[inaudible conversations] >> good evening. welcome. good evening. i'm glad you're all having a great time, happy to see you all. welcome, alumni and friends to the mit alumni fall forum event featuring northeastern president joseph aoun. thank you for tech review and press partnering with the alumni association to bring this event to come to pass and also a special welcome to members of president aoun's senior team from northeastern to make sure we treat him well on this side of the river. i'm from the alumni association and particularly glad to say a first hello to this batch of alumni and we'll see more of one another. it's my pleasure to bring the program. a few details, please remember it silence your cell phones, your phones may be use today

submit questions, if you type in-- or visit alum.mit.edu/qa, you can do that. we're filming the event. and during the q & a your face or voice could be live on air if you choose to participate. a fun note, please join us after the forum for conversation and coffee and dessert in the reception area you were in previously. so, given that we gather together to celebrate the mit community and the celebration after new book, it's fitting that president aoun's publisher and another alum, amy brand, ph.d. from the class of 1989 to help kick it off. amy became editor of the mit and she is an editor and

bradder experience in the publishing world and academia. i could share the full cv, but trust me, she knows a good book when she sees one. she has focused on the press on print and digital strategies, launching a partnership with the internet archive to scan, preserve and enable libraries to lend hundreds of mit books, and elevating the presence in the bo of the area with a shiny new store front complete with its own event series and i'm sure she hopes to see you there in the future. and amy will properly introduce our speaker, i can't offer up the microphone without a warm welcome to president aoun. [applause] we are proud to have you with us here this evening. we are eager to hear your perspective. the mit community, alumni

included is known for its intellect and near universal desire to make things and fix things, to make things better. your leadership at northeastern, as well as this book of important thinking about the distinctive capabilities of the human mind and even as we witness the ascendency of robots shows an mit trained human mind at work to make the world better and we thank you and appreciate your presence tonight. with that, amy, will et-- let me hand you the microphone. [applause] >> so, thank you to whitney. i'm delighted to be here to open up the program and to introduce joseph aoun more formally. in its 55th year of publishing some of the world's most prominent authors from science and technology to art and architecture and importantly

for this evening for higher education and linguistics, the mit process is committed to nothing less than reimagining what a university press can and should be. this spirit is alive and well. and to my featured speaker, joseph aoun and his thus published book "robot proof", in his book, he challenges models of the university and literacy passed on rote learning and memory are increasingly the purview of machines. his book makes us rethink of purpose of higher education in confronting the world's problems. the robot proof education trains creators not laborers. and some of the book proposals are dry academic stuff, let me say i was impressed with the content of the book, but with its many beautifully crafted

sentences. i mentioned to a mutual friend, jay keiser, professor emeritus of linguistics of mit, that i had the honor of introducing joseph tonight, and jay replied, quote, i could never understand how he could bring himself to choose the presidency of northeastern over being associate editor of linguistic inquiry. there's no accounting for taste. and he was also my student and perhaps that's where he went wrong. for those of you who knew him, that's quintessential jay. and joseph 1982, the first teaching assistant during here. he's a native of lebanon and studied in paris before coming to mit. then he joined the usc college letters and sciences, the older

of the anna h bing's chair. and northeastern named aoun its president in 2006. he is an expert on global and experienceal education. and he has work opportunities around the world, and he shares many successes of the successes of the co-op program in the book. today northeastern students have work, conducted research in 131 countries and all seven continents. in 2011 aoun received the robert a mew award from mit which honors mit graduates from significant achievements in humanities, arts and social sciences field. he's one of seven university presidents honored by the carnegie association with a leadership award of $500,000 to advance his educational initiatives.

which is remarkable and typical of his commitment. he pledged a matching grant to take this award further. after president aoun opens with his own remarks on his book. david rotman will take the helm and start a conversations to steer us through the works and questions. and we hope the audience will join in the discussion as well. david is editor of technology review, a science and business journalist, written extensively on chemistry, environment and ai, first help me welcome joseph aoun, president of northeastern university. [applause] >> thank you, good evening. it's good to be back at my alma mater and to see some friends and colleagues and some of my teacher, actually sylvan is

