it's knot for tomorrow. it's a now-say. it's a right now-say. so i challenge you to sign up. there's a table. and plenty of sign-up cards. i want to recruit you to get on board with d.c. voice. d.c. voice is doing tremendous work for our community. i came on some time ago. and i watched the level of town hall meetings and how parents and others are getting involved. sometimes parents just need you to ask. just ask. will you ask? and will you sign up? come on. get on board with us. let's get going. thank you. [applause] >> have a good day. [inaudible conversation] >> jacqueline edelberg is the mother who walked into her neighborhood's struggling school and presented a wish list for its transformation. her story has been featured on

many national news programs. for more information visit twitter.com/walktoschool. >> jonathan cole former provost of columbia university presents a history of the american university system. columbia university in new york city hosts the two hour and 15 minute event. >> well, we can begin. i want to welcome everyone to this evening's discussion of higher education that is occasioned by the publication of jonathan cole's new book, "the great american university." my name is claude steele. i'm the provost of columbia university. and my role tonight to be your host and moderator and emcee.

and after the remarks have been made i'll probably moderate the discussion a little bit. it should be a very interesting discussion this evening. it's just all too rare that the topic of what makes research universities so valuable to society gets talked about. even in those universities. a real hope of mine is that jonathan's new book, which so magnificently addresses these questions, will help to change that. that it will help us all take a step back and get a better understanding of these institutions. institutions that have been so central in many of our lives. and that it will help society get a better sense of the value that these institutions hold for a society of a distinct kind of contribution that they make toward the american way of life and the world for that matter. i am as just noted the new provost at columbia having begun my term on september 1st of this year.

i've known jonathan for a good while now. he was a member of the board of trustees of the center that i just recently directed, the center for advanced study and behavioral sciences at stanford. and for all these reasons, i allowed myself to think that maybe on the first day i arrived on my job i might open my top desk drawer and there would be a letter in there from jonathan. [laughter] >> telling me how to be a good provost. and what the challenges of the job were. and how to go about them. and how tomorrow morning about them. how to frame the issues that are central in higher education today. you know, i expected a brief letter. what i found was a 600-page book. [laughter] >> i can't tell you how grateful i am for that book. i consider it a great service to higher education.

it's a letter in the top desk drawer of all of us who care about higher education in america and in american research universities. and it's a service to the broader universities in a sense of reminding it or maybe informing it for the first time in many instances of the value of these institutions. their indispensablity in their own lives. a quick glance of the book will reveal the immense amount of labor and school and thought and life experience that has gone into it. i don't know of another book quite like it. nor one that seems so well timed to our particular time. my hope is that it will create a certain moment or at least contribute to the creation of a moment, a moment in which we, as i said a second ago, reflect on the role of higher education in the modern research university in american society. a moment that renews our motivation to preserve and further develop the things about these institutions that make them so important.

the book helps to create this moment, i think, in several ways. first, it gives an overview history of the modern research american -- the modern research university in american society. it's a combination of the british idea of an undergraduate college and a graduate school. in this unique hi-i don't kn know -- jonathan reveals these unique institutions and why they become a model of the world. the next the book offers the best compendium of achievement of these institutions that i know. a compelling description of the contributions that these made to society and the role they made of a national system of innovation. i will be cribbing from this section of the book for years whenever i need a concrete

illustration of contributions research universities make to society. last, the book addresses the value system that sustains these institutions. the freedom of expression and thought that has made them so effective. and the threats to the society of system that has arisen in the broader american society. so you can see from this listing that this book is not passing discussion of the modern research university. it is both comprehensive and deep. it is as near a complete education about these institutions as you will ever find between the covers of a single book, i believe. and here to discuss this book we have an extraordinarily distinguished panel of commentators tonight. the schedule for the evening will be that jonathan will make remarks for 40, 45 minutes or so. and then each of the panelists will also be given about 20 minutes to make remarks. and that will be followed by

questions from the audience. and there are two microphones that you can see there waiting for you. to give you a sense of who the panelists are and thus some of the perspectives that are represented this evening, i thought i would introduce them now at this point in the program. and that would avoid me having to get up and down and introducing each of them individually. the first commentator will be jeff stone, who is -- was himself a long time provost at the university of chicago. from 1993 to 2003. after receiving his law degree from the university of chicago in 1971, and working among others justice william brennan of the u.s. supreme court, geoff has been on the faculty of the law school at the university of law school ever since. and in this -- in the time since he has served as both in his time at chicago he served both as the dean of the law school for a good period, five or six years and then as a provost for

ten years. he will bring his own great experience to this discussion. he teaches rights and rights primarily in the area of constitutional law. he's written numerous distinguished books, several of which have gathered an impressive number of awards. he's currently editing a 15-volume series entitled "inalienable rights." you'll have to pronounce that one when you get up here. including chapters by the luminaries of political philosophy and history. a past book that is especially relevant to tonight's discussion is "eternally vigilant: free speech in the modern era" goeff is a american of the arts and science academy. our second commentator will be matthew goldstein who is currently the chancellor of the city university of new york. his alma mater. dr. goldstein has served in many

academic senior administrative positions over the years as president adelefy university. he's also helped faculty positions in these schools as others and his scholarship is in the area of statistics. a field in which he's published a number of major textbooks and other writings. he too is a member of the american academy of arts and sciences, the new york academy of sciences and is a recipient of a long distinguished list of prize and see awards. he will bring a wealth of leadership to the discussion tonight. finally, our last speaker of the evening will be richard axl. he's currently a university professor and professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and pathology at the columbia university of college of physicians and surgeons. i don't know everyone at columbia yet but the only person i know who rivals richard for having had the longest association, i should say, with

columbia university, is jonathan himself. i believe richard's tenure here was interrupted by a time in med school at john hopkins but otherwise has been throughout the duration of his time in college and career. besides being at columbia richard has done a few other impressive things on the way. one major thrust of his work as i'm sure many of you know has been in clarifying how the olfactory system. and richard's work in this area as long as his lab rarity linda buck has been a basic understanding of this system. he and his achievement and dr. buck won the 2004 nobel prize in physiology and medicine. richard is also a member of the national academy of sciences. the american academy of arts and sciences and the american philosophical association.

that concludes the introductions for the commentators on the panel. now, let me turn to our major person -- i'll introduce you, jonathan. you can stay seated. jonathan is currently the john mitchell mason professor of the university and provost and dean of faculties emeritus at columbia university. he was dean of faculties for 14 years. the second longest term i think in that position in columbia's history and even at this early stage can appreciate that achievement. and before that, he served as the director of the center for the social sciences from 1979 to 1987. and he has been vice president of the arts and sciences as well. he enjoys the distinctive status of having spent as i said earlier his entire post-secondary life, i think, at

columbia university having begun as a freshman by my count in 1960. so he has a number of -- an awful lot scholarly worked. most of it has been focused on the sociology of science as a research specialty. and he has been published -- this work has been published in a large number of outlets. in recent years his scholarly attention has been focused on higher education particularly focus problems on great research universities. i'll just turn this over to jonathan. thank you. [applause] >> well, thank you very much, claude. and i want to thank the people who have come to participate in this panel.

it's generous of them to spend time not only taking a look at the book but to share with me the possibilities of discussing this topic further. so geoff, richard and who else matthew. it's great to have you here. so thanks. as claude said, i spent my entire life at columbia university coming in 1960. and it's the type of experiences of being a student here, a faculty member here and then as an administrator here which led me to not only meet a great number of people who were leaders in american universities, faculty members who were producing the kinds of knowledge that i speak about in this book. and the people who are transmitting knowledge through extraordinary teaching. and it is all that combined that led me to want to write this

book. it's written to reach the educated public, in fact. the graduates of the stanfords, berkeleys and the university of michigans and those in the united states and those around the world as well. now, some say i believe columbia blew and they're probably right in saying that but i hope i have in the book a large enough perspective to be able to create a landscape, if you will, for the american university system. let me begin in trying to describe this big book. it's a big thick book with it being yea. and it's taken from the very beginning of the book and i'll quote it and then i'll try to introduce the other sections of the book to you. i stepped onto the stage before

