President Richard H. Brodhead: What Are Universities Good For?

I'm going to speak today about the function of research universities, and -- [t]he way I see their role evolving. In the introduction it was already noticed that when politicians and industry leaders think about how America is going to succeed in the increasingly competitive global competition, which gives us every day new rivals abroad and new dislocations at home, [they] look increasingly to colleges and universities as part of the answer. It's not surprising that they do. There's an obvious logic to the notion that educational institutions are going to have a larger role than ever to play in preparing people for what we now call a "knowledge economy." If those are the skills, then we are relevant to the preparation of those skills. But what exactly the role is that universities can play in this process is not -- a subject of all that much discussion in my experience. I think it's quite taken for granted, and so I thought I would try to bear down on this subject a little bit today out of the following sense: that unless we understand what these priceless assets are really good for, we may not use them to our full advantage.

I'm going to start by stepping back a little bit. American colleges and universities are generally regarded as one of the wonders of the world. If you look at lists of top world universities, you will be amazed to find that eight or nine of them will always be in this country and on some lists you might find more, but one of the very interesting facts about American higher education lies in its peculiar nature as a system. And what is its peculiar nature as a system? Its peculiar nature is that it is absolutely not a system, in the sense of a deliberate or coordinated whole. American higher education is a crazy quilt of institutions large and small, public and private, church-affiliated and secular, community-based and transnational -- very different institutions with very different philosophies of education, very different missions, very different audiences, thousands of separate institutions whose independent evolutions have created the fabric we have today.

Now, the relatively uncoordinated nature of our system may present certain problems or weaknesses. Notably, we lack a centralized means of planning how openings across our whole system -- ranging from local technical colleges to giant research universities -- how all those things could work together to meet the whole educational needs of our population. That's going to be [an] important question in future years, I wager, but it is also very important to remember that the weakly coordinated nature of our system is by no means only a flaw or weakness.

In truth, the non-centralized, non-centrally planned nature of American higher education has been completely essential to the strength and growth of these institutions and to the many benefits they bring our country. Paradoxically, our utterly uncoordinated approach has generated a universe of complementary opportunities that -- serve the needs of very varied populations among us. Furthermore, the very high degree of independence that has been enjoyed by our schools and their faculties has created a system-wide vitality that you tend not to find in places with lots of central coordination and lots of central regulation and oversight. The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has commissioned a group called the Commission on Higher Education that recently brought in its report, and that commission raises issues well worth our attention about the cost of education, conditions of access, the quality of educational experience and so on. Those are important questions but the sure way to get the answers to those questions wrong would be to forget that American higher education contains profoundly different kinds of institutions within it, and they're not amenable to one-size-fits-all solutions. Freedom from heavy government regulation has been the main precondition for our success to date, so it seems to me before we rush to embrace that as the solution to all our problems, we ought to stop and think about what that might in fact mean.

I well understand the value of all different kinds of institutions in our sectors. I'm sitting here at my table with the heads of all different kinds of colleges and universities, which is a great pleasure for me. I'm only going to speak about one kind of school. You may wonder what example I have in mind. I'm going to speak about a research university with an undergraduate college at the center that it takes very seriously. (You are right -- Duke would be a fabulous example of what I mean!) But not speaking entirely with regard to Duke, let me return to my question: What is it schools of that sort are good for, and how is it that they can yield their maximum benefit going forward?

I ask the question, and to me there are two fundamental parts. The first part is simple enough. The first great function of universities lies in their role in the creation of knowledge. Universities attract very smart men and women and give those people the means to use their minds and curiosity with maximum vigor, and for that reason, universities are natural centers of exploration. They are places not just for the transmitting of knowledge but for actively expanding the world's store of knowledge. Sometimes the knowledge generated in universities is almost instantly useful, and there are schools that will really only be interested in supporting work that is more or less instantly useful. But it is important that universities also have the capacity to help scholars and researchers pursue challenges that may seem purely speculative for long periods of time -- purely and abstrusely intellectual for long periods of time -- until their sometimes surprising benefits are eventually discovered.

