The University and Industrial Policy

July 17th, 2009

Sitting down for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Seoul on the last day of my trip through East Asia, I noticed a long table with a dozen reporters huddled around it. Presiding was an old friend of mine, currently serving as Dean of the Engineering School at Seoul National University, the top university in Korea. From the way the reporters were intently jotting down his remarks, you would think the dean was a major public figure, not just another academic running a school. Between morsels of pasta I eavesdropped on the conversation between the dean and journalists, picking up terms like “competitiveness,” “US News & World Report,” “measurable progress,” and of course, “benchmarks”—the vocabulary of excellence and competition, the lingua franca of higher education these days.

Curious at the preponderance of reporters at the dinner table, I asked if any of them covered Seoul National University exclusively. They laughed and said that they all did. In fact, there are some twenty reporters who cover this single university—as if it were the White House, or in the Korean context, the Blue House. The size of the press corps assigned to Seoul National University should erase any doubt in anyone’s mind about the central role universities are playing in the carefully plotted future of that country—and through a well-known Korean mechanism that dares not speak its name: industrial policy. Seoul National University made it to the top 50 universities in the world in the US News & World Report rankings —something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago—because of the large flow of R&D support provided by the government.

The situation is not dissimilar at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the two universities I visited on this same trip, and with whom the College is cautiously exploring programmatic possibilities. These universities are deeply cherished by their governments, as if they are national treasures—and not just because education, along with the institutions of family and the state, have formed the pillars of the Chinese civilization. Today higher education in Hong Kong and Singapore is the engine of massive social transformation, turning yesterday’s beehive of manufacturing into tomorrow’s global hub of knowledge and knowledge-intensive industries. Even in laissez faire Hong Kong and Singapore, the university has become the agent of industrial policy.

Not surprisingly, the governments of Singapore and Hong Kong are approaching this the only way they know how—by drawing in the greatest talents from around the world, and making alliances with the best and the brightest in North America, Europe, and Asia. The moment that they understood that universities accelerate economic growth, they went at it with vengeance. Determined to make their once sleepy universities into some of the very best in the world, they connected them to the rest of the world, and with amazing speed.

Singapore and Hong Kong are impatient cities. Even before they knew how to manufacture, they drew in foreign investments; even before they sold at home, they sold abroad. Now, even before their universities develop their own talent, they are drawing talent from abroad; their campuses teem with Nobel laureates and US national academy members giving lectures, running conferences, and in general transiting in and out. They have Memoranda of Understanding with world-famous universities—for student exchanges, branch campuses, joint-degree programs—anything to quicken the circulation of knowledge. This kind of international traffic invigorates scholarship, but it also generates reputations, reputations that are reflected in rankings.

On my way out to the airport the next morning in driving rain, I got a call from one of the reporters at the dinner. He wanted to know what I thought about the quality of the Korean universities (which I said was excellent), and whether some of their best colleges might have the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia as benchmark (a worthy goal, I said). The great universities in Asia and the University of Virginia all have the same aspiration: to provide our students with the skills necessary to learn the truth, however it might be defined. The truth, after all, is what Aristotle said was the point of education. But the philosopher also said there was a another point to education: to inculcate virtue.

And there’s the rub: how do you rank virtue?

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A Different Kind of Diversity

July 12th, 2009

It was not until the 1950s that the first African-American students graduated from the College; the first class of women graduated in 1974, thirty-five years ago. Diversity seemed a little more elusive for us than for other distinguished universities—until today. When you step into Newcomb Hall, along with the clanking of the utensils, you hear Spanish, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese.

Last week I was in Singapore, attending an event organized by Gordon Kirtland (College ’77; Darden ’81) and Chew Mee Foo Kirtland (Darden ’81) of Singapore. They are stalwart supporters of the College, pillars of the local U.Va. community, and parents of a rising second-year student. Even under the threat of a tropical rainstorm, the die-hard Wahoos of Singapore showed up at the event—some forty-five alumni, parents and students, wearing orange and blue. Those were the only colors they had in common; it was the most diverse group of ’Hoos I have had the honor to meet in my first year as Dean.

