COMMENTS FOR DR. EDWARD RAY
Sigma Xi Spring Banquet
Tuesday, May 25, 1999
Faculty Club, 2nd Floor
6 p.m. – 9 p.m.
It is quite an honor for me to be here with you this evening. I am deeply grateful to you and to President Reutter for inviting me to say a few words to such a distinguished group.
I have to admit that it is hard to say no to someone like Jeff Reutter who, on every e-mail, quotes one of Mark Twain’s great lines: "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
Now it’s not for me to say whether I always do right as provost. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had a perfect day.
But I can tell you that I always try, and there seems to be no end to the number of people who seem genuinely astonished by some of the things I say and do!
I don’t know if that’s quite what you and Mark Twain had in mind, Jeff, but it makes me hope that I might be among friends tonight!
It is also hard to pass up a speaking invitation at something called "The End of the Century Banquet." While this is certainly a celebration of achievement and hope, there is just the slightest suggestion of a doomsday observance in that title that I find tempting to challenge.
What I will do in the time at hand is first offer a brief historical context for tonight’s discussion.
Then, I will give a synopsis of the talk that President Kirwan presented at last November’s Sigma Xi Centennial Banquet. I discuss what we at Ohio State are doing to address the five elements that Dr. Kirwan identified as key shapers of our research agenda.
And finally, I will share with you what we can do – together – to take maximum advantage of the promise embodied in the new knowledge we create and to safeguard society from the dangers inherent in the misuse and abuse of the fruits of our research.
Let me offer my comments in the context of the extraordinary technological revolution that is taking place all about us. Indeed, those of us in higher education – especially those engaged in scholarly research – are among the creators of this technological revolution.
We would be hard pressed to say what this world will be like when the members of this chapter gather for the next "End of the Century Banquet." All we can say is that it will be vastly different than the world is today. I am predisposed by temperament to predict that the world – and the search for knowledge – will have advanced greatly relative to today.
I base my confidence, in part, on what happened during a similar technological revolution 600 years ago. Six centuries ago, the vast majority of knowledge in the Western world was contained within the walls of cloistered monasteries. Dedicated monks spent long, tedious hours transcribing and preserving knowledge during the bleak years of the Dark Ages.
Then a revolutionary device came along that literally changed the world. This device was no larger than a 25-cent piece. It was moveable type.
Moveable type and the printing press enabled an explosion of information that knocked down the monastic walls and allowed information to be transported to where the people were – in the cities and villages. Soon, great centers of learning – universities – began springing up everywhere scholars and students gathered in the search for new understanding.
The revolution we are involved in today is also emanating from a device no larger than a 25-cent piece. That device is the computer chip. It has caused another explosion of information that is knocking down physical barriers and allowing the search for understanding to take place not just on university campuses – but anywhere and everywhere and anytime.
This has profound implications for everything we do as researchers and educators.
And while some of these implications pose a threat to the university we know today, they also contain the promise that the scholarly and academic community of the future will be even more vibrant, more relevant, and more exciting than it is today. That is, if we are good stewards of the faith and trust society grants us. Those universities that will prosper in the next century in both real and virtual forms will be the ones that genuinely engage their research creativity in the service of the communities they serve.
In his talk to you last November, President Kirwan described the important role that land-grant universities have played during the century now coming to a close:
"We at The Ohio State University, and other American land-grant research universities, can feel a special sense of pride in the accomplishments of the past century because of our dual responsibility for research and for the dissemination of our research results to address problems facing our society," he said. "The success of the 100-year-old land-grant tradition lies in its unique combination of high-quality, affordable education, public service, and world-class research."
He noted that at least twice, land-grant universities have been called upon to help transform the nation: at the beginning of the 20th century when they were asked to help feed the nation and the world by endowing industry and agriculture with the fruits of research; and following World War II when the federal government recognized that investment in science was essential to improve the lives of all and to make a very insecure world more secure.
In assessing the challenges of the future, the President identified five key elements that will shape our research agenda in the years ahead:
- An increased attention to interdisciplinary research.
- A heightened emphasis on strategic partnerships with the private sector.
- A more intense focus on urban issues.
- A rigorous attention to public policy issues, and
- A stronger engagement of the research enterprise with undergraduate students.
Let me turn to what we at Ohio State are doing to address each of these key elements. The vitality and relevance of The Ohio State University in the next century will depend critically on our ability to address each of the five elements of our research agenda.
Interdisciplinary collaboration lies at the heart of our future as an outstanding comprehensive research university.
Our success at moving to the front ranks of the nation’s public institutions of higher education will depend in large part on our ability to marshal intellectual resources from a variety of disciplines to come to bear on the quest for knowledge and the resolution of problems facing society.
We see this in engineering, in medicine, in agriculture – in virtually every area of interest. Our comprehensiveness is our strength here at Ohio State only if we can approach problems in a collaborative way.
We are doing some obvious things to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation – from talking about it to supporting centers and institutes in which interdisciplinary research can take place free of our too many traditional administrative barriers.
