 Our opening plenary today is by University of Michigan President Emeritus Professor James Duterstadt. He's gonna talk about something that I know he has thought enormously deeply about and cares very deeply about, which is the future of the research university. He has been a real thought leader in the discussions over the last at least two decades about this topic. I was reminded of the wonderful report about technology in the future of the research university that was done by a committee he chaired. I believe that came out in 2002 and I was looking through my copy of it the other day. It's an analysis that's still very powerful but also has in some sense been changed by a very changing set of circumstances between now and 2002, economic, demographic, and other things. He's gonna share with us, he's thinking about this and I'm just delighted that he's able to come and join us because he's one of the people who's thinking in this area I have always looked to and always really admired. Welcome. Looking out of this crowd I'm sure I'm not in the Maryland Volleyball Coaches Association meeting. That's the next floor up. And I suspect most of you couldn't care more about what's going to happen tonight than the final game of the national championship. Couple of you do though I suppose. Cliff mentioned this study we did earlier. I thought I'd kind of begin with a story about your business that came out of that. The national academies put together a quite good committee to look at the impact of rapidly evolving information technology on the future of the research university. It led to a publication preparing for the revolution but that revolution was kind of slow and coming so we had a follow on study where the idea was to get together the leaders of universities around the country. What we'd do is we'd get four or five university presidents to commit to bringing their provost, chief financial officers, maybe a dean or two and CIO and get together in a day and a half session different parts of the country. Cambridge, Chapel Hill, Austin, Los Angeles and so forth to kind of share ideas on how they saw things. In order to get this going we would frequently begin with a leading question. How many of you folks are building libraries these days? Of course all the presidents would hold up their hand. Me, me, me, me. And then we'd follow on and say well what you gonna put in them? You gonna put books in them? Well no, the books are probably gonna be in high density storage off campus in place. Well what are you gonna use them for? And where are we gonna use them so students can come together and they can learn. And the more we probe, the more we realize the only common feature in these so-called libraries is they all had a Starbucks. So the Starbucks for stacks phenomena seem to be taking hold. Now I have a personal experience from this because I actually live these days in just such a library without books. Actually it does have about a million books but they're in a sub-basement and they've been digitized by Google and our faculty and students can look through them and see there's nothing of interest in them so they never check them out. So what is in it? It's 250,000 square feet. Well it's got lots of computers. Workstations actually, high end. 60 gigabyte per second connectivity to the back money internet. It has high end recording studios, performance, sound stages, 3D printers, virtual reality caves, workshops, studios, hacker havens where they can make things. It's got links to chip foundries where they can build chips if they want to. It's the only building on our campus that's open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Dominated by students. We find that the population in the facility peaks between 10 at night and two in the morning. I guess that tells you about when students come to use these things. And what it does is it provides students with resources not simply to learn but to do, to create and now that we're swinging a number of offices of our Center for entrepreneurial spin-offs into the facility actually to propagate. The head, it reports right now technically to the dean of our library is Paul Koran, that you know quite well. And so we have to make certain that when Paul steps down next year someone as venturesome and tolerant succeeds him so this strange facility will continue. I might add that at one time it had a marvelous name known as the media union, which is kind of what it was. The students now call it simply the dude, which is one of the curses that former university president sometimes are asked to bear. Well, if the library is the poster child for changes in university, what about the future of the university itself? Well, once again you can ask university presidents and if you listen, generally if you get a group together they talk about the same things all the time. They always talk about money of course. They never have enough of it. They talk about politics. I have too much of that. Students, what are they up to now? And now that Occupy has reinvigorated student activism on our campuses, students are much more fun to university administrators than they have been for the last decade. And for an unfortunate fear they have intercollegiate athletics. What is the next scandal that's gonna surprise us? If you push hard, you can sometimes get them to move the discussion up to perhaps the view from 100,000 feet. And there, the standard issues, the current global economic crisis, particularly the impact on the states, the rising costs of education research, rapidly changing demographics as minorities become majorities and as America once again becomes a nation of immigrants, reshaping of learning and research by rapidly evolving technologies, the emergence of powerful market forces, problems with antiquated forms of government management and leadership for universities, inadequate public understanding, the curse of today of course, and the limited capacity for change that these big occasionally awkward institutions seem to face. Now these are very compelling issues of today and you can understand why they're on the minds of university presidents. Whether they're gonna be the dominant issues, 10 years, 20 years from now, hard to tell, but the reality is that we've gotta deal with these things today, do something about them in order to provide the opportunities that we see in another decade or two. I was actually a part of yet another group that tried to deal with this about seven or eight years ago. It was the notorious Spellings Commission, the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education launched by Secretary of Education Markets Spellings in 2005. And although it was framed to look at issues such as access, affordability, accountability, and quality, it actually focused in on a number of broader issues. Worth noting here that most of its meetings, some of them were in this facility which you recognize, I suppose that kind of tinged the reception to our report since it was a FACA committee. It generally had members of the press, television cameras and so forth, that were homing in on what we did. The findings were stated in a very provocative form by the writer that was Ben Willanski who was asked to write the text