversation is a special edition as the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary. At a moment of profound political, cultural, and institutional change, we'll explore what the American story can teach us about leadership, citizenship, democratic resilience, and the future of civic life.

Joining me today is Katherine Rowe, president at William & Mary, the alma mater of the nation and one of the most respective and innovative institutions here in the United States. Full disclosure here at the beginning, I'm very proud to say that I am indeed a graduate of the university, so this is a distinct pleasure for me to be speaking with Katherine. Katherine, welcome. We're so very pleased to have you joining us today.

Thank you so much, Davy, and as we say at William & Mary, welcome home. Thank you. So Katherine, let's begin by actually stepping back for a moment and looking at the broader sweep of the American story. Throughout our history, periods of uncertainty have often tested the resilience of American institutions and civic culture.

As the U.S. celebrates this 250th milestone anniversary, how do you situate this moment for higher education? And from your perspective, does it resemble any earlier periods in history?

Yeah, so let me start by saying William & Mary is 333 years old. So this university - Wow. - Chartered in 1693, predates the American story, and the Revolution is our backyard. In fact, actually, Williamsburg, Virginia, Yorktown, the decisive battles, and more importantly, the ideas that animated the first founders, the nation-builders of this republic, were cultivated here at William & Mary.

So it's a summer that's incredibly joyful for us. Lots of festivity and hoopla in Williamsburg, let me tell you, and also a wonderful moment for reflection and for thinking about the value, the profound value of those original concepts and ideas in knitting together this country. So we've lived through, we've seen our way through multiple wars, multiple epidemics, world epidemics, and incredible transformations in technology, in public culture. And we're going incredibly strong right now.

I see this moment, there's two ways of thinking about the anniversary that I've heard around. One is a kind of straightforward celebration of independence from England. But the more interesting one to me, the more important one to William & Mary, is the reflection on the founding principles of individual liberty and civic life, and I'll just give you a bit of a history. The very first, the beginnings of constitutional government under William and Mary, so our founders after the Glorious Revolution, are outlined in the Declaration of Right of 1689.

John Locke, whose ideas about individual liberty were incredibly important to that document and those principles, was a tutor of Mary our founding monarch, and his ideas animated the education of William and Mary. The Declaration of Rights of Virginia that came in 1776, and then the US Bill of Rights, are based on that document, the idea of that legitimate authority rises from the consent of the governed, right? Legitimate authority rises from the consent of the governed. And it's anchored in individual liberties such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And the human beings who wrote those words and coined those ideas, well, five of them were educated at William & Mary: Jefferson, Washington, our first American chancellor, and many more. Wow, what an incredible history. So you mentioned founding principles. I'm curious, when you look back at kind of the founding era, and you look at roles and values or forms of leadership, what do you think institutions of higher education now most need to ensure into the future?

Open, curious debate. The ability to listen and learn from conflict. One of the things that I teach over and over again is pause, step back, respect the conflict because you're going to learn from it. Remember, the very first honor society, Phi Beta Kappa, was a debate society.

It was founded at William & Mary in the Raleigh Tavern, so they say, presumably over a couple of pints, as one does. And it was dedicated to open debate about the core and burning issues of the day. That's where Phi Beta Kappa comes from, 1776 in Williamsburg, founded by William & Mary students. Those principles animate our students today.

It's an incredible student body. I love, love serving them, in part because they care so deeply about forging community. So it's in that idea of curious, open debate and the marketplace of ideas, that universities are dedicated to, that we anchor ourselves right now today. I love that concept, the marketplace of ideas, and just this sense of curious, open debate.

I've always had in my mind a professor, years ago, told me, "Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean." And it's always resonated with me. So Katherine, today many Americans feel disconnected from institutions that once potentially anchored civic life. Trust in government, media, higher education, businesses, and many other institutions, the trust in those institutions has declined significantly, while polarization continues to deepen across political and cultural lines.

Are you seeing this on your campus and in higher education more broadly? Look, that is the story, and there's a lot of truth to it. And higher ed needs to attend to the building of community in a way that we haven't before. But if we step back and look at, first of all, the data, I'll say a little bit about that in a second.

And then second of all, the power of our students to, and their commitment, their sense of duty towards forging community, you can begin to see a slightly different story. In Virginia, for example, the data shows that over 80% of the citizens of Virginia are powerfully supportive of the local universities, their universities. People make a distinction between their university and universities more generally. I think that's probably true across the country.

I know it's true in Virginia. And that strong commitment and approval, surveys show that crosses political lines. So we're at a moment where the public sphere of noise in social media defines what we think we know more clearly than the data surveying human beings tells us. And we need to look at that, that noisy public sphere and what it tells us, with some skepticism, because it's filled with disinformation and even with active misinformation.

That's what the algorithms of social media are vulnerable to. So I see the building of institutional strength and trust as one of the most important things that universities do, and I see the ground for that work as much stronger and even hungry for trust than the noise in the system tells us. I'm curious about, you mentioned disinformation, and we now live in this world of rapid AI transformation. And my next question kind of touches on some of these challenges facing, well, let's just say American democracy and civic life, especially over the next decade.