here and amy and i graduated from the linguistics program so, you know, she's very biased in her introduction, don't believe anything she said. so, you know, i'm going to tell you a little about about the book. essentially, something you all know, smart machines are getting smarter and are displacing us in-- on many levels. many jobs are becoming obsolete. as a matter of fact, various studies have shown, indicated, projected that over the next 20 years, close to 50% of the jobs we know will disappear. in equality we know today is going to increase even further. at the same time, when we look at the marketplace, when we look at society, and we ask ourselves what--

you know, and we can people, ceo's, employers, institutions, what kind of talent are you looking for? they are looking for the creative talent, entrepreneurial talent, talent that can work with people, that can be culturally agile, that can be global, that can think in a systematic way and this is something that is needed and this is something that everybody wants to have. given the challenges of jobs being redefined and what people and what society is asking for, higher education must change in order to make people robot-proof. so in my book, what i am presenting is a blueprint for how higher education can change to make people robot proof. i'm thinking three things. one, we need to rethink our

curriculum, second, we need to integra integrate experienceal as what we do and we need to move life long learning as part of our coalition. let me start by the curriculum i'm calling on humanics. what humanics, it's three, tech understanding machines and how they work and how to interact with these machines. the second is date a literacy. meaning the understand of the enormous amount of information that machines are producing and

how we can navigate this information, make sense of it and be on top of it. and the third is what i call human literacy, namely, the focus on cultivating what is unique to human beings that machines will have difficulty duplicating. what are these attributes? creativity, entrepreneurship, systems thinking, the ability to interact with people, to be empathetic, the ability to be culturally agile, the ability to be global, and the ability to function in teams. how do we achieve that? we don't teach creativity.

we don't teach entrepreneurship. we have to practice it. we have to live it. and that's the second component, experiential education. experiential education is essentially the integration of the classroom experience with the world experience. now, i believe that the most powerful form of experiential education is based on the work practice or long-term internships or co-ops, as amy said. what are these? long-term internships that allow the learners to test what she has learned in the classroom, to refine it, to understand what she's good at, to understand how work with other people. to understand her limitations and her potential, and then to be a leader, to be a creator.

and then to integrate the two together. that's the power of experimental education and i see it happening on a daily basis. the third aspect is lifelong learning. machines are smart and also getting smarter. no jobs are going to disappear and new jobs are going to be created. we are going to be obsolete, each one of us, unless we educate ourselves. lifelong learning is a necessity. now, lifelong learning and higher education has always been viewed as a second class operation ancillary, to what we do. it has to move to the fore.

it has to become part of our co-mission. people need to educate themselv themselves in order to remain robot proof. but it's not going to be easy to integrate lifelong learning as part of our core mission because it will lead us till we think our curricula, who owns them, are we the sole owners of this curricula, are the learners, the providers, society, have they a role to play in shaping them? it's going to lead us till we think the notion of delivery. it's going to also lead us until we think how we're going to bring the learners to us. they don't have the time. they don't have the ability.

we have to go to them. the university has to go to learners. it's going to lead us also till we think our notions of degrees, credentialing. we need to meet these challeng challenges. society is changing, the world is changing. higher education needs to change and i believe that higher education has the responsibility and the opportunity to make every lerner robot proof. that's what my book an all about. thank you. [applause]. [applause].

>> thank you, my name is david rotman, editor of technology review. a great honor to be able to participate in this conversation with you. this book is terrific. >> thank you. >> if people haven't read it, they should. i think, it does many things well, but two of them is, it provides a historical context and a current context of why ai and robots are changing jobs and how technologies in the past have changed jobs and how this time it's different in many ways. and it's a nice discussion of what's happening and secondly, as we just heard, not just offers a problem but it provides a really, i think, strong argument for why education needs to help people

adapt to these changes. so, terrific book. >> thank you. >> i'm going to ask a few questions and then really open it up and hopefully have a discussion. and i wanted to start by asking you when did you start thinking about ai and robots and their effect on work and how they may-- why division might change and then as sort of a follow-up, as you began writing the book, as you wrote the book, how did your thinking change? >> you know, you know that there is seminal work that has been done by two faculty here at the sloan school second age. and this work was called into action because they raised the implications of what ai is going to do to society to work. so you know, if you want -- that's one of the first books

that i read, obviously, i had been reading a lot of books on ai, trying to learn about it. but that was one of the turning points for me, and then, you know, in higher education we don't like to think too much about work. we want --. [laughter] >> we want to educate our students, but we don't care whether there is any implication for work or not. you know, i belong to an institution at northeastern where this has been part of the core mission of the institution is to think about the work not only of today, but the work of the future. so, you know, this led me to start thinking about the implications of the ai revolution, the second machine age on work, on society and, frankly, on higher education. what has changed over when i