You may have seen an article in Science recently -- it was very widely covered in the media -- that had to do with the discovery [of] the world's first working "invisibility cloak." (I'm looking around hoping you saw this. Yes, you did. Okay.) Invisibility cloaks [are something] we used to read about in Harry Potter, and now they enter, at least potentially, the domain of non-fiction. Two teams, one in Great Britain and one of engineers at Duke, have developed the technology that permits the creation of this cloak.

Here's the concept: If you put a pencil in a stream of water, the water parts around the pencil and then rejoins, and so after it rejoins you can't see that the pencil was in the water, right? -- If you could work with the nanostructure of materials, it's thought you could create the conditions where light waves or microwaves would come to an object and move around it and rejoin as water does, so that further downstream you wouldn't be able to detect the presence of that thing there. Now that is pretty amazing.

I hasten to add that work done so far is mostly a proof of concept. We cannot yet make objects of any great size disappear. However, as soon as I mention this concept, it's going to occur to you that it's very likely to have hosts and hosts of applications -- commercial applications in wireless, in radar, in security. It's going to have all kinds of currently unforeseeable applications that will drive commercial development, employment, all kinds of other things. And here I would only ask you to remember how many things we take for granted every day -- in the domain of health care, the biomedical economy, all the economy that flows from information technology. Every phase of that activity in our culture started out as an abstruse activity taking place in some remote laboratory in a university, with its practical benefits hidden in an invisibility cloak until they emerged for us later on.

-- You heard that I'm a literature professor. I do not apologize for this. I believe that when we talk about the importance of expanding the world's store of knowledge, I choose examples from medicine or technology, but I don't regard this phenomenon to be exclusively contained there. You probably read this summer wide public coverage of work done by a Duke sociologist. She and her colleagues are the ones who did the study over the last 20 years that showed that Americans now tend to have fewer close friends then they did two decades ago. Americans identify themselves as having fewer confidantes among their relatives and strikingly fewer confidantes outside their families. I personally find it astonishing that the rise of continual cell phone communication and the fall of deep relationships turn out to be compatible, if not causally linked. You know that the inference is twice as many people as 20 years ago now say they have no one to speak to about serious life issues. Now, the work that taught us that cannot be commercially applied right away, but if we didn't have people doing work like that, there would be things we failed to know about ourselves and the world we are living in. And I just want to say [that] my sense is that literature and art give us the means to register the texture of personal experience and its changes, and the way they change in response to changes in cultural life at large. Since human self-knowledge remains as fundamental a need as any other in our world, I regard the humanities, literature, arts and the social sciences as quite as valuable as the other domains I've mentioned.

I've been suggesting the idea that to deliver the good of knowledge-creation in fullest measure, academic inquiry can't be held to the criterion only of immediate results. In face of the pressure for short-term returns, we need to continue to support inquiry with no clear immediate payoff. One reason we need to do so is there is no saying in advance what things we may turn out to need to understand some day. I have a colleague who worked on a truly obscure subject: the past and present history of madrassas in the Islamic world. This was an obscure subject until it was learned that jihadist terrorists were being educated in some version of modern madrassas, on which day, we became glad that someone actually knew something about this. I have another colleague who became interested in the mechanism by which living cells regulate the intake of water: the amount of water they take in and the way they control that process. It's not a question that occurred to me to ask, but I'm glad it occurred to someone. This person pursued this question year after year after year with very little in the way of results to show for it. When he solved the puzzle, he was almost right away given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of it. This is Peter Agre and his Nobel Prize was, I think, four or five years ago. But the full payoff of his curiosity has even now not yet been delivered for us. If you stop and think about it -- think of the number of human diseases of which one component is the body taking too much water into its cells or not enough water into its cells, it's a pretty long list. If we now begin to understand that mechanism, the consequences of that discovery for improvement of human health are almost incalculable, even if we don't yet know exactly how those things will work.

