Dec. 6, 2005

Exporting Thought: The University, Democracy, and Social Progress

The following is an address by President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg to the Institute of International Education’s Humphrey Fellows Nov. 7, 2005.

The following is an address by President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg to the Institute of International Education’s Humphrey Fellows Nov. 7, 2005.
Harold Koh, the distinguished and witty dean of the Yale law school, said his job reminded him of being the caretaker of a large cemetery. While everyone is under him, no one is paying any attention to him. I know what he means. President Emeritus of New York University John Brademas was asked by a former colleague from his years as a member of Congress how it felt when he first became a university president. Brademas answered, “Well, when I was a Congressman, I dealt with a wide diversity of constituents, made a lot of speeches, raised money, resolved conflicts, and wrestled with massive egos. In short, I felt very much at home as the president of NYU.”

Universities and colleges are not orderly factories turning out well-educated, good citizens. They tend, as the observations of Koh and Brademas inform us, to be very much like their societies: recalcitrant, generous, egomaniacal, self-seeking, improvisational, if not downright chaotic, both inspiring and dull, risk-taking and conservative, and creative and plodding. These among other things are their strengths.

Having been a university president for nearly 30 years, I have come to
value — if not always love — the free-for-all qualities of higher education. I hasten to add, the value I sometimes place on the way a university works is tempered by a good deal of frustration. For example, I have tried to change the University calendar in order to use our facilities for 12 months of the year, not just six or seven. The faculty wants no part of it. Someday they will see the light, I hope. But my frustration notwithstanding, what I may call the faculty’s recalcitrance reflects something that is all to the good.
I cannot govern by fiat. Even with the full backing of the Board of Trustees I cannot say, “Let there be three terms, not two,” and Lo, there were three. That is because of one of the adjectives I omitted from my list earlier. Universities and colleges are essentially democratic. Not all institutions are the same, but by and large universities operate on a system of shared governance. I wish people would pay more attention, as Koh said, and I wish there were fewer massive egos, as Brademas noted. But I think the variety of attitudes and the diversity of abilities and intellects is what makes the modern American university the envy of the world.

And our students are aware of it. They understand, or at least feel, the various processes that make a university work. I remember hearing years ago that under Napoleon’s education reforms all French school children were on exactly the same page of the same book at the same time. Perhaps it’s a canard, but it has the ring of truth to it. It is also a frightening idea — and would be to our students. After all, they are used to the freedom of the modern university. For instance, anthropology students might hear radically different interpretations of similar material from two different professors on the same day. This is part of the democratic nature of universities: we call it academic freedom, and it is the opposite of the Napoleonic approach.

This sense of freedom and democracy is one of the things we teach our students indirectly: we do not give introductory courses to all incoming freshmen on the workings of the University. But as they go through their years on campus, they sense it and come to cherish it. It is one of the best arguments I know for teaching by example. Yes, we require some courses and the satisfaction of some general requirements: we are running universities, not buffets. But the requirements are usually not burdensome, and in most cases turn out to be extremely useful. For the rest, students are free to choose their majors and, within those majors, focus more widely or narrowly on topics as their interests direct them.

This is why I said earlier that universities are not factories turning out well-educated citizens. We do turn out well-educated citizens, but not on a production line or with the time-and-motion precision of a well-run factory. That we do it at all is amazing to some, but if you look at our educational goals you will see that it is not all that amazing or even daunting.

Let me start with a premise: the uneducated or poorly educated cannot fully participate in society, and in some cases do not participate in civil society at all. How does education provide the means for young people to participate? I think I can give five reasons that education — especially higher education — enables participation.

First, education is for learning, which also may be called discovery. This may seem absurdly obvious, but remember I mentioned requirements earlier. One purpose of required courses is to expose students to things they know nothing about. Freshmen hardly arrive on campus tabula rasa: they have had 18 years of life or more, some of it perhaps even well spent. They know a great deal, but there is plenty they do not know. Required courses oblige students to look at new things, to discover what they don’t know, to open their eyes to possibilities that may never before have occurred to them.

Moreover, especially in their major years, students acquire a body of knowledge — and maybe even wisdom — which itself is useful. Yet the act of acquiring that body of knowledge — or rather the many acts, including reading, study, argument, and so forth — is to my mind even more important. Education ideally teaches people how to learn and should not end at the schoolhouse door any more than it should end when university graduates move the tassels on their mortarboards from right to left.