was writing a book-- the book is that the acceleration happened, namely, people-- when people started talking about ai, people thought that this was remote, this was not going to happen and suddenly, you know, we are seeing it around us. you know, jobs disappearing, jobs being redefined, and at the same time, you know, we are seeing also that some-- many politicians are denying that. you know? we have politicians here, you know, saying this is not a problem, that we should be concerned with. and, you know, therefore, other people are scared. we need to regulate that. we need to tax it. we need to do x, y and z. so what has happened is that something that started being a kind of almost an academic discussion became central to

many discussions in society and that's why i had to adapt and integrate elements i didn't think about before. >> yes, i think both the pace of the development of the technology has been much faster than i think many have anticipated and i think it's become more evident that we're unprepared for these changes, policy makers and society at large. >> absolutely, absolutely. and if you -- i was mentioning to david that if you look across different countries, europe is much more sensitive to that and much more worried about that. and you know, and it's happening at the government level, whereas here, the government is saying, look, this is not an issue we need to be concerned with. so, it's interesting, and there are, for instance, england is now-- the u.k. is looking at the possibilities of asking each company to put a fraction, a

small fraction of its margin in order to focus on educating and reeducating their workers, their executives, you know, and the future employees. >> you touched on this a bit, but i was struck at one point in your book, you said really, you called it one of the most powerful skills that we have as people versus machines or versus robots is creativity. and creativity is still an advantage that a person has over and will always, maybe always have. i was wondering if maybe you could expand on, i think, you mean creativity in a very general sense, in a very broad sense. maybe expand on why -- what gives people that advantage over machines, over robots. >> i mean, in--

look, here at mit, you know, the creativity is everywhere. but in society, let's go beyond higher education, you know, an entrepreneur is a creator, an entrepreneur is looking at the problem and looking at the opportunity and seeing it in a different way. similarly, somebody who is launching a not for profit in, you know, either in roxbury or in africa, is a creator. is a creator and is shaping something new. people who are working in various industries, are rethinking this industry. so it's not only, you know, the research, the fundamental research that is by definition, you know, creative, it's everything we do. the way we look at the world. the way we look the a the problem. the way we rethink the issue is based on creativity. and you know, this is something

that has been the purview of human beings or the human species and it's very difficult for-- i haven't seen yet a robot that is going to see the new-- the exin new opportunity, to create the-- you know, an apple, have a new theory, whatever it is. so, that's why i think we have to focus on these aspects that are specific to human beings. >> and recognize, as ai and robots, there's many things that will get more and more powerful, but i certainly believe as you just outlined that the creativity is something that will be elusive at least for the forseeable future for ai. >> and hopefully other aspects, too. the ability to look you in the eye and understand, you know, whether you're happy with what i'm saying or unhappy. the ability to read your body

language. the ability to interact with you, to empathize with you when you're happy or when you're sad. the ability to work with you and you know, be led by you or, you know, all of these aspects are fundamental to who we are as human beings. and this is something that we need to continue to cultivate and focus on. >> one thing i wanted to ask and you touched about it a bit on the book is we hear a lot these days about skill gaps. skill gap, in terms of there's not enough people to hire for jobs, or-- and then i know you point out in the book, many economists do not believe that's true and it's a complex issue, but i wanted to ask you, your take on a skill gap. how we address it, how we make sure people are sort of

prepared and how companies, perhaps work with universities to make sure that we're training people for the right skills, the right jobs. >> you know, for instance, now, if you survey what is needed in society now, and actually, those surveys happen, you know, the business and education forum did that, the chamber of commerce did that. counsel of competitiveness did that. you see that, for instance, they are saying that we need cyber security and big data. you know? this is not a surprise. and that there's a enormous demand for cyber, big data, et cetera. now, you know, clearly others you can add, you can add design thinking, you can add various other aspects, but you know, you asked me how society and how we can look into that.

