An address by Frank H. T. Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, February 13, 1996:

It is a pleasure to be part of this AAAS session on "Whither the Research-Intensive University?"

Let me begin by pointing out that it is difficult, if not actually dangerous, to answer such a rhetorical question with any degree of precision. Mark Twain was right when he observed, "Predictions are very difficult to make, especially when they deal with the future." And those who fancy themselves to be experts on a particular subject should remember the words of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister: "What all the wise men promised has not happened," Lord Melbourne said, "and what all the damned fools predicted has come to pass."

If history is any guide, those of us who are thought to be fairly knowledgeable about higher education may have no better track record in predicting the future of research-intensive universities than any one else. Still let me try to describe the current state of the research-intensive universities, how they arrived at their present position, and what I think they must do if they are to remain an important force in American life. There is no doubt that America's universities are caught in a paradox. Public expectations have rarely been higher; public confidence and support, rarely lower.

Resolution of the paradox is critical to the nation, but it can only come about if we understand research universities for what they are today, not for what we think they once were. As Will Rogers noted long ago, "The schools are not as good as they used to be, but they never were." When it comes to judging universities, critics often compare there with institutions that flourished before there were computers, space shuttles or gene guns.

Academic insiders, too, often seem unaware of recent, sweeping changes and their implications. Yet while today's universities may have failed to apply the old virtues to new realities, they are still essential to our national well-being. What is needed, I Believe, is a combination of internal self-renewal and external support, which can resolve the paradox successfully, that is, to the greater benefit of society.

The complaints against universities during the last five years or so are as serious as they are comprehensive:

 

• unreasonably high tuition
• neglect of undergraduate teaching in favor of
• inconsequential research
• fragmented fields of study
• garbled educational purposes
• trivialized scholarship
• improper accounting techniques, particularly with respect to
• federal research funds
• falsification of experimental results
• conflicts of interest
• preaching politics
• the imposition of political correctness

Perhaps most damning, in an era when the American people are being asked to "sacrifice" for the sake of long-term strength, universities are perceived as self-indulgent, arrogant, and resistant to change. Yet as unhappy as many Americans seem to be about aspects of their universities, most also acknowledge the institutions' great value to the nation. Having conquered polio and other devastating diseases with vaccines and antibiotics developed in their labs, surely they have something valuable to offer in the fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS. Having given us the laser, the transistor, and the high-speed computer chip, surely they can give us more of the high technology the nation needs to compete in the markets of the world. Having conferred substantial earnings advantages on their graduates, surely they can continue to provide economic opportunity to future generations of young people, especially those from groups not formerly well-represented in higher education. Having applied research to make American agriculture preeminent, surely they can apply social science to redeem America's cities. And, although it is much harder to document the contributions of the liberal arts or humanities, whose teaching has itself become a target of criticism, surely these disciplines still have much to teach about what it means to be human.

But why have the expectations for universities grown at the very time confidence in them has declined? What is often unrecognized in the current debate is the extent to which the universities have already changed from the ivory towers of earlier years. They have become, both by demand and by choice, far more actively involved in the large issues of public life. They are now citizens, partners in a social compact which places great responsibility and high expectations upon them. They provide, not only the products of their research, but also experts who can advise government and business, and graduates with the talent and energy to engage the issues of tomorrow. In their greater social engagement, universities have themselves undergone significant changes, some of them controversial and confusing. I believe these changes are the reflection of deeper changes rooted in America's character.

The most critical deeper changes are: inclusiveness, professionalization, the ascendancy of science. I want to talk about each of those, in turn, and then suggest how we might deal effectively and productively with the evolving interface between universities and the society in which they are imbedded.

First, universities have deliberately become more inclusive in their membership and in their programs of study and research. In aggregate they have made a deliberate and far-reaching commitment to equal access and social mobility. The origin of this commitment can be traced back to the founding of the land-grant universities in the 19th century, but the pace of the process has accelerated in the last fifty years and it has come to embrace all institutions, private as well as public. The GI Bill brought to the campus a wave of veterans, many of whom would otherwise have had little opportunity to participate in higher education.