150 of the nation's leading scholars and sciences to describe her biological research and discoveries. moving with controlled animation, bonnie, a stat uesque person in a black tan suit and curly black hair and a cat-like smile began describing her path-breaking work. the subject was small cell to cell communication in bacteria. over the next 20 minutes the professor eptranced this audience in the american philosophical society with stories of the molecular mechanisms that bacteria use for intercell uler communication. standing her portrait of the philosophical society she recounted her request to understand the chemical mechanism that allows these tiny bacteria which would be impotent

acting alone to detect environmental areas and use a process called quorum sensing to allow them to act as multicellular organizisms. act together the bacteria add the power and potency possibly to strategize and to assault the body in disease. using quorum sensing the bacteria are able to count themselves and after reaching a sufficient high number, they launch their attack simultaneously. that way the bacteria had a better chance of overpowering the immune system. bassler has demonstrated that this form of communication can be found in the world's most virulent microbes including those that call cholera and plague. and bassler is doing fundamental

science in her laboratory at princeton university as well as collaborating in others at america's great universities but she has also embraced the idea held by franklin of doing science in order to create useful knowledge. the bacterial diseases that bassler studies have relevance for biological defense against bioterrorism since many of the pathogens she studies are many that experts believe bioterrorists would try to use. she works with a goal of developing molecules that will have potential use as antimicrobial drugs aimed at bacteria that can cause lethal diseases such as anthrax. she wants to find a way to stop the bacteria from talking. now, bassler is just one of many extraordinary gifted people found in laboratories and classrooms of america's great universities. like them, she's the product of the greatest system of higher

learning that the world has ever known. and her works build on the past achievements of these academies to advance our understanding and well-being even more. what she and others are doing is transforming american society, developing knowledge that helps to generate new industries, to improve public health and to create higher standards of living for america, and americans and people across the world. these kinds of people exist, of course, in other countries. but they seem to exist in abundance today at america's greatest universities. now what is the evidence, in fact, that the united states dominates the set of greatest institutions of higher learning in the world? well, if you look at a variety of studies that have been done, you will see that we account for about 80% of the top 20 universities in the world. 75% of the top 50. and 60% of the top 100.

we also by other educators after the second world war have dominated the received nobel prizes. having earned probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of all nobel prizes since the war. and if you look at the literature in the sciences and other fields, almost all fields in fact, you will find the most highly referenced papers, the ones with the greatest impact are generally produced by americans. at least we dominate in many fields the production of verifiably important papers. i want to alert you to the fact that today not one german university is among the top 50. not one russian university is among the top 75. there's not one chinese university by their own reckoning that's among the top 200. now, interestingly enough, when most people -- when we think about great universities, our

own great universities, we don't think that lasers, fm radio, magnetic resonance imaging, global positioning systems, the barcode, transistors, improve weather forecasting, cures for childhood leukemia, the pap smear, messages for surveying public opinion and many others, for example, the algorithm for google. the discovery of radar. dna fingerprinting, fetal monitoring the nicotine patch. the heimlich maneuver discovered at cornell. we don't think of these as having their origins at the great american universities. most people and the educated public think these universities and think of them in terms of their ability to transmit knowledge to undergraduates and it's part of professional education.

in terms of teaching, and this transmission of knowledge, rather than the creation of new knowledge and how teaching and research ought coupled at that moment of the research enterprise. now, this is a big book as i say. and it's about higher education. and it tries to tell the story of how our system of higher education became the greatest in the world in producing this kind of great knowledge. how that knowledge through discoveries, inventions, devices, medical miracles have shaped our lives and the way we think. and why these excellence need to be protected against current threats of their preeminence. it's a big subject. a thick book. but the central messages, the central themes of the book can be summarized fairly simply. let me do that and then i'll elaborate somewhat on them in the time that remains. first of all, we tend not to think of this as a young system.

but, in fact, the american research university is relatively young. and highly embedded in the larger american society. after all, the first research university was founded 100 years after the signing of the declaration of independence in 1876. in the form of johns hopkins. and the research university doesn't really get going until the beginning of the 20th century. in the next three decades, by the 1930s, the core values of this system were put in place. the essential values in which the system was built and without which its greatness could not have been achieved. the structures were in turn built on those value systems. and they would be built in a way that would express themselves in the ability for us to have unmatched discoveries coming from these institutions. the take-off itself does not really begin until -- at least i

date it january 1933. and it doesn't reach its full speed until after the second world war and i'll come back to that moment in time. it also benefited enormously by perhaps the tipping point in which the united states government became deeply involved in scientific research after the second world war. and its choice to use taxpayer dollars to fund research in a way that had not been done before. and on the scale that had not been done before. it's not that the government hadn't been involved in research universities. they had begun to get very involved even during the civil war when the moral act that created land grant institutions in 1862 -- in the middle of that civil war was nonetheless passed by the administration of abraham lincoln. but it didn't really reach full

throttle until after the second world war. and what makes them truly the best in the world is not at the end of the day the quality of the undergraduate education there. but the research discoveries, inventions, innovations, et cetera that have been coming out of these universities for some time. now, what's extraordinary to me is that this story has not really been told by the leaders of american higher learning over the years. and i consider it a personal failure until i wrote this book, of course, of not trying to communicate to the broader public. what it is about these universities that makes them in their entirety quite extraordinary. and i don't want to. i want to be very careful. i don't want to underestimate the importance of undergraduate education or the transmission of knowledge. but it is not that which differentiates us greatly from those types of education that we

can find abroad or in the great liberal arts colleges perhaps in the united states. when i talk to alums at columbia, and i talk to many of them over the years, they would ask questions very intelligent questions about how is the university doing and particularly focusing on how is the columbia college core curriculum doing? are we maintaining the integrity of the curriculum? and i was struck by how infrequent, almost never -- i came across the following kind of questions from one of these alums. one of the great discoveries that had been made in columbia over the last five years -- what discoveries that are coming from columb columbia are changing our lives. they weren't questions that weren't asked. in some sense we hadn't educated them to ask those questions. so we had the right values and we built the right structures. on those values.

we also had exceptionally talented people brought into the system from wherever they might be found. we had enlightened and bold leadership from the inception of the research university. we had a deep commitment to the idea of free inquiry and the autonomy of the university, the research university, from the state. and that differentiates us from many of the countries. european countries that generally have state-controlled universities. there's little autonomy in the research mission from the state. and also in many other countries, it does not fully recognize the importance of free inquiry and academic freedom. and then we've had unprecedentet resou put into the system that has enabled us to build excellence. resources that went far beyond what european nations did during the war when they were trying to

recover from the war and far beyond what asian nations were able to do until recently. so what were some of the factors that contributed to the evolving idea of the american university? and there are a few. first of all, until the turn of the century, these were small colleges, basically. harvard and yale and princeton and the privates as well as some of the publics were relatively small focusing on undergraduate education when interestingly enough, when daniel gillman created hopkins and began to raid harvard of some of its best faculty that maybe we have to compete with hopkins for talent. and he had said about the incorporation of the german model of the american model by

hopkins. in the fit freshman as well as is a barnyard would suit a whale. well, he soon changed and became highly competitive in the world of research universities. it was a growing belief in science and technology. the federal government as i say became involved. it was a tremendous competitive spirit that existed at the time. and it was carried over into the universities themselves. if you look at the university of chicago, that was founded in 1892, and you look at william rainy harper, the first president of that university, he was immediately taking rockefeller's money and trying to recruit the best of the talent that was available elsewhere. and he was very successful at doing it. and very rapidly catapulted it into one of the best universities in the world. the model itself was a hybrid. it came from an amalgam of the

deep interest in the research activities of the british -- of the german universities in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. and the undergraduate model of the colleges at oxford and cambridge. we put our special stamp on this and we transformed it in interesting ways. for example, much less hierarchal than the germans. they were struck by the fact that students, graduate students, would actually talk to their professors and use their first names. and even talking to them. which was something which hadn't necessarily been done. now, let me talk very briefly about those values that i said are essential for great universities. and there are 12 that i talk about in the book and go on in some detail. many of them come from clients and the development of science.