Second, education is for the self. It activates the ability to acquire both cultural and artistic tastes, and, in some cases, talents. By “cultural” I do not mean exclusively an appreciation of 17th-century Flemish painting or classical ballet. Rather I mean they acquire the idea of a culture in general, their culture — its politics, economics, social qualities and relationships, the value of a meritocracy, and the importance of the arts and of public service. They also should acquire knowledge about other cultures. And by the way, those with university degrees divorce less, smoke less, have slightly longer life expectancies, and tend to enjoy better health than those who do not have a university or college degree. That has a lot to do with the self, too.
Third, education is for making a living. I know this is sometimes offered as the one true and holy reason for education. People like to point out that college graduates earn at least a 40 percent premium when compared to high school graduates. That is good, but it does not “justify” higher education. The other components I mentioned — and two more I will mention later — are equally justifiable. Making a living, after all, is not simply about making money. It also is about being independent, about making contributions to society by doing something useful, about building wealth in order to finance one’s children’s education and to give charitably, and to pursue both business and recreational opportunities: making a living is really making a life.

Fourth, education enables people to participate with others, especially family and friends. A fine education will not turn a fundamentally shy person into a gregarious, back-slapper — nor is it intended to. A good education, however, naturally integrates people of all characters and characteristics into an evolving set of communities or even families. Many courses at American universities require teamwork on some projects. Students often bond simply because they are in the same residence hall, lab, or English class. It is hard to be a hermit on a university campus — and that’s all for the good.

Fifth, education enables people to participate in what might be called the civic enterprise, which, in our case, is democracy. Even those students who do not get involved in student government are aware that governance of some kind is important. The more they know, the more they are able to contribute to their communities once they graduate. I am not simply referring to electoral politics. Serving on the PTA, on a condominium board, on a neighborhood association, as a reading or math mentor to a disadvantaged student, as a volunteer in a nursing home, and as a member of the local chamber of commerce, among many other possibilities, are all parts of civic engagement.

If we did nothing more than this, I think it would be fair to say that American universities support democratic values and social change simply by producing graduates who have a sense of democracy and its importance, who are engaged with their societies, and who are ready to participate both emotionally and economically with their communities.
But there is more to be said about the contributions of universities — particularly research institutions such as The George Washington University. We attract many students from abroad. GW’s foreign contingent is nearly 10 percent of the student population, with a bit of a tilt toward the graduate programs. We have students from every continent, except Antarctica, but that is only because we have a bias toward admitting human beings, not penguins. Our international students are attracted by the advantages of American universities — that’s why they come to study here. But once they are here, they begin to soak up American culture, particularly our ideas about democracy, social change by popular will and not from the barrel of a gun, entrepreneurialism, and the importance of merit, rather than connections, to get ahead in the world.

Thus, American universities are projecting what Joseph Nye of Harvard has called “soft power.” I don’t think there is a way to measure the importance or influence of soft power — of exposing young people, who in many cases will take leadership positions in their various societies, to the best of American ideas and values. Not every student will come away enthralled: understood. Much of our popular culture may seem coarse to them — as it often does to me. But they also see that freedom requires putting up with things you may not like. For some of our students this is a very novel experience. And, I think, immeasurably valuable for America and for the cause of democracy everywhere in the world.

Most of our students from abroad appear to like what they experience here and take our values to heart — and then home with them. If we are looking to make democracy the one form of government in the world — not necessarily American democracy — I think there is no better way than letting young people discover what it is like than to live in an open society.
The presence of foreign students also is a boon to those born here in the United States. As I mentioned before, students tend to mix easily. It is hard to imagine a student on my campus who has not spent some time — and no doubt made friends with — someone from abroad. This is something that cannot be taught, only experienced. And the experience can open the eyes of American-born students, just as studying in America can open the eyes of foreign-born students.

