With the entering students, I explored such subquestions as "Why are you in college?", "Why should you be in college?" and "Why should you be at Stanford?"
As I prepared for the State of the University address, it was suggested that the question "You are here, but why?" is worthy of consideration by all of us - faculty, staff and students. So, today, I should like to explore that question with you: First, in the present tense - Where are we and why? - and then, the future tense - Where will we, and universities in general, be in the decades ahead and why?
Where are we at present? The short answer is we are on course. Today, as we survey our work lives, we are spending much less of our time and energy in dealing with problems of the past or reacting to crises of the present, and much more in productively seizing the day.
Perhaps the single largest factor in that changed climate was the October 17 settlement of all disputed matters related to indirect costs of federally sponsored research. The Office of Naval Research, after conducting incredibly intense scrutiny, acknowledged that it has no claim against Stanford for any wrongdoing or misrepresentation with respect to the university's indirect cost submissions during the years 1981 through 1992. It also acknowledged that the Memoranda of Understanding governing Stanford's accounting practices were valid and binding agreements between the government and the university.
While the individual who initiated the charges still pursues a suit that would enrich him, we consider the claims to be without merit. I also note that every dollar of the considerable dollars we have to spend on this litigation is a dollar not available for student aid or other core academic purposes.
Let me turn to the more personal question: You are here at Stanford but why? The reasons are, of course, as varied as the individuals who make up our faculty, staff and students. However, I believe we all share some common reasons. We are at Stanford because of the essential attributes of the institution, the qualities toward which we strive together. Among Stanford's central attributes are excellences, commitment to the search for truth and creativity.
Why are you at Stanford? For its excellences - and I intentionally use the plural, for they are many. Consider just a few:
You are here for the excellences of our faculty. This year, the Stanford faculty produced six new members of the National Academy of Engineering, more than from any other institution, bringing our total to 74; eight new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for a total of 190; and six new Guggenheim Fellows. Anne Krueger's election gives us 105 members of the National Academy of Sciences. Three of our Stanford colleagues won National Science Foundation Young Investigator Awards, and more than two dozen head major national associations in their disciplines - from the American Economic Association to the American Comparative Literature Association to the American Association of Immunologists.
And then there is the "citation impact"! Despite its sound, this is not a new automotive safety feature - "air bags, anti-lock brakes and citation impact" - but rather a weighted measure of the average citations per faculty paper in the articles of fellow researchers. While efforts to measure quality by measuring the quantity of citations remain highly dubious, an analysis by the Institute for Scientific Information overcomes all doubts and reservations by showing what we knew by intuition - that the Stanford faculty ranks first in the nation by citation impact. As a literary man said to his critic in a Punch line from the 1880s: "I don't care twopence for your opinion, but if you say something favorable I shall be pleased."
You are here for the excellences of our students. Jim Montoya, dean of admission and financial aid, reports that, by such numerical indicators as grades and SAT scores, our current freshman class is the most academically talented in the university's history. That is a distinction we happily expect to be brief, for applications for next fall's freshman class continued the rise in both quality and, for the third straight year, quantity, to 15,390. The admissions office is making changes designed to make us even more competitive. For example, starting next year, we will offer early decision for those students who would prefer Stanford to other institutions.
You are here for the excellences of outstanding deans and staff. Twenty-three years after he earned his doctorate from our School of Education, Richard Shavelson returned as dean, bringing with him recognition as one of the nation's leading educational scholars. Directly from our own faculty ranks, Lynn Orr - described by his predecessor as "a first-class scientist and engineer, and a university statesman" - was selected dean of the School of Earth Sciences. And, most recently, Gene Bauer took office as dean in the School of Medicine, where he brings cohesive and forward-looking leadership to the school and to the complex task of implementing Stanford Health Services. In this new role, Gene has had the advantage of building on the accomplishments of outgoing Dean David Korn.
The excellences of Stanford staff members enable the pursuit of excellences by faculty, students, deans - us all. Such staff members are, happily, so numerous that even such awards as the Amy Blue or the Cuthbertson can honor only their representatives. Let me here cite two examples, the winners of the O'Neill Award for support of research: Droni Chiu, department administrator in the Chemistry Department, and J. Paul Lomio, assistant director for information services in the Law School's Crown Library. "Droni is an indispensable part of the research enterprise in chemistry," a faculty member wrote. "Since taking over as our departmental administrator, she has vitalized the department and streamlined our operations immeasurably." A law professor who came to Stanford from a competitor on the East Coast wrote that Lomio "far surpasses the level of service I was accustomed to. . . . He has made innumerable contributions to my own research in an unfailingly resourceful and imaginative way."
