Bowen GS '58 receives education award

Bowen, who served as president of the University from 1972 to 1988 and oversaw the beginning of co-education, was the first American to receive the prize. The award recognized his contributions to socioeconomic diversity and the use of technology in education.

Jose Rafael Estrada, president emeritus and founder of the Council, praised Bowen for leading the charge toward better education for all.

Whereas in the past, the “main signifiers” of a nation’s might were its economic and military power, Estrada said, a nation’s future now depends on the strength of its educational system because education provides the foundation for economic and military advancements.

In his acceptance speech, Bowen said universities “should take race into account” during the admissions process and explained that colleges with more socioeconomic diversity foster a greater range of ideas.

Bowen recognized a need for greater diversity on campus during his tenure in Nassau Hall, he said.

“My days in the president’s office were in many ways tumultuous,” Bowen explained. “How fortunate I was to see close-up the value of educational diversity and this country’s need to get past its ugly racial history.”

It is more than possible for colleges to be “more inclusive and more all-encompassing at the same time as they celebrate scientific and scholarly accomplishment,” he said, adding that “there is great resonance in the power of ideas per se and the results of intellectual exchange.”

On Monday, Bowen gave a lecture that examined disparities in educational opportunity in the United States.

In the talk, Bowen showed graphs that broke down college graduation rates by socioeconomic status and race. Among students with at least one parent who attended college, 61 percent of those in the “top income” category earned a bachelor’s degree, but only 25 percent of those in the “bottom income” category received one.

There is also evidence that minority students perform as well or better than their white counterparts at the nation’s top universities when given the opportunity to attend them, Bowen said.

These data indicate that minority students who exhibit great potential should be in higher demand, he added. “The world is badly in need of people from different backgrounds who wish to pursue achieving humanistic ideals.”

Bowen also attempted to debunk myths about affirmative action.

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For the vast majority of America’s colleges and universities, he said, the use of affirmative action is not detrimental to the academic strength of their student bodies because of the relatively low selectivity of those institutions.

He also said the claim that minority students admitted to the best colleges cannot succeed there is false, citing a study from the 1990s that found a 79 percent graduation rate among minority students who began college in 1989.

Bowen added that SAT scores were not predictive of success in college because the relationship between test scores and graduation rates flattens out for those with scores above 1100 out of 1600.

His Southern Ohio upbringing contributed to his “lifelong interest in extending educational opportunity,” Bowen said in his acceptance speech.

“My family had no history of higher education, but I was lucky to have the support of my parents and teachers,” he said. “My father died when I was a high school senior, and we had hardly any money, but I was lucky again because I received scholarships to go to Denison [University].”

The World Cultural Council, founded in 1982 and based in Mexico, aims “to promote culture, values and goodwill” through the giving of three different awards recognizing advancements in education, the arts and the sciences, according to its website. Each award includes $10,000, a diploma and a commemorative medal.