there are two types of learners that i am discussing in my book. those that i call short on experience, long on time, and those are the undergraduates that you teach. and the others, the learners who are long on experience, but short on time. and those are us. so you know, there will be new demands constantly for new jobs, et cetera. what has happened, for instance, is that-- and that's lifelong learning, namely for the second group. long on experience, short on time. what has happened is that society has answered because, in fact, higher education has not answered that. we haven't answered that by creating for-profits. by creating boot camps, but in order to meet the needs. the number of boot camps that

started that will teach you coding and now they're teaching you big data. they're teaching you cyber. they're teaching you -- they are doing it. but we're seeing the limitations of what they have done because if you have a boot camp, let's say, in coding, the employers are saying, this will get you into the job, but it will not allow you to really think and master and be a creator. it's rote learning. so this is, you know, in some ways, companies have answered that by saying, you know, we are going to create our own universities. that's interesting. and every time a company starts its own university, that's-- that means what? that means that would meet their needs. otherwise why should they start their own university.

at mit, i have mit t-shirts and also northeastern t-shirts. [laughter] >> i design at northeastern t-shirts, i don't manufacture them, i go to somebody who knows how to do it because that's their, quote, business. and every time a condition, like ibm or ge starts a universi university, that's a failure of higher education. so to answer your question, society has done that by allowing the for-profits to flourish. society has answered the need by allowing, oh, you know, they don't need to be allowed to do it by the companies doing lifelong learning. now, if we don't do it, and we do it based on precisely getting people to be robot proof, that's our failure. and that's also our opportunity.

>> all right. and i wanted to begin taking some questions from the audience. i'm sure there are many. yes, is there a -- why don't you give-- there a microphone that will come around? there you go. >> like many people in this room, i was taught by paul samuelson perhaps a central issue in economics is scarcity. and says that everything that is produced will be consumed and there's no concept of excess productability. i believe that ai and biotechnology have or will soon have these laws. how do we distribute purchasing

power so that consumer choice determines what is produced and yet, we want to maintain incentives for outstanding people to be creative and work hard. >> thank you. this is a great question and it's beyond me in many ways because-- because you are referring to the fact that if indeed ai and robots are going to displace us as people who have jobs, you know, who are going to be the consumers? who are going to be the taxpayers? and also, there will be great winners and many losers. very bifurcated society. so what is happening is that there are discussions about, you know, universal based income, you know about that. there are discussions saying, no, we have to give incentives for people to redefine themselves. you know, this is not something that i discuss.

it's really beyond my expertise. what i am saying, that everybody will become obsolete unless she or he reeducate themselves and higher education has to step in and integrate life long learning as part of its core mission. >> and i might just suggest, i wouldn't even begin to offer an answer to your question, but i think it does point out that these are major significant upheavals to the economy, our society. how we think about future and the role of work in our economy, so i'm not sure anyone really has an answer, but i think it does point to that this is a big deal going on. >> absolutely. >> here you go.

>> northeastern is known for its experiential education and northeastern has also made big strides with on-line education. how do you provide an experiential learning experience and how do you manage that when your students may not be anywhere near the campus? >> yes, i didn't ask him to ask this question. [laughte [laughter] >> so, thank you, first of all. in everything we do, we are experiential. whether we're doing undergraduate education, whether we're doing all the certificates, masters, et cetera, and now we are moving and having all our ph.d.'s being experimental and some of my colleagues are here leading this effort. one thing that we have done is

to go where the lerner -- learner is. for people long on experience and short on time, namely the adults, we have launched a certain number of campuses, in silicon valley, in seattle, in charlotte, in toronto, and soon in europe and asia. the purpose precisely is to be where the learner is and to provi provide experiential education. so, for somebody who is long on experience, we take into account what she knows, what she does, in the workplace. i'm talking here about the professionals. it's a -- it's not a--

we go for groups of 20, it's really not the mass market approach or anything like that. and then for those who are trying to educate themselves and move into new fields, everything we do from the certificate, to the degree, has to be experiential. and it has to be integrated because the point is not to have the experience and to have the classroom experience, the point is integration of the two. as a learning approach. so, which means that, in fact, the university is becoming a multi-university. you know, boston is only one manifestation of northeastern. that's what we have done. so whatever we do, wherever we do it, we go to the learner and we do it in an experiential way. let me--

go ahead, but as you get ready, let me intervane. -- intervene. there's a question that people have posted as follows. >> are you concerned even following your blueprint for higher education, there will be far fewer jobs available than people who need employment? i think it's-- >> you know, this is a healthy concern. there will be jobs that will disappear. there will be new jobs that will be created. i cannot predict whether the jobs created will be enough. you know, we need to be ready to be, you know, to educate ourselves, to be-- to look at these new opportunities. are they going to be enough? i don't know. i don't know. i hope so, but certainly, i know one thing, that if we