and have their origins in 17th century science. my teacher, robert merton elaborates it on many of his works and just to give you a sense of some of those core values that are essential without which i don't believe you could have greatness. one is the idea -- the idea and the aspiration to meritocracy or universalism. that is to say people are judged on the quality of their mind, the quality of their ideas. not on their status, their ascribed status by where they were born into but what their achievements and their possibilities were. there was the value of organized skepticism, which insisted that we question any claims to fact and truth and demand evidence be put forward in order to sustain claims to truth and fact. there was, of course, this very heavy value placed on the creation of new knowledge. there was the open and free communication of ideas. that there would not be borders

that could not be permeated within the academic community among and between universities. there was the norm and the value of free inquiry and academic freedom. there was the notion that these institutions were fundamentally international. that there were no scholarships. that were restricted of borders. the peer reviewed system. that essentially the people who could judge other's work had to be expert in the field. they had to be knowledgeable in the field. and those were the people who would establish the criteria of excellence. and would judge their peers as it were as to hiring, promotion and the like. and remember even in the early part of the 20th century, there was enormous power that existed in the hands of presidents to do this. and, in fact, it was elliott himself who said god bless the rise of disciplines. and of peers so that they could

help him judge the quality of the people he was hiring and promoting at places like harvard. there was a great set of bold leaders. and there was also a sense of you governed increasingly by authority. the rule of the governed rather than by sheer power. and there was a commitment to the common good. and that is after all what a lot of the research is designed to do. to produce common good. some of it has intrinsic value. and it's sometimes we see that some that have a fundamental value downstream have enormous practical implications. the laser is one example of that. which was -- and when it was first discovered as the laser here by charles town in the physics department at columbia later transformed into the laser -- but it was described by

towns himself as a discovery in search of applications. well, we found a few applications for the laser. and then it's affected all of our lives. now i mentioned earlier and i want to come to it that the tipping point was probably january 1933. and why? as many of us know, january 1933, was the month that hitler came to power. fdr became president of the united states and took the oath of office. and james would also like us to be president of harvard. i think he's been somewhat forgotten about that. but in any event after -- you have to recognize that germany in the first three decades dominated the production of knowledge. they dominated the receipt of nobel prizes. it was a power house that american scientists and scholars envied. we traveled to germany and

austria and places like that in order to soak up what they had to offer us. eventually what they gave us were great leaders and i'll go back to that. but the fact of the matter is, the professors at the great universities of berlin were purged very quickly and they were purged on ideological grounds. the point is that the basis on which the purging was done was on the basis of religion, on the basis of extraneous characteristics having nothing to do on the quality of their work. once that purging took place, 50% of the high energy particles in germany left and they embraided. -- emigrated. they emigrated to the united states which was the great immigration of the '30s and they write without the '30s and they were placed in american universities. and was said, you know, we have the core of the community here and we are young and what we are

in need of is leaders. and what was imported in effect was -- one of the leaders who could be placed at these universities and work with these young people to create the greatest physics community in the world. and that was done. so in some sense, some ironic sense, the great tragedy of europe led to an unanticipated way to the funding of research university and great people came. einstein, of course. max zobra, paul assenfeld. they offered vibrancy and extraordinary combination was created between those who were here and those who came. now, i also suggested that one of the critical moments was the production of the science

policy, a very prescient science policy that came into being after the war. and here's how it came in. i don't know how many of you have ever heard of the name vannerbush but i doubt too many young people have heard of her. she's not related to the bushes of modern times. but he mobilized the war effort among the intellectuals of scholars and scientists in the united states. he was in charge of it. he was the person who organized the manhattan project and developing the radar at the lab at mit and a whole host of other things. he was on the cover of life magazine. well, after the war was over and clearly, you know, the science might not have won the second world war for the united states, but it certainly contributed largely to the victory. he went to see president roosevelt and he was very close to him. and roosevelt asked him, well, what's going to happen now that

all these scientists are going back to the universities. what's going to happen to our position particularly interested in our military superiority at the time? and bush said it's going to be a disaster unless we do something. so roosevelt said, well, go do something. and what was created out of that go do something was one of the most extraordinary science policy documents it has ever come in to being called "science, the endless frontier" offered by a set of committees but really by vanover bush. and what were the elements of that that made it so important? first of all, what bush wanted to do was to use taxpayer money -- he knew while foundations could offer assistance in growing research, there was nothing like the public coffers and especially the federal dollars that could potentially really build science technology and other areas in the growth of knowledge. and so he wanted to use this. and that was extremely important.

he wanted to establish a national research foundation that was independent of government or quasi government and congress wouldn't let him do that and eventually it morphed into the national science foundation which was formed in 1950. there were other elements to this that are important. he wanted to outsource research. in short, he didn't want to take the route that european nations had gone which were basically to control the research by creating government-supported institutes, government-controlled institutes. he said let's run the money through the universities, outsource this funding and do it on a competitive basis that would be guided by the peer-reviewed system. and that's precisely what was done. that is the best quality proposals would get funding. the creation of the reorganization of the nih and the creation of the nsf and the very, very rapid rise in their

budgets were instrumental in the growth of these universities because the money was coming to the universities for research and there was another element of it which was critically important. he believed in linking teaching and research. especially at the grassroots level. in fact, we know today that doctoral students, post-dockal -- post-doctoral students. we're in fact coupling it in the american system making it far tighter, in fact, than it was in the european system where research that takes place in institutions like cnrs tends to get decoupled from the university system itself. okay. the legislation was passed. this grew. i'm going to spend less time because i want to get on to the

threats of the -- to the university on some of the great leaders that have been extremely important. i want to just focus on one because he was a provost. and by my accounting, the greatest provost in the history of american higher education. and that was frederick turman. if i believe columbia blue, he bled cardinal red. he was a lifer at stanford but he had worked during the war for vanover bush. if you think networks weren't operating there at the time, they were. and he got to not only know vandover bush but he headed the antisubmarine effort during the war. he actually ran a group that was numbered in the thousands, larger than the total population of faculty and staff at stanford when he returned to stanford.

he went back to the engineering school. he became provost in 1957. in the next decade he transformed with the help of wally sterling who was very important to the president of stanford at the time -- he transformed this from a sleepy college, a good sleepy college and good university into a world class institution. and he envisioned the future the way in which very few academic leaders did. and i'll contrast him for a moment with one of our own. what did he see? for example, he saw the opening up -- the enormous potential of biological sciences. so just a few years earlier it was discovered of the double dna structure. and the basic biological science with medicine was going to be the future.

and he and sterling against a great deal of resistance brought the medical school, which was located in san francisco, down to the stanford campus. began to link the biological sciences and medicine. began to recruit in clusters some of the great minds like josh letterberg, for example, from wisconsin to stanford and he would get them moving and running in a way that was unusual, extraordinary, and cost a lot of money. for example, putting up the three buildings at stanford that involved the new medical school involved the capital campaign. and the capital campaign had a target of $15 million. we're trying to raise 3 billion, 4 billion, 5 billion here and there. a different scale but not easily done. he had an insistence on quality. absolute insistence on quality.

and he did very clever things and why didn't i do it? he had friends and i think he himself at the time was a member of the national academy of sciences. he wanted great talent. so what did he do? he looked at the roster of people who had been elected to the academy. and he looked at them very carefully. and he passed those by. and he looked at the people who had just failed to make it. the youngsters who he could get cheaply and the ones who are apt to be members of the academy five years down the road and he went after them and he recruited them and he did an extraordinary job in building many of the disciplines at stanford. and, of course, we know, those of us who know the story -- he was in many ways the father of silicon valley. he understood after the war, not only is the government going to invest in universities, but that the externalities from that research effort were going to lead to new high technology

universities and if they could be located by the university the economic of the region for the university would be absolutely extraordinary. and so what did he do? he had mr. hewlett and mr. packard, they set up a garage on the campus and that's where the first hewlett-packard machine came out of. eventually spun off. so he was a visionary. and he was tough. and he believed in quality. and he saw the future. that's the most important thing. he really understood that we were an adaptive organism these universities. and he was adapting the organism to the new realities and the new context. i'm going to contrast him with one of our own. a professor of mine, actually. who's an icon. and i use that word very carefully. but he is an iconic professor.

and he was provost at the exact same time basically as terman. but there was something about him that had nostalgia for cardinal newman's university in 1852. the cloistered university that would be free of government interference, et cetera, et cetera. so he's a very brilliant man looked backwards. and he never saw the future in how columbia would have to upgrade its facilities, expand its facilities, move towards a greatest investment in the areas that the government was sponsoring. and so you saw very two different types of people with two very different results because in many ways his orientation hurt columbia for a decade or two afterwards. okay. let me shift because i know we're going to be short on time

to the third part of the book that i want to just capsulize to how we got here today and the second part to try to give you a sense in the biomedical sciences as well as in the physical sciences and engineering and computer science as well as the social sciences and humanities. ...

>> all kinds of large industries, ngos of various kinds have come out of the work that have been done at these universities in social/behavioral sciences. and that's the second part of the book, and i leave it to you to look at it, and i hope you will. the third part of the book talks about the challenges it faces us looking forward, and i wanted to summarize them very, very briefly, and then we'll open it up to questions can later. but one thing i want to make sure you understand is that these universities have huge economic impact. i mean, i mentioned silicon valley, but just think of what stanford university at the moment represents. it reports that faculty members, students and alumni have founded more than 2400 companies, a

report dated 2008. this includes cisco systems, google, hue let back ard and have -- hewlett packard. mit similarly. it reports that 4,000 mit-related companies employ 1.1 million people. and by the way, again, there's a multiplier effect of two or three or four or five times that number of the suppliers and others who feed these companies. and it has, these companies have an annual world sale of $232 billion which is just a little less than the gross domestic product of south africa and of thailand and which would make mit companies among the 40 largest economies in the world. when the university of california which i will come back to in a moment is dismantling it university system as we speak, it is also

dismantling the necessary conditions for economic growth in the area and, in fact, the wealth of their own community. okayment so what are -- okay. so what are some of the challenges, and what are some of the things that we have to be very careful about if we're going to maintain our preeminence? i want to begin, in some sense, by making at least the claim that the source of the challenge is not the one that most people think about which is the threat that foreign universities will surpass us in a short period of time. the chinese universities, for example, or the japanese university, the asian universities or those that are in europe. the european universities are in total disarray, i mean, extraordinary kiss array -- disarray. the chinese universities have far to go before they can really challenge the american universities. by the way, it's not that this

won't happen, and it may well happen in the next 25 years or so, but i don't think it's imminent, and i don't think that's the imminent threat. to paraphrase walt kelly's wonderful cartoon character pogo, the fact of the matter is i believe the enemy is us. and in what ways is the enemy us? well, you can see the way in which antiterrorism legislation was used and abused in the period between 2001 and quite recently, in fact, this legislation is still very much on the books. and whether it's being acted on or not we don't know. there were huge numbers of immunenologists working on trying to find cures for diseases, antidotes, vaccines, etc., who were subjected to fbi searches or reporting very closely-followed work. and look, by the way, i want to be very clear; some of these

select agents that these laboratories are working with are nasty things. i mean, you want to know where they are. on the other hand, if you prevent a scientist from saying i want to hire into my laboratory a postdoctoral student who happens to come from iran who has no security risk and you can be criminally dieted if that -- indicted if that student steps foot in that laboratory, then i think we have a problem of government interference with knowledge and the growth of knowledge. now, there are other important ways in which the government has begun to interfere with the growth of knowledge. one, of course, is restrictive visa policies which all of us know about. i mean, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to move freely from their countries to the united states, and if there is one industry in the world in which we actually have a favorable balance of trade, it's higher education.

and to the extent that we restrict this for, without real cause is really impeding the progress we can make because we cannot depend on our own talent base in science and technology at this point in time. it's another issue that i'll leave to one side. there have also been efforts to influence the publication of scientific papers if you happen to be a foreigner and living in a country which is considered one that we are restricting trade to. there are efforts, of course, for us to impose ideological positions on the conduct of science, and that, perhaps, is most troubling. the policies which existed upon growing stem cell line, for example, and embryonic stem cell research. the restrictions that were being made on people as extraordinary as james hansen who works here

and for nasa on the speeches that they can make. they were actually had to have the government politicians okay the speeches he would make before he would give it, and he refused. but that became sort of a cause celebre, but this has been going on with the government and with government scientists. the efforts to alter truth and facts about reproductive health and other health issues, the reason which the cdc altered its web site to emphasize abstinence rather than the use of condoms. there were the ways in which the government tried to infiltrate, if you will, the peer review system bringing political appointees into the peer review system and trying to get rid of extraordinary sciences like elizabeth blackburn who just won the nobel prize from the ethics panel because she disagreed in some ways with the existing policy.

okay. what i think this is also symptomatic of is, in some sense, a deeper set of problems in this country which, of course, arises every once in a while, and that is the politicization of science involves a certain kind of antiintellectualism of a kind that richard hostetter taught us a great deal about, a kind of movement towards anti-science which is problematic. the imposition of religious values over scientific values or at least trying to influence the growth of scientific knowledge on the basis of ideology. remember how ideology when the government imposes it can have devastating effects on universities. now, let me try to conclude this, this talk because i think

i've gone through my allotted time, if nothing else. and i hope that you will take a look at the book and where all of this is elaborated on with much greater specificity. i believe that there isn't any really good reason why the united states cannot maintain its position among the preeminent research universities in the world. there continues to be, in fact, in our own bellies, in our own universities enormous unrealized potential within this system. we should not fear foreign competition even if the competition exists, it should be good for the growth of knowledge. if the we can compete with other nations to find cures for cancer or different forms of cancer, to discover new genes and new waysover treating patients and -- ways of treating patients and this involves producing knowledge that moves us forward in a whole variety of ways, that's a good thing for the

broader system and, in fact, will probably make our universities still better because they are highly competitive. but there are choices, in fact, to be made. we're capable of blowing it. and if we follow the path being taken by many states in dealing with their great universities, we may well lose the luster that we have. that's the great test, i believe, that we face, and it remains an open question whether we'll pass it. thank you. [applause] >> as claude noted in his introduction, i had the great privilege of serving as provost at the university of chicago for a considerable period of time, and one of the real pleasures of that experience was it gave me the opportunity to get to know

jonathan cole and to have a chance to work with him during that time. and i used to like telling people after i was in a meeting with jonathan that i just came back from a meeting with one of the two best provosts in the united states. [laughter] joanna knows me well enough to know how arrogant i am, right? [laughter] what i meant by that, about jonathan o as opposed to the joke on myself is true. when i became provost, one of my predecessors in chicago said to me to be a great provost, you must radiate the values of the university. and that's true. a provost is as chief academic officer of the university someone who more than anyone else in the institution has the responsibility and the capacity to inspire colleagues and students to achieve what matters most to the institution. and what was always most impressive to me about jonathan was the way he radiated the

values of the university, and by that i don't mean columbia or chicago, but i mean of this university, and if there was any person who would write this book, it was appropriately jonathan. as jonathan observes in his book, "the great american university," the protection of ideas from interference or repression is absolutely fundamental to the university. indeed, it is in no small measure our deep commitment to academic freedom that, in my view, has allowed american universities to be great. it's imperative, though, that we never take academic freedom for granted, for that freedom of thought and inquiry that we enjoy today in the academy is the product of centuries of struggle, and in the first part of my talk i will briefly trace the history of academic freedom because unless we know how we got to where we are today, we may not understand just how unique and potentially fragile

our cac demic -- academic freedom really is. and in the final part of my talk i will offer a few thoughts about the challenges of the future. although the struggle for academic freedom can be traced at least as far back as socrates' elegant defense of himself of the charge that he corrupted athens, the modern history of this struggle as played out in university context begins with the advent of universities as we know them today in the 12th century. in the social structure of the middle ages, universities were centers of power and prestige. they were largely autonomous institutions conceived in the spirit of the guilds. their members, whom we today would describe as faculty, elected their own officials and set their own rules. there were, however, sharp limits on the scope of scholarly inquiry. there existed a hard core of authoritatively-established

doctrine which was made obligatory on all scholars and teachers. it was expected that each new accretion of knowledge would be consistent with the single system of truth anchored in christian dog dogma. as scholars and teachers gradually became more interested in science and began to question some of the fundamental precepts of religious doctrine, the conflict between scientific inquiry and religious authority grew intense. when galileo published his telescopic observations, for example, he was listed as a suspect in the secret books of the inquisition, threatened with torture, compelled publicly to disavow his views and ultimately imprisoned for the rest of his life. throughout the 17th century, university life remained largely bounded by the medieval curriculum. real freedom of thought was neither practiced, nor professed. as one statement put the point, the teacher is not to permit any novel opinion to be taught, nor

to teach anything contrary to prevalent opinion. this was the general attitude in america as well as in europe, and freedom of inquiry in america was severely limited by the constraints of religious doctrine until well into the 19th century. this 1654, for example, harvard's president was forced to resign because he denied the scriptural validity of baptism. the latter part of the 18th century saw a brief period of relative secularization of the american college as part of the enlightenment. by opening up new fields of study and introducing a note of skepticism and inquiry, the trend towards secular learning began to liberate college work. the teacher of science introduced for the fist time the discovery rather than the mere transmission of knowledge into the classroom. but this shift was short lived for the opening decades of the 19th century brought a significant retrodepression due largely to the rise of religious

fundamentalism in the early years of the 19th century. that, in turn, led to a sharp act against the skepticism of the enlightenment and a concerted effort on the part of the protestant churches to reassert their control over intellectual life. as a result of this development, the american college in the first half of the 19th century once again found itself deeply centered in tradition. it looked to antiquity for the tools of thought and to christianity for the laws of living. it was highly paternalistic and authoritarian, its emphasis on mechanical drill and richer discipline stymied free discussion and squelched creativity. three factors in particular stifled academic freedom in this era. first, the college teacher was regarded first and foremost as a teacher because academic honors hinged entirely on teaching, there was no incentive or time for research. indeed, it was generally agreed that research was positively

harmful to teaching. in 1857, for example, the trustees of columbia college attributed the then low state of the college to the fact that some of its professors wrote books. second, educators of this era generally regarded the college student as intellectually naive and morally deficient. stamping in with all that phrase applies was the predominant pedagogical method and learning was understood to mean little more than repetitive mechanical drill. third, teaching was smothered by the prevalent theory of moralism which assumed that any idea should be judged by its moral advantages, anathema to scholarly inquiry. the most important moral problem in america in the first half of the century was, of course, slavery. in both the north and south, colleges rigidly enforced their own views on this subject.

by the 1830s, the mind of the south had closed completely on the question. when it became known, for example, that a professor at the university of north carolina was sympathetic to the 1856 republican presidential candidate, the faculty publicly repudiated his views, and he was discharged by the trustees. the situation in the north was not much better. the president of franklin college was dismissed because he was not an abolitionist, and judge edward lorry was dismissed because in his capacity as a federal judge, he had enforced the fugitive slave law. between 1870 and 1900, there was a genuine revolution in american higher education. dramatic reforms such as graduate instruction and scientific courses were implemented, and great new universities were established, cornell, hopkins, stanford and chicago. new academic goals were embraced. to criticize and augment as well as preserve the tradition became

an accepted function of higher education. this was an extraordinary departure for a system that previously had aimed primarily at cultural conservation. two forces in particular hastened this shift. the first was the impact of darwinism, the second was the influence, as jonathan mentioned, of the german university. by the early 1870s, darwin's theory of revolution was no longer a disputed hypothesis within the american scientific community, but as scientific doubts subsided, religious opposition rose. determined efforts were made to exclude proponents of darwinism whenever possible. and these disputes were often quite bitter. the conflict brought together like-minded teachers, scientists, scholars and philosophers who believed in evolution and who developed new standards of academic inquiry. in their view to dissent was shot to obstruct, but potentially to enrighten. --

enlighten. the great debate went far beyond whether evolution true, it represented a profound class between conflicting cultures, intellectual styles and academic values, and it pitted the scientific -- the authoritarian against the impairist. in these conflicts science and education joined forces to attack both the principle of moralism and the authority of the clergy. a new approach to education and to intellectual discourse grew out of the darwinian debate. to the evolutionists, all beliefs were verifiable only through a continuous process of inquiry. they held that every claim to truth must submit to open verification, that the process of verification must follow certain rules, and that this process is best understood by those who qualify as experts. in the attack upon clerical

control of universities, the most effective weapon was the contention that the clergy was simply incompetent when it came to science. the result of this attack was the almost complete disappearance of the clergy as a serious academic force. in 1860, 39% of the members of the boards of private colleges were clergymen. by 1900 the percentage had cropped to 23 rt and by 1930, only 7%. the other factor that played a critical role in the transformation of american higher education in the late 19th century was the influence of the german university. the modern conception of a university as a research institution was, in large part, a german contribution. the object of the german university was the determined, methodical and independent search for truth. such a vision of the research university attracted individuals of outstanding abilities rather than mere med gogs and

disciplinarians. the german professor enjoyed freedom of teaching and freedom of inquiry. the german system held that this freedom was the distinctive prerogative of the profession and essential condition of the university. indeed, the single greatest contribution of the german university to the american conception of academic freedom was the assumption that academic freedom defines a true university. as william rainey harper observed in 1892, when for any reason the administration of a university attempts to dislodge a professor because of his political or religious sentiments, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university. though american universities borrowed heavily from the german in this era, there evolved two critical differences between the american and german conceptions of academic freedom. first, whereas the german conception encouraged the professor to convince his students of the wisdom of his own views, the american conception held that the proper

stance for professors in the classroom was one of neutrality on controversial issues. as president charles elliot of harvard declared the time, the notion that education consists in the incull case of what the teacher deems true is intolerable in the university. second, the german conception of academic freedom distinguished sharply between freedom within and freedom outside the university. within the walls of the academy, the german conception allowed a wide latitude of utterance, but outside the university the german view assumed that professors were obliged to be circumspect and nonpolitical. american professors rejected this limitation drawing upon the more general american conception of freedom of speech, they insisted on participating actively in the arena of social and political action. american professors demanded the right to express their opinions, even outside the walls of

academia and even on controversial subjects. this view of academic freedom has generated considerable friction for by claiming that the professor should be immune not only for what they say in the classroom and in their research, but also in public discourse. this empowers professors to engage in outside activities and views that can inflict serious harm on their universities in the form of disgruntled trustees, alienated alumni and disaffected donors. these issues were brought to a head in the closing years of the 19th century when businessmen began to support universities on an unprecedented scale. for at the same time that trusteeship at a prestigious university was increasingly becoming an important symbol of business prominence, a growing concern amongst scholars about the excesses of commerce and industry generated new forms of research, particularly in the social sciences, that were own sharply critical of the means by

which these trustee philanthropists had amaased their wealth. the moguls and scholars, thus, came into direct conflict in the later years of the 19th century. for example, a professor was dismissed from cornell for a speech in annoyed a benefactor. and a prominent scholar at stanford was dismissed for his opinions on immigration issues. during world war i, zealots persecuted and even prosecuted those questioned for the draft. universities faced the almost total collapse that had evolved up to that point to protect academic freedom for nothing in their private experience had prepared them to deal with the issue of loyalty at the time of a national emergency. three professors were discharged at the university of nebraska because they assumed an attitude

calculated to assume a spirit of indifference to the war. at the university of virginia, a professor was discharged because he made a speech predicting that the war would not make the world safe for democracy. were, in fact, being taught at the university. similar issues arose again with a vengeance during the age of mccarthyism. in the late 1940s and '50s, many, if not most universities, excluded those accused of communism from participation in university life. the university of washington fired three tenured professors, the university of california dismissed 31 professors for refusing to sign an anti-communist oath, and charles seymour boasted there will be no witch hunts at yale because there will be no witches. we will not hire communists. at many universities faculty members were actively complicit

in -- [inaudible] most recently as jonathan carefully documents and already mentioned this evening, the bush administration tortured academic freedom in the 1990s by restricting research into certain sensitive areas, implementing restrictive visa policies for prospective research students and speaker, prohibited the use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research for essentially religious reasons, and manipulated the nation's peer review system for political ends. so what can we learn from this quick survey of the history of academic freedom? several things, i think, emerge. first and perhaps most important, academic freedom is not a law of nature. it is a practical, highly vulnerable, hard-fought acquisition in the struggle for intellectual freedom, and it needs to be understood as such. second, the real tret to academic freedom comes not from the isolated incident that arises out of a

highly-particularized and often publicized dispute, but rather from efforts to impose orthodoxy that would broadly silence dissent. third, every form of orthodoxy that has been imposed on the academy whether religious, political, patriotic, moral, philosophical or economic, has been imposed by groups who are completely and sincerely convinced of the rightness of their position. but with the benefit of hindsight, every one of these groups has come to be viewed by thoughtful people as inappropriately intolerant at best, and as inappropriately intolerant and wrong at worst. finally, what should be our concerns for the future? for the most part, they are, i think, mere extensions of the challenges that we have faced -- not always very well -- in the past. but let me give just four examples. first and most obviously, there is the corrupting temptation of money. from the very beginning of the

modern university, the need for resources has generated dangerous conflicts. how much should we bend our values to please and to avoid alienating our donors? i was at a university several months ago with the most generous benefactor in the university's history who had not yet paid off his very large pledge met regularly with the president and provost to make sure that the university was headed in the right directions. there is no doubt that the president and provost were pandering to his ill-informed whims, and i was appalled. this sort of thing, usually in a less gross form, occurs naturally at universities all the time. the fact is that universities require vast amounts of financial support from individuals, foundations, corporations and governments in order to be great. too often, though, these donors want a say, they want to select the students who receive their scholarships, to remove from their professorship a faculty

member who has said or written something that offends them, or to insist that a program they support must use their products and on and on and on. .. >> invitinga torrent of abuse, protest, and ostracism. in this respect students are

often the worst violators. silence too often is preferred to debate. universities must stand for debate. we must teach our students as well as our colleagues and alumni the importance of tolerance, civil discourse, and academic freedom. in this, too, we too often have failed. third, as we saw, a rise of religious fundamentalists had a devastating effect on free inquiry in institutions of higher learning. we may now, i fear, be in the early years of a third great awakening as we experience new, and, perhaps, even more aggressive forms of religous fundamentalists. we see this debate. the same pressures are there on the political process will be

solved in universities and are, indeed, being felt in universities. this is perilous. religion and academic freedom simply do not mix. fourth, universities must understand the very core of academic freedom is institutional neutrality. the role of the university is not to take positions on matters political, moral, legal, economic, social, or international. for universities to promote academic freedom they cannot themselves participate in debates. our responsibility is to create the conditions for free and open debate. we cannot fulfil that responsibility if we take sides too often trustees, presidents, provost, deans, faculty, alumni, and students want their university to stand up and be counted. during the vietnam war i wanted my university to condemn the war as immoral. i was curious it would not do so. i was wrong.

deeply, profoundly, and dangerously. universities should never stand up and be counted. they should not endorse candidates, condemn policies, embraced politics, or advocate positions. if a university takes sides it undermines its own neutrality, its own credibility, and stifles free and open discourse and makes itself a target for others who will want to take sides on other issues in the future. to paraphrase william rainey harper from more than a university ago, the university that takes sides ceases to be university. thank you. [applauding] >> well, jonathan, this is like the seventh inning. usually we stand up and stretch. i'm just going to stretch my

back for a second. thank you for inviting me. it is a pleasure to join all of you this morning. for those of us, for those outside higher education, jonathan's book makes an irrefutable case for why higher education has always been and continues to be so essential to the well-being of our country. it is a remarkable achievement, jonathan. a master class in hardcover. jonathan authors a very cogent analysis of some of the threats facing higher education today, including the challenges particularly to public universities, and that is what i am going to speak about in the few minutes that remain for me to be with you this evening. well, first and foremost, the challenges are real, and they are happening across this country. let me start with some basics.

public colleges and universities educate almost 80% of our country's students. they include the well-known research powerhouses that we're all so familiar with: the university of texas at austin, university of california at san francisco, the university of wisconsin, the university of michigan at ann arbor. they also include smaller four-year institutions and, yes, even two-year institutions, the fastest-growing sector of higher education in these united states. those two-year institutions enrolled almost half of all the undergraduates that study in this country. last year the share of young people attending college in the united states hit an all-time high, and that increase was driven solely by two-year

colleges. cuny's six community colleges are among them. i called community colleges the sleeping giants of fire and educatio. in new york state that to public-interest, the one that i am connected with cuny and state university of new york together serve over 650,000 students at research institutions to liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. and we talk about college students and college faculty this assume you're talking about. all these students and faculty are experiencing the results of a free-fall of state support for public higher education. you have seen the headlines about california this year. the university of california system saw its support reduced by nearly 20% last year. since 1990 state funding for per

student education has dropped from 78% of the total cost of education in that state to 58%. but california isn't an isolated case. without the contributions that have come from the federal stimulus package the total state support for higher education across the country would have dropped 3.5% this year and 6.8% over the last two years. of course there is variation among states. some states showed increases, including small-population states like montana and north dakota, but also larger states like texas. eleven states have significant one-year declines. that is more than 5%, even when we include the stimulus from the better government. these states like california,

michigan, ohio, washington, and virginia, all home to celebrated public research universities. at uc-berkeley alone research has led to almost 2,000 inventions, and its alumni have founded over 250 companies. the university of michigan has licensed close to 50 start-up companies and just the last five years. my friend, jim dudistat, the former president of the university of michigan has said funding public universities have gone from being a state-supported to the state-assisted to state-related and now state-located. i would suggest we are sometimes state-assaulted. one unprecedented enrollment growth, largely spurred by the

country's recession, and the other is a growing need to prepare more students to a higher skill level. so our institute, so our situation is clear. public higher education is asked to do more with much less. enrollments climb, state funding drops, and the pressure mounts to raise tuition and deepen cuts. example abound. the university of washington observed a 14% tuition hike this year. the university of illinois ordered furloughs and warns students of a possibility of a high tuition hike with this year. the university of florida is looking to enroll, to reduce enrollment by unprecedented values. the university of california has to raise tuition by 32% this last november.

as uc president mark and i and so many others continue to say , we cannot simply fill in the revenue gaps with tuition. keeping it accessible is critical to higher education core initiatives. in his book jonathan talks about the importance of the moral act of 1862 which provided land to states for colleges and codified the importance of accessible for higher education for all americans. it enabled the development of the university of california, pennsylvania state university, the ohio state university, the university of wisconsin, and so many other stellar public universities. that is a tradition we just cannot abandon. public higher education simply can't compromise on access or

academic quality. so we must be creative and an entrepreneurial. public institutions must take responsibility for every escalating and legitimately incurred costs. they cannot ask students and government to foot the bill. whether through reorganization, expansion of revenue sources, or improved efficiency and productivity generated by sometimes difficult and unpopular decisions state universities must step up to the plate. let me just offer a simple example. a few years ago confronted with these challenges i proposed a new financing model for public higher education, one that spreads the responsibility for

funding among stakeholders. it was called the cuny compact, and it delineates a partnership between state governments and the universities. state governments supporting the basic operations at the university, and the institution itself through productivity measures, philanthropy, supporting investments -- and supporting investments at the university. this compact recognizes that states are spread been financially, but should support public higher education at a base operating level. and it calls for modest, predictable tuition increases based on a basket of economic indicators. students and their families should not be hit hardest during economic downturns. they need to be able to plan for college and college costs. it also emphasizes the need for

increased philanthropy, something that would have been under heard of at one time in public university systems. but in 2004 i audaciously stood up first ever cuny-wide campaign. we met our $1.2 billion goal. we are now entering entering pho working to reach $3 billion. support from friends and alumni is vital to our ability to invest in our university, to build sophisticated research centers, to attract the best faculty, to improve our technology infrastructure, to

assure services they need. cuny alumni include 12 nobel laureates. that is a tradition we are committed to expanding. public universities must also be willing to reorganize when necessary. we need to focus on restructuring strategy that best reflect our institutional strengths and opportunities for growth. when i became chancellor in 1999 the university was under some political pressure to establish a couple of flagship campuses. this is the model in most states which have one or two flagship public institutions, except the university of california that has a set of flagship institutions. but because of the economic imperatives of the time, instead we took the approach of building up and reinventing several

disciplinary areas in a collaborative way. this was done in a very deliberate fashion with the intention of raising the level of academic quality and productivity across the university in selected areas. the system's geographic density is so unique among public systems and it allows us, in fact, almost compels us to work as a more integrated system. reorganization also entails risk program review and assessment. as jonathan notes in his book, all of us are tempted to be like the institution across the street. if they have a new ph.d. program we need to do the same thing. public institutions have to look carefully and honestly at their offerings. we have some world-class graduate programs at cuny in the

arts and humanities. we must retain their prominence. in the past we gave less attention to a very promising areas in our science and technology graduate programs, and we are focused on building them up now. there are still other programs that, quite frankly, give me cause for concern. we have to be willing to cut and grow in order to insure academic quality and make the best use of our limited resources. public institutions all also need, public institutions also need to be more aggressive about research efforts and cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit in order to materialize those efforts. jonathan's book offers a

treasure trove. but while some public universities have developed a renowned research programs others need to develop targeted areas that reflect the institutions strengths and potential. that is part of the reason we created the decade of science at cuny in two dozen five. as i have said to we are working to strengthen our science programs, but we are doing so in a way so that reflects our integrated approach. rather than building world-class research facilities on a number of our campuses, and at cuny we have 23 of those campuses with about 270,000 students, we are constructing one cuny wide advanced science research center that will house researchers pulled from several cuny

campuses. the centers will focus on selected areas that we determine: photonics, nanotechnology, environmental sensing, structural biology, and neuroscience. it will be located in manhattan on the city college campus for greater accessibility by all. there is much that public universities can do to meet their growing funding challenges, but i would also suggest that when even the modest funding goals of a compact idea become difficult for states to meet the federal government they need to assume a larger role in public higher education. the next bauble i believe is e is going to be the government bubble. states are in very, very serious trouble with very fragile balance sheets. the sustained period of decline

in state funding can be very difficult to recover from even for well-established universities. in fact, my colleagues in california have proposed a 21st century version of the moral act to encourage federal investment in the operation of the country's great public research and teaching universities in order to maintain their core mission of access and opportunity. our future will be defined by the public investment we make in higher education and at the same time our institutional ability to innovate and stay nimble. this is a critical moment for public higher education, one that requires reinventing the relationships between states and it's providing institutions are going to succeed. we simply can't squander the

truly remarkable power and potential of our public universities. thank you very much. [applauding] >> it is both a pleasure and an honor to have the opportunity to participate in this discussion of both an interesting and important treatise, jonathan. now the true measure of a great provost is reflected in his ability to get his faculty to think about things that he, the provost, thinks is important. jonathan, you have succeeded. in thinking about my remarks tonight about what academic freedom means to a biologist i realized that i was practicing

the sociology of science, which is, indeed, would you do. so i would like to talk to you at a very personal level about what academic freedom means. at the close of the renaissance western man experienced a dramatic transformation. his relation to the world around him changed as he tried to represent a rational universe that would be more in accord with information that was perceived by the census. in part paintings of mistresses were lying naked on a bed replaced madonnas. representation substituted for symbol. scientists similarly saw a representation of the world that

