Virginia in Peking

November 3rd, 2009

Last week the College opened an office on the campus of Peking University.  It is located on the fifth floor of a state-of-the art building, overlooking a stately courtyard, surrounded by stunningly beautiful modern academic buildings that keep springing up, as the Chinese are wont to say, like bamboo shoots after the spring rain. We expect to put this office at Peking University to good use to facilitate research collaboration and faculty and student exchanges between the two universities.

At the ceremony for signing the agreement, President Casteen spoke of the growing bond between two great public universities.  The parallels between the two places are numerous. The University of Virginia was founded not because Thomas Jefferson wanted another shining beacon of enlightenment and secularism but because he felt the university was a prerequisite for the survival of the Republic and the American Revolution that had given birth to it. The creation of Peking University was also an act of desperate hope, seeking to establish modern learning in order to revive an ailing nation in a world dominated by the Western powers. In both universities academic freedom was to be the guiding principle governing the conduct of all their affairs.

But Peking University has had a more turbulent history. Academic freedom in the best tradition of the German research university (which is essentially what was sought at Peking University) was grafted onto the body of a Chinese tradition where the intellectuals actually laid claim to power. It turned out to be a combustible combination. In traditional China, intellectuals (or the literati) came from local landed gentry and, upon passing the state examination, they became government officials. Thus the intellectuals in China identified with the state, and took a certain responsibility for its welfare. This sense of political agency took new forms at the newly founded Peking University.

Throughout its history Peking University produced intellectuals, leaders, and rebels of every conceivable political stripe, and was responsible for triggering major social and political movements in China. A birthplace of the May Fourth Movement which gave cultural expression to Chinese nationalism, it also spawned Chinese communism by producing a number of founding members of the Chinese Communist Party—even Mao Zedong worked there as a staff librarian. In addition to Communist leaders, it also produced nationalist thinkers on the right and liberal thinkers somewhere in between. Nearly all major historical events involved agitations on its campus, whether be it the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square protests.

Thomas Jefferson famously said that the University of Virginia will be based on the “illimitable freedom of the human mind.” He also followed that “for here, we are not afraid to follow truth where it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

At Peking University, reason is still not fully free to combat the errors of its complex history. But it is claiming its rightful place as one of Asia’s greatest universities, and it is teeming with scholars from all over the world, engaged in all kinds of cutting-edge research. The Chinese government accounts for nearly one quarter of global funding in scientific research—and the beneficiaries are the universities like Peking University, China’s flagship in higher education. When I see their science laboratories, my jaw drops, not just because they are state of the art, but also because they are able to build them at a fraction of what they would cost in Charlottesville. With such vigorous investment in research and scholarship, China is finally returning to its greatness, again putting intellectuals and learning at the center of its civilization.

At the moment of this historical turn, I am full of hope for the future and for greater collaboration between our two great institutions.  When students from all over China and around the world walk down the hall of that beautiful building to arrive at a sign that says, “University of Virginia,” they may appreciate the truth so eloquently described by Jefferson: “That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature . . . like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

Posted in International, Research, Strategic Directions | No Comments »

E pluribus unum: An address to a Jeffersonian Class

October 16th, 2009

Today, I had the honor of delivering the main address at Fall Convocation, the event that honors the academic achievement of the top 20 percent of the Third Year Class. This post contains the text of my remarks. My remarks also are available on the University’s YouTube channel.

I am honored to be with you, who have so distinguished yourselves in your studies, and with your families and friends, who take great pride in your accomplishments. Your class is of particular meaning to me. I am mindful that you are more or less twenty years old, born around 1989. I have a son born in 1989, that remarkable year in world politics, and so I have many reasons for having thought hard about the coming of age of people like yourselves, and the world that has shaped you. One might say that you are a privileged generation—the first class ever to have been born and reared in a world that was spared the agonies of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the Age of Extremes, which he dates from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and that ended with the Fall of the Berlin Wall. For him, this period frames what was the essence of the 20th century—extremes of war, communism, fascism, racism, the Holocaust, and mass exterminations.

However terrible our recent problems–ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, 9/11, the brutalities of terrorism and the antediluvian Taliban wanting to rule Afghanistan and maybe the modern world as well—those events do not compare with the large scale brutalities of organized madness of the twentieth century. I remember holding my infant son, who seemed like a bundle of undifferentiated protoplasm, while watching students spill out into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and in the autumn the Fall of Berlin Wall, as young people smashed it with sledgehammers. I was riveted to the television, in awe of the world that was crumbling before our very eyes and full of trepidations for the world to come.  My son was named Ian—Scottish for John, but in Chinese Korean script, it means “doubly peaceful,” reflecting the hopes that 1989, the year of your birth, spawned.

We are also aware of another significant 20th anniversary: the unusually long tenure of our president John Casteen at the time of his retirement next year—a great president who has an encyclopedic memory of the events of his tenure and a remarkable understanding of the recondite and complex nature of the University.  By virtue of his tenure as president coinciding with your lifetime so far, he is also a president spared the extremes of ideological prisms through which scholars peered at the world; like you, his presidency was born into a world happier, more prosperous and tolerant, more forgiving of differences.

Gertrude Stein, in her book on Picasso, once defined the artistic spirit as one that is effortlessly contemporary, one that intuits and acts upon the zeitgeist. Not surprisingly, throughout his presidency John Casteen has advocated and exemplified the best virtues of internationalization that the post-1989 era portended, and he tried his best to infuse them into the University of Virginia, a university that truly cares about history and learns from it.

I myself came to America as a foreign student, guided by no more vision and sense of assurance than a picture I’d seen in National Geographic: a photo of a house shuttered for the winter in snowbound, forested Maine, which suggested a heart-breaking, desolate beauty, that was reminiscent of my ancestral home surrounded by mountains on the east coast of Korea. Clutching my National Geographic, I arrived at Kennedy airport in the middle of the night, took a cab to Port Authority Terminal and boarded a Greyhound bus for Maine. That was thirty three years ago; now I find myself at Mr. Jefferson’s University, as dean no less. In Facing West, one of my favorite poems in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, he writes:

For, starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere

From Asia—from the north—from the God, the sage, and the hero

From the south—from the flowery peninsulas, and the spice islands

Long having wander’d since—round the earth having wander’d

Now I face home again—very pleas’d and joyous.

The notion that the University of Virginia has become home for this dean who started so far away may strike you as quixotic, until you remember that Thomas Jefferson was the most cosmopolitan and worldly president we have ever had, and the first faculty members he recruited to teach local youth were mostly foreigners—a thought that was anathema to many Virginians of the time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was also cosmopolitan, also patrician, like his cousin Teddy, but they had nothing on Mr. Jefferson. Not just because he was Ambassador to France; or because he knew seven languages; or because he so widely traveled, replicating the visual splendor of Italy on the Lawn.  But because he instinctively understood and insisted that what was uniquely American could be also uniquely and ingeniously worldly, that America could be coterminous with the world, without the conquering ambitions so often associated with such wishes.

To realize his complex vision of America both pastoral and worldly, innocent and learned, he wanted to create a university different from nearly all American colleges—the Harvards, Yales, and the Princetons, founded during the colonial period, and over three dozen more colleges that sprouted up in the early days of the federal union, which were mostly established by religious denominations as you know. He wanted something fitted to the distinctive American experience. Thus, the University was conceived as a profoundly American, and, cosmopolitan place: civilized, learned, open-minded, un-parochial.  If in the first days of the University, the actions of some local hoodlums broke his heart, that still does not diminish the fact that his cosmopolitanism is truly your birthright.

I mentioned earlier that you are a class unscathed by the Age of Extremes, and in this you are the perfect class to embody the dreams of Mr. Jefferson—he fought in an anti-colonial revolution that was, compared to many others, not so bloody; he died before the bloodiest American conflict, the Civil War. He was a classic idealist in the American grain, and in the best sense of idealism tempered by historical experience.