of our final report. American higher education has become what in the business world would be called a mature enterprise, increasingly risk adverse at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive. I think he got the quote from our chairman, Charles Miller, who had that time and just stepped down as the chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas. He called himself Mr. Accountability in Texas. It's an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed. And in particular has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies and an increasingly diverse and aging population. Two areas of particular concern. The first was that too few Americans prepare for, participate in and complete higher education with a particular skewing based on socioeconomic characteristics. And then second, that at a time when the United States had to be and should be increasing the value of learning outcomes, there were disturbing signs that suggested that higher education was moving into the opposite direction. Numerous recent studies suggested that today's American college students are not really learning what they need to learn. Now I might note at that time, Derek Bakut just come out with this very provocative book making this same point. So this was not very original with us. The recommendations were to reaffirm America's commitment to provide all students with the opportunity to pursue post-secondary education, to restructure student financial aid programs to focus primarily on the needs of lower income and minority students, adopt a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement, greatly increasing investment in key strategic areas. We were moving this particular commission along in parallel with the rise of an above the gathering storm study that was being done by the National Academy and would come out with a proposal to double the support of basic research in the United States. So we felt that we ought to at least reinforce that in our report. We got some pushback on this from the administration but we managed to keep it in anyway. To ensure that all citizens had access to high quality educational learning and training opportunities throughout their lives, through the national strategy to provide lifelong learning opportunities at the post-secondary level and to demand transparency, accountability and commitment to public purpose. I would note here that despite the belief to the contrary we did not propose standardized testing, price fixing of tuition, no national or federal accreditation, no no child left behind or a nation at risk and no federalization of American higher education. In fact, there was a core of us, Chuck Vest, Bob Zemsky, David Ward and myself that made certain that the commission kept most of its focused on undergraduate education, particularly general education and stayed far away from the particular characteristics of research universities in terms of graduate education and research. We embraced very strongly that great quote from the economist that the strength of the American higher education system is that it has no system. Well, with that behind us, that 100,000 foot level is about where you can get most presidents to go these days. Let me move up to what astronomers call the L1 point. This is a million miles from Earth where if you place a satellite, forces of gravity neutralize and it'll stay there. Al Gore wanted to do that and broadcast from the satellite a picture, 24 hours a day of the big blue marble on C-span. Actually, I chaired the study commission for NASA that thought that that satellite would actually be a really good idea because it'd give us a better chance on what was happening with global climate change. We made that recommendation just before the Bush administration took office. You know what happened to it then. Anyway, at this level, the key issues are first the knowledge economy, that is the degree to which the world now depends on a radically new system for creating wealth that depends upon the creation and application of new knowledge and therefore upon educated people and their ideas. That the strength, prosperity, and welfare of a nation will therefore depend on a strong system of tertiary or as we call it post-secondary education and it requires world-class research institutions beyond that that can actually generate the new knowledge. The second issue is demographics. Most of the world's developed economies are seeing a serious problem with workforce. Aging populations out migration are leading to shrinkage as a workforce. We stand a bit apart in the United States because of another important demographic trend for us which is immigration. In fact, over 50% of US population growth during the past decade has come from immigrants and it's estimated they will boost our population by about 50% to 450 million by 2050. This increasing diversity of the American population is really one of our great strengths. It gives us a level of energy, of innovation, of different perspectives that really is an enormous benefit to our country although it requires some agility in how public policies and public perceptions evolve. Globalization, a study done by the National Intelligence Council several years ago put it this way. We see globalization, the growing interconnectedness, reflected in expanded flows of information, technology, capital goods, services, and people throughout the world as an overarching mega trend. It was sourced so ubiquitous it will substantially shape all other major trends of the world in the year 2020. And we already see that as markets characterized by instantaneous flows of knowledge, capital, and work are driving practices, outsourcing, offshoring, shifting from public to private, equity investment and so forth. And then of course finally global sustainability, the impact of humankind threatening the planet. The daunting complexity of this is something that does require the particular attributes of the research university and most of our institutions are treating this in a most serious fashion. Implications for higher education? Well as the knowledge economy depends upon the education of a workforce and also new knowledge, the education requirements of the knowledge economy, the bar is being raised higher and higher. If a high school diploma was adequate a century ago, today some level of post-secondary education, and I'm one of those that believe we're rapidly evolving to where at least the baccalaureate degree will be required. The driving force behind the 21st century economy is knowledge and developing human capital is the best way to ensure prosperity. This is now the skills race that the governors have accepted as kind of replacing the momentum of the space race in the 1960s. But that creates a certain dilemma. The Europeans call this the tension between massification and league tables. And what they mean by that is all developed societies believe that the opportunity for college education must simply extend over a much larger fraction of their population with broadened participation. But at the same time the need to generate new knowledge requires world-class research capability as measured by what they call league tables, the Times Higher Education Survey, for