For the Record
Casper in Peking: Advantage of the research-intensive
university
This is
the text of President Gerhard Casper's address at Peking
University on May 3, 1998.
The hundredth
anniversary of China's 1898 Reforms and of Peking
University is a special occasion. It merits the gathering
of university presidents from around the world. The
establishment of this university signaled China's
commitment to create a university that would serve the
nation and the world and that would meet international
standards of scholarly excellence.
The many accomplishments
of Beida in the intervening years as well as its
moments of despair are known throughout the world. At
the dawn of a new century, the original vision enunciated
by its early leaders is at last within grasp. Of this I
am confident: All will benefit as Beida draws upon the
remarkable talents of this nation to become a leading
center of creativity and innovation in the 21st century.
But, like my university
and like universities around the world, Beida faces a
major question: What qualities are necessary to serve
society through excellence? This is the topic of my
address. I am often asked to explain the
"secret" ingredients of Stanford's relations
with the Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley has become a
metaphor the world over for a productive relationship
between a university and the surrounding region. And many
visitors to Stanford seek to know the reasons for its
success.
The answer is to be found
not in some secret that Stanford has discovered, but
rather in its rigorous adherence to several fundamental
but universal purposes and characteristics of a
research-intensive university.
In using the term
"research-intensive university," I mean
something very specific. Systems of higher education have
become highly diversified and meet a variety of needs,
especially societal needs for a skilled workforce. The
institutions that have emerged to face these challenges
are frequently labeled "universities." There is
nothing wrong with this other than definitional
confusion. What I have in mind, however, is an
institution that meets three criteria: It selects its
students; it is primarily dedicated to the search for
knowledge; and it is marked by a spirit of critical
inquiry. For simplicity's sake, I shall call this the
research-intensive university. I do not use the common
American designation "research university"
because, as will become apparent, I do not think of the
university as a research institute, but as an institution
where the intensity of research is part and parcel of the
traditional university functions of teaching and
learning.
What research-intensive
universities need to do now, as the 21st century
approaches, is to think much harder about what
distinguishes them as institutions from other societal
institutions engaged in teaching, in order to bring into
sharper focus for themselves and for society what is
their unique and lasting task. And while some of that
thinking bears on the non-secret I shall discuss today,
its more crucial purpose is to clarify for the next
century a role that was delineated most clearly nearly
200 years ago.
To begin, I should like to
go back to the last decade of the 19th century, the era
in which both Peking University and Stanford were
founded. In the United States alone, three major
universities were formed at about the same time: Johns
Hopkins, Stanford and the University of Chicago. As we
know, Peking University resulted from the Hundred Day
Reform of 1898 and was made the pinnacle of a
multi-layered educational system that was meant to
modernize the education and training of officials.1
An American university
president who visited Beijing in 1910 observed critically
that, at that time, the university was "not a
well-ordered plan inspired by a lofty purpose, nor a high
purpose supported by a well-ordered plan. It is rather a
process, a becoming, a becoming of some sort, though of
what sort it is hard to say."2
It is, of course, true for
all universities that they are always a
"becoming," or, as I am fond of saying, that
all days at a university must be "first" days.
In the case of Peking University, it became clear in 1917
where the process was leading. It is at this point that
similarities emerge between Peking University and
Stanford University. The appointment of Cai Yuanpei as
chancellor of Peking made him the real founder of a true
university, one that rapidly became the foremost
intellectual center of the country.3 Deeply influenced by his two stays
in France and Germany (in Berlin and Leipzig) that
amounted to a total of almost 10 years, Chancellor Cai
sought a synthesis of European and Chinese elements in
higher education.
Cai's emphasis on
university autonomy and academic freedom reflected the
direct influence of the German model.4
The same model deeply affected the founding of Stanford,
as well as Johns Hopkins and Chicago. David Starr Jordan,
Stanford's first president, was an ichthyologist who read
German fluently and who had been inspired by the spirit
of scientific inquiry as exemplified by his role model
Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, in turn, was a protege of
Alexander von Humboldt. Statues of Alexander von Humboldt
and Louis Agassiz still stand on the facade of Stanford's
Main Quadrangle. In yet another linkage, Alexander was
the famous brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who took on
the task of rethinking Prussian universities at the
beginning of the 19th century and developed what has
become known as the Humboldtian model.