Further, our Academic Enrichment Initiative encourages cross-discipline work by funding projects and activities that would not normally be funded through established budget procedures.
And the budget restructuring process that is moving toward implementation at Ohio State will create incentives for researchers to explore innovative ventures with colleagues on campus as well as partners off campus.
Budget restructuring will provide incentives for innovation and entrepreneurship, reward successful risk-taking, and position us well to seize research and educational opportunities as they arise.
Finally, excellence in interdisciplinary research pre-supposes strength within individual disciplines. Our Selective Investment Initiative, now reaching the end of its second year, is intended to make available to some of our strongest departments the differential funding they need to reach the top of their disciplines.
Departments are selected for this funding based not only on their own records of achievement, but also on their potential for enhancing the strength of other departments with which they cooperate.
The departments selected during the first round of funding last year – Electrical Engineering, Physics, Psychology, and Materials Science and Engineering – are departments that have broad influence across campus, and which, as they improve, will help others improve. The second round of awards will be announced in the near future.
The second element of our agenda is to achieve a heightened emphasis on strategic partnerships in the private sector.
Harvard Professor Michael Porter suggests that economic vitality in the 21st Century will depend upon the exploitation of geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field. The benefits of such vitality will accrue not only individually to the companies and institutions but also to the geographic region as a whole. The key to success lies in the creation and maintenance of strategic partnerships that advance shared interests.
These partnerships will not only involve vendors, suppliers, distributors, and customers, but also governments and institutions of higher education. Colleges and universities, in particular, can assure the availability of new knowledge, of educated entrants into the labor force, and of training programs needed in a constantly changing marketplace.
The availability of new knowledge, new technology, and skilled workers will depend not only on strategic partnerships with the "suppliers" of these goods – colleges and universities – but upon the very existence of excellent, world-class institutions of higher education.
"In innovation, as in any other endeavor, there is talent, there is ingenuity, and there is knowledge," Peter Drucker says. "But when all is said and done, what innovation requires is hard, focused, purposeful work. If diligence, persistence, and commitment are lacking, talent, ingenuity, and knowledge are of no avail."
Institutions of higher education – particularly a comprehensive teaching and research university such as Ohio State – embody the very qualities Drucker identifies as essential, and they exist not to make a profit but to create new knowledge and to transmit that knowledge to society through students, faculty service & publications, and through research partnerships. The better these institutions of higher education are the greater will be the benefit to the public and private sectors.
And it is essential that we have the innovative infrastructure needed to support these partnerships and facilitate the exchange of information.
This is why organizations such as the Edison Welding Institute, the Center for Innovative Food Technology, the Center for Advanced Polymer Composite Engineering, The Center for Mapping, and, indeed, the Science and Technology Campus, are so important in our efforts to fulfill the multiple mandates of our land-grant mission.
At the same time, we must do a better job of educating our colleagues in the private sector to the importance of adequate state funding for higher education because business and industry need us to be strong if they are going to rely upon us, as they must, to remain competitive in the global economy.
The third element of Ohio State’s research agenda is the need for a more intense focus on urban issues. Urban decline and suburban sprawl have accompanied taxpayer flight from many of our largest cities. The urban poor are increasingly trapped in central cities without jobs and without prospects.
We are addressing this element in our own neighborhoods in a number of ways.
Our "Campus Partners" initiative is a non-profit community development corporation that unites business leaders, city officials, schools, neighborhood residents, students, faculty, and staff in efforts to improve the quality of life in the university area.
Ohio State has committed more than $28 million to the effort. In broad consultation with the community and the university, Campus Partners has created a revitalization plan and identified priority projects from among the plan's recommendations to remedy long-standing problems of deteriorated housing, low levels of homeownership, and a declining retail base.
These projects also work with the city to improve public infrastructure, safety, trash collection and code enforcement and with the community to improve elementary and secondary education, job readiness and economic development.
Campus Partners initiatives are leading to substantive private investment in both the housing and retail-commercial markets in the University District, while maintaining the ethnic and economic diversity of its people.
Ohio State's involvement is part of the more intense focus for the university as a center for learning and service on urban issues to which Dr. Kirwan referred.
Along with Campus Partners is the Campus Collaborative: an inter-professional group that links thirty-five university units and several community organizations to target the university's academic and human resources in the neighborhoods east of our Columbus campus.
Campus Collaborative received a $400,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Urban development which will provide support for many of the human service, education, health, and economic development programs the collaborative has developed through its work with Campus Partners.
Additionally, the Office of Academic Affairs funds an annual $100,000 seed grant program. The awards are given to faculty and staff at Ohio State to carry out academic work in adjoining neighborhoods. For the near term, the Campus Collaborative will focus on two key ingredients in community building – schools and housing.
Also, OSU CARES (Community Access to Resources and Education Services) is a jointly funded effort of the Office of the President and Ohio State University Extension which serves as a catalyst to activate groups of university professionals to address anticipated critical issues facing Ohioans.