example, Shanghai, Jotong, and so forth. At the same time of extending educational opportunity and raising the quality of their research universities, they'd like to reduce the burden on taxpayers, of course. And there's a certain incompatibility with these requirements that we see throughout the world and also in this country. Mission differentiation, the great diversity of higher education needs really requires a highly differentiated system of higher education. And yet, as we all know, there's an inevitable trend that all community colleges want to become four-year institutions. All four-year institutions want to begin to offer graduate programs, do research, eventually be classified as a research university and eventually become a member of the Association of American Universities. One of my colleagues, David Ward, a demographer who's now back in the saddle for two years at Wisconsin, did a calculation one time trying to demonstrate that to build and support a comprehensive public research university world-class quality, meaning one with medical centers and so forth, took a population of five million people. That just happens to be the population of Wisconsin, which means they can only afford one, and that's in Madison. My state, 10 million, we got with two. It actually applies to many European nations. That was not accepted by most people. Public policy versus markets. We're seeing a massive restructuring of higher education, like we've seen other sectors of our society, whether it's banking, health care, and so forth. And the concern is that market forces are rapidly overwhelming public policy. And as Hunter Rawlings pointed out, I think in a very eloquent op-ed piece and inside higher education last week, it's kind of shifted from the concept of higher education as a public good to that of an individual benefit in which the principal benefit is getting a job when you graduate from college. Well, how do we deal with that? That brings me to the next subject. Our American research university is riding on thin ice. Now, I don't know who dreamed up the idea of someone on a bicycle riding on a frozen pond. But in any event, I've been a part of a very interesting exercise for the last couple of years requested by Congress to essentially follow on to the rising above the gathering storm study they did in 2005 to look specifically at research universities as absolutely critical to the needs of the country as established by that earlier report. As it was put in the charge from Lamar Alexander, Barbara Mikulski and their colleagues, America's research universities are admired throughout the world and they've contributed immeasurably to our social and economic well-being. To an extent, unparalleled in other countries, they are our nation's primary source of long-term scientific, engineering, and medical research. But we are concerned they are at risk. And therefore they ask the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Institute of Medicine to assemble a group of individuals to assess the competitive position of the American research universities. In particular, they use the same language that was used in rising above the gathering storm to ask for 10 actions that could be taken. However, in the case of rising above the gathering storm first, they asked for those 10 actions to be provided to the federal government. Second, they were tolerant and when the Committee for Rising Above the Gathering Storms came in with 25 action items, they allowed them to come forward with all 25. In our case, we were asked to distribute these 10 actions over four key constituencies, the federal government, the states, research universities, and other stakeholders such as business and industry. And because we had a remarkable chair, Chad Holliday, former CEO of Dupont, and currently the non-executive chairman of the Board of Directors of Bank of America, he insisted that if they asked for 10, we're going to give them 10. And so part of our challenge was to take again about 20 to 30 recommendations, throw a few out of the lifeboat, crunch the rest into 10, and then distribute them over these. We began with a SWOT analysis. I should mention incidentally that the Committee itself was quite unusual because while it had university leadership presidents or board chairs from prominent universities like Stanford and MIT, Cornell, Virginia, McGill, Heather Murrow Blum, head of McGill, the University of Texas, Kentucky, and so forth. Half of its membership was made up of people with strong leadership experience, both in industry and in government. For example, I mentioned Chad Holliday, Bill Green, the CEO of Accenture, the CEO of Eli Lilly. We had Bill Frist, former Senate Majority Leader who helped kind of guide us through the political thickets and so forth. So it was a very well-balanced group. The SWOT analysis, strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, that's the whiteboard in my office as we try to put this together. But the strengths are obvious to you. The national priorities that require research universities, security, economic prosperity, public health, and so forth. The unique contributions that they can provide, new knowledge, scholars, scientists, researchers, knowledge-intensive professionals, services, and so forth. Weaknesses, well, obsolete financial models, obsolete public policies, inadequate alignment with U.S. priorities, mission creep, institutional cooperation that's winner-take-all that drives costs. The science, technology, engineering, mathematics pipeline because it was in the national academies that was dealing with this. Obsolete government management leadership, inadequate capacity for change, the changing professoriate, obsolete doctoral, post-doctoral training of the feudal system, futile to many, actually. And the list goes on. Opportunities, well, you use a strike, a crisis to stimulate change, might develop new financial models for the 21st century. Maybe we ought to ask for a Flexner report for the PhD. Rebalance competition, cooperation, redefined core mission of the institution, and so forth. Threats, mentioned some of these, globalization, changing demographics, financial stability. I might add that the one biggest concern that was unanimously accepted by the committee very early on was that the component of the nation's research university infrastructure at most risk right now are the public research universities. In part, they're critical because they do most of the research and produce most of the advanced degrees, physicians, scientists, engineers, and so forth. But beyond that, it was increasingly apparent that most states, no matter how hard they wanted to, simply would not have the capacity, the ability to restore funding for those institutions which had lost about 25% of their support over the last decade, to restore funding to world-class levels on a time scale that was acceptable, meaning on a time scale of a decade or two. I'll come back to that in just a moment. Lack of political and public awareness, technological change, of course, and so forth. We pulled all of this together into the danger signs. Today, that federal policy is no longer place of priority on university research and graduate education. In the face of