was both unified and coherent, but the laws governing the representation in the arts and humanities differ from those in science. in art, literature, religion, philosophy there are many possible representations of the world. each strives to provide an explanation for the origin, the state, and the future of the universe. all of the representations made be beautiful in their coherence and in their unity, despite the necessity that most will be wrong. in the sciences there are also many possible worlds, but the only one that interests the scientists is the world that exists. it is the representation of this world that comes closest to what

we call "reality." ironically scientists have only one world, yet the representation of this biological world we have elucidated. since other continually under attack or disbelief. while we, as scientists, exultant the glory of our knowledge the reaction of most people seems more often that they can our at the threat of this sort of understanding. this has led to the sense the acquisition of knowledge in biology is a transgression and it must be curtailed. as a consequence academic freedom is rescinded and science impeded. this evening i would like to considered to incursions upon academic freedom in the

biological sciences that affected me personally. the controversy over recombinant dna and the stem-cell debate. each seriously impeded scientific research, and each had implications for the integrity and independence of the research effort. recombinant dna technology was based upon what was without doubt the most significant contribution in biology in a century. the elucidation of the d ouble-helix structure of dna. the techniques of recombinant dna imitate in a very close way natural processes of evolution. this technology emerged early in my career, and i was a part of it. we learned how to isolate genes, to cut them, to rearrange them, to insert genes, turn humans

into bacteria, and genes from bacteria into mice. the isolation of these genes and the ability to mass produce them allowed us to analyze their molecular anatomy in intimate detail. finally we could introduce these human genes into biological factories coming into bacteria, yeast, a tissue culture and produced their printing products affording an entirely new approach to the concept of the drug, hence the emergence of a new industry, with the genentechs and the amgens providing novel solutions to heart disease, kidney disease, and even remarkably blindness. now, to produce a gene product is first necessary to clone a human gene and to introduce it into the genetic makeup of a bacteria. here is the trouble begins.

the possibility of introducing disease-related genes into bacteria into create new forms of life aroused to both passion and hostility. recombinant dna has been blamed for spoiling the quality of life and at the extreme for endangering human life. it has become one of the major indictments of biology. we, the practitioner of recombinant dna, were accused of playing god. as evidence for my role in this scientists journalists were quick to point to note that i name my first son adam. i am not denying that advances in science provide knowledge without assault. advances may be used for good or for evil, but it is not the scientific knowledge that brings harm. harmful effects will only result if knowledge is intentionally used for destruction.

indeed, there are many more evil priests and even politicians than there are evil scientists. recombinant dna research rains endless debate, the notion that genes can be taken out of one organism and inserted into the genetic make above another was, perhaps, so upsetting because it is linked with the mysterious. my friend and colleague, francois argued that perhaps the conjured up old myths that have deep structures brood's in human of hybrid monsters. we all know that hybrid monsters reside in hell. consider the frightful and impressive monsters of bosch and his paintings of the last

judgment, condemned sinners left naked before repugnant sinners that combined fish and a rat, a dog and a bird, a human and an insect. but reshuffling of pieces of animals does not arise from reshuffling pieces of dna. i can't help but think that word on recombinant dna elicited such a fury, not because of scientific concerns, but because it recalls many nightmares. it has the smell of forbidden knowledge. it called up myths, prometheus and pandora, in which mortals were punished for having stolen a power exclusively reserved for the gods. after all we were fooling with the substance that is at the very basis of life. what opponents both within and outside of the biology community

failed to realize was that evolution had been tinkering with this dna in a far more effective way for the billion years of life on earth. it is quite presumptuous to think that we could transcend that tinkering. what really happened? with the emerging technologies permiting the isolation of virtually any gene and the ability to introduce these genes into any cell, a group of concerned molecular biologists convened at a famous conference they considered the risk of introducing a potentially harmful genes, viral genes, tumor genes into a bacterial cell that might infect man. the conference concluded with a letter that appealed to the scientific community to hold off on the performance of recombinant dna experiments

until we have the opportunity to brave the risks. the doomsday scenarios. i sensed the desire on some of the conference. my colleagues, to demonstrate a self-serving sense of power, authority at the expense of the careful look at biology. whatever the motives of my colleagues, the scientific community endorsed these concerns and followed their leadership. after fillmore events moved out and became only one voice among many. others generally left there must be far more serious things to fret about of the scientific community itself had called for a moratorium. things then got tangled up in self-serving social, political,

and ideologic chatter. there were the environmentalist, the peace activists, the marxists, the scientific people groups, and numerous objectors from within scientific community. the growing volume of debate soon attracted congress' attention, and the world turned scientists into balance. i was called before the senate science and technology subcommittee and asked whether we could introduce human genes into monkeys to create a hybrid primate capable of serving man. such phantasmagoric scenarios abounded at this time. there were serious scientists opposed to recombinant dna efforts themselves. our own professor of biochemistry, irwin shawgast,

have we the right to counteract irreversibly the evolutionary wisdom of millions of years in order to satisfy the ambitions and curiosity of a few scientists. what began and should have remained is principally a scientific issue was captured and exploited by self-serving ideologues, and the first sensationalist were many of the scientists who participated in the sylmar. apocalypse was predicted and nothing happened. the recombinant dna debate delayed research by years. the second more recent incursions into science that seriously curtailed resurge surrounds the stem cell debate. the promise of stem cell

research remains unchallenged. the research effort, however, was challenged and seriously impeded by the ideology and politics that profused president bush's administration. briefly let's consider the science of stem cells. stem cells are simply cells that have the potential for renewal. they look rather like neurons or skin cells or liver cells. they are simply not yet developed. however, under appropriate conditions they have the capability to develop into the vast repertoire tissues that form an organism. put simply they are totipotent and immortal. this unique property affords

stem cells the promise for the repair of damaged as well as cell-based approaches to identify disease mechanisms. now it should already be apparent to this audience that one obvious source of some cells is the early embryo. the zygote, the one-cell embryo that results from the fusion of the sperm and egg, undergoes a series of divisions to produce a ball of cells, all of which are equivalent and totipotent. they can serve as stem cells. this ball of cells can be formed in a laboratory or in the bedroom. in the laboratory it is formed by in vitro fertilization. in the bedroom by passion. at present over half a million embryos formed by in vitro fertilization are stored been in fertilization clinics and are no longer desired by their donors.

half million. the options open to the donors of these embryos are continue to ask that they be stored, to destroy them, to offer them up for adoption, or to donate them for medical research. these are a great source of stem cells. however, this research has been prohibited by the ideologic and religious interpretations of once reasonable regulations governing research on human subjects. laws adopted in 1991 argued for the protection of "the products of conception from the implantation to delivery." recall that stem cells derived from embryos formed prior to implementation and under these laws stem cell research would be

permitted. but in 1996 representatives kiki and wicker introduced an amendment that prevented any research "in which a human embryo is destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury." and this effectively prohibited stem cell research. pleased by congress and the research community to repeal ths amendment were rebuffed by president bush who argued that he could not condone the destruction destruction of embryos at any stage to create stem cell alliance. research using federal funds, by far the major source of research supporting this, was halted. some investigators availed themselves of research funds from private institutions. others left for nations with

more liberal regulations and yet others simply ceased stem cell research. beyond the research efforts the integrity of the scientific process, its independence from politics, and freedom from fundamentalist dogma was seriously questioned now. this presidential order was recently rescinded by president obama. nevertheless regulations for the generation of new stem cell lines persist, and we are working through them now with an aura of great optimism. the ethical issues surrounding stem cell research concerns the question, when does life begin? we have heard the arguments about this as politicians, theologians. and to my knowledge nowhere is there an answer to this question that is formally written, for

example, into religious law. it not in the old or new testament, not in the quran. rather it is a cultural dictates. for medieval christendom by a first thought to begin with the quickening, the first movement of the fetus. for dante in the early renaissance we are told in purgatory 25 that life begins that the soul is breathed into the embryo as soon as the articulation of the brain is perfect. for the muslims life begins with the heartbeat, and for the jews upon separation from the mother why is it then that in this modern society costs we now consider a ball of cells generated in a test tube in a laboratory with no capability of developing into an organism and outside of the womb and no

prospect of ever being placed in the womb as life? to me it seems just as reasonable to define life as the glance between a young man and a woman in a singles' bar. nonetheless we have had bills introduced into the senate by senators brownback and umbria that would outlaw research on human embryos, not only in the public but private-sector. this extraordinary legislation would criminalize scientific research making it punishable by a $1 million fine and ten years in prison. despite the fact that these efforts are moving forward in most countries in the world with the sensitivity, respect, and

anticipation of medical advances. i can't help but feel that with stem cells as with recombinant dna this research somehow fears of the forbidden. we were tinkering with dna, the substance of the very basis of life. the cellular precursors of life itself. what has been so deeply troubling during this debate is the fact that ideologues and religious opinion were cloaked in a language and a veneer of science that arguments were based on religious conviction and not on scientific data. the integrity of science and its scientists were questioned and the scientific effort was curtailed by ideology. in this instance we took a big

hit. now, jonathan in the book, correctly argues and i quote, "the eight years of the bush administration taught as a frightening example of how to start the scholarly and scientific work because it challenges the ideological views of the prince can begin to seriously erode the structure of knowledge production." true, jonathan. but the fall the prince does not assure the fall of his followers. the conflict between political and religious authority will intensify as we continue to address questions concerning the origin of man, the nature of our genes, and how they define or biological character. most elusively the relation between genes and behavior and promotion and cognition.