You are here for the excellence of the setting in which we work. In a letter dating from 1913, David Starr Jordan, our first president, wrote: "The yellow sandstone arches and cloisters, the 'red-tiled roofs against the azure sky,' make a picture that can never be forgotten, itself an integral part of a Stanford education." Beyond providing beauty, our classroom and lab buildings are a tangible asset of the university, a physical endowment as important as the university's financial endowment, and requiring equally attentive maintenance and investment. We are fortunate to have forward-looking benefactors willing and able to make the investments to keep Stanford teaching and research at the forefront. In a class by themselves have been William Hewlett and David Packard, who last October made a $77 million gift to replace aging and obsolete buildings and complete a new Science and Engineering Quadrangle.
Why else are you here? Closely related to excellences, I believe most of us also are here because we know the love of truth means being rigorous. We share a value in hard work and commitment to the highest standards.
In particular, I commend the truly remarkable performance of the Faculty Senate in essentially devoting its entire year to the report of the Commission on Undergraduate Education. As a result, we have made great strides in a much shorter time than I would have imagined possible.
The Faculty Senate has approved measures to increase the rigor of Stanford's writing and foreign-language requirements, and is tackling the breadth requirements in the humanities and social sciences. Faculty members, under the leadership of John Etchemendy of philosophy, are vigorously involved in the Commission on Technology in Teaching and Learning, in deep and broad explorations of how to harness technical innovation to our missions. The Science Core Design Committee, chaired by Brad Osgood of mathematics, is detailing plans for the proposed interdisciplinary science course for nonscience majors. Professor Ramon Saldívar of English is productively engaged in the new position of vice provost for undergraduate education. Deans, directors, chairs and the Committee on Undergraduate Studies are at work on reviews of majors, minors and interdisciplinary programs. The registrar and the Committee on Academic Appraisal and Achievement are tackling academic bookkeeping. On the agenda are reviews of advising, residential education and evaluation of teaching.
Why are you here? For the creativity represented by these efforts and much more. One of the distinguishing features of Stanford is its pioneering spirit, its passion for ideas, innovation and entrepreneurship. While ivy can be found on campus, it is not the dominant plant. As a research-intensive university, Stanford applies the values of research - the search for new knowledge, the constant challenging of orthodoxies, old and new - to all its efforts. The CUE report is not the only source of creativity at Stanford, or even in undergraduate education.
In February, Dean John Shoven unveiled the School of Humanities and Sciences' plan for a new interdisciplinary program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. It is a creative and forward-looking program, distinguished by its rigor, its comparative nature and its interdisciplinary approach - particularly in bringing the social sciences to the table along with the humanities and in applying all these disciplines to issues of American society.
In addition, this fall we will launch the Sophomore College. For three weeks before the start of the fall quarter, an initial 50 incoming sophomores will take part in intensive faculty-led academic projects and exchanges, designed to prevent "sophomore slump" and energize students about a major. The level of our commitment to this pilot project is indicated by the faculty members leading the projects: English Professor Saldívar, Provost and political science Professor Condoleezza Rice, engineering Professor John Bravman, geology Professor Gail Mahood and law Professor Bob Weisberg.
Creativity has been abundant in other parts of Stanford again the past year. We have brought into existence Stanford Health Services, headed by Peter Van Etten, to consolidate all patient care and help us deal with the onslaught of changes in hospital and clinical practices, and the support they provide to medical education and the School of Medicine. We have begun a multi-year restructuring of administrative processes and replacement of 22 major administrative information systems to increase efficiency, accountability and effectiveness, and to allow us to reallocate resources to academic priorities.
We have launched the Stanford Fund to better enlist the support of our college alumni, making clear that even small donations are a vital continuation of previous generations' sense of moral obligation to give something back to Stanford. The Stanford Alumni Association and the Board of Trustees have displayed another form of creativity, reaching beyond our borders to select the board's first overseas member, Chien Lee, a holder of three Stanford degrees and past president of the Hong Kong Stanford Club.