economic challenges and the priority of aging population, states no longer are either capable or willing to support their public research universities at world-class levels. We estimated that the 100 or so public research universities have lost about 15 billion a year in support, about 25% of their state support over the last decade. And while we believed it was terribly important to urge the states to strive to restore that, both in the interest of their state as well as the nation, we were not optimistic that this would occur. The business and industry had largely seeded their basic research to research universities, but with only minimal corporate support, support from industry amounts to typically around 5% of R&D done on the campuses. And the research universities themselves had failed to achieve cost efficiency and productivity in teaching and research required in an increasingly competitive world. So the framework that we selected after many months of testimony and both oral and written, for the stakeholders, for the public, the idea was to rephrase the Vannevar Bush Report for a 21st century driven by rapid transformations in the economy and health and security, so that the nation's research universities are still fundamentally strong, but today they are seriously threatened. For government, to make the case that the states and the nation are seriously underinvesting in research universities, and while obsolete policies and practices hinder their capacity to serve as a key asset, and in addition, obsolete policies and practices hinder their capacity to serve as a key asset necessary for economic prosperity, health, and security. For the business community, to stress the role of research universities as a primary source of intellectual and human output, critical to an innovation-driven global economy, but rather than business viewing universities primarily as suppliers, instead view them as a partner, building strong partnerships to achieve mutual interest. And finally, for universities to recognize the current economic constraints and be prepared to work with government to address common goals and challenges, restructuring their activities and sacrificing as necessary. So the language that was suggested to us and although the report right now I should tell you has just come out a final review. We had 23 reviewers of this report because of its potential impact, which led to 140 pages of comments that I and several other members of the committee dealt with over the Christmas holidays, and four iterations with the Academy reviewers. But we cleared that last Monday and we will probably be releasing the report publicly in June, although we'll be engaged in deep background meetings with members of government, the states, higher education, and so forth in the meantime. The key is to make a strong case for the importance of research and graduate programs of Americans' research university as essential contributors to the nation's prosperity, health, and security, the triad used in Vannevar Bush's science, the endless frontier. To note that the nation faces new challenges, a time of rapid, profound economic, social, and political transformation in which educated people, the knowledge they produce and the innovation and entrepreneurial skills they possess have become keys to America's future. And so the key here is to, as a nation, reaffirm and revitalize the unique partnership going back 150 years ago to the Morel Act and then being reinforced 80 years later toward the end of World War II. A partnership between the nation's research universities, the federal government, the states, and stakeholders such as business and industry. The characteristics of the partnership that we are stressing are first to ask for a balanced set of commitments by each of the partners, that is, federal government, state government, research universities, business, and industry to develop and implement enlightened policies, efficient operating practices, and necessary investments. To provide among these commitments sufficient linkages and interdependence that will provide strong incentives for participation at comparable levels by each of the partners, sufficient flexibility to accommodate the differences among research universities and their various stakeholders. A recognition of the importance of supporting the comprehensive nature of the research university, spanning the full spectrum of academic and professional disciplines, including in particular the arts and humanities. We felt it was very important to get that out on the table because we are the academies of science, engineering, and medicine. I might add that having Hunter Rawlings on our committee for half of its tenure until the time that he assumed the presidency of the Association of American Universities helped get that language in, sprinkled throughout our drafts. While merit and impact should continue to be primary criteria, for example, awarding of research grants and contracts, there should be additional criteria that both reflect need and opportunities, for example, building new research capacity. And then finally, a commitment to a decade long effort when both the challenges and opportunities are likely to change. In the early phase, with a global economic crisis still very much in the minds of people, most emphasis will be on restructuring policies and practices of all of the partners. Over the longer time as the economy improves, we hope to see additional investments in research and graduate education in the later years. Now, the recommendations themselves, you can't read because I can't tell you about them. These are the stickies on my whiteboard. But as I said, they are quite broad. They are intended for the long term. They will evolve, they're stated in fairly general form in our report, which the last version of, I think is about 160 pages long. But they will be refined as we look for opportunities. The same thing happened with the rising of the Gathering Storm report. It caught the attention of the White House advisor, Carl Rove, who got it put in the state of the Union Address for President Bush, led to what was called the National Innovation Initiative, which was eventually transformed into the American Compete's Act, which had a number of important recommendations, authorizing a doubling of the basic research for the National Science Foundation. Office of Science of the Department of Energy and NIST, but also a major investment in K-12 education, changing tax policies and so forth. And in fact, was reauthorized early in the Obama administration and funded at an early stage out of stimulus funds. Part of the challenge is going to be to continue to get it funded. So in any event, that's kind of where we are on that. And as I said, we hope to roll this out publicly in June, but we are now at least through the difficult phase of review. I should mention that one thing the academies have a great deal of difficulty in is letting anything get through the reviewer net that's max of a strong policy or large numbers in terms of investments. We have both, and so it took a little bit more work. Okay, now we've gone from 100,000 feet to the L1 point. Let me go to the Oort Cloud. Okay, now the Oort Cloud is a light year from the sun and that's where X university presidents are exiled to. That's where we are doomed to contemplate issues out of sight and out of mind. But everyone's involved, just as the astronomers know, we can launch a comet in to kind of rattle around the university solar system. So that's what I'd like to do for a while right now because it really does tie very much to the kinds of activity you folks are involved in. The conjecture is that over the next generation, the university I believe is likely to change so much that it may no longer be recognizable in today's terms. Lifelong universities, global universities, what Chuck Vest calls meta universities and so forth. I'll give you a historical example which is my own institution. That's the University of Michigan in 1850. You see the cows on the pasture around several small buildings. 