 So for the first panel, I guess what I want to do is introduce the moderator for the first panel, which is Deborah Blum. And she's the author of Poisoner's Handbook, The Murder and Birth of Modern Forensics, Medicine in the Jazz Age, New York. She's also a winner of 1992 Pulitzer for a series in the Sacramento Bee entitled The Monkey Wars, which analyzed the battle over using animals and biomedical research. Another example of the kind of fraying of the social contract between society and science. And now she's a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So I'm going to turn things over to Deborah, who will introduce her speakers, and she will get the conversation going and ultimately engage all of us as well. I'm also instructed to say, if you have an open seat next to you, could you please indicate so by raising your hand? And of equal importance, more lunches on the way, but you're not permitted to go get it. As you can see, we're setting this up in a fairly conversational way. What I'm going to do is introduce our two panelists and ask them a couple of questions to get them started. And we're hoping this will be an inclusive conversation and that you will join in and ask them questions as well. To my far left is Steven Trachtenberg, who was the 15th president of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007, where he still holds an endowed chair in public service. He's a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, received 16 honorary degrees in honor of his service to higher education. And he's written numerous books on the subject. Sitting next to me is Andy Revkin. Andy is a longtime environmental writer for the New York Times. It still maintains a blog there, Dot Earth. He's a senior fellow at the PACE Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. He's the author of numerous other publications, including the 2009 book The North Pole Was Here, Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World. And he primarily, if you know Andy, focuses on issues related to climate change, but opens those up in other ways. We had a third panelist, and you'll see him in your program, who is not here. George Post speaking of climate change. He's back in Arizona fighting an outbreak of wildfires near his house. But we will try, that will allow us to have more time for our other brilliant panelists here. I'm going to start with Steven Trachtenberg in this sense. Partly because at this moment, higher education is such an exceptionally easy punching bag. And I note that James Pearson wrote recently in The New Criterion that it used to be that only conservatives criticized higher education. But now he says everyone is unhappy. And as an example, he cites some of the points raised in a recent book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreyfus on higher education, in which they say, a huge and vital sector of our society has become a colossus, taking on many roles and doing none of them well. As we watch government's retreat from funding higher education, California being a prime example, one question worth asking is whether the dysfunctional operation of universities has actually led to a loss of public support in this enterprise, including the research enterprise. In other words, is the way we run universities the problem? Professor Trachtenberg. As you'd expect, the answer is yes and no. Val Brinstein, who I think is going to be quoted by everybody here today, who said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. And therein lies one of the great problems we've got with the contemporary university, is that its medieval roots have inspired us to do the same thing over and over again. And we've been successful at doing it for so long that we cannot imagine doing it in any other way, even to propose modest change as a university administrator, is to invite the disapproval of one's faculty. The faculty are always in favor of progress, but change is a word that is eschewed. I saw a cartoon the other day in the New Yorker that I thought was perfect, and I will describe it to you because I didn't have the sense to make a slide. And it showed two medieval-looking people looking at a book. And one said to the other, well, it seems like an interesting idea, but it'll never replace the scroll. And it occurred to me that the book, of course, is what should have replaced the lecture. When the lecture was first used in the university, it was because the faculty member had a set of knowledge that needed to be transmitted to the students. The students sat as you were sitting. The professor sat at the front of the room or stood and spoke, and they took notes. And at the end of the year, the book had been transmitted to the students. They went away with the book. After the invention of movable type and the book, you would have thought that the lecture would have been mitigated, that people would have increasingly simply turned to volumes rather than to lectures. And little by little, there is some of that, of course. But the books were expensive and it took a long time. So here we are in the 21st century and continuing on universities all over this campus to put up buildings in which we put lecture halls on a regular basis, even as concurrently. We are seeing more and more distance learning and less and less use of classrooms in the conventional way. Lectures, as you know, are the least effective way of transmitting knowledge. People retain information that they have read far better than what they have heard. So you would think that it would have changed, but no. As a university president, I, every now and again, decided I would risk my career by proposing to the