this knowledge too often elicits discourse and even fear. this fear has led to the disturbing notion that there is knowledge best left unknown. this thinking undermines the scientific process. we must choose either to have a science or not to have it, and if you have it you cannot dictate the kinds of knowledge that will emerge. this knowledge will inevitably have the potential for both good and harm. with this knowledge of our lives and those of our descendants will be inexorably changed, and it is our shad responsibility to ensure that this change is for the better. [applauding]

>> at this point the audience has been very patient, and i would like to invite you for questions. you can ask any questions you have. there is a microphone on this side of the room and one on that side of the room. so i also invite the panel to ask each other questions at this time if they would like to. have we worn you out? [laughter] here comes one. >> while we wait for the real questions, president goldstein, you talked about stakeholders supporting public institutions like yours. you said that it is traditional that it hasn't happened. i think you said something like that. is there any of the real reason why there is a resistance to

alumni, for example, and other groups, i think, the alumni of your universities supporting this as the alumni of private schools. is there any real reason why it should not be happening? >> the fear that makes the problem real in some places, i must say it has not been my experience, but the experience at other institutions is that when legislators see monies coming in to support the operating needs of public universities there is a tendency to then have money pulled out from the state coffers. that was a very real at a number of state universities are around the united states, and that served as an impedance for presidents, deans, provosts and

others who were asked to try to generate additional revenue to pull away from that. that has not been my experience. i think what state universities have to do, because i really believe that states across the united states are in a very serious trouble, not only defaulting on their notes, but just not being able to support the general obligations of their universities. and as a result in order for these institutions to really survive they are going to have to emulate not only what private universities have done from their inception, but to innovate in ways to generate additional revenue, and that is what we're doing. it is what we are seeing across the united states. there was a chill that existed for some time that really served as a break at public

universities, and it was real. >> i'm in journalism school. thanks. in identifying curtailments to intellectual freedom almost all of you folks have done two things. would really surprise me that no one identified as the technology transfer offices and plants. do you identify that? also undermining the support capacity. with the result the hps and start-ups, do you think that is a real risk? >> i think geoff was alluding to some of this. it is discussed in the book as

well. there are the possibilities, of course, that the fundamental values at the universities could be undermined by the commercialization of ideas and allowing conflicts of interest to take place, allowing professors to focus the attention of their students on, perhaps, the most profitable ideas they think they have in their quiver, rather than the most important idea. i think it is extraordinarily important that we take seriously what was being suggested, we don't sell ourselves to the devil. that requires very, very clearly put conflict of interest policies and the close monitoring of activities on the campus. i think at columbia we did do that. we were very much aware of the

potential for undermining the values of the university, and it could result from, you know, people becoming overly involved in the funding of their own research by commercial entities, the ways in which their own research results could be affected by their receipt of funding from external forces. but we put very strict limits on it and held to its regardless of the standing of the individuals it is a general problem that one has to be very careful. we have read recently about ways in which pharmaceutical companies and doctors have been closely aligned. people have been getting very large sums of money from pharmaceutical companies supposedly in ways that do result in a conflict of interest. so i do think we have to be very

careful about that. i think universities have to be vigilant in enforcing the policies. >> professor cole, i think a significant efficiency of your otherwise authoritative work is the absence of any discussion of the current and historical impact of the runway ethics programs on the universities mission. only this month the perversion of the intercollegiate athletic program at binghamton was subject to a page-one story in "the times" and resulting in the shape of the administration there. thank you. >> is that a statement or a question? by the way, derek in his book having to do with commercialization of the university does talk about athletics. i don't really talk about athletics in the book. i do find that it is somewhat frightening that the schools have 20% of their income classes, 20% of their income and

class is being recruited athletes. very few people know that. notre dame is about 4%. you know, whether or not that corrupts the university or not or whether that is the way people want to shape the class, i don't think it undermines the research initiatives of the university. i think it has much more to do with the creeping. i don't know what is, professionalism of sports, whatever it is. to my mind, unfortunately, i wish we could roll that back a bit. [inaudible question]

[inaudible question] >> well, i mean, first of all, i think there are an awful lot of people who have produced doomsday scenarios. we had a man why it mattered greatly who said that days of brick-and-mortar universities were gone. this has been in the dot-com bubble when everyone thought that every could be done remotely. i don't know how bad was possible. these kinds of soothsayers are very often off base and somewhat

alarmist. i think that we have to recognize that we are going to adapt in various ways through the changing needs of society, and i hope that we, as an institution, can do that. in one of the ways it has become very plain is that very, very complex problems today require the extraordinary knowledge of people of many disciplines working together in various ways. in it the silo structures of disciplines are by necessity going to break down. we have to see whether or not we can facilitate the growth of knowledge rather than create centers of the growth of knowledge by maintaining old structures in a new era when the new structures are required. that does not mean, i want to be very quick to assert, that we don't need true depth of knowledge. it is no longer really possible, i think, and rich could tell me

that i'm wrong. many areas of biology are going to be linked up with computer science. they're going to be linked up to a variety of other disciplines in order to be able to achieve certain kinds of results without forgoing the kind of depth of knowledge that you have to discipline. that is a structural adaptation that i think is going to take place. some better than others. one in which i think we ought to try to and facilitate without dumbing down anything. >> if i could just comment, i think one of the really important changes in the view of the university that will emerge as a consequence of what jonathan has been talking about, and that is, the integration of

the sciences with what were previously thought to be the humanities. i am a neuroscientist. neuroscience increasingly involves the merger of biology with psychology, philosophy, sociology. more importantly what we are beginning to see is that the data that are merging so profoundly has the potential to protect our lives that we, as an integrated academic community, can no longer adopt the notion of an ivory tower. i have tried to portray we are going to have to present the significance of scientific observation to the public, so as to allow science, rather than

ideology to dictate the response and ultimate use. >> if i can just add one thing to what richard has just said because he did introduce humanities. it is a very important thing we recognize. you really cannot build great universities without the participation in those universities, not only the social behavioral sciences, but the humanities. increasingly this is important. five or six years ago i was asked to help design a great university from scratch by an extraordinary leader of the chinese province. when i went about doing this and was outlining some of the blueprints they said, well, look, you can forget about the humanities. by the way, sociology, your discipline tomorrow we don't need that very much either. nothing but trouble will come to the discipline. we better get rid of those. why don't we concentrate on the

sciences, engineering. we will have the start-up companies right next door. i tried to convince the people that, in fact, there is a kind of seamless that one hopes to achieve in universities where the kinds of issues, the kinds of questions that are raised by humanists are essential for the growth of scientific knowledge as well and also for the resolution of questions that richard was posing. ethical questions, questions of morality, as well as the interactions between the social and behavioral aspects of science and the pure knowledge and even applied knowledge that comes from the scientific disciplines. >> jonathan, this is a question addressed to you and to geoff because i think you both have been saying things that pull in slightly different directions.

richard just said passionately that we are no longer ivory towers. you said that when you praised the provost at stanford and criticized the provost here. but geoffrey ended his talk by saying the universities should not take a stand. that strikes me as really asking the university to be trusted in a very significant way. so the kinds of things that you and richard think opens up a university aren't, i think, strictly interpreted the things. and geoff, nevertheless, wants a real constraint on this. it is not obvious how this is to be done. a question addressed to both of you. >> let me just say because i

admire the university of chicago and its ethos so much. i will jump in here and defend what i think was the intention of my dear friend, geoff stone. i simply say this, the idea is that if you're going to allow all the expression of opinion by your faculty enter students and everybody who is part of that community and have it be free and open exchange of ideas, discourses in the market place of ideas we don't want to have forces operating. we have a single individual presuming to speak for the university that can have that chilling effect. i think that is very much the philosophy of the university of chicago, one actually that i admire. the educational mission towards the future, but