Cai and Jordan not only
shared the same intellectual heritage in their thinking
about universities and their commitment to the value of
rational analysis and the efficacy of the scientific
method5 but, as unlikely as it sounds,
they also had somewhat similar attitudes toward the
academic tasks of the individual. As Eugene Lubot has
written, Cai was "by temperament and education a
moralist. He often stressed the impact that neo-Confucian
values, such as self-examination and self-cultivation,
had upon his life."6
Similarly, values of
self-examination and self-cultivation were stressed
continuously by David Starr Jordan. He saw them as among
the main purposes of higher education, though, in his
case, they obviously were not derived from Confucianism,
but somewhat secularized Protestantism, with its emphasis
on the autonomy of the individual.
I am stressing these
shared origins because the story of Stanford (and
therefore ultimately that of the relationship between
Stanford and the Silicon Valley) is not a story of a
university that set out to become a locomotive of
economic change in its region and country. Rather it is
the story of a university that, especially in the period
following World War II, built on and increased its
commitment to the highest-quality teaching and research,
and the pursuit of innovation.
The first element of the
non-secret regarding Stanford's productive relationship
with Silicon Valley is the university's fundamental
commitment to the building of scholarly "steeples of
excellence" in research, learning and teaching, not
to the training, as such, of engineers and business
managers.
This commitment can be
traced all the way to the background shared by Peking
University and Stanford Wilhelm von Humboldt and the
German universities of the 19th century. In 1810,
Humboldt wrote a memorandum entitled "On the Spirit
and Organizational Framework of Intellectual Institutions
in Berlin" that led to the founding of the
University of Berlin. It was only 10 pages in length, and
constitutes perhaps the most concise reflections ever
written on the university as an institution. These
reflections have in no way lost their relevance, despite
changes in the notion of scholarship and in the problems
universities have experienced over the last two
centuries.
Quite to the contrary,
with universities seemingly hopelessly confused about
their mission as they enter the 21st century, it is a
matter of urgency to reflect on the university's core
tasks and not be diverted by those who want the
university to be all things to all people. I hope you
will permit me to quote Humboldt on these matters as we
continue.
The second element of
Stanford's non-secret is that in spite of innumerable
temptations, it has remained an institution that sees the
combination of teaching and research as what it is
primarily about. Therein lies the university's advantage.
In remaining true to the Humboldtian concepts shared with
Peking University in its founding era, Stanford developed
an enduring institutional character that at its core does
not change.
Humboldt clearly
recognized the dialectical nature of the relationship
between research and teaching. He expressed this
relationship in the following blunt formulation: The
university instructor does not exist for the sake of the
students.
[B]oth teacher and student
have their justification in the common pursuit of
knowledge. The teacher's performance depends on the
students' presence and interest without this, science
and scholarship could not grow. If the students who are
to form [the teacher's] audience did not [gather round]
of their own free will, he [or she] would have to seek
them out in [the] quest for knowledge. The goals of
science and scholarship are worked towards most
effectively through the synthesis of the teacher's and
the students' dispositions. The teacher's mind is more
mature but it is also somewhat one-sided in its
development and more dispassionate; the student's mind is
less able and less committed but it is nonetheless open
and responsive to every possibility."7
Although Humboldt did much
to strengthen the institutionalization of research and
teaching in the university and to link the two as
essential aspects of a university, the link between the
two realms, in many universities around the world, has
not been attained.8 In others, the two have become
separated through the drastic reduction in funding and
the relocation of research to institutions other than
universities (as was the case in the former Soviet
Union). The link is also nullified when teaching at the
university is primarily carried out by those who have no
direct relationship to research.
Not only do students
profit when taught by scholars who are themselves engaged
in creative endeavors; rather, scholarship itself is
enriched when the younger generation consciously, if
naively, questions it. This assumes, of course,
discussion and the willingness for discussion in
lectures, seminars and laboratories.
It seems to me that in
those universities overwhelmed by the sheer number of
students or by hierarchical structures, or in countries
in which research and teaching are fundamentally or even
partially separated, much creative force lies fallow. My
Humboldtian view of the matter is more radical than it
may sound. My point is not what goes without saying
university teaching should be based on university
research but that university research benefits from
teaching, not just from teaching graduate students but
also from teaching first-year students.
The most successful method
of knowledge and technology transfer on the part of the
universities lies in educating first-rate students who
themselves have been engaged in the search to know men
and women who will then be in a position to take on
leadership roles in industry and business. Students who
receive their training in university-based research
arguably have a greater influence on the economy than the
patentable inventions of university scientists.
Therefore, attracting gifted students and interacting
with them in a non-hierarchical manner is a crucial
condition of success.
In this regard, I would
like to cite the former dean of Stanford's School of
Engineering. According to Professor James Gibbons, what
students learn by participating in research during the
course of their education at universities is nothing less
than "the ability to think using primary principles
and, in so doing, to produce innovative results."