faculty senate that we do something new. For example, I thought about the calendar I got each year at Christmas from the garage, and it had 12 months in it. And the one I got from the university seemed to be missing May, June, July, and August. And so I went to the faculty and said, look, we could run these places far more efficiently if we maximized the utility of our physical plant. And we ran classes 12 months a year and we ran research 12 months a year. And we had three semesters and students could come in and they could go through the university much more quickly. And everybody laughed at me and then actually got nasty. And so I put it aside and came up the following year with a more modest proposal. I said, look, you know, a lot of people work five days a week, six even. And it occurs to me that we seem to close down on Thursday nights. And it's the night when all the students have their parties. And it might be a good idea if we would have run classes all day Fridays and maybe half a day on Saturday, the way it was when I was an undergraduate back in the dark ages. And everybody laughed at me again and I got nowhere with that idea. And so I discovered that changing universities was perhaps even more daunting than getting a building put up in the District of Columbia, which turns out to be extraordinarily daunting if you've ever tried it. Getting zoning permits and things of this sort in Washington is a Olympian challenge. I am concerned that while the conventional universities are going about business as usual, the for-profit institutions have in fact seized the future. And one need not be willing to accept their excesses without recognizing at the same time their successes. And Phoenix and the other for-profit institutions are in fact successful only partly because they have been exploiting the federal government and its financial aid programs. They are also successful because they are delivering a service to students that those students find helpful. Not every student in fact can come to a place at a certain time. Not every student can afford the price of a university. Many people are homebound. Many people are traveling. Many people have jobs, children, and nevertheless want to learn. And that will only increase. We have democratized education and the need for education in such a way that it cannot be retained as the elite institution. It was in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. Indeed, the balance of this century between elementary and secondary education as well as secondary education and post-graduate education is increasingly seeing the commodization of degrees and the need for credentials and the need for continuing education, whether one is a lawyer or a physician. Is that a stop? Almost. Okay. In any case, what I am arguing is that Peter Drucker may have gone too far in saying that the place-based university will become an artifact in the next decade or so. But he has not completely gone wrong. I want to follow up on the subject of education and put a question to Andy Revkin in this context. And it is not so much whether it is a public or for-profit university, but I want to pull it back to the way we teach science just for a minute in this sense. A long time ago, one of the vice presidents at Caltech said to me that the K-12 system of teaching science is really a filtration of the priesthood. And K-12, what we do is we train those who are fit to become scientists and in that same system we cast off everyone else. And so that by the time they get to college, most of them are not part of the conversation about science to begin with. And I am concerned that we continue to do that at the college level as well. But I want to bring this back to Andy because he deals some with K-12 on daughters. And because I think it is an interesting thing to look at in the aspect of climate change, that is we have a lot of scientists and a strong consensus at one level on global climate change and a kind of mixed reception, I am going to say modestly, with the public. And we have to ask ourselves where does that mixed reception begin and is the failure in part the way we teach science itself and whether or not we are bringing everyone into that conversation. Oh boy. There is a lot to chew on here including what Dan was raising some really important points. And the question is about academia. No, I moved from journalism to academia because I thought it would become more effective. Little did I know that it is the same issues. But there are also great opportunities. I think clearly the system we have now is not for the average citizen. And this is journalism as well as the way we learn in schools. We are not absorbing what science is, which is process. And that science implicitly is about argument. And if I could just convey one thing to the average person coming to my blog at the New York Times or to a student at Pace University, to get across the idea that argument is normal. Argument is how science proceeds. It is like a pool of piranhas or an acid bath and whatever is left over after everybody bites and chews is the new sense of what the world is like. And so because what happens is when you don't have that awareness then people go out into the world and see how scientists are arguing and by the way nature is still complicated and they kind of fuzz out because they are not understanding and really engaging in the reality that it is a journey. And that there is robust knowledge about basics but that contention around the pace of sea level rise around how warm it is going to get from a double amount of CO2. Those are highly uncertain questions still. But then you could at least