More recently, a sustained program of affirmative action has been successful in increasing enrollment of women and other under-represented groups. The greater presence of these groups has enriched the campus community and has brought new interests and new insights, which have had a significant impact upon the membership of the university. Universities have also become more inclusive in their curricula. They have responded to public needs by offering new fields of study, from environmental health, safety and policy issues, to urban and regional planning, from gerontology to real estate management. These inclusive changes in membership and in programs, and the growth in size they have brought with them, have effectively ended the isolation of the campus and transformed the nature of the university. Ivory towers they are no longer. They are, more than ever, imbedded in the society that surrounds them and reflective of its membership.

Second, over the last 50 years, university studies have become far more professional in the scope of their curricula and far more practical in their orientation. It is not the presence of professional and practical studies that is new, but rather their dominance. Most of the new additions, such as those above, are professional, while longer-established schools of medicine, dentistry, public health, law, engineering, architecture, agriculture, management, public communication and other professional disciplines loom larger than ever before, both in enrollment and in influence. Premedical education, for example, has had a major influence, distorting and stifling in some ways, on the general pattern of undergraduate education. Even the humanities and social sciences, disciplines that were once coherent fields of study, have now been splintered and subdivided into a host of sub-specialties in an attempt to link them more directly to training for a specific career. Third, the ascendancy of science, both as a professional study and as a dominating influence, has noticeably changed the culture of the university. Unlike most other countries, the United States concentrates much of its basic research in universities rather than in government laboratories and institutes. Along side the desirable results of this --the institutes. Along side the desirable results of this --the closer linkage of the basic sciences to medicine and engineering; the practical benefits of the association of education and research -- there have been results of more debatable value. The model of scientific knowledge -- factual, sequential, undebatable and unengaging -- has often had a baleful effect, not only within science, but also far beyond it.

It is the cumulative effect of these changes, which began to build around the turn of the century and accelerated rapidly after World War II, that underlies virtually all the charges that are leveled against America's universities. American research universities may attract half the world's graduate students, but they also attract controversy as they try to resolve the political, social, and cultural conflicts of the larger society.

Like it or not, the moral influence of the great universities has diminished as they have assumed new responsibilities and new priorities and established new partnerships with business and government. Moral pronouncements tend to flow more freely from those in ivory towers than from those with rolled-up sleeves and grimy hands laboring in the trenches. As Alexander Astin's annual surveys of freshman attitudes have shown, far more freshmen today believe it is more important to prepare for a well-paying career in college than it is to find a meaningful philosophy of life.

But on the whole, the new university's benefits to society have been immense. From the Green Revolution, to antibiotics, to the new opportunities and hope that education has provided for millions from deprived backgrounds, universities have steadily enlarged the democratic dream and steadily extended life's decencies to people worldwide. To focus complaint on the mere symptoms of change, ignoring its benefits, is to shadow box. To denounce all teaching by graduate students, for instance, without accepting that such apprenticeship is an integral part of the modern university is very much like denouncing electricity or automobiles: denounce them if you will, but do not pretend that America can exist without them.

The changes wrought by these three forces are very much American. Though their effects on universities seem compressed into several decades, they sum up the journey America itself has made since its founding. But inclusiveness, science and professionalism, without a moral foundation, lead to empty success. Universities, as much as nations, need their moral moorings. More people knowing more facts about more fields has nothing to do with how wisely or happily they live. However dazzling may be the material implications of palm-held supercomputers, they will not in themselves elevate the quality of our national life any more than television did 50 years ago. I would not presume to reform society at large, but I do have some ideas for our universities.

I believe there are four simple reaffirmations we need to make to the public if they are to understand that research universities are unique and vital and serve a role that no other institution in our society can fill.

The first affirmation is this: Scholarship is a public trust.Our scholarship is supported by the public. How many books does a university need to educate an undergraduate? How many books will a typical undergraduate student use over the course of four years? I don't know the answer to that, but it is not, I suggest, the five million volumes in the library of my own university, Cornell. How many periodicals does it take to provide a comprehensive and well-rounded undergraduate education. Again, I don't know precisely, but not, I think, the 59,000 periodical titles we have in the library at Cornell. Major universities have libraries of impressive size -- and Cornell's is hardly the largest --because the public believes in what we, as scholars and researchers, do.

