The New Education: Cathy Davidson with William P. Kelly

A leading educational thinker argues that the American university is stuck in the past—and shows how we can transform it for our era of constant change.

Cathy Davidson says that today's roughly  21 million college students are getting a raw deal. In her latest book, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, Davidson argues that most higher education is insufficient to meet the demands placed on recent graduates by the "ever more complex and bewildering" realities of the postindustrial, post-Internet world. It will need a revolution if we want future generations of students to succeed.

Davidson, who is also the Director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Futures Initiative, sought out innovators everywhere from forward-thinking community colleges to massive public universities, to elite private schools. The iconoclastic educators she found are remaking their classrooms by emphasizing creativity, collaboration, and adaptability over expertise in single—and often abstract—disciplines. And by inculcating their students with a sense of the multidisciplinary approaches that solutions to real-world problems typically require, they are teaching them not only how to think—but how to learn.

Davidson will speak with William P. Kelly, The New York Public Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries, about her travels through the halls of the new education, and what she has learned about how we can educate students not only to survive but to thrive amid the challenges to come.

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