A case in point. A couple of years ago, at the end of Ramadan, Jewish and Muslim students organized an iftar — the breaking of the Muslim fast. Most of them were amazed by how similar they were, many were reminded that they are both “people of the book” — part of the great Abrahamic tradition. I take a little credit for suggesting the idea, but the students organized the iftar themselves, and I know they profited from it.
You may say that “cultural exchanges” like this are not really part of a university’s mission. I wouldn’t argue one way or another, but I would insist on this: our good fortune in attracting students from abroad promotes international understanding and I believe it advances the possibilities of democracy and peaceful social change abroad.

I hope we can continue to do so. As you know, foreign students and professors have run into visa problems since Sept. 11, 2001. The situation has improved a great deal, and I am looking forward to its becoming even better. My reason is clear. Many students from abroad chose not to apply to American universities these last couple of years because of the visa problems. Many probably would not have made the cut, but actual enrollments of international students have fallen just about everywhere, and this is worrisome. We obviously do not want to lose the tuition and, for graduate students, the expertise they bring. But most research universities have grown accustomed to having students from abroad and value them for all the reasons I have given.

What else do we value? Most of all, ideas. I mentioned “soft power,” an idea developed by a Harvard professor. The less optimistic idea of “the clash of cultures” was first enunciated on the same campus a few years ago. It is hard for me to think of an important idea in the sciences, politics, economics, literature, or philosophy, among others, that does not trace its lineage to a university campus. For example, both Keynesian and supply-side economics were born in the groves of academe, and I think every economist who has won the Nobel prize for the last couple of generations has been a university professor or closely affiliated with a university.
It is not remarkable that Ben Bernanke, recently appointed to replace Alan Greenspan as the chair of the Federal Reserve, was a professor of economics, first at Stanford, then chair of the economics department at Princeton. Former academics are found in every federal agency. Some have been famous, like Henry Kissinger and Robert Reich. Others are not, but their presence is important and influential in government. Look at the Supreme Court: Justices Scalia on the right and Breyer on the left were both university law professors before they joined the court — and both have written popular books on their judicial philosophies. Why is the professoriate so well represented in government and public affairs? I think that is because universities routinely nurture ideas and — sometimes slowly, sometimes with amazing speed — export them to the rest of the world; not just to American institutions.

The recent rejection of the European Union’s constitution by France and the Netherlands was, according to many observers, really a rejection of the European post-WW II social welfare state in favor of what some called “Anglo-Saxon economics.” That might be an unfair way to describe liberal capitalism, but that idea spread to Europe from somewhere, mainly from the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and a few other countries.

Ideas leave campuses and enter the world’s mainstream in other ways. For example, most of the think tanks have members who also hold academic appointments or affiliations. This is true of the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, and many others. Ideas developed in classrooms and libraries often get a swifter hearing when they pass through the filter of a politically interested organization, like a think tank.

That’s not the only means of export. Many universities, including GW, permit faculty to act as consultants. Thus, we have business professors, for example, advising emerging economies on things as simple as business plans and as complex as transparency of financial information and the creation of stock markets. In countries such as those of Eastern Europe, where financial control was a state function, ideas like these encourage trust and investment, and promote social change for the better and democratic principles.

Other professors, for example, act as consultants in engineering, physics, biology, government, and law to nearby companies or organizations. Again, this accelerates the export of ideas and fresh thinking from the university to the community. The reason for this is clear to anyone who understands higher education. Professors teach, conduct, and publish research. But they also are paid to think, to reflect on various subjects, to pose hypotheses and try to chase them down.

This is not to say that other kinds of endeavor or enterprise are thoughtless or staffed by people with no imagination or curiosity: far from it. Universities do not have a monopoly on intellect. But they do offer something that no other institution I know of can offer in the same measure. I think of it as “intellectual leisure,” the time to think and hypothesize, to change one’s mind, to work independently.

Let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate my point. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world’s preeminent medical research enterprise. Ninety percent of its budget is spent away from its Bethesda campus, and almost all of that research funding goes to university professors — chiefly in biology and chemistry, but other sciences as well — and to medical doctors, typically affiliated with university teaching hospitals. The NIH gives grants to researchers who are pursuing hypotheses or possibilities that, as they like to say, move back the frontiers of our knowledge. There is no guarantee of success. As Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg wrote:
For 30 years, my research… was funded [by the NIH] with many millions of dollars without any promise or expectation that this research would lead to marketable products or procedures. No industrial organization had, or ever would have, the resources or disposition to invest in such long-range, apparently impractical programs. We carried out these programs to satisfy our curiosity. Yet, to my great pleasure, such studies of the replication, repair, and rearrangements of DNA have had many practical benefits.
Professor Kornberg is too polite or perhaps too modest to point out that “no industrial organization” would have had “the disposition,” as he puts it, to grant the intellectual leisure he had while at Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford University to chase his hypotheses about DNA. Medical discoveries know no borders. Thus contributions to our understanding of the human genome, born chiefly on academic campuses, become available to all — surely an example of social progress that literally knows no bounds.

