Listen to a Billionaire, at Least This One

 [4-5-2026] submitted to TH Trib Star online, 3-5-2026

To the Editor:

“This process [streamlining higher education toward in-demand careers] is almost a no-brainer.” – Larry Garatoni, member of the  Indiana Commission for Higher Education, – Terre Haute Tribune Star, April, 2, 2026

It’s a fair guess not many of us had the experience of taking two college history courses taught by an Cambridge University PhD scholar who in mid-life was ranked 512 among The World's Richest People in 2006.  The Cambridge degree still impresses me. Billionaire status? Eh! 

But this was my personal luck as an undergraduate history major at Northern Illinois University. Decades before the billionaire thing, this prof, my favorite teacher of all time, heard I was choosing to teach at the high school level rather than going on to grad school. He took me aside and told me this, “For God’s sake, Daily, make them [my future students] read and think.”

Teaching at a far southwest side Chicago suburban high school in the early 1960s taught me that this advice, offered so sternly and sincerely, was not easily achieved. And why would it be?  What is challenging, important and deeply meaningful is never easily grasped and ingrained, is it?

While I was working hard at the “reading and thinking” teaching task, a sign prominently displayed in the hall near my high school’s administrative offices did not strike me as helpful.  It advised the students passing each day of worthy goals: “Stay In School!  Go to College!” 

This counsel was direct and admirable. But it went on, emphasizing in specific numbers, a bargain. Stay in school and in a working lifetime you would earn this much more moola than a high school drop out. Or go to college and pick up a college degree  and with that sheepskin “union card” in hand  you too will become a well-heeled organization man.

What this billboard shouted out was the benefits of education are all wrapped up in dollars. 

I have no doubt there was and is one form of truth in the education equals dollars adverts surrounding us today.  But where are the value truths residing in the reading and thinking advice/admonition my mentor put forward?  We must ask:  Are reading and thinking served by the cutting of college programs that are splashed onto a spread sheet and shown not to pay off in dollars?

Who speaks for the reading and thinking dimensions, personally and socially, of education in our lives? Far from being “no-brainers,” these centuries old elements of thought and critical thinking cannot be weighed on an indifferent scale of dollars and cents. It shows a failure of insight, creativity, imagination and plain courage when state education boards, school trustees, university administrators, and faculty cannot overcome the wave of materialism washing over true “higher” education in Indiana.

It was John G. Sperling who handed me the  “reading and thinking” advice all those decades past. He made his billions with the founding of the for profit Phoenix University corporation. His motivation, at least originally as far as I can make out, was to provide an education for adults who had missed the traditional path to higher education.

When Sperling was interviewed by the business press, reporters invariably noted the shelves of books in his offices. Asked about them, Sperling was always ready with this comment:

 “I have learned more about how to conduct my business affairs from such novels as Tom Jones, Emma, Notes from the Underground, The Red and the Black, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Great Gatsby than I ever have from reading a business book.”

You have to read and think to find an important “no brainer” lesson in billionaire Sperling’s  response.