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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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