Nine college and university presidents including ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Elaine Tuttle Hansen were invited to join about two dozen members of national news media recently in a dialogue on higher education.

The 22nd Annual Higher Education Media Roundtable was hosted by Arizona State University President Michael Crow at the Harvard Club in New York City on Nov. 4, 2009.

National media outlets included National Public Radio, NBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, Time, Newsweek, Kaplan/Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, University Business, The New York Review of Books, Bloomberg News, and Inside Higher Ed.

College and university presidents and chancellors participating where Alice P. Gast of Lehigh University; David W. Leebron of Rice University; Harris Pastides of the University of South Carolina; Freeman A. Hrabowski III of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; John J. Neuhauser of Saint Michael’s College; Kent Hance of the Texas Tech University System; Robert C. Holub of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and presidents Crow and Hansen. Communications officers from each of the institutions also attended the meeting.

Discussion topics were broad-ranging and included: assessment, access, K-12 teacher education,
the impact of economic forces on higher education, three-year baccalaureate programs, tenure, swine flu, President Obama’s education policy, and the increasing academic and socio-economic stratification of higher education.

While ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has offered a three-year option for 40 years, an undergraduate education is hard to speed up, says Hansen. “I think too much in our culture is about doing things faster and simpler and easier. And what we can’t let go of in higher education is that slower is actually better when it comes to learning.”

Hansen joined Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;  Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander.