University of Rochester
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New Dean of College Faculty

Investiture Address

I'm very fortunate to be here today: I come to the University at a time of optimism and opportunity; I join an ambitious faculty of great talent; I am surrounded by extraordinary students; I have exceptional partners as colleagues in the Dean's office and in the University administration, and I benefit hugely from the support of very skilled staff.

I'm fortunate too because you have given me an immensely rich and challenging job. I have the chance to help shape the future of a member of the world's most special, and most envied, group of universities: the American research universities. The distinctiveness of this group, and of American higher education generally, is especially clear to someone who grew up and was educated abroad.

When I was an undergraduate in the UK, about 4% of 18 year olds attended university, vs. about 30% in the US. The proportion in the UK is much higher now, but the difference then, and to some extent now, reflects fundamentally different views about the importance of higher education: in this country, as in no other, higher education is considered indispensable. We spend 2.6 percent of our gross domestic product on it—more than twice the fraction spent by any other country except Japan. But it's not just the centrality and funding of higher education that distinguishes this country from others: American research universities, in their influence and distinction, are in a class of their own.

International surveys that try to capture broad measures of quality make this dominance very clear: one very recent one places 21 American universities in the world's top 50; another places 37 of them. Most of these American universities are private. The University of Rochester is a member of this group, and as we consider how we should develop here in the future we need to keep in mind what makes universities like ours so special.

The most striking attribute is the uncompromising pursuit of excellence. This is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the way we determine who becomes a member of the University: when we appoint faculty, we undertake a nationwide, often a worldwide, search for the right person; when we recruit and admit graduate students we invest tremendous effort in finding the strongest, no matter where they come from; and when we admit undergraduates we work very hard to find and attract not just those who excel academically but those who will benefit most from the distinctive education we have to offer. This unrelenting and very competitive focus on excellence is a long-established trait that we tend to take for granted, but it's not characteristic of universities in the rest of the world. Nowhere else in the world will you find this insistent openness to talent, and nowhere else will you find faculty and students with the range of national, racial and cultural backgrounds that exists in American research universities.

American research universities, especially the private ones, are also conspicuous for their heterogeneity—in the organization of their schools and in the range of disciplines and programs in which they invest. This reflects to some extent the freedom we have to determine our own future—to identify the things we believe are important to do, and to choose from among these things the ones in which we can excel.

The freedom to determine our own future distinguishes private research universities from almost all others, and is extraordinarily precious. It makes possible much greater successes—and of course much greater failures—than might otherwise be achieved. It puts no ceiling on our ambitions. It permits us to take risks in pushing intellectual frontiers. It makes planning for our future both much more interesting and much more challenging.

At the heart of each university is the school that none can do without: a school that brings undergraduates, graduate students and faculty together in a shared investment in the broad range of disciplines that provide the foundation for a liberal education. This centrality confers on the College a special responsibility.

In recent years the University and the College have used their freedoms to great effect, particularly in strengthening undergraduate education. The formation of the College through the union of the College of Arts and Science and College of Engineering and Applied Science, and the progressive assumption by the College of responsibility for all aspects of undergraduate life have been profoundly beneficial, bringing an enviable coherence and consistency to the support we provide for all aspects of undergraduate life. But perhaps the boldest step was to restructure the undergraduate curriculum. Universities do this often, but generally by alternating between, or tinkering with, two conventional ways to provide a liberal education: the core curriculum and the distribution requirement. Both are interminably troublesome. Rochester's solution to this—expressed in the cluster system—is elegant and powerful, and has rightly attracted great acclaim.

How should we use our freedom going forward? It is easy to misuse it. Clark Kerr noted that "Universities have a unique capacity for riding off in all directions and still staying in the same place..."

The first principle has to be that we attend to the special strengths of what we do now. By this I don't so much mean the particulars of what we do especially well in the College; I mean the core attributes that make us distinctive as a research university with a liberal arts tradition. Our central obligations are to discover and assemble knowledge through research, scholarship and creative works; to educate students through the transfer of that knowledge; to prepare students for careers—to qualify them and equip them as the future leaders of our society; and to provide for their personal growth as individuals.

The key to discharging these responsibilities with distinction is the strength of the faculty. Nothing else is remotely as important in shaping and energizing our scholarship and our instructional programs—and ultimately in determining our reputation. It is extraordinarily hard to excel in the creative work of research and scholarship, and teaching. Those who make up our faculty are drawn from a pool of rare talents, and they deserve not just our recognition as the College's most precious asset, but our firm commitment of support.