The themes of "restructuring" and "reinventing" have caught hold in much of the business world, in government and, increasingly, among institutions of higher education. As I look back over the past three years and the challenges of the coming year, I see Stanford engaged in the hard work of renewing itself to meet new challenges. From undergraduate education to basic financial administration, we are challenging current methods and inventing better ones. New technologies will assist us, but only to a point. It is vital that every member of our community participate openly, fully and enthusiastically in the task of reinventing our institution.
Those are but a few of the answers to the present-tense question - "You are here, but why?" - and I apologize for the many wonderful examples I am forced to leave out. Now, however, I wish to turn to the future tense: "Where will we be, and why?"
As the turn of the millennium approaches, millenarian references are becoming increasingly tiresome. I beg your indulgence for one more, for it is of a different sort. Permitting for some rounding up, universities are nearing the completion of their first millennium, and the coming decades may bring more changes to universities than in all of their previous centuries. Some of these changes will be wrenching.
The emergence of the western university - beginning roughly with the second millennium A.D. and associated first with Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, Oxford and a few other cities - is indeed a millenarian phenomenon that, while it has not led to the rule of saints, has contributed much to the improvement of the human condition.
Universities have been extraordinarily durable as institutions and in terms of the functions they have performed in Western societies. They have even been durable in their methods of instruction. The lecture, the lectio, of the medieval university is still with us, as is the disputation, if in the less structured format of a seminar. Clark Kerr has counted that of 75 institutions founded before 1520, "which are [still] doing much the same things in much the same places, in much the same ways and under the same names," about 60 are universities. This puts some universities in such company as the Catholic Church, the Bank of Siena or the Royal Mint. And Edward Shils, the great sociologist of knowledge who died last January, put it, as always, bluntly and caustically. I quote:
Universities are much criticised nowadays by government, civil servants, professors of education, journalists, et al. There are numerous reasons for these denunciations - some are good reasons, many are poor. The universities cost immense sums of money, their achievements cannot be measured in any clear and reliable way, many persons fail in them, and they certainly do not accomplish the solution of economic and social problems which some expect of them. Nevertheless, these societies cling to them. The universities do not survive simply because professors have a vested interest in their survival. . . . That would never be enough. These societies cling to them because, in the last analysis, they are their last best hope for a transfigured existence. . . .
Much of the criticism of the self-indulgence of the universities is an act of hypocrisy by their beneficiaries. . . . It is too late . . . to decide whether modern societies can get along without universities. For good reasons and bad, they must have them - much as they have been.
There is a small, if increasing, minority that predicts that information technology will prove Edward Shils wrong. The notion is that a few decades into its second millennium the university as a corporeal entity will not be "much as it has been" if, indeed, it will continue to exist in a recognizable form. We are bombarded with articles in, for instance, the Chronicle of Higher Education on plans for a "Virtual Online University" or "Canada's On-Line MBA." Britain's Open University is much looked at as a model. There is a consortium of some 50 American universities that has formed the campusless, degree-granting National Technical University offering multi-university academic curricula. Forbes attempts to strike terror in the hearts of academics by hyperbolically asserting, in the present tense indicative, "Colleges and universities as we know them are obsolete [my emphasis]."
I should like to attempt what should be the impossible on a university campus: Imagine a world without universities. I invite you to follow me in this effort by asking what would be missing if there were no more universities. I shall proceed by examining, one by one, just a few of the "roles" that universities have come to play in modern society. I am using the term "role," rather than "task" or "function," because it is more indeterminate and permits me to avoid the question of how particular tasks came to be "assigned." As Clark Kerr, the former president of our great sister, the University of California, said in his famous 1963 lecture on "The Idea of a Multiversity": "No man created it; in fact, no man visualized it."
I turn to:
1. The role of universities in education and professional training.
From their very beginning, universities have performed the teaching role, especially in professionally training lawyers, theologians and doctors. And we are still employing essentially the same approach that enticed students from all over Europe to Bologna as early as the 12th century. We expect students to travel to a physical place (often many countries away) where they will find a set course of more or less tightly integrated studies based mostly on lectures and seminars by recognized experts.
Before Gutenberg, this was quite efficient. Even after Gutenberg, it has remained so as long as books were relatively expensive or students needed extensive research libraries or anatomical theaters or laboratories or concentrations of famous scholars. Nothing has as yet substituted for the intellectual excitement of a good seminar or lab or clinical rounds at a hospital.