Now, for most of their modern history, universities have conducted their inquiry through the logic of specialization. You know this. You know that in research universities, research tends to be in tightly focused areas, and that kind of specialization has been the prerequisite for many of the great discoveries in every field that we now take for granted. That process of specialization has also given us the maps of universities that [are] familiar to many of us: the map of separate departments, specialized graduate and professional programs, and undergraduates required to major in a single discipline like history or physics and so on. I'll tell you, we are not on the verge of a new age of amateurism. You know, you cannot make advances in health care, in molecular level health care discovery, by sitting around with your friends in your living room. You know, we're going to continue to need people with very sharply trained forms of specialized knowledge to advance in many fields. However, I must say, I do wonder whether the specialized model of the university will be as adequate going forward as it has been in the past. For if one truth continues to come clear to us, it's that the major problems of our time can't be solved through the lens of a single discipline or can't be fixed with the toolbox of a single expertise. If you're interested in a phenomenon like acid rain or global warming, you can't get a handle on that unless you really have people with extraordinary expertise in natural science fields, especially biochemistry and things of that sort. But you know you can't solve these problems by their scientific solutions alone. You can't solve an environmental problem unless you also have engineers who can invent the relevant devices, unless you also have business people who are interested in trying to make it a dimension of management to take care of issues like this. You can't solve these problems unless you have ethicists helping you understand the meanings of the different choices you're making. You can't solve them unless you have people with some sense of public policy and how one needs to make changes at that level to implement changes in the human environment.

If I could just give one other example, you know that in the post 9-11 world, national security requires that we know more than ever about conventional politics and military history, but it has also taught us that anybody who knows that needs also to know more than they used to have to know about world religion, about cultural history, about psychology, and lots and lots and lots of foreign languages Americans long thought they didn't have to bother to know.

When I asked what universities are good for, my first answer was that universities have the ability to help create uniquely valuable forms of knowledge -- understandings our society needs to count on to solve practical problems, drive economic engines and improve the quality of human life. But what I just said a minute ago makes me need to add a corollary to that. Because in a world where problems have the kind of complexity I've been describing, I believe universities are going to need to migrate to a new model, a model based far less on the separation of fields and far more on the interlinking of different domains of knowledge. When Duke creates a program that links faculty in medicine, in nursing, in psychology and divinity to study aspects of the phenomenon of aging, we are recognizing that those are multiple dimensions of a single phenomenon. If you try to understand it through one of the dimensions alone, you're going to get a very flat picture of that phenomenon. When we build a building that creates new physical contacts between our environmental scientists, their natural science colleagues, our schools of law and business and our institute for public policy, we are building the physical bridges to enable new collaborations in hopes that people with different expertise will come together to create solutions that no one of them could create with their own special equipment.

So much for answer one. Now I approach answer two. What else are universities of the sort I'm describing -- what else are they good for? When universities look with pride at our graduates, we are recognizing the other chief good we do in the world and for the world. And that is the steady flow of young men and women we produce who are equipped to bring trained intelligence to all the fundamental processes of social life: to bring trained intelligence to business, to education, to government, to medical care and to every other thing the world needs these skills in. Stop and think about a society without this form of human capital. If you could envision a society without that kind of trained intelligence, you're envisioning a radically impoverished world. Stop and think, and you can think of countries very rich in natural resources that don't have that kind of trained intellectual resource. Those counties have a very hard time of it. Stop and think, and you can name countries that are extraordinarily rich in the mental training of their population and have almost no natural resources. They've often done quite well in modern conditions. Nevertheless, if trained intelligence really is the main product we give the world, our value doesn't lie in giving students fixed knowledge they can practice on for the rest of their careers.

Some people sometimes speak of education like a kind of vaccine or something, you know, like you might have it early in life and then it would last you the rest of your time. Personally, I don't think that's the nature of education. Especially, I think, modern universities have the challenge of educating people to participate in a world that's going to continue to change in ways that we can't foresee now and to cope with challenges that we cannot now name. Lacking knowledge of the future and what it will hold and what exact skills students will need, the only thing we can do -- but it is a valuable thing -- we need to give our students the mental discipline and dynamism to keep learning how to understand and act in an emerging world long after their formal education or schooling is complete. More particularly, in the future, educated people are going to need to be able to pull together and integrate very different bodies of understanding, and to do so not by some fixed formula we could teach in advance, but to keep integrating knowledge in an improvisational way, in an opportunistic way or entrepreneurial way -- in other words, in response to changing arrays of facts and circumstances.