Through the funding of interdisciplinary university teams, 13 of Ohio State's colleges have participated in seed grants supporting networking and outreach/engagement. OSU CARES is working with the new outreach/engagement efforts of colleges across the university to partner these initiatives with the OSU Extension's delivery system.
In addition, I have asked Dr. Bob Moser, vice president of agricultural administration, to devise a comprehensive outreach and engagement strategy for the university that will sharpen the focus of our outreach and engagement efforts and increase our responsiveness and effectiveness in serving the people of Ohio, including urban-area residents.
We hope that through these and other programs we can refine our own skills at dealing with urban issues and develop best practices for use by others in keeping with our land-grant mission.
The fourth element of our research agenda is to provide even more rigorous attention to public policy issues.
We have a responsibility, as citizens of this state and this nation, to engage in dialogue involving matters of public concern, whether those matters involve national, foreign, or political affairs, economic and funding policies, public education, race relations and diversity, science and research guidelines, or health and medical concerns.
Along with that responsibility to engage in the dialogue is an obligation as an institution of higher education to ensure that the dialogue is informed by fact-based, world-class scholarly research. This is especially critical at the state level as we enter into the era of term limits for lawmakers.
Term limits and the resultant legislative turn-over produce a heightened need to help public officials understand the essence and dynamics of the issues with which they must contend.
The John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy will be at the center of our effort to provide technical and policy briefings to public officials, internships, public service and learning opportunities for students, and original public policy research on topics as diverse as nuclear proliferation and the science and social consequences of aging. The Institute will surely be a signature element of The Ohio State University in the 21st Century.
The fifth and final element of Ohio State’s research agenda is a stronger engagement of the research enterprise with undergraduate students.
This is a vital consideration if we are to offer our students the full benefit of studying at a comprehensive teaching and research university. Not only does this help to grow the pool of future faculty and other research scientists, but it equips our students with the problem-solving skills they will need in their future careers, whatever they may be.
We recently heard from a 1998 graduate at a Board of Trustees meeting. He had a double-major in history and the classics and is now working as a computer software technician at Nationwide Insurance. He said that the skills he developed by doing his senior research project have proven to be invaluable in his job. He is often given a problem, given an end date, and told to come up with a solution. He knows how to attack the problem because of his experience doing research here. We cannot overestimate how valuable that experience is to the future success of our students.
That is why we support graduate and undergraduate research forums for our students, and why I am so very pleased that Sigma Xi is acknowledging the achievements of some of our best student-researchers and initiating them into the Ohio State chapter. This is precisely the kind of encouragement and mentoring that we need in higher education.
Which leads me to the final observations I would like to share with you this evening. It is vitally important that we engage in ground-breaking research. It is essential that we have the best equipment and the best facilities possible. It is central to our mission that we engage in strategic partnerships and productive collaborations. And it is important that we try to keep pace with the fast-moving technological revolution that seems to change everything – every day.
But while there is great promise in the quest for and use of new knowledge, there is also the constant danger that this new knowledge will be used or abused to the detriment of community, society, and the general health and welfare of the world’s citizens.
We in higher education must be concerned not only with the generation of new information but also with the integrity of the scholarship that produced it and the competence of our graduates. We must, in short, be accountable for what we do.
This theme of accountability was addressed recently in a document entitled, "The Glion Declaration: The University at the Millennium." The signers of the declaration were a small group of European and American educational leaders who met in Glion, Switzerland, to discuss the challenges facing higher education in the 21st Century.
The full text of the declaration is available on the Internet, and Jeff Reutter has the web site if you wish to read it – and I do recommend it.
I would like to quote one section that is particularly relevant to our meeting tonight and to the role Sigma Xi plays:
In a society of shifting goals and uncertain values, the university must stand for something more than accurate data and reliable information; more, even, than useful knowledge and dependable standards. The university is the custodian, not only of knowledge, but also of the values on which that knowledge depends; not only of professional skills, but of the ethical obligations that underlie those professional skills; not only of scholarly inquiry, disciplined learning and broad understanding, but also of the means that make inquiry, learning, and understanding possible.
In its institutional life and its professional activities, the university must reaffirm that integrity is the requirement, excellence the standard, rationality the means, community the context, civility the attitude, openness the relationship, and responsibility the obligation upon which its own existence and knowledge itself depend.
Above all else, we must be the stewards of the values, the integrity, and the standards that have long marked excellence in scholarly research. As the world changes, as we are pulled in many ways, and as we are confronted by increasingly complex dilemmas, we must remain anchored to the highest principles of professional and academic conduct. And we have an obligation to ensure that those principles, those values, and that integrity are passed on to subsequent generations of scientists and researchers.
This stewardship and this mentoring takes places not only in our classrooms and laboratories, but also within organizations such as Sigma Xi. You serve as examples of the excellence to which others should aspire. Which is why I am deeply honored to be here with you, and proud to be counted as your colleague. Thank you very much.
|
|
|
|