If the university as a corporeal entity were to disappear, propagation of existing knowledge would no doubt continue, as would professional training. In addition to the "information industry" a "knowledge industry" will develop - is indeed lurking around the corner. Software producers may well become competitors of universities. You can presently buy courses on videotape - a rather ancient technology - in philosophy, fine arts, science, religion and history taught, to quote one sales pitch, by "today's most compelling and charismatic university lecturers." One of these sets, quite ambitious in content, is produced by a partnership appropriately called "The Teaching Company." They had the foresight to obtain a trademark for their name.
One observer believes that "CD-ROMs will soon rob teachers of their power because students will have instant access to everything teachers know." While "soon" may be a considerable overstatement, given the quality of present products, much of the instructional software will be superb, indeed superior to the "live talking-heads" that have been with us since Bologna. Even the corpses needed for anatomical instruction are beginning to be supplanted by "virtual corpses." Promotional copy I read recently praises a "video dissector" because "unlike the actual cadaver, the program can be rewound."
The Internet will make it unnecessary for students to travel long distances. Computer bulletin boards and other electronic fora will become more structured and organized - though, as in a real marketplace, they will continue to amass garbage, and lots of it. Teaching will become available to students, 24 hours a day, regardless of whether they are still in high school in West Bloomfield, Michigan, or are postdocs in Sri Lanka.
The main question is this: Will technological substitution be complete, or will the university as a physical space continue to attract students? For a variety of reasons that remain to be examined, I assume that the traditional university will not disappear. However, in the future, very different tradeoffs will be made by students and parents.
When distance-learning alternatives develop that will seem to save individuals, families and the public money, these alternatives will have a profound impact on the traditional college and university. For one, they will shorten the course of studies. The line between high school and college will blur perhaps even more than the one between an advanced degree and continuing education. Learning will become less concentrated in time because there will be less need to take advantage of one's presence in a physical space. This phenomenon will further enhance the shift to life-long learning.
Having said this much, John Etchemendy has reminded me to recall Wittgenstein's distinction between "knowledge-that," i.e., knowledge of propositions, and "knowledge-how," i.e., knowledge of how to do things, as a general reminder that much knowledge is imparted by interaction. Personal trade-offs and preferences apart, the question is what learning and which skills can not be taught at a distance. I do not presume to know the answer, though I certainly urge caution before declaring victory for the electronic media.
However this may be, no university in the world, not even the best, will be exempted from reviewing - in a searching and comprehensive manner, department by department - the quality of its teaching programs with a view to improving preprofessional and professional education. For the first time, universities actually may be able to achieve productivity gains in some areas of teaching. Due to the personnel-intensive traditional modes of teaching, universities, in the past, have not participated in the productivity gains in the economy that, ironically, can be traced to the very discoveries ultimately attributable to universities. We must examine without delay how we will use the new technologies, what investments in infrastructure and software development are called for, and how new video-conferencing technology can lead to increased interaction among universities for improvements and savings in programs. All of this should go without saying, but it does not. I think we are unduly complacent about the change of pace.
2. The role of universities in credentialing.
Again, from their very beginning, universities have certified accomplishments. Our present degree structure is in the truest sense of the word "medieval."
The question is, how would the world adjust to the absence of university certification of "higher" education? This may be an anthropological question as much as one dealing with rational choices. Can the modern world do without the status conferred by traditional higher education credentials? Is what Jacques Barzun has referred to as a "mandarin system" by now so all pervasive that credentialing amounts to a major raison d'être of universities?
According to a 1990 poll by Yankelovich, Clancy & Shulman, only 17 percent of the American public think the main reason to go to college is to become more broadly educated. I say "only 17 percent" because that is what the commentators emphasize. Actually, that 17 percent of the public wants to be more broadly educated strikes me as a gratifyingly high proportion. In any event, 67 percent believe that the main reason for college is to get the skills for a good job. If employers were to abandon college and university degrees as - at least as a matter of convenient fiction - marks of job readiness, then the world might learn to do without universities as issuers of credentials. Whole batteries of proficiency tests might become the means by which to demonstrate preparation for various careers.
3. The role of universities in social integration.
To some extent, since their origins, universities have been places where one meets utter strangers in terms of social or ethnic background. The medieval university was open to male individuals regardless of origin or rank or proximity of residence.