From your perspective, what do you think some of those challenges are? Is it beyond just disinformation? And also really appreciate just your thoughts and perspective on how higher education institutions like William & Mary can help address them. Well, let's go back to the moment in time that this most resembles for me.

I'm a Renaissance scholar, and that was the 15th, 16th, 17th century, was a period in which the technology of print was taking off. And literacy was growing in a way that was not controlled by censors or by institutions in the same way that it had been. There was a lot of worry about accuracy in this rapidly proliferating media. And out of that grew what we now know as the Enlightenment, where literate people learned to test their ideas in that marketplace of ideas.

Fast-forward to today, we're at a very similar moment where accuracy, truthfulness has a high value and needs to be taught and relearned, and we need to find ways to advance it within the new technology. So we're in a different public sphere technologically, but we can and we will and we are learning to build systems of accountability and trust within that new public sphere. And that's part of what we are invested in at William & Mary. We educate, in one sense, a classic liberal arts and sciences preparation, which is emphasizing the ability to think critically, to use judgment and moral assessment over multiple different kinds of evidence, connecting and synthesizing information, looking for patterns, and understanding what's a really good question.

And at the same time, we teach technology literacy because that is one of the liberal arts and sciences of the moment. And an important part of that is being accountable for what you say and testing the accuracy of what you read and hear and know Really interesting. I think you've given me an idea for our next podcast, which should talk more about exactly what you've just spoken about. William & Mary and the Gates Foundation for Global Policy announced earlier this month the establishment of the Robert M.

Gates Initiative in American Statecraft at William & Mary. Yes. In that announcement you said, and I quote here and again, this is another quote that's kind of resonated with me and really given me some of the motivation to have this conversation with you today. But you said, "By examining the lessons of the last 250 years of American engagement with the world, the Gates Initiative in American Statecraft will put the alma mater of the nation front and center in ensuring that American power is used well and wisely for the next 250 years."

How, from your perspective again, and the purpose and mission here, how will the Gates Initiative and the university ensure that impact moving forward? First of all, leadership skills, and second of all, data at scale. So let me break that down a little bit. At William & Mary, we teach leadership skills to navigate conflict, whether it's interpersonal conflict or geopolitical conflict, and everything in between.

Those skills are essential for citizenship, and they're essential for professional life. And I know you and I are going to talk about our Better Arguments curriculum in just a little bit, but we break down the capacities that are needed for navigating conflict in very systematic ways to cultivate them in our graduates, whether it's undergraduates or graduate students, in the service of really powerful research on how resources are being used in the world in order to serve the community and the country that any of our graduates is going to be part of.

I think a lot about what our chancellor, Robert Gates, has said about William & Mary. He said, "What William & Mary gave me above all else was a calling to serve, a sense of commitment to community and country that this university has sought to install in each generation of students." And I spoke earlier about our students being human beings who bring to college a sense of duty to their communities, their professions. That's quite striking.

It's different in this generation of college students. They're in the world in a way that prior generations were not because they're forced to be by social media, and they are hungry to understand how they can make the world and their communities better. So that calling to serve, the leadership skills that make one effective in service, and then the massive research that we do. AidData is one of our big labs.

It tracks $6 trillion of development aid worldwide and shows where it's being invested by which countries every year and what the effects are. And so they are the group that broke China's Belt and Road Initiative more than a decade ago, just released the second iteration of that. The debt bubble in China is something that they revealed, too. And that work is being done by undergraduates and graduate students at William & Mary under the leadership of the folks who work there at AidData, which is a lab that's going to be informing the new Gates initiative.

Absolutely fantastic. We're going to take a short break right now and be right back with more of my conversation with Katherine Rowe. Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, David Young, the president of The CEO Center, the public policy center here at The Conference Board.

Delighted to be joined today by Katherine Rowe, the president of William & Mary. Katherine, before the break, you were sharing your thoughts and reflections around the importance of leadership skills to navigate conflict, which is a central priority to how you teach at William & Mary. And also, and this just has resonated with me over the last few minutes, just a sense of duty that you're trying to instill in all of your students to apply to every dimension of life. I want to continue the conversation, talk a little bit about leadership, courage, and civic responsibility.

One recurring concern today is whether our political and civic culture still rewards the kind of leadership qualities that democracies depend on, and some that you've already alluded to: prudence, courage, restraint, and the ability to build consensus. William & Mary is often referred to as the alma mater of the nation. Super-curious here as to how the institution and the university came to that moniker. And also, how do you address civic culture today, and how do you weigh its importance moving forward?

How is the university part of this revolutionary thought today? So many wonderful questions, David. Thank you. We are in the year of civic leadership at William & Mary, so we've been thinking about that whole array of questions very deeply and in a sustained way for the year.

I'll start with why we're called the alma mater of the nation. Five presidents were educated here. George Washington took his surveyor's license at William & Mary by distance learning, at the time, and became our first American chancellor. It's a distinction that we're incredibly proud of because it rests on a tradition of core principles for civic life, the ones that you just listed before.