50 years later, it looked like that, okay? Those don't look on the same planet. 50 years later, it looked like that. 50 years later, it looked like that and this is an overflight and somewhere buried in and nestled around the university is the city of Ann Arbor but you don't see it because most of what you see is the University of Michigan. 5.6 billion dollar year multinational conglomerate. Well, we're facing a lot of game-changers right now. I mentioned two of them, lifelong learning and globalization, cyber infrastructure, social networking, universal access to knowledge and learning in ways that we could never have imagined and then an interesting trilogy I'll come back to. Paradigm shifts, possibility of hybrid universities. At a time when the public served by and supporting our state universities no longer seems to align with state boundaries. Maybe they're still public universities but maybe they're not really state universities anymore. Maybe they're some, they're hybrids. What we call universities of and in the world. Open and open source universities. Meta universities a la Charles Vest. A return to Universitas Magistraum at Scholarium, kind of the medieval university been in cyberspace. Learning networks and ecosystems. Or even an emergent civilization. Let me give some examples. Lifelong learning. Lengthening lifespans and careers. After all, they both doubled during the 20th century. Not so much because human lifespan extended but because of healthcare. The increasing pace of new knowledge creation, challenges of a global knowledge economy. Make it increasingly important that democratic societies provide all of their citizens for the education, the learning, the training opportunities they need throughout their lives whenever, wherever and however they needed at high quality and affordable costs. That was I think the most important recommendation of the Spelling's commission and the one that was immediately ignored by the past administration. Nevertheless many countries around the world right now are trying to establish this as a major national policy. They don't know yet quite how to do it but they're at least making the effort. Of course, this would require a very considerable transformation and expansion of the existing post-secondary educational enterprise. Entirely new paradigms for the conduct, organization, financing, leadership and governance of higher education. Most of our institutions are built for the young and what we're talking about is most of the learning occurring for people engaged in careers with families and other responsibilities. The Global University. Well, mature and developing nations around the world are making major investments in building knowledge infrastructure, schools, universities, research institutes, high tech industry and so forth. But there's a sense that higher education is also in a somewhat different stage of globalization than it has traditionally been. Every couple of years I have the challenging job of being co-director of what's called the Gleon Colloquium. This is kind of a Davos-like meeting of university leaders from around the world meeting in a horrible hotel in Switzerland looking out over Lake Geneva and Chateau Chalon. And when you get in these intimate discussions over several days with long luncheons and lots of Swiss wine, you find that most of these people think about the same things. They have very similar perspectives. Incidentally, one of the nice things about the Gleon Colloquium is that the books that come out as our proceedings after six months are opened up for PDF access. And so you can download any of them as you'd like to see them. But one of the ideas that came out of this is maybe we will see the emergence of what they call universities in and of the world. Universities that not only address the opportunities that are provided by a global marketplace but define their public purpose beyond institutional or regional or national needs and instead begin to encompass global imperatives, global sustainability, world health, wealth disparities and poverty international development. Early phases of this, the British Open University I suppose is the most pronounced. Many of the for-profits through merger and acquisition are becoming international in scope. There are various consortia and I suppose in a way, the effort by Stanford and MITx to provide access to certain parts of their curriculum on a scale never before imagined or possible is an example of institutions that may now be moving into this more global sense. Cyber infrastructure. Arden Mameth, the past director of the National Science Foundation put it this way. We're entering a second revolution in information technology, one that may well usher in a new technological age that will dwarf and share transformational scope and power anything we've yet experienced in the current information age. We're already intimately familiar with the first revolution, now well underway. Information, computer and communications technology have transformed nearly every aspect of our lives, creating entirely new opportunities and challenges and trailing some inevitable surprises in their wake. Now Dan Adkins actually wrote this for Arden and Dan Adkins as many of you know chaired the Blue Ribbon Commission on Cyber Infrastructure and was the first director of NSF's Office of Cyber Infrastructure. After three years we've lured him back to Ann Arbor, thank heavens, but nevertheless he's still very actively involved. Cyber infrastructure of course is a familiar term to you but it's hardware, software, people, organizations and policies. The key here though is that it is a comprehensive phenomena that involves the creation, dissemination, preservation and application of knowledge, adding new dimensions that greatly enhance the transformational potential of this technology. Now when we think of this stuff, we think of things like Jaguar, actually I'm part of a group that uses Jaguar, one of the few. Of course we're trying to build one like that in Champaign Urbana, a little hiccup when we had to switch from IBM to Cray. But of course that's not what most people see, they see things like this or things like this. How many of you have a new iPad incidentally? Okay, other possibilities, ubiquitous computing, computers disappear like electricity, they're already becoming, at least information technology is becoming a