Contemporary universities are characterized by a remarkable extent of peaceful interaction across multiple social boundaries. I think we do not make enough of the fact that, relatively speaking, American universities may be the most diverse and integrated institutions in the world. Included in that social integration is their extraordinary capacity to bring all ages together - what our colleague Michael Bratman calls "vertical integration."
Without colleges and universities, nations - at least those without the military draft or its equivalent - would have to rely on schools and the workplace as the main fora for sustained interaction among segments of society. Distance learning, as television before it, is likely to increase social isolation, though the electronic pen pals from the Internet may offer some, if only "virtual," protection against such isolation.
4. The role of universities in providing a rite of passage.
Universities also perform the function of furthering the process of coming of age, of growing up. The residential version of the American college may have no equal in challenging the familiar; in challenging prejudices, and values; in creating uncertainties; in bringing about new ways of relating to one another. Its emphasis on socialization and peer interaction, in the eyes of many, make the college environment, as distinguished from the college curriculum, a formative and formidable experience that is valued in its own right, independently of any academic purposes. The rite of passage is one reason, anthropologically speaking, Americans go to college. It is, of course, only one reason, and it is not the reason anybody invokes to justify tuition.
To imagine a world without colleges is to ask what value, including monetary value, people attach to the rite of passage. Most universities the world over are not residential. Most systems of higher education do not interpose college between secondary education and specialized pursuits. At some level, it is therefore easy to imagine a world without college. However, as someone who has been severely taken to task merely for suggesting that natural law has not laid down that college last four years rather than, say, three, I cannot be so sure.
5. The role of universities in "networking."
For emphasis, I separate this aspect from the role of universities in social integration and in providing a rite of passage. A couple of years ago, I discussed the length of undergraduate education with a group of Stanford students. When I timidly asked whether it could be done in three years, instead of four, a student suggested strongly that one of the main functions of college was to make friends: Three years meant fewer opportunities.
There can be little doubt that, for all those who attended, friends and acquaintances from college and university constitute an important network in terms of social life, career developments, business and political connections. "We met in college" is, even in our day and age, an often satisfactory explanation for preferment. Universities have provided these networks since time immemorial, anywhere in the world and reaching across the world.
There are strong utilitarian reasons for being part of a university if one wants to maximize opportunities, from marriage to career. The untested question is how many would be prepared to do without this forum. Probably this is not an either-or proposition and thus the question becomes one of how much value individuals are willing to attach to this aspect of higher education in its traditional form.
My point is that integration, maturing and "networking" in the past were no more than supporting roles, by-products of studying at universities. Their relative importance may change in the future as people weigh the advantages of attending the physical university against the advantages of distance learning.
6. The role of universities in knowledge assessment and creation.
The origins of universities are intertwined with the dominant position that Aristotelian logic achieved in the 12th century. To quote Alan Cobban: "This pre-eminence of logic marked a radical deflection from an educational system based upon a passive adoption of an inherited culture to one in which a challenging and analytical approach to both classical and contemporary material was paramount."
The main task of the university has been to question and to challenge fundamental assumptions and practices - that is, by implication to favor change if these assumptions and practices prove to be wrong. However, the university's commitment is to knowledge and research, not to a particular content or to specific results. That is why so many people so frequently get impatient with universities.
The quest for "applications," for research that is "targeted," has been pressed on universities from the beginning of the millennium to the American land-grant universities of the 19th century and, of course, to contemporary views worldwide that universities should be engines for economic progress. No less a philosopher than Leibniz favored theoria cum praxi and urged the creation of an academy of sciences that would look to useful applications. The "ideal type" of the modern university, Wilhelm von Humboldt's concept of a new university for Berlin, was developed to counteract pressures for immediate practicality. Humboldt's five conditions of a true university were: the unity of teaching and research or, put differently, "education through research"; interdisciplinariness; unforced and undirected cooperation; solitude; and freedom.
Some of Humboldt's conditions for the successful pursuit of knowledge, of course, have never been fully met at Berlin or elsewhere. However, can the world do without universities that at least strive to meet them? In the short run, the answer is probably "yes." As Edward Shils has said, universities' achievements cannot be measured in a clear and convincing way. Therefore, what would be lost by the disappearance of true universities would take time to be understood. Alas, if that were to happen, it would be too expensive to rebuild the complex and fragile infrastructure of research-intensive universities. I worry that the United States and other countries are increasingly losing sight of the conditions that create good work and good institutions.