The wonderful young woman who is running our year of civic leadership programming has framed the idea of what it means to be the alma mater of the nation in a way I really like. She says, "William & Mary has played a formative role in the life of the republic, and at this moment of anniversary, invites us to reflect on that legacy while recommitting to the responsibilities that come with it." And so we begin with understanding that we've played a distinctive role in crafting the idea of civic learning in this country.

We begin with a set of principles that we borrowed from the Aspen Institute and then scaled to thousands of people. It's called Better Arguments at William & Mary, and it's focused on how you can turn a conflict into a learning opportunity in a community. We're among the leaders in adopting this dialogue-based model. It's entirely peer-educated.

It's very, very systematic. Over 80% of our faculty and staff have done it, our leadership boards. It's part of new student orientation and has been since 2021. So at this point, every student at William & Mary has participated in it at some point.

Wow. And our director of conflict resolution and peer mediation has built it into her work with students. Our ombuds office has built it into their work with faculty and staff. Our leadership boards, our board of visitors has participated.

So it begins with a simple principle, which is to take winning off the table for this conversation, and then to listen passionately. And I could say more about it, but the most important part of it is to respect the conflict so you can learn from it. Those are practical skills. They're important to every employer.

They're important to every community. They're important to American foreign policy and statecraft. I could say more, but to me, that's the core: the systematic building of a culture that sees, as our founders did, sees conflict as the beginning of a learning process and the path to a stronger union. I want to say a little bit about why this liberal arts and sciences model of learning through argument, through debate, through conflict, matters so much in the future careers of our students, as well as in their lives as citizens.

Because those two things are so powerfully, I think, intertwined. There's a really wonderful study by the organization Strada, which looks at employment and college readiness for the workforce. And the findings of the study, came out May 19 of this year, have to do with the way AI is changing entry-level hiring. And the increasing significance in the age of AI in two things: critical thinking, that analytic judgment that I spoke of earlier, and communication.

Those are valued much more highly in entry-level hiring than AI literacy, and more highly now because AI literacy makes other kinds of learning so swift. Yeah. So to me, that idea of being a really good communicator, be able to work with lots of different people across many different kinds of differences within the group that you are assigned to now. That's what we're preparing students with as they enter the workforce, and it matters more now, I think, than it did 10 years ago.

We survey our students six months out of graduation. We ask them the question, "Are you in a role that's consistent with your future career aspirations?" And in the last three years, we've had over 70% response to that survey. Wow.

Year one, 97% said, "Yes, I'm in a role consistent with my career aspirations." Year two, 100% said, "Yes, I'm in a role consistent with my career aspirations." And year three, which was last year, 97% again said yes. So that's a powerful measure to me of whether this combination of tech savvy, literacy, and broad liberal arts and sciences preparation to have extraordinarily good judgment, to be a moral thinker, to be able to work with others.

Those two things together I think are positioning our students to be leaders. Yeah, I really couldn't agree more on this. Just as you look at this world of AI transformation and these two points you mentioned, critical thinking and communication, it's hard to think of them not becoming more and more important as you look at the years ahead and what lies ahead for us all. They will.

Really interesting. I was just thinking, the founders placed enormous emphasis on civic virtue, personal responsibility, and also the obligations of citizenship. As we recognize, there is an ongoing debate about whether Americans still share a common understanding of what citizenship requires, and you've mentioned William & Mary's Better Arguments curriculum. I'm just curious, you've kind of alluded to the importance of that curriculum, but also be curious as to the reception and feedback you've got from students and faculty that have gone through this program.

It's incredibly exciting. I'll be sitting in an event. We're talking about something really hard, one of the most pressing issues of the day, let's say, that challenges everyone to think in a reflective way. Let's say it might be the wars in the Middle East right now, And the student leaders will say, "OK, we're going to start with our Better Arguments principles.

Here's the five principles. First thing, take winning off the table for this conversation." And in they'll go. I hear it in our student assembly meetings.

It's quite powerful and leads to really productive meetings and decision-making by our student leaders. I talk about it with faculty. Alumni have loved it. They are continually asking us for more workshops, and we run those out of the Washington Center if anybody would like to hear them.

We run them at events. We do it with parents. Parents are thrilled by it. Wow.

And we started building, we won a wonderful grant. We're calling it We the Teachers, for the next three years from the Department of Education, nearly $3 million, to do teacher preparation, continuing education for middle and high school civics teachers, that is anchored in that same set of principles and in how we teach the core founding ideas of America using primary documents. So by the end of three years, we expect to have educated something like a million middle and high school teachers, history teachers, social studies teachers, in a refreshed 21st-century version of American civics.

That's one of our birthday presents to the nation, as we honor the nation. Thank you for joining us today. This really has been a true privilege, as I said. At the beginning, I did go to William & Mary, and never really in my wildest dreams thought I'd be sitting down with the president of William & Mary to talk about the importance of the university and the path ahead.

So Katherine, my sincerest thanks for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure, Davy. I really, really appreciate it. The pleasure is all ours.

And thanks to all of you for listening today to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm David Young, and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.