utility. Agents and avatars, emergent behavior. This is one of the middle school students in a summer camp we have at Michigan where we turn them loose on our facilities which are underutilized during part of the summer. I don't know whether he looks like Morpheus or not, but it's probably something we ought to worry about. Virtual universities, not your father's virtual university, Western Governor's University or one I started during the 1990s. But iTunes U or iTunes U with courses now available or iTunes author with textbooks that you can write and get a royalty of 70% on, kind of a contrast. MITX, the launch of MIT's open courseware initiative during its time was extraordinarily provocative. Chuck Vest called me up the night before the press conference when they announced it and said, am I crazy? I said probably, but you really ought to do it. Anyway, the idea that you can provide fairly sophisticated learning experiences available to hundreds of thousands and then a way to certify it, whether you give them a badge or something, that's gonna be interesting. Universal access to knowledge and learning. Well, this is how the open philosophy of open software development now has propagated through society. The open courseware initiative I mentioned early, picture of Chuck when he announced it, what is it, they have 2200 courses, many with rather primitive digital materials, many with quite sophisticated digital materials. And I suppose MITX is their first step in how actually to begin to market those materials. As I said, iTunes you. Digital access, JSTOR. We were quite delighted to be a partner in the early development of that at Michigan during the 1990s and it is now a tool for scholars of immense importance. Google, when Larry Page was a undergraduate engineering student at Michigan, he worked on a digital library project there, NSF. Of course the page rank system at Stanford was also working on that. When he came back in 2004 and said we'd like to try to digitize your library, the first reaction was that's hundreds of millions of dollars, let us try and they have and they have. There's a great article by Kevin Kelly in the New York Times in 2006, I think familiar to all of you. And making the analogy between Google and now others that are doing this. And the Library of Alexandria, which attempted to capture in one place the knowledge of the world. Some pictures of mythology. And he makes the point that when Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries, might it be that the Long Herald Great Library of all knowledge could be really within our grasp. We can provide all the works of humankind to all of the peoples of the world and it would be an achievement remembered for all time like putting a man on the moon. And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic offering every book to every person. Well Google's books are to search for the Hathi Trust, which takes much of the material that has been digitized and now through collaboration with 60 institutions involving many of you in this room, is trying to methodically move through and provide broader access to that. They've got about at last both and I saw from them there are now over 10 million titles, 2.7 in the public domain. They're trying to put as much full text access into the public domain as possible. Michigan as you may be aware, took a rather bold leap into the unknown by actually trying to open up within our domain. Orphan works and got suitably beaten back but nevertheless these kinds of issues are things that clearly are on the table. I might add that one of the hats I wear is as Chair of the Policy and Global Affairs Division of the National Research Council and that's the group that managed over a decade of effort and trying to modify the patent laws last September. And so perhaps the next thing to take on is the way that copyright applies to scholarly publication where the principal motivation of people developing scholarly publication is not to make money directly off of it but to get it read as wisely as possible. Perhaps. So the Hathi Trust, 60 institutions and so forth. And then when you combine it with other things like social networking, instant messaging, Facebook, Twitter, virtual environments, immersive games, simulation and so forth, you are led to what Chuck Vest calls the meta university, open source, open content, open learning and other open technologies. Really providing the opportunities not simply for accessing knowledge but accessing learning. As he suggests that through an array of open paradigms, we're seeing the early emergence of a meta university, a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. I don't know he wrote that himself but maybe. Meta university, well, it will enable not replace residential campuses, adaptable, not prescriptive, so forth and so on. And so all of this is this world of tremendous excitement and rapid change that you folks are involved in over the horizon. So what happens when you put all this together? Open source knowledge and learning technologies, open content distribution, library digitization, open participatory collaborative learning, immersive environments, simulation, ubiquitous connectivity and then built on the substrate of technology that continues to evolve at a rate of 100 to 1,000 fold a decade. Four billion cell phone users, 500 million with broadband connectivity. And realize how this is shifting once again into a utility and into data centers and clouds. What my colleagues call the five pillars of social, collaborative, mobile, cloud, where the software is a service. Big data, that's your world. Cyber physical, sensors, activators to couple the digital electronic world, the physical world, the source of big data. Now this is my puzzle, this little triangle. Part of us Wikipedia, Google and Watson. Now what do I mean here? Wikipedia represents the capacity to create enormous learning communities, collective ability to digest and analyze information, self-correcting, evolving very rapidly. In fact, it's now become probably more responsive than newspapers are. You can go to it within a few minutes after something happened and find the entry has changed. Google is the world of big data, big everything. The cloud, digitized, accessible, searchable. Everything ever printed, measured, sensed, created, and so forth. And then Watson is the capacity to analyze this stuff. Trillions of transactions per second. Identify correlations, create information, perhaps authenticating knowledge, certifying learning and providing ubiquitous access. I actually tried to ask Siri, does the Higgs boson really exist? Because in my class tomorrow afternoon, I have one of the leaders of the Atlas experiment which claims to be close to actually measuring it. Siri doesn't know what the Higgs boson is yet. But she'll learn. So what is this? Well, you all know John Sealy Brown, and he characterizes the core competencies that define a university as the capacity to form learning communities, to provide access to knowledge, libraries, faculties, laboratories, to authenticate that learned knowledge is true and to certify that learning has occurred. So is this kind of a representation for a post-modernist university? Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a new epistemology for the 21st century or maybe a foundation for the 21st analog to the Renaissance or even the age of enlightenment. Maybe it's a brave new world, a hive culture, Ender's game, a technological singularity, Oliver, Neumann, and Kurzweil. Or perhaps maybe it leads to a time in the near future when anyone with even a modest internet connection has access to all of the recorded knowledge of human history, along with ubiquitous learning opportunities. Imagine further than linking together of substantial part of the world's population with limitless access to knowledge and learning opportunities enabled by this cyber infrastructure continuing to evolve. Is maybe it's a new form of collective human intelligence billions of world citizens interact together unconstrained by today's monopolies on knowledge or learning opportunities. Maybe this is the most exciting vision for the future of the university. No longer constrained by space, time, monopoly, or cake laws, but rather unleashed by cyber infrastructure to empower the emergence of a new global civilization of humankind. Wow. Well, how do you deal with stuff like this? I mean, the university looks like it always has, right? I mean, we still organize our programs into academic professional disciplines. Campuses look about the same traditional degrees that undergraduate and professional levels. And university presidents always fall back on Clark Kerr's comment that about 85 institutions in the Western world established by 1520 still exist in recognizable forms with similar functions and unbroken history, including the Catholic Church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man in Iceland and Great Britain, and several quists, cantons, and 70-year universities. But change is everywhere that may look the same, but people don't behave the same. Students utilize the internet to access information and services, social networking to interact, gaming to learn. Faculty members interact more with colleagues around the world than across the hall. The libraries evolved, as I said, from stacks to Starbucks. Scholarship is hopefully shifting from publisher monopolies to open access distribution, both to publications and to data. The reality is that universities are extraordinarily adaptive institutions. They tolerate redundancy and diversity. Technological change tends to evolve much more rapidly than social change, and so it's not surprising that universities do not evolve on the time scale of tech turns. Change is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Tends to usually begin at the edge of an organization to propagate to the core, although I would say that if the library is the poster child, that is at the core, so maybe that's something different. It could be that the IT revolution is more like a tsunami, that universities are floating far enough out to sea that they just bob up and down a little bit as the wave crashes on the rest of society, on the beach. But change will occur. Universities will continue to exist as a place because that's how human interaction today, at least most effectively occurs. But yet learning itself should not be bound too tightly to campuses, and I think Stanford and MIT, as well as many other experiments, are making it apparent. While learning will continue to depend on communities, we should not assure that the current forms will continue, the four quadrant, not simply same time, same place, but same place, different time, and so forth and so on, immersive simulations. We can also remember Christensen's innovators dilemma, something that today may not look as good as the old, something new today that may not perform as well as the old, but evolves much more rapidly, can lead to disruption. And so here I always go back to a tremendous passage that Frank Rhodes, former president of Cornell wrote, at the turn of the millennium for a huge UNESCO conference in 2001 on the future of the university, and I'll read it for you, you can read it as well, but as only Frank can write, for a thousand years the university has benefited our civilization as a learning community where both the young and the experienced could acquire not only knowledge and skills, but the values and discipline of the educated mind. It has defended and propagated our cultural and intellectual heritage. What is my reminder coming up there for? While challenging our norms and beliefs, it has produced leaders of our government's commerce and professions. It has both created and applied new knowledge to serve our society, and it has done so while preserving those values and principles so essential to academic learning, the freedom of inquiry and openness to new ideas, a commitment to rigorous study and a level of learning. There seems little doubt that these roles will continue to be needed by our civilization. There's little doubt as well that the university in some form will be needed to provide them. The university of the 21st century may be as different from today's institutions as the research university is from the colonial college, but its form and its continued evolution will be a consequence of transformations necessary to provide its ancient values and contributions to a changing world. Thank you very much. Comment and question time. Right, Cliff? Good, okay. I'll come to the microphone and get things started. I'm Michael Siedl from Humboldt University, Tetsu Berlin, and I was glad that you were referencing a number of international features here. I'm obviously not originally from Germany. In fact, I'm a graduate of University of Michigan, among other places. When we talk about major initiatives and major issues, one of the things that stands out in Europe is not massification versus tables of who is the best university. I think that's very British, but rather how we can interact and cooperate. The Bologna process has certainly taken some steps forward, but working across cultures, working across languages is difficult. Not everyone speaks German. We end up communicating within Europe, largely in English. And when we have partnerships with the US, with Canada, with Britain, we're actually dealing with multiple cultures too. I'm here partly representing the iSchool group, which is truly international, not only European, US, Chinese, other members. It seemed to me, you referenced this, but how much of a priority do you see this, how much of a role does this level of internationalization play in your vision of the future for our universities? I think it was our sense, from these international conversations that we've been having, that it is very important. And we use intentionally the term globalization because internationalization kind of takes on more of a colonial character if you look at how universities have done it in the past. Certainly they try to attract students from around the world, faculty. But when they become engaged, is to provide a satellite, a campus and so forth, rather than a peer to peer interaction with multiple institutions, which has got to be the direction I think they're going. Many aspects of the Bologna process are very attractive, and I think are lessons to be learned in this country. The way that you can sustain that kind of