normalize your sense that that is actually part of the picture that we understand. And then there is all the behavioral science that the physical... You know I spent almost 25 years writing about the biogeophysical problem of climate change. And it is just the last 7 or 8 years paying more attention to the Dan Sarowitz's of the world that I really realized how much of this problem is here. That critical thinking about science is not just having the ability to go on Google and understand what is a real important advance and what is just someone yelling. It is also the critical thinking has to involve thinking about your own reaction to information and realizing that is a powerful filter and that that is getting in the way of cogent discourse with other people. So making sure that behavioral sciences are a big part of what people learn is part of their basic understanding of these questions from an early age is I think vital, important and possible. And possible which is the most important part here. Do you agree? Yes I do. And I think again part of it has to do with the problem we have is starting at the very earliest grades in which youngsters particularly young women are frightened away from mathematics and frightened away from STEM subjects. And then it serves as sort of a gatekeeper. Everybody here would be a physician if they could have only gotten through organic chemistry. That is why I am not a physician. Well that is what I am saying. Specifically I remember the course. I never hear physicians talking about how much they use organic chemistry after they become doctors but to get into medical school in the old days that was the key. And still is. It is still a gatekeeper kind of course. So if you look at the slow change of universities that would be a classic example of that. Are universities distilling a, what do I want, a set of value in research and development? And what made me think of this is there was a New York time story this week. Hewlett Packard is planning to cut 30,000 jobs. And it talked about not this particular, Meg Whitman is the current CEO, but it was talking about an earlier one Mark Heard and made the point that as part of his necessary cost cutting he cut R&D at Hewlett Packard which had long time been an international leader to such a degree that their scientists were using pirated software to run the equipment in their laboratory. And when I looked at that, first I did one of those kind of, oh I can't believe that. But then I thought, well okay, but here's someone who's highly educated, goes into running a major company and has not had instilled with him a value in respect for R&D. And I wonder if again, do we blame that on universities as well? Are we not teaching us to think in the ways we used to about investing in innovation? I don't think it's sufficient database to come to that conclusion. You know, I remember everybody blaming the law schools for Nixon. And with good reasons. And the business schools for what, you know, for losing two billion dollars even though you're the leading investment banking company in the world. People make stupid decisions in all areas of life. So I don't think it's a cause and effect I think. After all, an awful lot of what we did accomplish is the result of what went on in the colleges and universities. And I think human beings are flawed and they're going to make bad decisions at times. Well and also, you know, it's the quarterly report. Doing long-throw, high-failure rate research in the world of profits that have to be there for the next quarter is just not tenable. So we've taught that better. We've taught the quarterly report better. Well, that's right. And then this gets at some work that some people in D.C. have written about with the, you know, who's on campus recruiting. The MBA pipeline is much more present, apt to capture the really smart minds than science these days. I think that's true. Where do you see universities investing now in research than more? Do you see a shift? In the sense of I would change universities if I didn't have the drag of the institution. Are they investing in, where would you change them? And I'd be interested to hear you say that, deal with that too, Andy, if you could. Sure. Well, I think it's important to take a look at what universities are doing and they're doing two, obviously many things, but two conspicuous things are the teaching and the research. And I think on the teaching side, we're going to see more accountability. People are, the books that you've cited, for example, Hacker's book, really focuses on the undergraduate experience and essentially says we're not adding value to young people after they come out of high school and go through it to the BA. The second side, which is the research side, is another matter altogether. The universities, whether they are the great California universities or the independent universities, are increasingly concerned about funding and their ability to continue. Now, the truth of it is that funding has remained fairly consistent over the past decade. So I think part of the problem is a perception, a perception issue because if somebody is going to invest in putting up a building, they're going to spend millions of dollars, they're going to take 30-year commitments and they're uncertain about the future. And it is that uncertainty factor, I think, which is impacting on the commitment of institutions to doing research. Secondly, it's the issue of jobs and the fact that an awful lot of our graduate students in the sciences are coming from abroad and then going back home to China and India which are increasingly building their own infrastructure and which are going to be increasingly competitive both in the academic world and in the commercial and industrial world. And so these are obvious issues that are driving the universities. My own institution is putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a new science facility and it's a colossal gamble by my successor on the ability of GW to become an even better science-based research university and he comes out of a culture informed by 10 years as provost of Johns Hopkins. I myself in his place might have taken the institution further into the social sciences and talked about because it seems to me a sure bet for less money located in the District of Columbia. And I'd like to come back to that, Andy. I get around to a lot of campuses these days for a variety of reasons. Actually, George Washington has, the rich things that I see, the reason campuses will persist is as a demonstration test bed and also to build demonstrations that their communities can understand but also as a collaboratorium where students from different disciplines can find each other, do stuff, like at Planet Forward I think is a very good example from George Washington, Rensselaer Polytechnic has an inventors lab and there's a course there that I wrote about in Dot Earth that's produced a bunch of startups and that's very tied into the community around it. So the campus is a hub that's helping local businesses grow and find ways forward that are sustainable. At Pace University, again, we're doing collaborative work where from the sciences and communication we've created films, documentaries that mainstream media aren't going to do anymore about sustainability issues because we're doing the pieces that are sort of the good news which the media don't tend to focus on very much. So there's lots of potential to make campuses into the sort of hub place for people to relate to each other and work collaboratively. And then you've got to build your virtual campus. At recent meetings at Pace, again, there's a lot of focus on the physical campus but I say we've got to focus more on the virtual campus because that's where you're going to have these tie-ins to other institutions and have a public face. And again, if you want science to have meaning, it better be out of the ivory tower and in the face of the public as well. We see two interesting things going on. On the one hand, MIT and Harvard committing 60 million dollars to develop distance learning and to democratize the university and allow people to take courses for free. And on the other hand, you see Cornell University and what is it, Hebrew University with the aid of Mayor Bloomberg making billion-dollar commitments to build physical campuses to do science research in New York City. So the tension between the distance and the place-based I think is going to be increasingly obvious and both are going to cost great deals of money. And where's the business model, right, when you're giving away your... Well, nobody's figured that one out yet. No, I know. But that hasn't stopped other people from jumping in. No, no, I know. So Stanford said, wait, wait, me too. No, I think we're doing more of that. I mean, going back to your point about the humanities though because science has to exist in a context and one of the things that we see universities doing and certainly my own is putting much money into what I'm going to call the hard sciences, the physical sciences, biological sciences, the med school and shrinking the humanities component down to less and less and less because they don't see it as income producing for one thing. And so you see American universities sort of torquing their investment. You don't hear anyone talking about a billion-dollar investment in an English history building, right? So do we limit the discussion to a select... Again, going back to my question about the priesthood. Do we find ourselves investing only in the select few who are able to get into those buildings and study in those buildings and disconnecting sort of the larger social discussion? Well, I think you have to ask science for what and that's where the humanities comes in. And it's interesting that the humanists are starting to have an interesting impact on the sciences. To the extent you consider medicine, for example, with science recent deliberations have concluded that the admission standards for admission to medical school ought to be mitigated and let the medical schools teach the science and teach the medicine and bring in students with social science and humanities backgrounds because they're going to make better physicians. They're going to actually reach out to patients in a more concerned and humanistic way. It never occurred to me that that was the function of physicians until I started getting older and sicker. It always seemed to me that the function of physicians, at least the people I went to college with, all wanted to become research physicians. They all wanted to teach at medical schools and many of them went on not only to get the MD degree but the PhDs as well. Andy? And I think this is particularly, Germaine, when you look at how we process an issue like global climate change because certainly you see it affecting us not in a purely researched sense but in a cultural sense, in a social sense, in a political sense, in a religious sense. Well, yeah, the thing that I always see conflated and the biggest source of arguments on an issue like global warming is the conflation of the is. This is the David Hume, the is and the ought. And Dan, I think you've written about this stuff. Essentially, science lays out the is. This is the landscape including the uncertainties about sea