And, for the most part, those dreams were both fulfillable and fulfilled. My friends and I went to college, even though most of our parents had not completed high school. We were taught that the future was paved with education. The American dream is dying for both the children and the adults in my old neighborhood. But because our dreams, our children, and our future depend on it.
Education is our last and best hope for tomorrow.
In the ceremonies, Thomas W. Evans, chairman of the Teachers College Trustees, conducted the investiture, handing Levine a bound version of the bylaws of the school. Lambros Comitas, Gardner Cowles Professor of Anthropology and Education, presented the new president to Evans. After teaching in the Boston public schools, he attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1976, awarded jointly by the departments of sociology and higher education. He was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Foundation and the Carnegie Council of Policy Studies from 1975 to 1982, when he became president of Bradford College in Massachusetts. After seven years at Bradford, Levine became chairman of the Institute for Educational Management and a member of the senior faculty at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.