You Must Be Better

You Must Be Better

To the students of Sarah Lawrence College: I write not in disappointment alone, but in expectation—because expectation is the more demanding of the two. A liberal arts education makes a claim. It promises to produce independent, disciplined thinkers who can locate authority, test evidence, confront counterarguments, and remain in the room when ideas become uncomfortable. That claim must be earned. Recently, on two separate fronts, it was not on …