Commentary
Keynote Address at Chinese-Foreign University Presidents' Forum (Shanghai, China)
Richard C. Levin
Yale President
July 18, 2006
I am greatly honored by the invitation of the Ministry of Education to participate in this important biannual forum involving the presidents of China's leading universities and others from around the world. This is a propitious time for such a gathering, as those of us outside China continue to watch with admiration the enormous investment your country is making to improve the capacity, quality, and international standing of your universities. I want to express my gratitude to Minister Zhou Ji for taking the initiative to organize this event. I am delighted to participate.
I have been asked to discuss how universities serve their society. This is a question well worth asking, at a time of such massive investment and growth here in China. To answer the question, I will draw mainly on the experience of American universities, not because their contributions are unique or more important than those of universities elsewhere. I focus on the U.S. experience strictly because I know it best, and I do so in full recognition that some of the lessons learned in my country may not apply directly to China. I have spent parts of the past two summers engaged in an intensive seminar with the leadership teams of fourteen of the universities represented here today, and I have seen how eager my colleagues are to learn about the experience and perspective of other nations – not to mimic foreign practices, but to understand them, digest them, and reflect upon how to adapt them when appropriate for use in a Chinese context.
So let me go straight to the answer. I believe that universities serve their society in many ways, but I will focus on the contribution that they make through three activities in particular: research, education, and institutional citizenship.
First, by advancing knowledge of science, technology, and medicine universities create the foundation for economic growth, material well-being and improvements in human health.
Second, by educating students to be capable of flexible, adaptive, and creative responses to changing conditions, universities strengthen their society's capacity to innovate.
And, third, by serving as models of institutional citizenship, universities make a direct contribution to social betterment and inspire their students to recognize obligation to serve.
Let me discuss each type of service to society in turn.
University Research as an Engine of Economic Growth
In the modern economy, global competitive advantage derives primarily from a nation's capacity to innovate, to introduce and develop new products, processes, and services. This has clearly been the foundation of America's economic leadership in the period following the Second World War. And one important element in sustaining that leadership has been the strength of American science.
As the principal locus of basic research, America's universities play a key role in sustaining our nation's competitiveness and economic growth. Basic research, by definition, is motivated by curiosity and the quest for knowledge, without a clear, practical objective. Yet basic research is the source from which all commercially oriented applied research and development ultimately flows. I say ultimately because it often takes decades before the commercial implications of an important scientific discovery are fully realized. The commercial potential of a particular discovery is often unanticipated, and often extends to many unrelated industries and applications. In other words, the development of innovative products and services that occurs today usually depends on advances in basic research achieved ten, twenty, or fifty years ago — most often without any idea of the eventual consequences.
The emergence of universities as America's primary basic research machine did not come about by accident. Rather, it was the product of a wise and farsighted national science policy, set forth in an important 1946 report that established the framework for an unprecedented and heavily subsidized system in support of scientific research that has propelled the American economy. The system rested upon three principles that remain largely intact today. First, the federal government shoulders the principal responsibility for financing basic science. Second, universities – rather than government laboratories, non-teaching research institutes, or private industry – are the primary institutions in which this government-funded research is undertaken. This ensures that scientists-in-training, even those who choose industrial rather than academic careers, are exposed to the most advanced methods and results of research. And, third, although the federal budgetary process determines the total funding available for each of the various fields of science, most funds are allocated, not according to commercial or political considerations, but through an intensely competitive process of review conducted by independent scientific experts who judge proposals on their scientific merit alone. This system of organizing science has been an extraordinary success, scientifically and economically.
The second and third of these central principles are worth emphasizing as China accelerates its rate of public investment in science. To isolate the nation's best scientists in research institutes, as was common in the Soviet Union and to some extent in China, deprives the nation of important benefits. It limits the exposure of students, especially undergraduates, to first-rate scientists and, often, to state-of-the-art equipment and methods, which tend to concentrate in the institutes housing the top scientists. Moreover, by removing many of the very best scientists from the university environment, the quality of teaching suffers and the curriculum is less likely to incorporate the latest advances and novel thinking.
Allocating research resources by means other than peer review of proposals submitted by individuals and groups also imposes a huge cost on national systems. In most European countries, political considerations dominate the process of allocating research funds to institutions. There is a powerful tendency toward spreading resources across a large number of institutions. And, even in Britain, where there is rigorous peer review, the bulk of grant funding is awarded by considering the quality of departments taken as a whole rather than judging the merit of specific proposals from individuals. This also tends to shave the peaks of excellence.