It is precisely through
the intensive participation in university research that
graduate students develop the openness and curiosity that
will later enable them to transfer the latest knowledge
into innovative products. Outstandingly educated students
are still the most meaningful contribution that
university-level research has to make to technology
transfer, a topic I will return to shortly.
In this context, the third
important aspect of Stanford's non-secret must be taken
into consideration: the university's freedom to set
agendas. Academic freedom is the sine qua non of
the university.
As Humboldt so nicely puts
it: "One unique feature of higher intellectual
institutions is that they conceive of science and
scholarship as dealing with ultimately inexhaustible
tasks: this means that they are engaged in an unceasing
process of inquiry."9 Concerning government, he
writes: "The state must understand that intellectual
work will go on infinitely better without it."10
This statement, however, explicitly does not pertain to
finances.11
Academic freedom means,
above all, freedom from politics. Insofar as this means
freedom from politicians, the situation in many parts of
the world nowadays is, by and large, better than in the
19th century. To be sure, the state and its bureaucracy
anywhere frequently suffocate initiative and refuse to
let in any fresh air.
Academic freedom also
means freedom from pressures to conform within the
university. Even Humboldt emphasized: "Intellectual
freedom can be threatened not only by the government, but
also by the intellectual institutions themselves, which
adopt a particular point of view at their inception and
then eagerly suffocate the rise of another."12
It would, however, be
completely out of place if academic freedom were to be
interpreted as though no one has the right or
responsibility to hold professors accountable for
shortcomings in their teaching. This is the
responsibility of the university itself. Universities
must continually be occupied with the improvement of
their own quality. It is hard work, often unpleasant and,
since it concerns human endeavors, perfection will never
be attained. But we must begin with the notion of
perfectibility. Too many of the world's universities seem
to have given up the idea of working toward perfection.
In this respect,
universities and politicians must worry about the
imbalance that exists worldwide between the capacity of
research-intensive universities and the number of
students. Quality and size have a complex relationship.
To be sure, it is becoming more and more urgent to make
the notion of education as a form of self-learning, as a
form of understanding, accessible to large numbers of
people. Being able to continue to learn is more important
for a man or woman of action than is the accumulation of
facts for future reference. The only problem is that
universities are not always the most efficient
institutions for accomplishing all of this.
In the end, society
suffers because, in overcrowded research-intensive
universities, investments in what economists call human
capital can hardly be described as optimal. The burden of
numbers frequently weakens the capacity of the university
to encourage the talented ones and thus stands in the way
of demanding the best from them.
At the same time, the
university neglects the training of those who are less
gifted because it is not at all prepared for this
training, or does not want to prepare itself. A culture
of excellence cannot grow if a university's capacity is
over-taxed.
Humboldt also insisted
that the university demands a measure of solitude. Edward
Shils, the great sociologist of higher education, defined
the solitude postulated by Humboldt as "freedom from
distraction."13 In the contemporary world
professors, students and the university itself are
constantly being distracted, letting themselves be
distracted and even seeking distraction.
The temptations are
endless. Universities and their associates are expected
to carry out research, to educate and instruct, to
contribute to society, to make their expertise available
to business, to improve the speed of innovation, to
become engines for the economy, to participate in the
improvement of social conditions, to contribute to a
higher quality of life and to obtain outside funding for
research. Small wonder that the university has become a
highly questionable institution.
The current situation is
not solely the result of outside demands placed on the
university. Rather, it is often a case of simultaneously
being led into temptation and yielding to it. For many
professors, for the university itself and occasionally
also for students, giving in to temptation brings fame or
profit or both, and is thus easy to justify. If the fate
of the country and in the face of globalization one
could even say the fate of any country depends
on a professor's well-remunerated expert opinion, then
the demise of the office hour with students is a price
many are prepared to pay.
If we set no limits on
this, even expect it, we should not complain that the
university is losing its institutional character or that
it is neglecting its chief tasks. This
"distraction" is a worldwide phenomenon.
Among its principal
sources is the area of technology transfer. Globally
there exists a demand for a stronger connection and a
greater partnership between universities and industry. As
I said at the outset, Stanford University and Silicon
Valley are seen as models for such partnerships. It is no
longer a matter of debate, for instance, that Northern
California owes much to the presence of its universities,
including of course the great University of California,
and their willingness to work with industry. For example,
in the 1950s, contact between Stanford University and
business was made easier by the founding of the Stanford
Research Park adjacent to the university. We work
actively toward securing patents and licensing rights.
