Valuing Every Unique Background

Your Lot and Parcel · Apr 6, 2026 · 43m

In higher education over the past two centuries. He explores how the diversity principle—the belief that people with varied backgrounds, experiences, identities, and perspectives produce better outcomes by working together—first took root in the world’s first modern research university, founded in Germany in 1810. This principle inspired John Stuart Mill’s on Liberty, a cornerstone of academic freedom, and shaped Charles Eliot’s transformation of Harvard in the late nineteenth century to encourage the “clash of ideas.” It also underpinned the twentieth-century equality efforts of figures like…