As we continue to train students in specialized disciplines, in other words, we're also going to need (in the language of athletics) to cross-train our students more, to introduce them to different bodies of knowledge and different modes of analysis, and to train them in the arts of synthesis. With students, as with faculty, we're looking to them to foster a new model of education that's based on merging and not separating the domains of human understanding.

Indeed, at my university we're trying to make a lot of efforts now to break down barriers, not just between disciplines but between the formal part of a student's education and everything that they do with the rest of their life. If you stop and think of your own education, you may begin by making a list of courses you took that altered your life. But everyone I ever talked to spoke as if it were an almost equally or possibly more valuable part of their early education that they worked on a student newspaper or that they helped tutor in a local school or that they worked in a local health care clinic or something of that sort not on their official transcript. That's not a bad thing. That makes life more interesting and it also gives people a richer training. We now have this [expression] "multiple intelligences" -- that diversity of experience trains students on more different sides of their capacity. Based on this recognition, Duke is working hard to break down the divides between formal academic study and the other things students do with themselves to make these things more connected and to have that connection be a little more intentional.

So for instance, you may not know that North Carolina has one of the most rapidly rising Latino populations as a percent of the population. And you may or may not know that Duke also has quite a serious foreign language requirement which many students fulfill by studying Spanish. These two facts need have nothing to do with one another, but it would be stupid if they didn't have anything to do with one another, so we're working now to take our students as they learn Spanish and get them out into local schools where they can work with Latino students and their families with -- three excellent results: one, they help people; two, our students get a far deeper grasp of the language that they've been studying by using it in a real world setting; and three, they learn there really was a better reason to learn foreign languages than to fulfill the requirement. Schools don't have requirements so people will fulfill the requirements. They have them so people will learn powers and aptitudes and capacities, and here we're helping students, I think, get a better sense of that.

Just one more example: After the tsunami hit eighteen months ago or so, Duke engineering students traveled to Indonesia to help restore a devastated shrimp fishery on the coast of Sumatra. These students helped revive a local economy by rigging up an aeration system, but I promise you, no student at Duke has ever taken a class in shrimp fishery aeration systems. We do not offer them. What these students did was I think something better: They took things they had learned in school and adapted them to cope with unforeseen circumstances, thereby making knowledge and ingenuity a force for real-world service. To me, that's a virtual definition of what I would mean by trained intelligence.

Learning of this sort not only makes academic study more real to our students, it gives them a sense of their own power. It gives them a sense of the difference they can make in the world. Now it will not have failed to occur to you that all the examples I just gave also show education in another thing: They all involve taking students across the boundaries of cultures and nations. Nearly half of Duke students study abroad during their undergraduate career, and many more of them find work in communities very different from the ones they grew up in. And it's our thought to promote this activity, because we regard this as not a peripheral or accidental, but an entirely central part of the process of education. In the future world, no student is going to understand that world or know how to inhabit it who has not developed some first-hand sense of the reality of human diversity and learned to practice the art of respect across lines of race and nation and ethnicity and religion. Furthermore, in a world where collaboration will be needed to solve every important problem, no one is going to be able to be very effective who hasn't learned how to work with others across a wide human span.

Important as these are, these intercultural skills also require something else that universities have to promote. I mean the civic or ethical sense. Duke was in the news this past year because of a legal case whose merits are far from certain. We can only wish that these charges will be resolved in a fair, decisive and timely fashion. But beyond the legal case, the incident raised larger questions about student behavior that are absolutely not confined or particular to Duke University, but that we are not free to ignore. We've embraced this as an opportunity not only to make our expectations clearer for students, but to remind them of the expectations they ought to have of themselves. If we help students recognize that the choices they make every day are what create the world they're going to live in, we'll [help] them -- make better choices, and we'll also train them to be responsible inhabitants of whatever community they go on to inhabit.