ignore the fact that we need to reeducate ourselves and be part of them, we're going to be losers. >> i've actually asked this-- some version of this question to many people and the best answer i get is really, there is really no way to know how-- the key part of this equation is how many jobs will be created with the new technology and this is basically unknowable. and i think to your point, what we can do is prepare ourselves for the type of work that's needed, the types of jobs and hope those jobs flourish and multiply. >> and also, along the same lines, you know, if we start thinking about our learners as creators, there may be opportunities that they can shape themselves in different ways, and not only partake in,

you know, in a new economy, but create and shape this new economy. >> sir. >> two questions briefly, american higher education, i think, generally is viewed as leading the world. american pre-college education is middle of the pack and maybe below middle of the pack. what has to happen in the public school system and in private secondary education to prepare people for the world they're about to enter? and secondly, do you see any risk over time of what i would call a 21st century ludwick-- luddite movement saying i don't want my operation to be by a robot. i don't want my car being driven by a nonhuman. no, no, stop the world, slow down, i like the way things are, and could that be significant over time? >> absolutely, you're seeing, as you enter into the second question. you're seeing the reaction to that. you know, and the reaction is,

for instance, take even uber, where in europe, and the rest of the world, there are very strong movements to oppose and limit that. you know, every time, i'm not saying something that is going to surprise you or change. you have the early adopters, and you have the people who are not going to accept that, the luddites, and there are wait and see options. the early adopters become the models and they will carry the rest of the day, and it may take time, but ultimately you cannot stop it. so, absolutely, it's happening as we speak. similarly, the idea of taxing robots, you know, is-- can be viewed along some of those lines. and other protectionist measures that you know about, worldwide, can be viewed along similar lines.

so, with respect to your first question about the discrepancy that we have in the united states between k through 12 and higher education is a fundamental question. i think that in some ways, i'm going to say something that may surprise you. higher education needs to start looking at itself as providing education, or education, educational frame works from k to grade. for instance, we have launched at northeastern this year a workshop in the summer where we invited 70 school counsellors, advisors, principals, to come from, you know, from the united states and canada, to come and work with us on getting strained and retrained in experiential education. so, why? because we assume that our

responsibility is also with respect to the k through 12. and the k through-- i mentioned that higher education needs to change, you know, and in order to allow learners to be robot proof. that starts as an early child and in higher education, we're leading the pack in terms of they go about learning and not only in terms of, you know, science and engineering, humanities, et cetera. who does learning? us. are they benefitting from that? not really. >> i hold the mic. i'm sorry. [laughter] >> therefore, the power. you mentioned the critical characteristics that the students have to have, the entrepreneurship, creativity, you know, ability to interact with people. at the same time, and i couldn't agree with you more

about that, absolutely -- at the same time those tend to be fairly soft skills and society seems to be moving more to key word and pattern recognition on resume's, all that. the interesting question, number one, how do you assess both within the school and then how do you propose to, let's say in society or the private sector, to educate and assess those skills? because that's getting harder and harder, without interviewing everybody in the world. >> it's a great point because in many ways, in whatever we do in higher education, we have focused on input measures on that. we know how to assist input very well. namely, when you look at the incoming students, we know who they are. we know, you know, the grades they have, what they've done, et cetera. we don't assess the outcome. we don't know how to assess the outcome well and now that's something we need to work on. but going back to your point

about what you called the soft skills, i'm not asking about only the, you know, focus on what you call the soft skills. i'm asking -- i'm calling for the integration of the-- you know, the text literacy with the human literacy. in other words, every engineer has to understand the implications to be very simplistic, the implication of what they are doing when they're working on building a new city along the coastal line. the environmental implications, the human implications, et cetera. the final point that you raise, how do we assess that? you know, we are-- we have created a platform, an app, that will take each

learner before they start at northeastern, and then will remain with him or her for the rest of her life. call it coaching for life. that will allow them to assess their objectives, learning and otherwise, and how they are meeting their objectives and how we're helping them meet their objectives. we launched it this fall with 1,000 students and next year, it's going to be universal. so, we have to do it. we have to start, and you know, will we have the perfect app and the perfect coaching app in, you know, in the first year? absolutely not. we are learning and we are building it as we are flying it. it. >> all right.