There they were: The Peranakans (the descendents of Chinese immigrants who came to Singapore in the eighteenth century), Tamils, Punjabis, Malays, and Thais who reside permanently in the city state, and sojourners from everywhere in the United States, working in the financial sector for UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Standard Chartered Bank.  Together, they were Exhibit A of what has made one of the most improbable of the twentieth century’s fairy tales come true, when a colonial entrepôt turned into one of the world’s greatest financial centers. Singapore has parlayed this terrific diversity of humanity—open, munificent, and welcoming—into a vital asset for the future.

Twenty years ago, the government of Singapore presented the world with a political philosophy called, “Asian values.” It was mocked in some quarters as the antithesis of the self-evident truths and transcendent values we hold dear in the West. But buried in the din of criticism was the truth that “Asia” for Singapore is a very diverse and contentious community, making “Asian values” something almost universal.  The qualities that have made Singapore successful are the qualities of maritime commerce, which turn out to be the qualities of a great university: open, multinational, multilingual, multicultural.

In my meeting with the Singaporean Wahoos, I shared the news that the College now offers language instruction in a number of Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu and soon, Bengali—and hopes in time to be recognized by the Department of Education as a National Resource Center for both East Asia and South Asia. This news was received with great delight—but at the same time, they know, as I do, that the College is a deeply multicultural place. And as our Singapore alumni demonstrate so proudly, it has been for longer than people realize.

Posted in Alumni, College, Diversity | 1 Comment »

My First Year as Dean

June 24th, 2009

As I mark the end of my first year on the Grounds, I thought it would be a good time to take a moment and reflect on the events and the accomplishments of the past year.

Shortly after my arrival, Provost Garson asked me to identify three things that I would like to accomplish in my first year. I promised him that I would work with my colleagues to:

  • set the priorities for the College
  • enhance the College’s administrative capacity
  • increase our fundraising capacity

Let me touch briefly on each to let you know where we stand.

Top Priorities

When I arrived on the Grounds, the long-range vision for the University was already laid out in the report of the Commission on the Future of the University.  Their study underscored the continuing importance of undergraduate education but also emphasized the value of building the sciences, graduate studies, as well as global experience and scholarship. As I read the report, I understood that the College, as the largest school at the University, would need to play a leading role in achieving these goals.

The challenge was to how to best direct the College’s energies and resources toward the University’s goals. Our first priority, then, was to craft a series of specific strategies that would set the College on a clear course toward achieving the larger goals of the University.

The great German sociologist, Max Weber, once likened politics to “the strong and slow boring of hard boards.” This is equally true of academic leadership. In order to maintain excellence, we have to be persistent, with our eyes focused on seemingly small things that together are essential for something of lasting value; carefully crafted hard boards become a room where teachers and students think great thoughts.

We have identified six priorities for the College.

  • The first is to expand the size of the faculty to maintain the strong student-teacher ratio that is a hallmark of the College. Where possible, we will make target-of-opportunity hires.
  • The second is to establish or expand collaborative and multidisciplinary research in targeted areas. Toward this end, we first identified areas where we have distinction, where we are on the cusp of distinction, and where we feel we must achieve distinction in the long term.
  • The third is to secure consistent funding to provide appropriate start-up packages for new faculty to enable them to mount aggressive research programs.
  • The fourth is to support research and teaching capacity through adequate staffing and facilities.
  • The fifth is to increase financial support for graduate students to make our programs more competitive. Inadequate graduate support is a long-standing concern. Its solution will require taking a hard look at our graduate program to determine the optimal size of the Graduate School in light of the high cost of graduate education today.
  • Last but not least is to enhance the undergraduate educational experience. We are particularly interested in moving the fine and performing arts closer to the heart of our undergraduate education.

Financial Realities

As the College was working out the details of these priorities last fall, we found ourselves in the midst of a financial crisis, a crisis so severe that we were forced to direct our focus from the future to the present and make some hard decisions in order to protect and preserve the distinction of the College. The current financial crisis will have both short-term and long-term effects, and it has affected our thinking in significant ways.

During the early 1990s the University realized that our resource needs could not be adequately met by the Commonwealth, and thus launched us on the path to seek greater philanthropic support than ever before. The current crisis has taught us, however, that we cannot rely on the market for consistent returns on the endowments so generously given by alumni and friends of the College over the years.

In the midst of the current crisis, then, we are increasingly focused on the need for greater external funding for research, either from the federal government or from foundations. Robust research funding is the sine qua non of a great research university. In order to increase the flow of external funding to the College, however, we need to make a significant investment in our new faculty members, especially in the sciences, to place them in a position to apply for and receive the external funding they need.

Immediate Progress

Despite the financial crisis, during the past year the College has made significant progress in the priority areas that we identified in our medium-range plan. Here are a few examples:

  • One of the frontier areas that the College has identified is in energy research. Professor Brent Gunnoe, who joined the Chemistry faculty in 2008, was recently awarded an $11 million Energy Frontier Research Center grant from the Department of Energy to develop technologies for converting methane gas and other hydrocarbon and fossil resources into readily transportable and higher-value liquid fuels.
  • Another focus area for the College is Morphogenesis and Regenerative Medicine. It now has an institute on Grounds, bringing together researchers from Medicine, Engineering, and of course, the College. The questions that underlie morphogenesis are basic puzzles in the biological sciences involving not only developmental biology, but also the areas of cell biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and neurobiology. The College has just made important hires in developmental biology, thus bolstering our strength in morphogenesis.
  • Chemistry of the Universe is a third area of recent progress. The College has great research strength in this field that brings together astronomy, astrophysics and astro-chemistry. It is buoyed by the collaborative presence of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)-related science projects. U.Va. scientists have developed a major breakthrough with the potential to reduce laboratory measurement times by a factor of 50,000. This enables our scientists to develop chemical models and extend understanding of the chemistry that operates in the universe. Led by chemistry professor Brooks Pate, a group of scientists within the College is now operating under a seed grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to potentially create a center for chemical innovation that could attract $40 million of NSF support over the next decade.
  • Finally, the College is gearing up to compete for National Resource Center (NRC) status from the Department of Education, especially in the study of East Asia and South Asia. In addition to increased federal support for graduate fellowships, establishing NRC status will enhance the stature of our language and social science programs in these critical areas. Achieving NRC status requires the addition of faculty positions in the relevant languages as well as additional faculty strength in the related social science and humanities fields such as anthropology, history, and the arts.

Administrative Capacity

The past year also saw a significant restructuring of the College’s senior administration. Many large liberal arts colleges at major universities have a divisional structure, with each division—humanities and the arts, the social sciences, and the natural sciences—having its own dean to serve as an advocate and provide expert guidance and attention to the increasingly complex details of faculty and academic affairs.  I felt that the College would benefit from a more decentralized structure of a divisional system. So in the past year we created three divisional portfolios, and the three associate deans now work closely with department chairs and program directors on all aspects of faculty affairs from recruitment and retention, to tenure, promotion, and retirement.

Over the past year, we also oversaw the appointment or reappointment of one third of all department chairs and program directors. Department chairs in the College have a three-year term, with most rotating out after three years to concentrate on their teaching and research. The quality of this year’s administrator-scholars is absolutely superb and because of them, I could not be more optimistic about the future of the College.

Fundraising Strength

Because the development operation in the College is relatively young, we spent the past year expanding its size and mentoring and training new gift officers. Whereas in the past few years the College development operation was necessarily focused on the completion of the South Lawn Project, now our fund raisers are familiarizing themselves with the College’s academic priorities, becoming more versed in matters from poetry to neurobiology.

The development office also arranged dozen of events across the country this year where I have had the chance to talk about the College, meet alumni, and help them reconnect with the school they love so well.

As you can see, the first year has been a whirlwind of activity for me, but it has been a wonderful whirlwind. I have been so impressed by everyone I have worked with, from our senior administrators, to our faculty, our staff, and our students, both those studying in the College now and those who studied here in years gone by who return to the Grounds for their reunions. Everyone has made me feel so welcome. And as I look back on this first year, I am proud to call Virginia, and the College, home.

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