Scholarship is a public trust, and that puts two obligations on us that I see rarely fulfilled across the country. First, as creators of knowledge, we must also engage in explanation and application where appropriate. We need to become advocates of scholarship because our voices not being raised in response to the Allan Blooms, Martin Andersons, Charles Sykeses, and all the rest of our critics.

Most of us regard our scholarship as completed when it is published, exhibited or performed. But we need to move beyond mere publication to explanation and advocacy for research as such. We hear again and again that useful research is the only kind worthy of support by the state or federal government. We must become champions of the scholarship we represent.

Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, speaking at the American Astronomical Society on January 15, 1996, said it well:

"If you don't take it as one of your professional responsibilities to inform your fellow citizens about the importance of the science and technology enterprise, then that public support, critical to sustaining it, isn't going to be there. Who knows more about science, its complex relationship with technology, the linkage between research and education, the often unexpected benefits to society, than you. . . ? Who understands better than anyone the price our nation will pay if we fall behind in science and technology in the effort to downsize government? I sit self-serving to advocate support for science? Perhaps. But if the "self"' is the American people and the position of leadership of the U.S. in all fields of science and technology in the 21st century, then I wouldn't worry too much about appearing self-serving."

And what holds for science and technology holds also for the humanities, the social sciences, and the creative and performing arts. We must become champions for the scholarship we represent.

Second, within this affirmation of scholarship as a public trust, we must also begin to build bridges internally so that we link research to the undergraduate experience in increasingly effective ways and also build bridges between our colleges and to the community. We talk a lot in universities about interdisciplinary efforts, but in practice most universities are still divided into departmental cells. For educational and economic reasons we must work to build bridges -- not walls -- between researchers and scholars with complementary interests no matter where in our administrative structure they may be found.

The second affirmation I believe universities must make is that service is a societal obligation. Our greatest service is providing educated men and women and highly trained professionals for society at large. But we should also re-examine the role of the land-grant university in these, the closing years of the 20th century. These are the sub-set of universities established by the Morrill Act of 1862 and the second Morrill Act of 1898 to provide instruction in "agriculture and the mechanic arts" and which, through the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, were given specific responsibilities for extension and outreach -- for using the fruits of their research and scholarship for the public good. Yet many of these institutions are still using the 19th century model, the agricultural model, while the problems that confront their constituents are urban, industrial, environment, professional, and personal.

We must begin to address, along with the needs of the food and agriculture industry, these other problems. At my own university, prompted by concern from Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) about higher-than-average "clusters" of breast cancer in some regions of the state, we are mounting a new synthesis and public information program that will examine the environmental risk factors for breast cancer in women of New York and the United States. The program will interpret and disseminate research information on both the established and suspected risk factors for the disease. Also planned is a publicly accessible database, within the Pesticide Management Education Program at Cornell, covering chemical pesticides and their sales and use in New York. And when my successor as Cornell President, Hunter R. Rawlings III, was in Taiwan last month, one of his meetings was with a group of Asian venture capitalists who had come together to learn more about Cornell and the businesses that had been "spun off" from campus research.

Not every research program will yield marketable results, and I would be the first to argue for a strong program of federally funded basic research. But if service is truly a societal obligation, then universities must do far better than they have in ensuring that the fruits of their research are developed for the public good.

The third reaffirmation is that teaching is a moral vocation.I can see myself making that statement in a faculty meeting and watching a fair number of eyes roll up. There would be qualification and polite dissent. I believe teaching has a moral dimension because of its impact not just on the mind but on the character and the will. And I believe, as most of you probably do, that it is a "calling," and not just a means of earning a living in order to allow us to do research. If teaching is the core business of faculty members, as I believe it should be, both the content and the method of teaching should attract our attention and our concern.

An important need in that regard is to recapture the curriculum. I believe the curriculum has escaped from the faculty at large and has fallen into the hands of individuals. We pile on course after course after course. We need to ask ourselves the point behind the courses. Do undergraduates really need the 4,000 choices offered at many research universities? Can't we do a better job of bringing some coherence to the undergraduate experience so that a baccalaureate degree stands for something more than having sat through some number of courses whose cumulative credit hours add up to some magical but meaningless number like 120 or 125? Wouldn't our students be better served by fewer choices, but a clearer idea of what, as new graduates, they should be expected to know and be able to do? I am not advocating more teaching. I would, if anything, advocate less teaching -- bracketing small courses and offering them in alternate years so that we could spend more time advising students. The greatest element of student dissatisfaction in research universities is the inadequacy of faculty advising. We have separated ourselves from students by building up an army of professional advisors of one kind or another. Students yearn for meaningful contact with the faculty, and we should make time for that by offering fewer courses and making ourselves more available.