The budget pressures that all governments feel undoubtedly mean that we will face cutbacks in the support of education and research and its infrastructure. We do not expect to be exempted as all other aspects of the country's activities are being reviewed. However, universities are incredibly complex institutions, the financing of whose research has been supported in major ways by a variety of federal agencies. As the budgets of these agencies get reduced, the cumulative impact on research-intensive universities could be devastating without anybody intending such a result. Stanford, for instance, will be affected by what happens to various student loan programs, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare, the departments of Defense and Energy, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Institutions such as Stanford are built over generations stone by stone. They also can be destroyed by removing stone after stone until the edifice crumbles at an accelerating pace. Destruction does not take many generations.
In 1954, Herbert Hoover gave one of the most eloquent defenses of university research when receiving an honorary degree from the University of Tübingen - one of Clark Kerr's institutions that date back to before 1520. Hoover said:
It is by the free shuttle of ideas between our universities that we weave the great tapestries of knowledge. Our academic traditions have developed a system that is peculiarly effective in spotting outstanding intellects and putting them to work in a climate that fosters creative, original thinking.
From the mutual building by our university faculties and laboratories devoted to abstract science have come most of the great discoveries of natural law. The application of these discoveries through invention and production has been the task of the engineers and technicians whom we train. Applied science dries up quickly unless we maintain the sources of discovery in pure science. From these dual activities of the scientists and the technicians, a great stream of blessings in health, comfort and good living has flowed to all our people.
7. The role of universities in the selection of academic elites and in peer review.
When Hoover said that "our academic traditions have developed a system that is peculiarly effective in spotting outstanding intellects and putting them to work in a climate that fosters creative, original thinking," he referred to the universities.
Universities have in the past played, and continue now to play, a role in the creation and maintenance of societal elites. Also, throughout history, beginning with the first lawyers trained in Roman law in Bologna, universities have contributed to specific elites from the political to business. They have been important means for upward social mobility.
The role I am singling out here has to do with selecting those who themselves have the capacity to become scholars. In many countries some institutions of higher learning can be very selective in the admission of applicants generally or as to specific programs. Entry competition, competition within a university and competition among universities, especially in the incredibly open and flexible American higher education system, leads to a lot of winnowing out. The system is far from perfect, but the likelihood that it will actually bring excellences to the fore is greater than in a less competitive, less differentiated system. The system depends on institutions that aim for the highest quality, and a society that itself wants to be at the frontiers of discovery and intellectual vibrancy will not easily get, or remain, there if it abandons the institutions that are dedicated to the recognition and challenging - and, thereby, the nurturing - of excellences.
Faculty members also provide peer-review services to grant-making institutions, in order to assess the quality of research proposals, and to refereed journals. The cooperative, socially organized nature of knowledge has been recognized and supported liberally by the universities. The peer-review system has been remarkably open to the world. It has never been perfect but is analogous to what Churchill said about democracy: that it is "the worst form of government except for all others."
8. The role of universities in fostering a worldwide community of scholars.
While particular universities or societies are, at times, excruciatingly parochial when it comes to recognizing the quality of institutions elsewhere or of "foreign" scholars, the work of the university has been universal by aspiration and character. The "republic of learning" has been the first global industry. This is one reason why faculty members have taken with such zest to the downsizing of the world by the communications revolution, from airplanes to the Internet.
The question is how universities can cope with ever increasing opportunities for, and demands on, faculty members to engage in what we still call, somewhat quaintly, "outside activities" in their discipline, with their potential for conflicts of commitment and interest. A friend of mine from my University of Chicago days, the statistician Stephen Stigler, addressed some of these issues in a recent paper. I quote:
It seems plausible that [the] expanding electronic network will eventually lead to a weakening of our sense of institutional identity and a fundamental change in the intellectual competition that organizes our enterprise. Individual faculty may be in closer contact with collaborating colleagues at other universities (or with graduate students working under their direction in other countries) than with faculty and students in slightly different specialties down the hall. The importance of the geographic unit may be eclipsed by intellectual disciplinary units that are international in scope. For the immediate future financial resources that are administered by geographically-constrained universities may restrict the scope of any reconfiguration, but in time even that constraint may diminish, leaving the present research universities effectively operating themselves as foundations supporting international, highly specialized, disciplinary graduate schools.
