How Ants and Humans Are Alike

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Earl Lewis, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, believes we have two important terms confused: skills development and education. The first is all the practical abilities that will equip a person for their first job – can you read and write, can you code, do you know the most current techniques of your field? The latter is much harder to quantify and teach: can you think autonomously, and go down a path where the endpoint hasn’t been set out for you? Can you pore through a vast array of information and come up with a new answer, entirely your own?

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EARL LEWIS

Earl Lewis became the sixth President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in March 2013. Under his guidance, the Foundation has reaffirmed its commitment to the humanities, the arts, and higher education by emphasizing the importance of continuity and change.

A noted social historian, Mr. Lewis has held faculty appointments at the University of California at Berkeley (1984–89), and the University of Michigan (1989–2004). He has championed the importance of diversifying the academy, enhancing graduate education, re-visioning the liberal arts, exploring the role of digital tools for learning, and connecting universities to their communities. Prior to joining The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mr. Lewis served as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University. As Provost, Lewis led academic affairs and academic priority setting for the university.

Lewis is the author and co-editor of seven books, including “The African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present”; “Defending Diversity: Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan”; the award-winning “To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans”; and the heralded book series “American Crossroads.”

A native of Tidewater, Virginia, Mr. Lewis earned an undergraduate degree in history and psychology from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and a PhD in history from the University of Minnesota.  He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008. In 2016, Mr. Lewis was named an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Rutgers University-Newark and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College in 2015; he also received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from Concordia College in 2002; Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota in 2001; and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award from the University of Michigan in 1999.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Earl Lewis: A number of commentators over the last decade maybe two decades have talked about what I think of as skills development meaning do you have the requisite skills to be able to enter your first job. Can you read well? Can you write well? Do you have the ability to code, et cetera? I actually think we often times confused skills and skills development with education. An education is actually designed to actually encourage the individual to consider questions they hadn't considered before, to actually be able to assemble a vast array of information and then to synthesize that information and to come up with perhaps what one would think of as new answers. It's not about learning the most recent technique. And the challenge is is that if you only talk about skills development the way knowledge is produced these days a generation is 18 months. And so that means by the time you've actually finish school often times you're already behind the curve and some of that information is obsolete. If you're really truly educated you then learn and you know how to go about pursuing the new acquisition of information and that information that you can then synthesize and apply to what you already know means then that you're not behind the curve, you're keeping pace with the change that's always occurring in both technology and other aspects of American life.

I love STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. I actually can remember circa 1998 being at a meeting at the National Science Foundation and it wasn't even STEM yet, it was SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. And we were all sitting there going are you sure you want to call it SMET? ...

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