In the long run, I'm trying to suggest students are guided less by the specifics of the courses they take -- which they forget, as you know, almost right away (well, some people do) -- than by the emerging qualities of mind and character. Those are not all formed in colleges and universities, but colleges and universities do help to form those patterns, and so we have to take seriously the shaping of mental dispositions. It is not any simple disposition we need. It's a complementary array of strengths, so it would include personal responsibility, it would include thoughtfulness for others, and certainly we also need students to learn to be innately versatile, innately creative.

I want to make one point here, which is our educational system has special strengths for producing these traits, and we should not take these strengths for granted. This past summer I traveled extensively in Asia in countries whose economic progress has been much noticed by Americans. Many Americans speak as if these countries have an innate competitive edge, and I by no means underestimate their strengths. But the most interesting thing my travels taught me was how many people in other countries look to our system as an object of envy, not just for its research accomplishments, but especially for the way it promotes qualities of flexibility and creativity among our students. In fact, I've traveled pretty much all over the world this past year, and most places you go, a university education is based on a very early choice of the thing you're going to specialize in for the rest of your time. Often that's chosen [in] high school, sometimes fairly early in high school -- . [I]n this country, we often look at those places and say, "Look how smart they're getting." And indeed they are. But when I travel to those countries, I encounter much anxiety that their systems are producing an excessively narrow model of education. And those people look at us in admiration of something that we don't often enough remember: The liberal arts model of education is based on the idea that before the mousetrap snaps shut on you or before your fate settles on you, you need to explore a little bit to learn what all there might be that might interest you before you commit yourself [in] one direction or another. A model of education that's based on exploration and self-discovery is always going to have special values, and we should not hasten to give up the advantages we have.

Maybe one last word. This is something about the relations among universities. (Maybe I'll direct my eyes here to the college and university leaders to see whether you agree with me or don't.) Our universities have a habit of thinking about one another in very competitive terms. Each of us likes to advertise our special strengths, and each of us seems to aspire to leave our rivals in the dust. The reasons for university competition are not trivial and they won't soon go away. We compete for research funding, we compete for top faculty, we compete for top students and the rest. But to meet the challenges that humanity is going to face in coming decades, American higher education is going to need to become far less about institutional competition and far more about institutional cooperation and partnership. We've got to find ways to join together in flexible and opportunistic partnerships to create communities of intelligence focused on complex problems.

This idea was highlighted for me by a group that was formed and announced and unveiled in the summer of 2005. It's a group that's working together to find a vaccine against HIV/AIDS. It's called CHAVI, the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology. A Duke professor of medicine was chosen to lead this world-wide venture, but this is not a Duke project alone, nor even a traditional partnership on any known model. To face this great international health challenge of HIV/AIDS that kills thousands of people every week, the great funding sources in this country formed the idea they needed to begin to work together. The NIH, government agencies, private foundations like the Gates Foundation, they decided, let's not spend our money separately backing different horses, let's pool our money and see if we can use that vast sum -- approaching $400 million -- let's see if we can use that vast sum to bring current rivals in different universities to a state where they can become collaborators, where [there] can be a kind of intelligent division of labor where people work together to create something they can't alone. And so it is that major leading researchers from around this country and the world have come together as collaborators under the CHAVI label. I went to the launching of this venture in Durham in August of 2005. It was a veritable United Nations. Better then that, it was -- or maybe this is what we should always mean by that -- a display of potential rivals working together to do a task that no one of them could perform alone.

Learning to work truly collaboratively across boundaries of country and actually closer to home which certainly is harder than collaborating internationally -- this will require powerful changes in the habits of universities as we know them. But we will not deliver the whole of what we could for the world if we each insist in going it alone. What has been the theme of my talk here? I've been talking about working together on complex problems. That's a good lesson for students. You know what else? It's also a good lesson for the schools our students attend.