You are also one of the most diverse classes to arrive at the university. Look at yourselves: you are diverse, measured by the usual metrics—by ethnicity, race, and nationality—much of it owing to that universe unto itself known as Northern Virginia. In Northern Virginia it is said that there are over one hundred languages and dialects spoken—and it is teeming with Arab-Americans, Afghan-Americans, Korean-Americans, Indian-Americans, Salvadorans, Peruvians, Colombians, and the Bolivians—the largest such community in the US resides in Arlington. There is also a sizable African population—Nigerians, Kenyans, Ethiopians. They are enriching our community, and we are responding.

In the College of Arts and Sciences alone, we teach 26 languages from Spanish to Yiddish, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali, Swahili and also sign language. With students from 148 countries, you are a veritable United Nations, distinguished not by how you look, but who you have become: excellent in what you do. The Commonwealth of Virginia is not just diverse, but excellent because the heritage of the original settlers (whom we think we see over at Williamsburg) commingles with the dynamism of the immigrants who bring their own outlooks and skills. Here in this great state, tradition and innovation go hand in hand, a great bellwether for the future of the nation.

You are diverse by another measure of diversity: excellence. Let me advance this proposition: diversity is excellence, and we shall measure our excellence by the way we cherish and work with differences.

I had a colleague at the University of Michigan, Scott Page, a game theorist who wrote a very fine book called The Difference. It is full of equations that show groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and difference beats out homogeneity, whether you’re talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. The best collective whole that exceeds the sum of its parts is one that relies on human diversity—not what we look like from outside, but what we look like from within, our distinct tools and abilities.

The world faces enormously complex problems that require truly creative solutions. To solve those problems, we need people with diverse skills—people with different ways of conceptualizing, imagining, and doing things; people with different life experiences and different memories of what worked and what didn’t; people with different referents. People who think alike, with the same referents, experiences, and skill sets cannot get quite as far in solving complex problems. That’s why Silicon Valley, with the variegated multitude of humanity from every background, revolutionized the world and continues to go forward from strength to strength; why Manhattan, a magnet for humanity from everywhere, is so dynamic, constantly reinventing capitalism as it resuscitates and rejuvenates it.

Diversity has its pitfalls, too, as we know; but when well led and disciplined, it leads to a curious kind of homogeneity. Let’s think about baseball, since we are in the high season of American baseball, with the “World Series” around the corner. It used to be a joke—a “world series” in America—but now it isn’t, because the players come from everywhere.  The other day I was watching a replay of the Olympic gold medal baseball game between Cuba and Korea, when the Koreans made a double play with the bases loaded.  After a while, I rubbed my eyes to realize I was having some difficulty telling who was Cuban and who was Korean, they all looked the same because they moved the same; the way they stretch before they hit; the way they chew gum; the way they play their positions; the body language of the shortstop and second baseman as they execute a double play; the way they give each other high fives; the way they pat each other on the butt; the way they glare at the umpire, protesting in whatever language but the same the world over. They are all just players—they have the same body language, same plays, and same rules.

Baseball cannot exist without rules—the baseball rule of law: the pitcher stands sixty feet six inches away, the bases are 90 feet apart. Change either measure, and it is a different game. If Nolan Ryan had stood 50 feet away with his fireball, no one could have hit him. Take five feet away from the basepaths, and anyone can steal a base—but at 90 feet, only the fastest players can do so. It’s amazing how well these old, 19th-century rules have worked to make the game so challenging and so exciting.  It is said that there is no action in all of sports more difficult than hitting a major league pitch.

The rules require everyone to conform to them, as chess does, and out of that comes a beautiful human choreography on the baseball field. You do things, you excel, and at the moment of excellence and accomplishment, as you do, you begin to look alike in your excellence as distinguished people, and that is something wonderful. It isn’t an accident, because if you excel in math or physics or art or history, you cross home plate with an A regardless of who you are or what you look like. That’s why the Cubans and the Koreans in the Gold medal game merged seamlessly into one mold: baseball player. You will merge into physicist, scholar, lawyer, doctor—and maybe a player in the pros.

For diversity and difference to thrive and translate into excellence, there has to be hard work, discipline, conformity to rules and respect for community.

Perhaps we are entering into the twilight of diversity, in the sense that we have so rightly stressed diversity for decades now, and have achieved so much. Yet the great universities can now be melting pots, creating people with common pools of knowledge in different fields, who know and play by the rules, and distinguish themselves by merit—just as Jackie Robinson’s speed was perfect for racing 90 feet and sliding safely home. In this sense I would hope that you would all look the same and act the same, in your chosen fields—to excel as learned historians, or biologists, or engineers. Here is something that is indeed singular in your achievements: you are inquisitive, humane, and worldly—educated citizens in Jefferson’s best sense.

And since you are the first class to have lived outside the Age of Extremes, your citizenly duty is to make sure those extremes remain an unfortunate part of the past. Yours is an open age, to learn, experiment, find out what works for you. It is an optimistic age, in spite of our economic difficulties. It is a Jeffersonian age, because all things worldly are open to you. Do your best to try and meet his standards—very high ones, but in the end, Mr. Jefferson’s standards are also signs of a life well lived.

Posted in College, Diversity, Students | 1 Comment »

Remembering Edward Kennedy, Virginian

September 2nd, 2009

The University of Virginia witnessed the passing of another great Virginian—a Virginian in the sense of his association with the University—just shy of two centuries, or 183 years to be precise, after the passing of the founder of the University. Ted Kennedy’s ties to Virginia, of course, do not compare to those of Mr. Jefferson. Yet they are, in a sense, two bookends on the long and growing bookshelf that is the University, with the architect at the beginning and a man emblematic of an important moment in the University’s history further down the shelf.

The two men were alike in ways that are profoundly revealing about our country. Both were aristocrats in a country that shunned aristocracy. Both were dominant figures in the Democratic Party. Both stood for the common man in spite of their great privilege, something reflective of the egalitarian aspirations of the country they loved. Both led large and complex families, in Kennedy’s case, a legacy of three older brothers who died violent deaths while serving their country. Jefferson and Kennedy were patricians, patriots, and patriarchs.

Yet in spite of their privilege they were also “levelers,” dedicating themselves to providing opportunities to those who lacked their inheritance. Jefferson was a slaveholder, of course, from a different era in our history; Kennedy was born to great wealth in a house full of servants, yet he was at the forefront of the civil rights movements that finally brought equality under the law to former slaves a century after the Civil War. And as both men grew older, they grew bolder, more outraged by inequality, yet with gravitas and dignity. They became more human, and humanized, at the end of their lives.

They were also alike in being bundles of contradictions. Jefferson had a long relationship with Sally Hemings, a beautiful black woman who was a half sister-in-law and, of course, a slave. Ted Kennedy long had a reputation as a womanizer. It took an appalling tragedy at Chappaquiddick for him to become the most important champion of women’s rights in the Senate. He also became, like Jefferson, a workaholic who was responsible for a myriad of legislation. (In the vast commentary after his death, his work on civil rights, voting rights, health care, immigration, the environment and many other endeavors were mentioned, but hardly anyone noted his long and sterling record as a champion for the rights of women.)

Ted Kennedy and the founder of our University were, in short, complicated men who lived and wrestled with their contradictions, both privately and in the public arena, always willing to fight the good fight, never downcast, and in the end better men for having confronted and tried to overcome their human-all-too-human frailties—even as their lives ended with battles still to be won.

When people say the United States is “the last, best hope of mankind” I often pause, because so many countries around the world have high standards of democracy and human rights. But there is something intangible about the United States, with its extraordinary complexity and diversity, part of a great continent anchored at the beginning by states as different as Massachusetts and Virginia, states that so embody that diversity—one, a former member of the Confederacy; the other, the most liberal state in our time; both, sites of the country’s creation at Plymouth colony and Jamestown, and both producing great politicians who gave their all to overcome the worst legacies of our national heritage. And two great universities distinguish those states, Harvard, as one of the greatest private schools, and Virginia, as one of the greatest public schools, both overflowing with a diversity that would warm the capacious hearts of two great men, one the son of the Commonwealth of Virginia; the other, son of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. One attended William and Mary and then went on to found the University of Virginia. The other attended Harvard and then had the good sense to come to Charlottesville to study the law. He would go on to become one of the great American lawmakers of the twentieth century.

At the University of Virginia we mourn the passing of an era, and of a formidable alumnus: we will miss Ted Kennedy.

Posted in Alumni, Diversity | 22 Comments »

To the Parents of Incoming Students

August 24th, 2009

Last weekend I greeted many of you who were fortunate enough to accompany your children to Charlottesville and help them move in as they start a new and important phase of their life. For those parents I was not able to meet, let me offer my greetings in print, as Dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, but also as another parent. The older of my two children is starting his third year in a university in Chicago; so two years ago, I was in the same situation you are in, sending off a child to be on his own.

During the convocation at his university, I sat—like so many of you did last Friday—and listened to no less than four different administrators speak about the “life of the mind,” and about the fabled discussions in the student dormitories that stretch into the wee hours of the night at that university—as students debate about Adorno and Horkheimer, about Foucault and Poulantzas.  That is certainly admirable—far better that they should contemplate the horrors of the historical predicaments that Adorno and Horkheimer faced, than to spend hours on Facebook with ear phones jammed into their heads, rap music pulsating in their brains. They will do enough of that, as all parents know.

Today, however, I want to talk to you about something other than the “life of the mind,” another kind of life. Exactly one hundred years ago, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was then President of Harvard, said: “The object of the undergraduate education is not to produce hermits, each imprisoned in the cell of his own intellectual pursuits, but men fitted to take their places in the community and live in contact with their fellowman.” What he said was true then, and it is true today, and it includes both men and women.

I am mindful that you have entrusted us with an exquisite responsibility—to educate, nurture, and help find larger purposes in life for your children, who are dearer to you than life itself. In the four years that your children will be with us, they will transition from being male-children to men, and female-children to women.  Those will be truly complicated years—exhilarating, challenging, confusing, frightening, and fraught with massive opportunities and dangers. The College will provide your children with safe boundaries in which they can grow, learn, experiment, and find out who they are as human beings. And at the end of the four years, your child will leave Charlottesville better educated and more mature—and above all, a better human being.

In Aristotle’s Politics, he pondered the purpose of education. Do we as educators impart to our students truth through knowledge, or do we impart useful skills? Or—and here is a tough one—do we impart virtue?  There are many professors who believe that truth, being relative, cannot be taught, let alone virtue.  Yet the point of our education really ought to be all three: knowledge, skills, and virtue, each informing the other.

But how do you teach virtue?

Harry Lewis, a former dean at Harvard, reminds us in his recent and excellent book Excellence without a Soul, what John Dewey said about learning: “the only way to develop curiosity, sympathy, principle, and independence of mind is to practice being curious, sympathetic, principled, and independent. For those of us who are teachers, it isn’t what we teach that instills virtue; it is how we teach. We are the books our students read most closely.”

At the College of Arts and Sciences, we still practice something that has gone out the window at most research universities: faculty advising.  We are one of the last public universities where world famous scholars—Guggenheim award winners, members of national academies—are still assigned undergraduate advisees; and where mentoring takes places at every level—in residence halls, classrooms small and large, tutorials, undergraduate research opportunities, and in the pavilions on the lawn where the deans live, just as Mr. Jefferson intended.

Our system of mentoring and advising is not perfect, and it is stretched to the limit. It is hard to ask excellent scholars to dedicate themselves to advising when few other research institutions would insist that they do so.  And it is not necessarily the case that world-class researchers make the best advisors and mentors. But we do what we can, with an imperfect system—and always trying to make it better. We have no choice: as the teachers of your children, we are the books your children read most closely, and we will endeavor to be better role models.

For your part, I would ask that you stay in touch with your children. I don’t mean that you should hover over them as “helicopter parents,” but please stay in touch, which is so easy to do these days with cell phones, text messages, email, and even Facebook pages that many of you keep. No matter how safe we try to keep the confines of your children’s universe for the next four years, there are always dangers—like drugs and excessive alcohol, the scourges that afflict every university.

I would also ask you to be engaged with the College.  You have every right to scrutinize our work, and we are the better for it. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to email me at . I don’t have all the answers, but I know the deans and faculty members and administrators who do, and we will answer your queries as efficiently as we can, and do our best to help you and your children.

Welcome. I cannot tell you how delighted I am that you are now part of the College community.

Posted in College, Students | 4 Comments »

The Price of Inspiration

August 4th, 2009

Last week I received a letter from an anguished parent, distressed about the study-abroad fees levied on U.Va. students attending non-U.Va. programs. (There are fewer fees for students participating U.Va.-sponsored programs abroad.) To study in Freiburg, Germany this spring, his daughter had to pay two administrative fees that added up to $550 plus an application fee of $90; to study art in Italy this summer, she was asked to pay yet another $400 in administrative fees, plus another application fee of $90. The total came to $1,130—not a trivial sum, especially coming on the heels of other hidden costs associated with transplanting a child to Europe.

I should know. My son is about to commence his study abroad in Berlin, and I am stunned by the dizzying array of costs associated with ensconcing a child in a foreign country. After paying various fees to the University of Chicago where he is a student, and the extra cost of language school and home-stay, we also laid out cash for his survival fees—a new cell phone for local use; the chargers he needs (and always forgets) for the many gadgets he can’t live without; new subway cards and rail tickets; a new pair of Birkenstocks; books, dictionaries, and other supplies. It is as if you pay to start college all over again. Then there are the great museums and concerts that beckoned him to Berlin in the first place, and that must be appreciated; the cafes and beer gardens; the choucroute, flammekuche, and endless sausages to choose from; and of course, all the cities to be explored—each of which costs money, at a time when the dollar remains weak against the euro.

The charge that the anguished parent found most galling was the $400 administrative fee, recently mandated by the Board of Visitors, which was required for his daughter to take her studio art class in Italy. I wrote to explain that the $400 covers the administrative costs of approving non-U.Va. programs and credit transfer, financial aid packaging/repackaging, advising services, pre-departure orientations and emergency response to student needs while abroad—and then I sheepishly added that at $400, we were a bargain, compared to University of North Carolina’s $650. I know that this was no consolation to him.

In truth, however, the “cost” of education, either on Grounds or abroad, cannot be computed. Unlike a for-profit business, we run a money-losing operation. U.Va., like other excellent colleges and universities, provides a cornucopia of services that cost far more than what it charges, and it subsidizes the loss through its state appropriations, endowments and funds from gifts and bequests from alumni and other private donors. Even if U.Va. charged its students the full cost of their education, the fact remains that there is really no meaningful way to express in monetary terms the benefits of learning.

On the third day my son arrived in Berlin, he paid 49 euro for a bus trip to Dresden. His guide who, like so many Berliners, said he was “completing [his] dissertation,” took him to Frauenkirche, the domed church which had graced Dresden’s skyline for two centuries before it collapsed after the infamous firebombing of the city. “There were three thousand bombers covering the sky on that day in February 1945, and the people ran out to the street to find out what this was all about,” the guide said, as he squinted his eyes against the brilliant August sun and let out a long sigh. “Dresden has never been a city prepared for tragedy.” But it is prepared for rebirth: after the reunification, a grass-roots movement arose to painstakingly rebuild Frauenkirche, and to make whole the rubble and fragments of a city as stunningly beautiful as it was defenseless. It was a big lesson in just one a day, for 49 euros. Priceless.

Posted in College, International, Students | No Comments »

« Older Entries