What must we do to ensure the continued strengthening of the faculty? We obviously need to provide the resources and facilities that match or exceed those of our peers, but we also need to focus on some special local circumstances. Our academic departments are almost all much smaller than those of the universities with which we compete. In important respects we punch above our weight, but that alone will not carry us to where we want to be. Our faculty must grow so that we can increase the depth and range of our programs.

In a research university the second distinctive attribute, after the faculty, is the graduate programs. Outstanding graduate programs are not just crucial determinants of our reputation; they are absolutely central to what we are. Not every department has or will have a graduate program, but everyone here should and must benefit from the presence of graduate students among us, and have the opportunity for engagement with them. Graduate students are the lifeblood and the intellectual future of our disciplines, and often are our indispensable partners in research and scholarship. They contribute powerfully and distinctively to undergraduate education. Many of our graduate programs provide exceptional training, but they are small, and some are underresourced. We need to contemplate a judicious expansion of what we do in graduate education.

Distinction in research and scholarship is indispensable, but doesn't make us a great university. We need to be distinguished too in what we do for undergraduates. Our obligation to undergraduates is wide-ranging: at its core it is to provide a liberal education—broadly to impart knowledge, but what knowledge? There is a long established tension between doing things that are vocationally or professionally relevant, and doing things that are not. In the 18th century Franklin, when establishing what would become the University of Pennsylvania, was eager to have what he called "a more useful culture of young minds," and Clark Kerr notes that Franklin wanted to ensure that universities trained people for agriculture and commerce, among other things. A century later Cardinal Newman was openly disdainful of useful knowledge, calling it a "deal of trash." He believed that "Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward."

The world in which we now live makes this debate increasingly pointless. In equipping our students for life in the 21st century, we must, in a sense, attend to the philosopher's distinction between knowing that and knowing how. The particulars of what we teach become less important than that we provide students with an armament of intellectual skills that can be broadly applied, and that we help students develop the mental flexibility to shape and to thrive in a world that we who teach them cannot imagine. These should be the standards by which we decide what is admissible in a liberal curriculum, and we must remember them as we consider the curricular opportunities now emerging from our planning.

Although it is more important than ever that we provide a liberal education, we must do more than that, or students benefit too little from being at a research university. Engagement with faculty and in research is essential. Our record in the College is already exceptional: well over 40% of our undergraduates undertake independent research under the guidance of a faculty member, and an unusually large fraction go on to graduate work. But we must extend that opportunity to disciplines where this immersion is not yet common, and we must seek and encourage students who will pursue it.

Our obligation to undergraduates is not confined to the provision of academic programs. A distinguishing feature of the American research university is that it is a residential community. Such a community can and should offer an unmatched environment for personal growth. Nowhere else can young women and men encounter, engage with, and be enriched by people of such diverse cultures, races, intellectual talents, and passions, and nowhere else is such diversity of people and interests so obviously beneficial to the institutional mission. We must live up to that promise, not only by embracing an inclusive community, but by working hard to attract to the College the students and faculty who epitomize it.

One final large principle, implicit in much of what research universities have always done, but now increasingly explicit, is that the distinguished universities of the future will have a global reach, not just in their research programs and the places from which they recruit faculty, but in every aspect of what they do—in the domains in which they offer programs of study, in the places from which they seek to attract students, and in the places to which they send their students. We must equip ourselves to succeed on this world stage.

I have discussed some general principles that define the context in which we plan for the future, but within that framework there are innumerable things we could do, so how should we choose among them? Any reasonable projection of faculty growth over the next five to ten years will still leave our departments and programs smaller than those in the schools with which we compete. It's going to be essential that we make focused investments: we will not do everything, but what we do we will do exceptionally well. Some of our investments must be aimed at strengthening promising ventures currently under way; others must be aimed at a future well beyond where we are now, at issues and programs we expect will come to be of major scholarly, social, or scientific significance. But all of our investments must be aimed at domains in which we can make a distinguished mark, and in which there are powerful curricular opportunities.

Planning for the future of the College is richly challenging. It is and must be a shared enterprise, in which key stakeholders with varied needs and interests come together as partners. My task is to ensure the success of that partnership. The job is made immeasurably easier by the remarkable and diverse talents, and the goodwill, of the people involved: the students, the faculty, and my colleagues in the Deans' office. For that I thank you.


Content last modified on: November 07, 2006