I finish this way. My question today has been "What are universities good for?" My answer is universities give us knowledge to propel our economy and civilization, and at the same time, universities empower our sons and daughters to be positive contributors to their world. Another way to say that is that universities help the production of a better future, and I would say that's why our work is an inspiring task.

Thanks so much.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Q: We thank you for your fine presentation and model. Robert Coles at an early date found that professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, were lacking in resources from the literature -- the great literature -- and he helped to introduce them [to literature] in many ways. He also found that learning alone was not enough; you had to involve yourself in the community and react with the literature in your other training, and I wonder if you admire Dr. Coles as much as I do and if you have any comments on him.

RB: I am so much in sympathy with your question that someone might think you were planted in the audience. Let's just go back -- we're talking about Robert Coles. His point was that literature doesn't have its value as a narrow specialization that some people know all about and other people know nothing about. It has its value as it becomes part of the experience of everyone. People engage in every aspect of human experience and human care. And why does it have that value? Among other things, because literature is the record of human hopes and fears, human aspiration, human dreads. We know those things most intimately through the record of literature and art, more than we do than by reading psychology books or anything of that sort.

I also know Robert Coles because he was a person so much associated with taking expertise typically found in universities into areas that lacked access to that expertise: areas in rural America, the American South that lacked access to people with high- powered medical training and things of that sort. You have listed a great example of someone in the previous generation whose work was to try to put aspects of experience and education together, and I recognize that as a very friendly motion [on behalf of] what I've been talking about here today.

Q: Dick, recently Duke University announced a more than billion dollar investment, I believe to give meaning to what you talked about today. Among the initiatives is a global health initiative. Could you share with us how you see that initiative embodying the concepts that you've talked about?

RB: To be sure. I have been president at Duke for two and a half years. I was there for six months before I came into office, visiting and staying at a hotel many nights. One of the things I found very striking at Duke [was] Duke not only has one of the principal American medical schools and one of the four or five principal centers of biomedical research in America; it's also a university with very extraordinary and unusual habits of cooperation and collaboration across the university. And so global health at some places is a program that would be lodged in a public health school and [other departments] wouldn't work with it. The point of having it at Duke is one of our strongest fields in our law school is in intellectual property. You know what that is. [Intellectual property deals with] the question: To give people an incentive to make a discovery, you may give them the ability to control human use of the thing they discover, and how can we get the balance right between the incentive for discovery and opening biomedical discoveries to human use and profit? Something like a third of the students in our business school do a concentration in health sector management. The health sector is almost one-fifth of the American economy. In a place where you can bring people together across the bounds of engineering and medicine, medicine and nursing, nursing and engineering, law school, business school, indeed -- divinity school and public policy -- you're going to have special strengths for the interdisciplinary solution of these problems, and -- the program that we're already in the middle of creating is one that really tries to stitch these things together. I'll tell you one thing: the faculty who find their work suddenly becoming more meaningful when they see what they can contribute to the solution to a problem that partly lies in someone else's territory, those people get enormous satisfaction from that recognition.

I'll tell you another aspect of our program. Our thought is we don't want our global health program to be just a research-based program for people of highly trained expertise. We want to drive it all the way down through our curriculum. We have freshman offerings in this subject now. We have freshman who've done summer internships in Tanzania, in South Africa, in this country in collaboration with this program. And so really it fulfills what I was talking about before, which is not just trying to realize interdisciplinary things in some abstract way in the university, but trying to make the whole dimension of people's education have to do with training from many sides of the problem and learning your own power to help bring knowledge to bear on human problems.

Q: You've convinced me it's time to go back to college.

RB: Fortunately, I have brought a large stack of applications!

Q: You mentioned at some point that we keep learning after college and you also said it's important that we learn to work together. How are we doing in these areas?