Ensuring that world-class science is done in universities should be an important objective of national science policy, and the three principles – adequate government funding, co-locating advanced research and teaching in universities, and peer review that focuses on the merits of individual investigators – have helped the U.S. achieve excellent performance.
To ensure that university-based scientific research truly contributes to national well-being requires that ideas move from theory to practice. For much of the period following World War II, most U.S. universities did not actively seek to participate in the translation of discoveries into new products, processes, and services. An exception was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the mid-1990s, graduates of MIT had founded over 4,000 companies nationwide, and were continuing to create an additional 150 companies a year. Illustrating the impact a university can have on its local economy, more than 1,000 of those companies are based in Massachusetts, accounting for about 25 percent of all manufacturing activity in the state.
If engagement with industry was once the exception among U.S. universities, it is now the norm. Since 1980 over 4,000 companies have been formed based on technology licensed by a university. The shift occurred in part because in 1980 the federal government granted universities the intellectual property rights to inventions made during the course of government-funded research. This simple change created powerful incentives for faculty and their universities to commercialize faculty inventions in order to promote economic development and create additional sources of revenue for academic programs. But the policy change also encouraged a stronger sense that universities could contribute to society by facilitating the commercialization of their research. Many universities in the U.S., like Yale, have sought to use their own research to stimulate the economic development of the city or region in which they are located.
Educating Students for Innovation and Leadership
The knowledge created by the enterprise of academic science is by no means the only important contribution that universities make to the welfare of their societies. By educating students and preparing them well for service across the range of occupations and professions, universities contribute at least as much through their teaching as they contribute through their research. The increase in the number of well-trained engineers here in China has been staggering, and providing students with the requisite skills to obtain and retain productive jobs is important. But I want to talk about a more subtle and profound objective of university education, one that has been achieved with distinction by the very best of America's universities and colleges. And that is educating students to be creative, flexible, and adaptive problem-solvers, capable of innovation and leadership.
The world we live in is fast-paced and constantly changing. New scientific discoveries are made every day, and new theories displace old ones with relentless regularity. Many successful companies produce products or services based on technology or marketing strategies that didn't exist a decade or two ago. And government officials, too, confront a world radically altered by changes in communications technology and new tasks that are dictated by increasing globalization. In such a world, knowledge of a given body of information is not enough to survive, much less thrive; scientists, business leaders, and government officials alike must have the ability to think critically and creatively, and to draw upon and adapt ideas to new environments.
The methods of undergraduate education used by America's most selective and distinguished universities and liberal arts colleges are particularly well suited to prepare students for a changing world. These institutions are committed to the "liberal education" of undergraduates. The premise underlying the philosophy of liberal education is that students will be best prepared for life if they can assimilate new information and reason through to new conclusions. Since any particular body of knowledge is bound to become obsolete, the object of liberal education is not to convey any particular content, but to develop certain qualities of mind: the ability to think independently, to regard the world with curiosity and ask interesting questions, to subject the world to sustained and rigorous analysis, to use where needed the perspectives of more than one discipline, and to arrive at fresh, creative answers. Society gains most from a pedagogy that seeks to enlarge the power of students to reason, to think creatively, and to respond adaptively.
What does this mean in practical terms? It means that, at America's best universities and colleges, education is not a one-way street. Information is no longer simply conveyed from faculty to students and reproduced on examinations. Consider the following description of Woodrow Wilson's teaching, from the days when he was a professor at Princeton University. It provides a good example of a style of pedagogy that is no longer used at the best American institutions.
Professor Wilson habitually stood during his lectures. Speaking from a mere skeleton of notes, he hammered in his teachings with an up-and-down, full-armed gesture. Thus he was a perpendicular lecturer, his talking nose and his oscillating Adam's apple moving up and down with speech, along with his pump-handle gestures. He gestured as if operating the handle of a spray pump. He was there to spray students with a shower of knowledge, his superior mind acting downward upon the mass — a Scotch Covenanter bent upon describing how man acts politically, hammering information into reluctant minds . . . 1
Even as recently as the 1930s and 40s, in many college classes, professors spewed forth information in lectures, students copiously took notes, memorized them, and then "recited" them back to the professor when called upon in class. Today, students cannot simply rely on a good memory to succeed in college. Although lectures are still used in many courses, they are supplemented by other forms of pedagogy, and students are no longer encouraged to recite back what they hear in class or read in a textbook. Instead, students are encouraged to think for themselves — to offer their own opinions and interpretations in participatory seminars, writing assignments, and examinations.