Let me be clear, however, that dedicated teaching and advising are not to be done in place of research and scholarship. John Slaughter, former head of the National Science Foundation who is now president of Occidental College, had it right when he said, "Research is to teaching as sin is to confession. If you don't participate in the former, you have very little to say in the latter." We need our best scholars to be teachers, and we need them to give the same creative energy to teaching as they give to scholarship. We need to identify, support, and reward those who teach superbly. There is no antithesis between teaching and research. Great teaching can, in fact, be a form of synthesis and scholarship.

To these three affirmations -- that scholarship is a public trust; that service is a societal obligation; that teaching is a moral vocation --I would add one more: that community is the unique means by which universities fulfill their obligations. In 1963, Clark Kerr wrote an insightful book on the uses of the university. He commented then that the original community of the university had become fragmented and, instead of a single community, there were many communities: a community of sciences, a community of arts and letters, a community of social scientists, a community of undergraduates, a community of graduate students. Over the 33 years since Kerr wrote his book, fragmentation has increased, so that now we sometimes do not even have a community of a single department. You remember John Donne's lament on the new Copernican universe: "Tis all in pieces, all cohesion gone."

If universities are to be effective, they need to reestablish a sense of community. Universities were invented because medieval monks believed that scholarship could flourish better in community than in the isolation of monastic cells. We need somehow, in the rambling organizations we have created, to rebuild community: between faculty and students, between faculty and faculty, between the disciplines, between the schools and colleges. We may be able to reach out to colleagues across the world through the Internet and to come together as "virtual" communities on a scale hardly dreamed of even a decade ago. But a bumper sticker I notice frequently in Ithaca, usually on older Volvos -- "Think globally, act locally" -- has a message for universities as well. We need the stimulus of face-to-face communication and shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation on our own campuses, not just the temporary, often anonymous, and usually disengaged communities of cyberspace. It is in the rough and tumble of day-to-day living and daily, direct conversation that faculty members and students can best carry out the work that research universities were invented to do.

Will these reaffirmations be enough to safeguard universities as the federal government scrambles to balance the budget in seven years? Will they preserve student aid programs and funding for basic research? I can't guarantee that research universities will escape the belt-tightening and demands for greater efficiency, productivity and effectiveness that are being asked of other institutions. Indeed, most universities I know have been simplifying, delayering, collaborating and working to do more with less. But administrative changes, by themselves, will not renew the public's confidence in what universities do.

Only if universities renew themselves -- applying old virtues to new realities -- are they likely to strengthen public confidence in their work. The public understands intuitively, without in most cases the benefit of reading Plato or Jefferson, that education is the most fundamental of all social responsibilities. Without it, there can be no democratic state, no personal freedom worthy of the name. With it, a society may achieve greatness.

But we in the universities also have an obligation to the public we rely upon for support. We must continue to be, to a unique degree, the conservators of human experience; the custodians and transmitters of the best that has been thought and written, said and done; the embodiment of openness, rational discourse, and experiment; the creators of new knowledge, fresh insight, novel techniques, and creative approaches. We must be true communities, with all the tensions and advocacy of our larger society, and with the noisy and rancorous debate that sometimes generates. But we must also be communities committed to fairness, reason, and civility.

To the extent that we have fallen from our own high standards and lofty calling, we must reclaim our ground -- not by an enforced return to a vanished 19th-century orthodoxy, but by the restoration of a community of learning, based on engagement with the issues of our day within the context of the enduring values which have shaped both our universities and our civilization. It is that kind of learning community which offers our best hope for the future. It is that kind of learning community that makes the nation's research universities an irreplaceable resource, quite literally a national treasure, whose value to society far exceeds their demands on the public purse. It is that which, when the dust from the budget cutting settles, will mark them as worthy of continued public investment and support.