Writings & Remarks

Our First Principles

April 16, 2025

Tags Public Statements

Dear Hamilton Faculty and Staff,

In a letter to the community at the beginning of spring break, Dean Munemo and I shared some updates about the current higher education policy landscape. We mentioned that I would be working on a message to parents and alumni and that we would be planning a community gathering where we can join in solidarity and care for one another and in affirmation of our core values.   

Please save the date for the community gathering: April 29, 2025 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Details are being finalized and will be shared soon.

Below is the message that was sent to alumni and parents today.  

I appreciate the notes I have received from many of you, and I look forward to more conversation as the context for higher education continues to evolve. 

Onward,

Steven

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Dear Hamilton Alumni and Parents:

On April 3, we hosted President Barack Obama as part of the Sacerdote Great Names Series. It was an historic event in front of more than 5,000 people in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House, with many others joining us online. Coverage of this event has now traveled across the world in every imaginable media platform and news outlet. We should all be proud that our college was the catalyst for these important remarks. Please look for the April 17 edition of Hamilton Headlines for the story and full video of the interview.

Joining other colleges and universities across the country during this challenging time, we will continue to define and defend our first principles, especially freedom of expression and academic freedom. At Hamilton College, we draw a bright line around those principles and we will defend our rights to pursue, teach and express any idea that we deem important for learning, discovery and democracy.   

Higher education is in the news almost daily and I wrote this short reflection below to help make sense of the current critiques and to reaffirm our value and purpose. 

I am, of course, always happy to receive your ideas, reflections, and questions. 

Thank you and Onward,

Steven

Higher Education Delivers on the Promise of America

Critics of higher education are on the attack with tax proposals, executive orders, and economic sanctions and penalties that could greatly hobble our core mission and jeopardize America’s standing in the world. They argue that college is no longer affordable, especially for the middle class; for others, that our campuses are not open to disagreement and debate, including welcoming conservative ideas about liberty, freedom, community, and markets. 

These critiques can be misleading. For example, data suggests that the real cost of college – after accounting for dramatic increases in financial aid – has actually declined for most  families over the past 20 years. And, while some may worry that we are preparing too many disruptors and activists, in reality the vast majority of college students across America are studying traditionally mainstream subjects – economics, business, engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry, along with literature, religion, and philosophy and art from ancient Greece through today. Many more students graduate from an American college or university knowing how to draw a supply and demand curve than can articulate the important theories of post-colonialism, feminism, or any other critical theory. If the academy is out of balance, it is tilting more in the direction of producing graduates who want to take their place in the current economic order rather than those who are trying to change it. So while we can acknowledge needed reform, we should not abide by distortions and generalizations of who we are and what we do.  

Far from being hostile to American values, our colleges and universities embody our founding fathers’ greatest hopes for our democracy. They believed that a new democracy needed new institutions and new ways of organizing itself. Alexander Hamilton designed and built the nation’s first central bank, established the U.S. Coast Guard, and created public-private partnerships to encourage manufacturing and industry. He also believed colleges and schools were essential to preparing future entrepreneurs and citizens who could contribute to a diverse economy. Hamilton, along with Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and most other founding fathers, believed that education was essential for building prosperity for all and a strong America – and history has proven them to be correct. 

Alexander Hamilton believed in diversity and pluralism: He arrived in America as an immigrant; he believed a diverse economy would engender social mobility and opportunity; he was an outspoken critic of slavery; and he was among the only founders who cultivated a relationship with the Jewish community. And, he agreed to be a founding trustee of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, which later became Hamilton College, endorsing its aspiration, never fully realized, for cultural exchange and reciprocity between settler and indigenous youth. 

America, in fact, has been guided by an aspiration for pluralism from the beginning, and this ideal has expanded over the centuries to include more people and more ideas. Our colleges, along with our military, have been critical spaces for helping humans from every imaginable background figure out how to learn together, work together, and build bonds of affection and trust. At Hamilton and many other colleges across America, this is how we practice inclusion and belonging – rejecting discrimination of any kind and advancing the promise of our founders – a pluralistic, creative, and diverse America. 

Higher education is often accused of a type of ideological purity around the way certain disciplines approach and critique power. At Hamilton, we have a requirement to take courses that explore “social, structural, and institutional hierarchies” – examining places where power prevents liberty or creates inequality. Asking students to understand power is about the most patriotic thing we can do. Every founding father expressed a critique of power – the power of a landed aristocracy, the power of unchecked government, the power of nobility and wealth, the arbitrary power of a king. Whether you are on the right or the left, a healthy skepticism of power is an act of patriotism. Ultimately, this is our commitment as a college – to give our students the capacity to critique things as they are in order to imagine things as they could be. That act of imagination is core to our American identity.  

America’s higher education is the envy of the world and remains the number one destination for international students – contributing close to $50 billion to our economy and generating huge trade surpluses. And more important than direct economic impact, most breakthroughs that have improved our quality of life over the last century – fighting disease, improving crop yields, driving productivity through technological advances, discovering new forms of energy, creating new building materials, and finding new ways to use data to save our planet – can be traced to university-based research. Education is and will remain our surest guarantee of a healthy, competitive and prosperous America.   

Alexander Hamilton once wrote, “There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.” Bravery today requires wielding the tools of critique, discernment and good will to improve our great colleges and universities. Taking a sledgehammer to higher education is not an act of heroism; it is reckless and inconsistent with our founders’ vision for an educated, informed, and pluralistic citizenry.