The participatory seminar is now a fundamental part of most undergraduate and graduate programs at America's top universities and liberal arts colleges. The purpose of small seminars is to challenge students to articulate their views and defend them in the face of classmates and the professor, who may disagree. The format forces them to reason through issues and to think critically for themselves, not just repeat what a professor has told them or what they have read. Often, these seminars are accompanied by in-depth research and writing assignments, where students are required to engage in independently study and write a paper articulating and defending their own conclusions.
Even most lecture classes for undergraduates have some form of discussion section attached to them, to give students the opportunity to discuss for themselves the materials being presented in lecture. Like the participatory seminar, these discussion sections consist of relatively small numbers of students, and, especially in the humanities and social sciences, they emphasize exchanging views and developing analytical skills, not memorization and recitation.
Professors also encourage critical thinking by the form of writing assignments they require and by the kind of examination questions they ask. Exams emphasize analysis and problem solving rather than description and memory. Many exam questions don't have a correct answer; they are designed to see how well a student can draw upon the facts and theoretical explanations at their disposal to fashion a coherent and defensible argument of their own.
This distinctive emphasis on critical thinking produces graduates who are intellectually flexible and open to new ideas, graduates equipped with curiosity and the capacity to adapt to ever-changing work environments, graduates who, in business, can convert new knowledge into new products and services and who, in government, can find innovative solutions to new challenges.
The University as an Institutional Citizen
I'd like next to explore with you one more way in which universities can contribute to society – by being good institutional citizens of their communities. In this way universities can contribute directly to local economic development, neighborhood improvement, public education, health care, social services, and environmental awareness. But they also contribute indirectly by modeling good citizenship for their students, thus helping to inculcate in them a sense of social responsibility.
When I became Yale's President in 1993, the city of New Haven, Connecticut was deeply troubled. It was suffering from the absence of industrial investment and job creation, a partially abandoned downtown, blighted neighborhoods, and an unflattering external image. Ten years later, a feature article in the New York Times travel section called New Haven "an irresistible destination."
When I took office, we decided to develop a comprehensive strategy for civic engagement, create administrative infrastructure to support that strategy, and make a substantial, long-term commitment to its implementation. We recognized that the most enduring contributions we could make would require partnership with public officials and neighborhood interest groups in New Haven, but we knew this would take time to develop. To signal emphatically to both the university community and the city the seriousness of our commitment, we took three important unilateral steps during the first year of my tenure. First, to provide appropriate support for the implementation of our strategies, we established an Office of New Haven and State Affairs. Second, to demonstrate institutional endorsement of the prodigious volunteer efforts of our students, we established a program of paid summer internships to support the work of students in city agencies and nonprofit service organizations. Third, to stimulate immediately the process of strengthening neighborhoods, we announced what has become the most visible and successful of our urban initiatives: the Yale Homebuyer Program. The program, now widely imitated, subsidizes home purchases by our faculty and staff in the neighborhoods surrounding the campus. Of the nearly 900 employees who have participated in the program over the last 12 years, 80% were first time homebuyers.
One element of our strategy to become an institutional citizen was to accelerate Yale's effort to contribute to economic development through technology transfer, a strategy that has also been successful adopted by many Chinese universities. In our case, the lack of critical mass in electrical engineering and computer science had caused Yale – and consequently New Haven – to miss out on the technological revolution that spurred the development of Silicon Valley around Stanford and Boston's Route 128 in the vicinity of MIT and Harvard. But Yale has impressive strength in biomedical sciences, and thus in 1993 we had tremendous unexploited potential to build a biotechnology industry in and around New Haven.
We sought out faculty with an interest in commercializing their results, used students at our School of Management to prepare business plans, drew upon Yale's extensive connections in the venture capital business to find financing, and helped to find real estate solutions in New Haven. We are seeing results. More than thirty new biotechnology companies have been established in greater New Haven area. These firms have attracted over $2 billion in capital.
One of the major constraints in the initial years of this economic development effort was real estate. We worked closely with state and city officials to revive a long moribund Science Park at a factory location abandoned more than two decades ago by the Olin Corporation. Once the initial, publicly funded facilities had been fully leased, and it was clear that Yale was continuing to generate two or three new companies each year, private capital moved in to develop one million square feet of new space.
The development of a strong biotechnology industry in and around New Haven augurs well for the long term, but it did little to address the immediate needs of the low income, inner city neighborhoods that surround our campus. To build trust and credibility, it was essential to establish working partnerships with grassroots organizations and community leaders. Neighborhood partnerships also provided an opportunity to coordinate and focus on a common purpose the enormous talent and energy of our student volunteers.