Another example is the computer. The first real computers were the size of small houses. You could walk into them — in fact you had to in order to repair and maintain them. They contained workbenches inside for the technicians. The first, called Eniac, was developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The second, called Univac, was built by a team at Harvard University. It’s interesting to note that the physicists, mathematicians, and engineers who built these early computers all carried slide-rules on their belts. If you want a slide-rule today, I think you have to buy one from a collector on eBay.

Compared to the laptop you may own, these early computers were slow, unwieldy, and limited. But they did put the slide-rule out of business. And they did get better and better as time went by. By the early 1960s, computers had become basic tools for university scientists. One problem early computers faced was exchanging information easily. Computers were not connected.

That problem was solved by what might look at first blush like an unlikely entity — the Pentagon, or, more precisely, the most academic part of the Pentagon, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Darpa was looking for a way to stay in touch with all the university researchers who had grants or contracts with the Pentagon and enable them to communicate with one another and with defense contractors. The answer was what is now known as the Internet and especially its e-mail component. That was 1964.

Permit me a digression. Why didn’t this filter down to us sooner? I have a theory. Universities were steadily improving their big mainframe computers, mainly by making them smaller and faster, but they were still the bailiwick of senior researchers and a few graduate students. It pains me to recall that around 1980 two college dropouts, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Bill Gates of Microsoft, simply changed the idea of computing. They wanted to put one in everyone’s home, not in a lab where it was reserved for special research. It pains me further to say that the academic computer people may have been asleep at the switch, not seeing the possibilities of the small, personal computer, even though there was a band of people, including Gates, who were deeply interested in making and programming them and writing about them in ordinary journals like “Popular Science.”

That has changed, I’m pleased to say. GW underwrote the development of specialized academic software that has since been acquired by Blackboard. And Google was developed by two Stanford students with the cooperation of the university, which is a large shareholder in Google.

So much for my digression: universities are not always in the vanguard. But let us return to the Internet. Is there anyone who does not use it? Daily? If so, you are a rarity. The Internet and e-mail, which were developed for university researchers, have now become ubiquitous utilities available to all. Some people over-use them and there are spam and phishing and virus attacks.

But there also is a virtually seamless worldwide mode of communication as well. If we are interested in promoting ideas, advancing democracy, and fostering social change the Internet is not the only instrument in our bag, but it is one of the most useful. Only the most repressive of regimes can stop it or censor it thoroughly. Like the printing press, it has changed the world. And it was invented to aid research on university campuses.
I do not claim that universities alone in our various societies are responsible for new ideas and the promotion of democracy. Both are too big for any one kind of enterprise to undertake successfully. But I do believe that universities provide a disproportionate amount of public good.

And I believe I know why that is true, though having devoted nearly all my working life to university governance I may have a bias. Beyond the fundamentally democratic structure of the university, at least in the United States, beyond the intellectual leisure that we afford our instructors, beyond the diversity of talents we attract, beyond the basic agreement that debate is part of education, beyond all the other qualities of a university I have mentioned, there is still something more.

For want of a better phrase, I will call it a sense of inclusiveness. Our forerunner, Columbian College, taught 11 subjects when it opened its doors in 1821. Our course offerings today run more than 400 pages. We teach and think about nearly everything under the sun. This requires not just rigor and intellectual leisure, but also open minds and open eyes. Moreover, it requires equal respect for different disciplines and a fair hearing for new ideas and for diverse ways of seeing the world. In other words, it requires giving thought both breathing space and elbow room. When we do this, we foster both democracy and social progress.

This is no small order. But chaotic though universities may seem, we manage to deliver this year after year. It’s something to be proud of and to cherish. I do.

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu