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Variations on an Irresistible Theme
In
his fourth Freshman Address, President Levin cautioned the Class
of 2000 to avoid the kind of information and skills that may become
obsolete, and nurture the kind of curiosity that leads to "a
solution looking for a problem."
October
1996
by Richard C. Levin
You are
the fourth incoming class that Dean
Brodhead and I have had the pleasure of greeting.
I join him in welcoming you to Yale College and in welcoming to
the Yale family the parents, relatives, and friends who have accompanied
you.
In previous years, Dean
Brodhead and I have conspired successfully to differentiate the
subjects addressed in our welcoming remarks. But in your case we
have both succumbed to the temptation to comment upon what the Dean
has called "the astonishing date of your expected graduation."
Think of this exception to our normal practice as "variations
on an irresistible theme."
Mention of the year
2000 evokes more than the sense of mystery that attaches to round
numbers and more than the hope, dread, and strange behavior associated
with millenarian movements throughout history. The year of your
graduation also compels us, in a way that no other single year in
a thousand possibly can, to think about the future. Thus, I would
like to talk about two subjects: how you, as entering students,
prepare for your futures, and how we, as a nation and a wider world,
prepare for the next millennium.
My first observation,
bearing on both these subjects, is that we should not flatter ourselves
by assuming that we can know very much at all about the future.
I recently reviewed the various papers published at the time of
Yale's 200th birthday celebration in 1901, and I was struck that
among the dozens of distinguished commentators on education and
society none anticipated the changes that the 20th century was about
to bring.
For example, no one
foresaw the extraordinary demographic changes in the population
of the University, nor did anyone anticipate the enormous shift
in the composition of activities undertaken here. No one foresaw
that by the end of the century half of the students in Yale College
would be women, nearly half of our students would receive financial
aid, more than 5 percent of our undergraduates and more than 25
percent of our graduate students would come from abroad, and the
number of students enrolled in our graduate and professional schools
would equal the number of students in Yale College. No one foresaw
the extraordinary growth of the sciences as a component of this
and other universities: Nearly one-quarter of all the University's
operating funds now come in the form of external grants to support
scientific research. Nor did anyone foresee that the University's
physical plant would be almost completely transformed, that more
than 90 percent of the space currently used by the University would
be built in the 20th century.
Such
examples of failure to foresee the future, drawn from the history
of our university,
can be augmented by innumerable examples drawn from other spheres
of life. One of my favorites has particular resonance today. In
1876, Western Union, then the nation's largest communications firm,
declined an opportunity to acquire the rights to Alexander Graham
Bell's patent on a new device because, among other reasons, it was
convinced that the telephone would never supplant the telegraph
for long distance communications! A colossal misjudgment -- but can
anyone sitting here today tell me, with any degree of assurance,
whether in 30 years the bulk of our communications will take place
over fiber optic cable or the electro-magnetic spectrum, or whether
we will use for this purpose computers or television sets? In the
last ten years, the development of electronic mail has restored
the art of letter-writing, which the ubiquity and ever-declining
cost of the telephone had virtually eliminated. Will the advent
of two-way video once again make written personal communication
disappear?
All this is merely to
say that the future is highly unpredictable. But let me say more:
This unpredictability carries implications for how you would wisely
conduct yourselves these next four years. Most importantly, you
should not imagine that your education is in principal measure to
be devoted to mastering a specific and substantial body of information,
nor should it be focused on developing specific vocational skills.
To prepare for an uncertain future you will need to attend to the
fundamentals. You should not focus narrowly on acquiring information
and developing skills that may become obsolete. You can use these
four years to learn how to learn, how to acquire information, how
to develop skills. This means learning to listen and read closely,
to think critically, to disentangle arguments, to separate truth
from untruth. These are capacities that a broad liberal education
in the arts and sciences fosters more readily than a narrowly focused
technical preparation, and this is the kind of education to which
Yale College is committed.
Just as you, as individuals,
must prepare for the future, so must the larger society. It would
be comforting to conclude that the needs of your generation were
being adequately served by the political process, but I have grave
doubts about this. I say this not to minimize the importance of
the ongoing national debates about values, the proper size and scope
of government, and the appropriate rates and structure of income
taxation, but merely to call attention to the lack of public focus
upon, and dangers inherent in, deficient levels of public investment
in the future.
Let me
highlight two areas of concern:
first, investment in improving our system of primary and secondary
education and, second, investment in fundamental scientific research.
It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that our society's future
level of material well-being depends critically on support for these
two activities.
You represent the very
best that our system of primary and secondary education can produce,
and, indeed, it has been Yale's good fortune to see, year after
year, classes entering with ever-stronger preparation and rising
scores on standardized tests (even before re-centering!). But in
a society in which access to economic opportunity is open principally
to those with adequate literacy and numeracy, too many of our young
lack the essential skills for successful careers. Despite the relatively
stable performance of the college-bound population on standardized
verbal tests, 25 percent of our 12th graders and 40 percent of our
fourth graders lack the capacity to read at "basic" levels,
where "basic" is defined as partial mastery of the skills
required to do proficient work at grade level. And, in this age
of computers in which familiarity with basic mathematics is ever-more
essential in securing and retaining good employment, 9- and 13-year-olds
in virtually every developed country in Europe and Asia outperform
their U.S. counterparts on standardized mathematics examinations.
Against this background,
it is dispiriting to observe the lack of public enthusiasm for investing
in education. Indeed, for the past two years, Congress has seriously
debated, not a new infusion of resources, but actually closing the
Department of Education! Now, it could be reasonably argued that,
after several rounds of budget cutting, a significant portion of
what the Department of Education has left to do falls into the category
of intrusive and unnecessary regulation. But is there not a proper
role for Federal support of elementary and secondary education?
We need not abandon the well-established principle of local control
over public education to recognize the desirability of a nation-wide
effort to develop, test, demonstrate, and disseminate innovative
and effective ways to teach the basic skills of reading, writing,
and mathematics. No state or locality has sufficient incentive to
invest adequately in such an effort. There have been some promising
initiatives in the private sector, and encouraging these should
be part of any solution, but, on the whole, the performance of our
schools is too important to be ignored by the Federal government.
The second
concern I want to raise about inadequate public investment is less
obvious but no less critical to the future.
Since the Second World War, America's competitive advantages in
world markets, and a substantial fraction of the economic growth
experienced here and around the world, have depended upon a steady
succession of improvements in technology, newly developed products,
and the emergence of entirely new industries, such as televisions,
computers, cellular telephones, software, and medical devices and
therapies based on biotechnology. These developments are all ultimately
traceable to basic scientific research, most of it undertaken in
universities and most of it driven by a desire for new knowledge
of natural phenomena rather than a quest for results that have immediate
practical application.
The time lags from university-based
fundamental research to new industrial products are typically long,
far longer than an impatient private sector will tolerate, and,
often, the ultimate commercial applications of new knowledge are
entirely unforeseen when the initial, enabling discoveries are made
in university laboratories. These very facts have made it difficult
for many of our political leaders to see the essential linkage between
fundamental, curiosity-driven research undertaken in universities
and the benefits that accrue in terms of human health and economic
growth decades later. In recent years, there has been tremendous
pressure to reduce government support for research overall and to
allocate more of a limited Federal budget toward projects and programs
aimed directly at producing commercially useful knowledge. The balanced
budget plans under discussion in Congress these past two years call
for a 20 to 25 percent reduction in the level of support for basic
science.
Reducing investment
in fundamental scientific research is an easy target for legislators
intent on deficit reduction, because the cost will not be perceptible
in our nation's economic performance over the next five or ten years.
But, throwing my caution about forecasting the future to the wind,
let me assure you that today's failure to maintain investment in
basic science will have a profoundly negative effect on the economic
performance of the next 25 or 50 years.
Let me
tell you the story of Professor William Bennett, who began working
in the 1950s on the phenomenon of coherent light.
After he came to Yale in 1961, he continued his work on lasers with
the support of grants from the U.S. Department of Defense. Professor
Bennett says the Russians found it astonishing that the American
government funded basic research of this type, research that appeared
to lead nowhere in terms of practical or useful application. For
many years, the laser was what Professor Bennett calls "a solution
looking for a problem."
Today there are so many
uses for lasers that it would be impossible to describe them all.
Lasers are used to cut cloth, to lay out the foundations of a house,
to make microchips, to pinpoint and treat brain tumors without surgery
or irradiation of the whole head. We run lasers into arteries to
clear them of plaque.
Last spring I learned
that Professor Bennett was at home recovering from treatment for
a detached retina. The treatment was accomplished by using precisely
the same Argon Ion Laser which he developed at Yale in 1964!
If these reflections
on the coming millennium have strayed from the subject of your entry
into Yale College, such is the lure of the round number which each
of you will bear after your name in future issues of the Yale Alumni
Directory. I encourage each of you, women and men of the Class of
2000, to partake in such speculation yourself. Think about the future,
boldly and often. Think about the possibilities the future holds
for you, not only as an individual and but as a responsible and
committed citizen. I have highlighted some important matters we
must act upon now to lighten your burdens in the future. But, ultimately,
the future is yours to shape. Seize the opportunity to use the vast
resources of this place to prepare yourself. Welcome to Yale.  |
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