RB: How are we doing in these areas? You know, it's hard to generalize about what the "we" is. Are we talking about the whole of this nation? Are we talking about American universities? You know, I wouldn't dare raise these as suggestions if I couldn't think of many positive examples both at Duke and elsewhere of people learning to collaborate and learning the pleasure and necessity of collaboration. I would say though, that there is a lot of force of inertia in the universe, and some of it can be found in universities. And the habits of people living within walls, within boundaries, you know, they really take continual commitment on all of our parts if we're going to hope to move toward the version of education I've been describing. So I have given you an answer of cautious but not inevitable optimism. It takes work. It's not going to happen by itself.

Q: [Tenure for] professors is a useful tool to foster academic freedom and security and freedom from political influences of professors. On the other hand, it can also insulate underperforming professors and hinder a university's ability to adapt and evolve its curriculum. What are your thoughts on the role of tenure in an increasingly interdisciplinary university environment?

RB: Why is everyone chuckling? You know, I got tenure when I was 33 years old and not only that, shortly thereafter, Congress made it against the law to require anyone to retire in a university at any fixed age. And furthermore, my life expectancy has increased remarkably during the period of my adult life. You put these things together and you recognize the danger, which is when you look at someone like me, you're looking at someone who could stay in his position until the day I drop. Other industries don't have this. Why do universities have tenure? It's an interesting thing. People think it's an eternal fact of life. It really doesn't go back much before the 1940s in the history of this country, and it was associated with a couple things.

People tend to forget the second one. It has always been associated with academic freedom because almost everywhere people want to take tenure away, it's usually based on objection to someone's ideas rather than to their non-performance, which I admit is a serious problem. So it was a protection of the climate of intellectual freedom and exploration. You know countries that don't have that climate don't have the academic traditions that we have here. One needs to take that seriously. Funnily enough, if you study the original legal cases, a second reason for recognizing tenure as a legal concept was since people in academe don't make the salaries they could make in other fields, it was recognized as a kind of an incentive to make people choose these professions. And frankly, if no one ever [chooses] to go into the academic professions, it's going to be hard to have a great educational system.

Now the trouble is, I've been talking about complex problems. The trouble with complex problems is they make people so frustrated they believe there should be simple solutions to them. And sometimes they lead people to believe that the problems themselves are actually simple, and when people act on the basis of simple solutions to complex problems, they typically don't solve them. I've listed a bunch of factors together. How do you protect intellectual freedom as a reality? You've got to have that. How do you create some incentive for people to go into this career? The main incentive will always be one's curiosity and the desire to teach. That's the main reason anyone goes into these careers. And how do you put those together with the desire to protect against the accumulation of deadwood? People who form their habits in Year X and now we've entered World Y and they're part of the past instead of part of the future. I think the trouble is ... every place I know that has tried to abolish tenure has tried to do so with a heavy ideological motive to it, and that's just a very troublesome concept. I really think the way one solves this problem is by trying to do everything you can on your campus to promote a climate of continuing education, flexibility, outreach. You know, it's not only students who need the traits I'm talking about here. If faculty have these, they themselves become models of lifetime learning, and they become people you're happy to have for extended careers.

Q: Dr. Brodhead, I believe you referred in your talk to the legal problems which Duke University has had.

RB: I briefly alluded to it.

Q: I think you're referring to the very unfortunate, reprehensible behavior of one of your athletic teams during the past year. And my question is, what advice can you give from what you learned about that behavior and the supervision or lack of supervision that occurred that you might want to pass on to other universities to avoid their -- receiving the same type of very unfortunate publicity that Duke received at that time.

RB: All right. You said "unfortunate and reprehensible" behavior of one of Duke's teams. I want to remind you that some facts of this incident have always been established and undisputed, and others remain very heavily disputed.

The notion that a party was held that involved drinking, that involved hiring a stripper -- these are facts. I think myself that the behavior was quite inappropriate, and I've said so on many occasions. When people leap from that to being convinced that the matters of legal charges took place, they make a very big step, and the truth is those things are far from established. And it has been part of my work as the president of Duke to remind people that the charges in this case are very serious, but that doesn't prove that the people accused of the charges are guilty. It's our labor to remember -- everyone's labor to remember -- the importance of the presumption of innocence, but in a university especially to remember the importance of evidence as a way to advancing toward truth. Opinion is not a basis for truth, and these things remain to be established.