High-tech companies in Silicon Valley alone recorded
earnings of $85 dollars in 1995, and according to one
estimate, 62 percent of those earnings can be traced back
to companies whose founders had connections to Stanford.
They have created hundreds of thousands of jobs.14 And I
am not even referring to businesses elsewhere in the
United States or the world to which graduates of Stanford
and other research-intensive universities have
contributed.
With divisions such as
Stanford's Center for Integrated Systems, we have created
partnerships expressly between university and industry.
However, partnerships of this sort demand relatively
large investments in terms of both capital and time. The
Center for Integrated Systems, which belongs to the
university and possesses its own complex of buildings on
campus, has as its task the integration of hardware and
software systems. Represented in it are 40 professors,
200 students (largely doctoral candidates), approximately
10 academic fields and some 15 companies from the
electronics industry worldwide. The research priorities
of the center develop from meetings between researchers
from the university and from industry: Researchers from
industry gain insights through time spent at the center
and, in turn, doctoral candidates complete internships at
the companies.
This kind of partnership
is not a "distraction" but an enrichment, since
universities learn from their partners in industry and
therefore it constitutes the fourth essential element of
Stanford's non-secret. Such contacts strengthen the
entrepreneurial spirit and the insight that technology
transfer is a "bodily contact sport," that is
to say, it assumes the willingness for personal
interaction. This non-hierarchical interaction is very
much part of the Stanford culture.
In a stimulating
assessment of Silicon Valley, Annalee Saxenian, a
professor at the University of California-Berkeley, has
generalized this point for Silicon Valley as a whole. I
quote:
Silicon Valley has a
regional network-based industrial system that promotes
collective learning and flexible adjustments among
specialist producers of a complex of related
technologies. The region's dense social networks and open
labor markets encourage experimentation and
entrepreneurship. Companies compete intensely while at
the same time learning from one another about changing
markets and technologies through informal communication
and collaborative practices; and loosely linked team
structures encourage horizontal communication among firm
divisions and with outside suppliers and customers. The
functional boundaries within firms are porous in a
network system, as are the boundaries between firms and
local institutions such as trade associations and
universities.15
Nevertheless, one must
beware of simplistic expectations. While boundaries to
the business world should be porous, the
research-intensive university's advantage in contributing
to innovation lies in its ability to set agendas and
remain open to chance and serendipity in research.
Stanford seeks
continuously to maintain this openness and the results, I
believe, indicate that this aspect of its character is
indeed the fifth element of the university's non-secret.
If a research-intensive university becomes dependent on
the imperatives of business product development or
governmental industrial policy, it loses the advantage
that it gains from its commitment to the endless process
of inquiry, the search to know. We also have to keep in
mind that support from industry can be of great
significance, but, in light of the expenses involved,
will not supplant research funding from the state. Basic
research is a public good that business, given its
orientation toward profit, can produce only in a limited
quantity on its own. This is an insight governments tend
to forget all too frequently, especially in times of
fiscal crisis. Stanford would not be where it is today
but for government funding in the period since World War
II.
At the beginning of the
21st century, the research-intensive university, in order
to make contributions to the welfare of society, must
still attempt to approximate the ideal type as defined at
the beginning of the 19th century. However, the
university as an institution will be deeply influenced by
information technology, which will redefine the
university and its relationship to society beyond the
imagination of Humboldt and the founders of both Stanford
and Peking University.
Information technology is
advancing so rapidly that I cannot possibly cite mastery
in this area as one of Stanford's non-secrets; however, I
can say that our ability to deal with issues it raises
successfully will be as critical to the university's
future as any of the previous five elements of the
non-secret I have described today has been to our
progress thus far.
I will focus on four areas
specifically. First, there is the World Wide Web as an
encyclopedic source of information, as a library and as
an archive. Today, databanks with scientific,
demographic, economic and political information are
accessible worldwide, as are legal decisions, not to
mention newspapers. Catalogs of the library holdings of
many universities are available to researchers without
the necessity of undertaking a physical trip to that
library. Increasingly, the complete texts of world
literature are available online, as are scholarly
journals and preprints. Entire archives are being created
worldwide: Government documents can be found in their
entirety, photos can be reproduced, film and audio
material can be downloaded. Because these databases can
be searched with great specificity and because links to
relevant sites and documents are easily accessed, there
are possibilities for research that, not long ago, could
only be dreamed of. The web is wonderfully unlimited,
robust and open.
From the perspective of
the university, what matters is that as a source of
information, as a library and archive, the World Wide Web
does not need a physical location at the university; thus
the university's function as an organizer of knowledge
and information will, in part, cease to exist.