In one nearby neighborhood to the west of our campus, we mobilized faculty and students from the schools of architecture, law, and management to help neighborhood residents develop a comprehensive plan for revitalization. We sought and won a sizeable federal grant to allow implementation of this resident-led plan that support job training, housing improvements, and support for the neighborhood elementary school. With the assistance of our Law School's clinical program and another federal grant we helped to secure, a new community development corporation was formed. Among the results of our collaborative efforts in this neighborhood are an addition to the neighborhood elementary school designed by Yale architecture students, the first new urban supermarket in the state of Connecticut in a generation – an effort facilitated by the work of management school students, an extensive literacy program staffed by undergraduate volunteers, community gardens planted with the assistance of Forestry School students, and improvisational children's theater programs mounted by Drama School students.
We have also worked extensively in another neighborhood to the northwest of campus. We rehabilitated a substantial number of residential properties we own and lease to graduate students, setting in a motion a process that has encouraged other neighbors – including participants in our Homebuyer program – to invest in the upgrading of their own homes. We have worked closely with community residents on plans to develop a large vacant site that sits directly between the university and a new, very attractive low-rise public housing project developed under a federal grant that we helped the city secure. We have used a portion of this site for a new headquarters for our University Police, which provides safety and security to those nearby. The new facility incorporates a community center, with a computer cluster for school children and heavily used meeting space for community organizations. We are now relocating the outpatient health care facility that serves our faculty, staff, and students to the site, where we will engage the neighborhood in numerous health outreach programs.
Complementing our neighborhood efforts are some very substantial public school collaborations. At one high school over 200 students participate in science courses taught by members of our medical and nursing school faculties, and 65 students live on campus during the summer to study science and work in laboratories. And at the local arts high school, students from our School of Music play an active role in the instructional program. We also take pride in the twenty-eight year old Yale New Haven Teachers Institute, an innovative program now being disseminated nationwide, where professors work during the summer with public school teachers as partners in curriculum development.
As a final component of our neighborhood outreach, we have endeavored to make our campus more accessible to local school children. In addition to opening our museums to school visits, which has been the practice for generations, we now make our extensive athletic facilities available to hundreds of children enrolled in the National Youth Sports Program during the summer, and we host a citywide science fair each year.
It has been most heartening to me in conducting an Internet search to discover the extent to which Chinese universities are also reaching out to serve the residents of their local communities. Over 30 educational institutions in China have provided legal services to people with difficulties. The East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai has helped of 60,000 people, and the Center for the Protection of Rights of Disadvantaged Citizens at Wuhan University has served more than 30,000. Sichuan University defends criminal suspects who cannot afford lawyers, and a legislative clinic at the Northwest University of Politics and Law in Xian helps the local government conduct legal research and write new laws.
Student volunteerism is apparently as robust on Chinese campuses as it is in the United States. At Northwestern Industry University, students gave more than 100,000 hours of tutoring to 2800 children of recently laid off workers. At the Shanghai Second Medical School, students have conducted AIDS education programs that reach over 18,000 people. Recently, students at Fudan University established a Student Volunteer Union to bring together the volunteer groups on campus that work on issues ranging from disaster preparedness to community development.
Volunteerism in China seems also to focus on the problems of the nation's rural areas. For example, Student Volunteers for Rural Support, a network connecting rural volunteer societies in 120 different institutions of higher education, has encouraged 20 of these societies to adopt specific villages, where students assist in tutoring and the construction of public buildings. And Tongi University is sending more than 200 students to 28 rural locations to work on health and environment issues.
Yale's China Law Center has been privileged to collaborate with several Chinese law schools in public service projects. For example, at Peking University, we have worked with the Center for Public Participation Research on reforming the transparency and responsiveness of systems of administrative rulemaking at the local and national level. And at the China University of Political Science and Law we have collaborated on projects to promote the oversight role of China's legislature and reform in the regulation of the media.
Such efforts to mobilize students and faculty in support of worthy civic causes, as well as efforts by the leadership of institutions to contribute directly to the betterment of the broader community that surrounds us, flow naturally from the mission and purposes of our institutions. On our campuses we are devoted to the development of full human potential of our students and faculty. But many of our neighbors lack the opportunity to flourish. We, with the privilege of education, can help those without privilege gain access to greater opportunity. Thus, universities contribute through their citizenship, as well as through their research and teaching, to the betterment of society.
1 Alfred Pearce Dennis, "Princeton Schoolmaster," in Houston Peterson, ed., Great Teachers, Portrayed by Those Who Studied under Them 134 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1946).