so before i came to mit, i with ent to liberal arts school where it was sort of drilled into us that the purpose of higher education is it not to train you for a job, but it's a place where you learn how to learn and given these developments, i feel that this approach is being vindicated. however, over the last 20 years, i have also noticed that the universities around the world have started reducing or even eliminating their departments of philosophy, of history, of literature. are they doing a disservice to their students, given what the future bears? >> i think, each one of us in higher education, there's a responsibility because we created a false dichotomy between learning to live and learning to earn a living. let me repeat that. we have created a false dichotomy between learning to live and learning to earn a

living. and we got away with that because we are an affluent society. nowadays this is being questioned so what i'm asking for, what i'm calling for is not this dichotomy, it's to go beyond it, and to integrate the various literacies, from the technological, to the human literacies. and that is what i'm calling for. so, the second aspect of your point is that are we doing ourselves a disservice to close classics department or not? in my mind, as an educator, the responsibility dual. we are doing ourselves a

disservice and i agree with you, but also, when we start focusing on-- the we are not teaching literature, we are teaching theory. i'm not teaching history, i'm teaching my theoretical approach to history. that becomes something that is about me, not about the learner. so, we moved away from what the ideal that you're espousing and that's why, also, you are seeing now several liberal arts colleges waking up and saying, no, we need to integrate an experiential approach in what we're doing. we need to worry about the real world. we see that the world is changing and we have to change and we have an enormous

opportunity and that's what i'm describing in this book. >> let's take one more question and i have one question that's been sent in. >> karen is somebody i know, so i don't-- she's biased, too, so go ahead, karen. >> looking forward to reading the book. >> thanks. you haven't read it, karen? oh, my god! . [laughter] >> okay, i'll give you a copy. >> so primary and secondary education have been widely criticized for training teachers too much in how to teach. higher ed has been criticized for teaching people content, ph.d.'s learn about research and so forth, and not how to teach. is northeastern hiring different kinds of ph.d.'s or training people? how do you get your professors to a spot where they know how

to teach experientially than what they're trained to do or differently? >> what we've done at northeastern, karen, is to focus on learning sciences and to create a center that is building the learning sciences, but also, in like whatever we do, this is not only a theoretic theoretical incentive, but a translational incentive so that every educator is educated in experiential learning, it's helped, it's coached, and it becomes part of the eco system along these lines. >> how do you train someone to-- >> i'll invite you, karen, to do that. essentially you know, as i mentioned, the first aspect of experiential education is not to have two separate endeavors. namely, i'm teaching my

material in the classroom and then they go and they have six month co-op or internship, whatever. it's how you're going to integrate that and that's what we focus on, the integration of the two. so, we have our learning specialist working with our faculty colleagues and at the same time the faculty colleagues become the ones who are leading it through their practice, through, and through their fine-tuning of that. and i have to tell you, the students, the learners they grow, because once they spend six months in shanghai or nepal and they come back and you talk about the-- you know, discuss what's happening in terms of the climate, let's say in shanghai. they can question you as faculty because they got out of their comfort zone. they lived it. they worked in it. they shaped it. and they come back, they

questioned you and they-- and then they get you out of the comfort zone. so this means that in this approach, the learner is really at the center because the learner is leading the whole process. so, we, you know, for me, you know, when i came to northeastern, this was an uneasy situation because itd to learn and my best teachers were the students because they lived it, but i saw the transformation on impact. because they came back knowing exactly what they don't want to do. what they want to do and how they want to do it, which is-- and they got me to understand this. so, we have, you know, this eco system is going to be helping you at multiple levels, through the students, the centers, the colleagues. and every faculty is doing that. you know, goes through this

immersion, if you want, that is transformative for us as faculty. >> i'd like to sort of perhaps leave on-- there's a question that was sent in and the question is, knowing mit as you do, what is your specific advice for the institute vis-a-vis the conclusions in your book and how best to rally the institute resources in that direction? >> i have to be careful. raphael is a friend. so, let me mention something. and it's going to be semi controversial, not fully. ed x is an operational at many levels. if you believe that lifelong

learning has to be part of the core mission, your opportunity is to see how you can lead the world by integrating at ed x and mit. ed x is not mit and that's an opportunity. if you agree that lifelong learning has to become core and has to be fundamental to what you do, then that's-- there is a way of rethinking ed x, and rethinking the whole operation. how, i will let my colleagues here do it. that's a tough question. [laughter] >> and i think a good one to leave the audience with. so, please join me in thanking president joseph aoun. [applause] >> thank you, thank you.