Second, the domain of
teaching is currently undergoing changes due to the new
methods and forms of communication. In the near future,
the "lecture" from the podium will be replaced
by an interactive "presentation" in a virtual
"theater" that may or may not take place in a
lecture hall.
The third aspect is the
most important, and one that simultaneously liberates and
threatens the research-intensive university. As
limitations of time and space fall by the wayside, much
of what is currently tied to university teaching by those
limitations will fall too. Online teaching is beginning
to attain a reality that is anything but speculative. At
Stanford, for example, we give highly advanced math
instruction to gifted high school students the world over
whose schools do not offer these courses.
The amount of instruction
offered on the World Wide Web is continually increasing.
Any student in any country, as long as he or she can pay
the fee, can matriculate at universities that offer
"cyber instruction." Competition is evolving
internationally into a tide that accreditation and
testing monopolies will scarcely be able to stem. Given
what I said earlier about the importance of the link
between research and teaching, we have to be very careful
before we accept this development as equivalent to the
university as a physical institution.
Finally, the fourth aspect
is the electronic links between scholars and students
worldwide that already allow, for instance, for the
immediate communication of new research hypotheses as
well as their immediate falsification and refutation, or
seminars conducted with participants in different
locations. In this way, the walls of all universities
will become more porous. I welcome this development that
has begun to make possible the realization of an ancient
dream: a worldwide "republic of learning," a
global community of scholars.
But when all is said and
done, the ultimate measure of a university remains in the
contributions its research has made to human welfare. In
that respect the university of the 21st century has to be
measured by traditional yardsticks.
In 1954, the former
American President Herbert Hoover, an alumnus of
Stanford, eloquently evoked the character of universities
and what they can do. The occasion was receipt of an
honorary degree from the University of Tübingen, which
dates back to 1477. Hoover said:
It is by the free shuttle
of ideas between our universities that we weave the great
tapestries of knowledge. Our academic traditions have
developed a system that is peculiarly effective in
spotting outstanding intellects and putting them to work
in a climate that fosters creative, original thinking.
From the mutual building
by our university faculties and laboratories devoted to
abstract science have come most of the great discoveries
of natural law. The application of these discoveries
through invention and production has been the task of the
engineers and technicians whom we train. Applied science
dries up quickly unless we maintain the sources of
discovery in pure science. From these dual activities of
the scientists and the technicians, a great stream of
blessings in health, comfort, and good living has flowed
to all our people.16
Today I have attempted to
stress why, for Stanford, being part of that great stream
has had very little to do with secrets and a great deal
to do with adherence to the fundamental purposes and
character of a research-intensive university. A
commitment to building "steeples of excellence"
in research, learning and teaching; viewing the
combination of teaching and research as what we are
about, despite innumerable temptations; having the
freedom to set agendas; seeking industry partnerships as
enrichments to, not distractions from, the research
process; maintaining porous boundaries; and being open to
chance and serendipity in research these are the
non-secrets.
Their source is the common
wellspring from which Stanford and Peking University both
were drawn and from which blessings will continue to flow
for our nations, and for all mankind, in the 21st
century.
Thank you.
Footnotes
1 Ruth Hayhoe,
"China's Universities and Western Academic
Models," in Philip G. Altbach and Viswanathan
Selvaratnam (eds.), From Dependence to Autonomy: The
Development of Asian Universities, Kluwer Academic
Publishers (1989), 37.
2 Charles F. Thwing,
"The Imperial University of Peking," The
Independent 69 (September 1910), 573.
3 Eugene Lubot,
"Peking University Fifty-Five Years Ago:
Perspectives on Higher Education in China Today," Comparative
Education Review 17 (vol. 1), 48-49.
4 Ruth Hayhoe, China's
Universities 1895-1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict,
Garland Publishing, Inc. (1996), 45.
5 As to Cai, see Lubot,
46.
6 Lubot, 45.
7 Minerva VIII: 1
(January 1970), 243f.
8 See Edward Shils,
"The Idea of the University: Obstacles and
Opportunities in Contemporary Societies," Minerva
30 (1992), 301.
9 Minerva, 243.
10 Minerva, 244.
11 Minerva, 257.
12 Minerva, 246,
with some changes for clarity.
13 Shils, 309.
14 Joan Hamilton,
"Circuits of Knowledge," Stanford (May/June
1996), 48.
15 Annalee Saxenian, Regional
Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and
Route 128, Harvard University Press (1996), 2-3.
16 Herbert Hoover, Addresses
Upon the American Road 1950-1955, Stanford University
Press (1955), 95.
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