An interesting analogy

I had lunch today with John Vasconcellos,a retired member of the California Legislature. John has spent a good deal of his career thinking about higher education and is in the process of working on a couple of very interesting projects including ones to bring greater attention to higher education as a public good and a serious attempt to significantly improve opportunities for Latino students to be successful at the university level. One of the things that has intrigued me about him for more than four decades is that he combines a constant set of values with an exploratory ethic to think about new ways of thinking.

John is someone who thinks creatively about a lot of issues. Today, he came up with what I thought was a great line. We were talking about a number of trends in society where the old way of doing things does not seem to work. There are amazing parallels between the problems of trying to form a budget in the state and bailing out the financial industry, for example. John suggested that in this time of transition that we need to provide "hospice care for the old system, while simultaneously providing a mid-wife's role for the one developing."