that was terrific. >> thank you, thank you for being here. >> and i want to thank the mit press and mit alumni association for arranging it and making it happen. thank you. >> thank you, thank you, david. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> here is a look at some authors recently featured on book tv's after words. our weekly author interview program. progressive policy institute senior fellow david osborn examined the charter school movement and offered his outlook for the future of public education. harvard university professor david allen discussed how incarceration affected her

family. and merc mark levine, a report on the mental health industry. former radio host and msnbc contributor charles sykes offers his thoughts on the movement in america. and discussing the life and political clear of newt gingrich and new york times contributor suzie hanson talks about travels abroad and weighs in on america's standing. >> are we exceptional? why have i never thought this was a form of propaganda. why have i not thought to question where was this concept coming from and what it's doing for americans. it took a long time, the very language we used when we talked about foreign countries has

been kind of determined for us a very long time ago because we tended to look at muslim countries and especially countries in the east, were they catching up with us or were they behind us? and what that does, is that prevents you from being able to see the country on its own terms. >> after words airs on book tv saturday and sunday 9 p.m. eastern. you can watch previous after words programs on our website, book tv.org. . >> let me talk about the, just some-- a couple of examples, i mentioned bad materials, and one of the prime examines is cell lines that scientists use, they're in plastic dishes and the first of those was featured in the story of henrietta, a

wonderful book and a tv movie that's just out. she was a woman diagnosed with cervical cancer at johns hopkins in 1951 they isolated some cervical cancer cells from herand turned it into the world's first set of immortal cells. this is a tremendously useful line of cells, they're used today. in labs around the world. and this is the sort of kudzu of cell lines, they grow rapidly. if you make a small error in your lab, before that, they're called he hela cells, and they'e all over. scientists who think they're studying liver cells, liver cancer cells, ultimately realize they're studying these cells. that's a huge problem for decades. scientists recognized the cells were taking over and there was

concern about it and hang wringing and honestly not much was done. starting 15 years ago there were some pretty good tests that could rapidly identify whether these cells were in fact the hela cells or the cells that the scientists thought they were using and the tests did not take off and they're not used as widely as they should be. there are 450 other examples of cell lines that are misidentified used all the time in biomedical research labs and scientists have the tools to check them out, but they cost money and they're cost of convenience, or inconvenience, and so these things don't end up getting used and these tests do not end up being used as often as they ought to be. >> the problem is a bad cell line. the other thing i mentioned was bad methods that get picked up. and scientists design, sometimes designs these, and

some are mouse studies of ala, lou gehrig's disease. these studies led to a lot of drugs and all have been failures, in search of treatment of als. one of the main problems, some of them are that scientists didn't think very thoroughly what they needed to do and how many mice they needed to use. the it's true that the experiments are very expensive and to do it right you might take dozens for your control group and that could easily cost over $100,000. and many academic scientists don't have that kind of money. they say i'll do ten mice and call my study a pilot study and they're constrained by resources, i get that. but on the other hand, occasion those kind of things have led to large scale clinical trials that have led to results that have been very disappointing. they look promising when you do

it in a small number of mice and then, you know, maybe spend tens of millions of dollars to expand into humans only to discover it doesn't work. this is one example of a meth methodlogical problems and what can go wrong. i mentioned the bad assumptions and the other about mouse work, if you study something and it works in mice, you can cure cancer in mice and strokes, but they often don't translate to human beings. we're not just giant mice, right? and mice aren't just tiny people, but the assumption is well, they're mammals, we're mammals, it ought to work and often scientists say well, i don't have anything better. all i can do is use rodents and hope for the best. we should be more modest in our expectations what can come out of those studies and i talked to people who are thinking about ways to make better use of animals, to think more broadly, how you can extract

meaning from the ab-- animals and how they work in mice and human beings. that's as well. >> you can watch these and other programs on-line at book tv.org. >> next, on book tv's after words. progressive senior fellow david osborn, he examines the charter school movement and offers his outlook on the future of public education. in his book reinventing america's schools. 's interviewed by chester fin of the thomas b fordham institute.