Now let me return to your question. You ask what lessons there might be. You know, I have not yet met another leader in this country who hasn't said to me in private that they knew perfectly well that such a thing might have happened -- a party of this sort -- might have happened on their own campus. I don't shirk the fact that Duke is the center of this story, but I tell you I have not spent all my life at Duke, and I know that this [is] something that has a great deal more to do with the behavior of the collegiate young than it does with any particular school.

Part of what one has to do is to be clearer about our expectations. We've worked in this case. One of the things we discovered is that we didn't have the information loops feeding back from Student Affairs that learned about episodes of bad behavior by students. We didn't have the information loops that carried those back to the coaches and teams so they could have been acted on. We have made very big steps in that regard, I'll tell you. But I'll tell you the other thing is you know that the problem of student conduct cannot be solved entirely by regulation or entirely by a heavier police force any more than any other problem of moral behavior in the world can. The path -- [one] has to advance down is the path of students taking themselves seriously and learning to think of themselves as responsible for the choices they make and for the consequences of the choices they make. And I will say that I do think that one of the very salutary moments in this episode that has become so familiar to everyone was when the team in question itself wrote a Code of Conduct for itself and pledged to uphold that code as the condition for being re-started as a sport. That made something an episode in moral education, and I'd have to say we're looking for many ways it will not only be athletic teams that need such things. You know, no one's moral education ever comes to an end. And why we should assume that anyone's has come to an end by age 17 or 21 or 25, I do not know. It's a process of growth and maturation. But I do believe that universities and colleges need to take more active interest in this rather than assuming it simply happens by itself while we continue to drive people to take mandated courses.

Q: Dr. Brodhead, thank you for your academic expertise. You talked about the collaboration across programs, but it seems that the core to many solutions is technology, is science, is discovery in those areas. In the last few years, it seems to me that here in the United States, the interest in undergraduates pursuing those technology fields is falling off. Is there a role the universities play in encouraging that within our own country?

RB: To be sure. I'm going to begin by a little disagreeing with you and then relatively, massively agreeing with you.

I myself am not of the view that technology alone is the solution to problems. Technology is a means that coupled with other forms of analysis and imagination can solve problems. I feel the same about biomedical research. I spent last night with a colleague -- a very distinguished geneticist -- who is talking about [how] as we learn how to discover the individual genetic signatures of people, we will treat people by giving them genetic medicines that are good for large populations of the world. We'll figure out if this actually is good for you -- or if it isn't, if something else is good for you. You know, you can't make that discovery without skills in molecular biology, computational biology -- all kinds of things like that. But as soon as this person said that, he saw what the next issue is. When we have those technologies, how do you distribute them? Will it be only rich people who get the benefit of these cures? Because there are ethical issues that arise simultaneously with the scientific issues. And what I've been talking about is, let's have a university where we don't artificially isolate dimensions and therefore get simplistic solutions to human problems.

Now back to where I agree with you. You know, the trouble with two-part questions is the speaker is always free to forget the second part or if he chooses, the first part.

[What] you were talking about, you know, I think it is a subject of great distress in this country. I think that many people would agree with me. We don't want students to study only science, math, engineering and technology. Nevertheless, every graduate school in those programs in America tends to have far more students from foreign countries than it does from this country, and it has many causes, and one of the causes is -- the weakness in our own K-12 education in math and science, as has been very widely recognized. We have to take this seriously. We have lived through an extensive period where people who needed top education in these fields felt they had to come to this country to get it. But you know, the other universities of other nations are not sitting still at this time. We already know that people who came here got an education and settled here are beginning to go back to their own country and find new opportunities they didn't used to find there. How are we going to make sure that we have this intelligence in our midst? We need it. It's not the only form of intelligence we need, but we need the people who will be making the creative breakthroughs in technology and biomedical and all those things. So we better take seriously the notion -- starting about fourth or fifth grade -- of making these subjects interesting to give students the discipline, to give students the foundations that will enable them to take the steps later on.