The prospect of the university of the 21st century is that of a forum without borders. However, almost all universities are national institutions. Included in this category are the very best private universities in the world - universities that are in many ways international public utilities, but financed overwhelmingly locally. I confess that it is very difficult for me to imagine a global republic of learning without traditional universities as major elements. However, a combination of a weakening sense of identity with a dwindling of national sources of support may eventually prove to be highly destructive.
The final aspect I will consider is:
9. The role of universities in the transfer of knowledge.
Universities contribute to knowledge transfer in many different ways. The most obvious are their curriculum and teaching, the books, articles and CD-ROMs produced by their faculty. Through these and other means, they indirectly help establish standards for elementary and secondary schools; those standards, in turn, become vehicles for knowledge transfer. Furthermore, what schools of education discover and teach about how to learn is as important for knowledge transfer as standards of substantive knowledge.
The transfer of knowledge involves, of course, the work of all faculties, from the humanities and the social sciences to the professional schools and the sciences. Mostly it is mediated, though there is increasing direct participation in the economy by means of faculty consulting (creating manifold additional opportunities for conflicts of interest and commitment). University patents and licenses also are of moderately increasing significance. Most important, however, have always been and still are the students.
Graduates of research-intensive universities have a much larger impact on the economy than specific inventions created or discovered by those universities. The extensive use of graduate students in the conduct of university research as part of their training has helped to make the United States' basic research enterprise so outstanding. As Jim Gibbons, dean of our School of Engineering, likes to stress, students trained at top research-intensive universities learn to think from "first principles" and arrive at fresh conclusions. They acquire from their faculty mentors expectations of scientific breakthrough and a knowledge base that are, for instance, the hallmarks of Silicon Valley's success stories.
In a world without universities and their generally accessible research, knowledge still would be created in such places as government-funded research institutes as they exist now in many countries, including the United States. This, however, would eliminate most student participation, and student participation is crucial to both the creation and the transfer of knowledge. There also would continue to be proprietary industry research laboratories that, with the profit motive providing powerful incentives, can indeed be spectacular vehicles for knowledge creation. Hoover's question is how quickly all of this would dry up without the sources of discovery in university research.
*
As we prepare for the second millennium of universities, let us remember that the world may need us, but it does not owe us anything. The history of the last one thousand years of institutions of higher learning has seen waxing, but also a lot of waning. Unless we make the case for our work in its entirety, and pursue it rigorously and efficiently, the world may tire of us and develop new approaches that it will consider adequate substitutes, even though they may not be adequate in fact.
Originally, the physical university was mostly a teaching space. But early in its history, the university also became, and continues to be, a space for intellectual interaction of faculty with students, students with one another and faculty with one another. Some of that interaction already has moved to cyberspace, and the level of activity there grows at a breathtaking speed. The university as a physical space will remain attractive to the extent that we will make it more valuable to people to interact personally and face-to-face in learning and research.
In 12th-century Bologna, students came by horseback over the Alps to sit at the feet of a master. That was the lecture that, in some measure, nine centuries later is still with us. It is hard to believe that the future will belong to it. Indeed, even its past has been questionable. I was reading recently an appreciation by David Starr Jordan of the Stanford ichthyologist Charles Henry, who died in 1928 and for whom the Gilbert Biological Sciences Building is named. Jordan wrote: "He shunned every phase of . . . 'the dry-rot of academic biology.' He taught chiefly through laboratory work, along lines which interest the individual student, and through field excursions. Theoretical matters were taken up regularly at a seminar . . . lectures never served to pour out information which students should gather themselves." While this approach is widely shared nowadays, it will be even more important in our future.
Thus, ironically, as I have said before, our future may lie in going back to the pre-university Socratic gymnasium as our main model of discourse. The university as a physical space will be superior to anything else to the extent that we provide a convincing structure for individual learning. The university will remain viable if we can convince the society in which we exist that it would be poorer but for the continued investment in institutions that combine the rigorous tradition of knowledge and the rigorous search for truth with the excitement of frequently serendipitous discovery and the opportunity for societal greatness.
Maybe that is exactly what Edward Shils had in mind when he wrote, rather mystically, that societies cling to their universities "because, in the last analysis, they are their last best hope for a transfigured existence."
You are here, but why? Perhaps because you believe that universities are our last best hope. Let us make that case in everything we do.