an interaction, now entering its second decade. And it has accomplished a great deal, although obviously the cultural and language issues are very serious. The UK situation, or at least the English situation, raises the topic that we are probably going to focus on, that the next Leon conference, which will be a year from this summer, which is the sustainability of the research university. Because in an effort to go to income contingent loans and removal of block grants from the central government and so forth, that sounds very much like what we're going through in the United States right now, but it's also happening in other parts of the world, not necessarily in Asia. And their lessons can be learned from elsewhere. Your comment about the league table business, I mean it is clear, at least from the little I know about it, in Germany and France and so forth, they are trying to look at a differential approach to build truly world-class and competitive research universities, rather than across the full spectrum of institutions. But it looks like it's a top-down effort, rather than the market-driven effort that we have in the United States, in which the predators devour the prey. The winner takes all. But nevertheless, I do believe that these universities in and of the world is simply a terminology to recognize that collaboration and very much of a peer-to-peer relationship is the way those institutions will evolve, rather than essentially distributing their activities around the world driven from some central core. Other questions, comments? I'm Bill Arms, I'm currently Cornell University, but 40 years ago, I was at the Open University, which you mentioned. Yes. The Open University's success came from being a new organization. The resistance to change in our American universities is so great that one wonders sometimes whether we might do better to not try to change our universities, but to get entirely new institutions to replace them. Any thoughts on this matter? Well, of course, that was the approach that was taken during the 1960s by Clark Kerr, where in a rapidly expanding economy, he had the wealth to start a variety of new campuses of the University of California, Irvine, Santa Barbara, San Diego, which is kind of along the British model, University of California, Santa Cruz, which as he said is a Swarthmore buried inside a UCLA. Although that was referred to as Uncle Clark's summer camp by most people at the time. And of course, what's happening is all those campuses are on the same trajectory, becoming AAU-class, world-class research universities. There have been very few experiments in this country, and I think that's a shortcoming. One of the few I can think of is Olin College, which was put together to look at new paradigms in engineering education, but it's far from critical. It has fewer than 500 students. We need much more of that kind of experimentation. But change can occur within universities. I've always felt that change works best if it comes from grassroots. That's where the best ideas come from anyway. And so maybe what we have to do is intentionally weaken university leadership administrations and governing boards and allow more of the Occupy spirit to bubble up. Maybe that may not be silly. Maybe during the great protest days of the 60s and early 70s, people were much more engaged and therefore much more willing to experiment and try new things. And maybe we need some of that fervor once again. And it may be driven by students as much as anything else. But the reality is today that the way that we're financing higher education in the United States and indeed in most developed nations is not sustainable. And so we've got to simply look at new ways to not only finance ourselves, but new ways to deliver learning opportunities and conduct research and scholarship. If there are no other takers, I'm gonna go for one. You mentioned David Ward's rule of thumb of about one research university per five million and said there was some skepticism about whether that's the right number. Certainly as I look at the current scene and how things are liable to play out, one of the questions is does the research university kind of core in a place like the United States get bigger or does it get smaller? Certainly if we look around today we can find many institutions to aspire to be research universities and are clearly on some sort of trajectory to get there. But I wonder if you have thoughts on how big really is that potential core on a sustainable basis? Well, the comment I made and referred to David Ward really referred to a comprehensive research university complete with medical center and probably football team, okay. I've had experience with little teeny tiny research institutions such as Caltech that certainly doesn't have a hospital and they kind of have a football team but they allow the custodians to play on it. So it's better than it should be. I think the point is that you can make the case for much broader distribution of scholarly excellence in institutions that are prepared to focus resources. Or have, you know, unique assets, locations, faculty access to students and so forth. That's why I think intentionally in the report we put in we have put in the phrase that the capacity building research capacity should be one of the criteria that should be used. And that was not just put in so that each of the 50 states could see themselves as a player in this. It was because in a very real sense you cannot confine the graduate or the research contributions of the United States higher education system to the membership of AAU or even APLU. There are many fine institution have very focused programs of high quality and areas of very significant need have worn you out. I'll ask a question. I'm Joy Sogburn from the University of Utah. In conversations with some of the humanities people that I work with, they've pushed back against globalization and the idea of the world is flat because there's so much tied to geography and culture and sense of place. How do we sustain that balance if we start going more global than ever? Say the last part of that again. How do we sustain the balance between the local identification culture, et cetera, and globalization? The Mac Jihad, was that the paper that was published a number of years ago, does globalization threaten to wipe out the great diversity and culture that's the strength of our society? I don't think it, my own sense is that it doesn't. Most of our students today that graduate will spend much of the early part of their careers in other parts of the world and they need some capacity to appreciate, to look upon that as a very positive experience and to prepare for it. And so for that reason, you know, I think that that kind of intellectual breadth really should be a character of most universities just as a fundamental part of the educational opportunity, educational responsibility they have to students. Whether that means junior years abroad or whatever, that's an institution, my institution decision. But the reality is that our students will lead lives as global citizens in ways that we did not. And my own belief is that we have to prepare them for those lives. I think you're gonna get some time back. Okay.