Letter from the President
A Message from FSU
President Nancy S. Niemi
Stories extolling the virtues of education are numerous and the more resonant of them create well-worn oratorical tracks into opening day and commencement ceremony speeches; some make their way onto inspirational posters and within the last decade, many more appear as internet memes. (“CEO asks a teacher: What do you make?” and the “Blueberry Story: A teacher gives a business man a lesson” are two examples of this genre.) The paradoxical theme underlying most of these stories can be summarized as: getting a good education is an equal-opportunity path towards social equity and the middle class, but having enough money to fully fund education won’t really help make it better.
The entitlement embodied in this message is enough to set this president’s hair on fire.
American public higher education has been, since its inception, the tool that offered students and families with fewer means the chance to learn on equal footing with their wealthier peers. Students who had less money would have the same opportunity to gain analytic skills, the same access to thinkers and theories and experiences, and the same exposure to new and varied ideas through the humanities, social sciences, science, and arts. They would have the opportunity to ask themselves what is true, and what is real.
Moreover, less privileged families also knew that the act of being educated was an opportunity to create greater social equity, for their children and their communities. Public higher education has delivered on these learning goals with increasing success, creating more equitable lives for students and their families, enabled significantly by rising historic financial investments at the state and federal levels. We invested in the belief in higher-education-as-equity, ignoring those who would deny that learning demands assets.
Unfortunately, this situation has changed dramatically: not only does the current national zeitgeist dismiss the learning (and earning?) power of all higher education but it is also divesting its former financial commitments to public higher education, all the while claiming that the very thing that raised up so many—a college degree—is now no longer necessary. Many are pulling up the very ladder that higher education helped them climb.
The stories in this FY2025 President’s Report illustrate three of the ways in which Framingham State University is countering this current devaluing of public higher ed while also staying true to our mission. Our Historic Comprehensive Funding Campaigns—the one just finished and the one about to begin—are built on creating financial access—scholarships—for everyone who chooses to join us. Philanthropy at FSU, you’ll read, is measured by how many doors our dollars can open, and how many lives we can raise up. In Equity in the Classroom our professors show how they create learning experiences rooted in helping students in many disciplines see and challenge the inequities around them. Finally, Breathing New Life into a 185-Year-Old Motto will almost surely be a surprise to readers who have wondered how Framingham State “Lives to the Truth” in an era where truth is a shapeshifting concept.
We at FSU know that completing an excellent education is still the best path to creating and living lives of greater equity, and we are determined, by all means, to create titanium ladders to that success for all who choose to join us.
With resolve and determination,
PresidentFramingham State University