ice, species loss, you know how much warming you could have but science has a hard time telling you what to do and there's been this argument, well, the scientist has to be treated as a physician telling you to aspirin and but there's a problem there because not every scientist is in the role of policy and so how do you, one of the best ways to disarm an argument over global warming is to start by dissecting the question. How dangerous is global warming? This is this classic question. That's not a science question. The pace of sea level rise determines the disruption to coasts from global warming but how much investment in technology to ameliorate those impacts versus working on the emissions mitigation versus nuclear power versus renewables versus natural gas, a valid bridge. Science only gives you a certain chunk of that and if you don't get comfortable with the reality that the other part of it is values based and that comes from your humanistic background then you're in trouble. A lot of deadlock. One of the things that's changing now is again, when I was coming up the notion was the scientist in his laboratory alone. Increasingly now there's an emphasis on collaboration. Collaboration not only between students and universities which are now linking programs and classes and research but also collaboration between what goes on in the university, what goes on in the government, what goes on in industry and increasing need to fund things through bringing resources together from multiple sources. There simply isn't enough money in the universities to do the kinds of things on their own that they used to do. One of the things I've always thought contributed to this is that the culture of science does not reward scientists for engaging in the conversation outside their own community. There's not very many significant career boosts you get for being a good communicator. There's not very many scientific societies that reward you for having a conversation with the public. And I think that that also is something that I would like to see universities in a way that they haven't done. Spear had that change in acknowledging that if less scientists are willing to get out there and share what they do, we're never going to take this conversation to its successful conclusion. It goes beyond the university. The National Science Foundation ostensibly has a requirement for every grant of greater outcomes, broader outcomes as the language, which often is translated into public output. But it's usually a kind of a rubber stamp by the way aspect. So if the funders got more serious about that becoming a normal obligation, not so much of the individual scientists but of the institution, then you'd see a lot more of what you're talking about. It's not only the scientists, though. It's all professions which are celebrated by their own. There's lawyers and there are civilians. There are scientists and there are civilians. There are historians and there are civilians. And so somebody gets to be a professor of history. He or she wants to be celebrated by the American Historical Association. They don't care as much once they've got tenure and full professorship about their own institution. They become cosmopolitan and the people who concern with the campus are thought of as provincials. And that has a negative effect on the community of the campus and the welfare of the institution. People jump around. I mean, if you're a professor at GW and you get a better offer at Harvard, you're gone. I'm not so sure it works the other way, consistently. The fact of the matter is that knitting universities together and having them have some sense of the future of universities, which is one of the issues we're addressing today, is very hard to insinuate into the faculty ranks because they've been brought up as physicists or they've been brought up as historians. I do think, but there is, again, in getting around and also getting around virtually, I get the impression that there's motivation on young faculty to start sort of working around the system. The end of the textbook is leading to great opportunities to build online learning tools that will be much richer if they're collaboratively managed. You know, I can create, and there's so much parallel evolution going on in different campuses. ASU has a great sustainability program. Brent Solier is doing this remarkable work on innovation, but finding ways to create a common, more wiki-style learning enterprise. The successor to a textbook on these issues that we bundle is sustainability is something that can be done by right now. Duke University was there recently, a marine science professor with some students doing the software, the programming, created an iPad app that's basically an introductory text on big, cool marine animals. And it's a freshman course. And it could be a chapter in a much bigger open enterprise that takes you through biology, climate, earth science. It takes motivation and sort of intentionality, and it also takes breaking down those barriers of who owns the idea, who authored the textbook, building a community enterprise like that. It's possible now in a way that also it's cheap. It's ridiculously cheap to do that. So we have the tools. Well, and I think part of it is that people, it turns out, like plants are tropistic, except it's not so much the sun and water, it's money. And so you talk about motivation. If you want to motivate people, if you want to get on the table, not everybody, of course, but frequently people are very responsive. And if you reward professors who turn out to be Americans like everybody else, if you reward them for doing certain things, they'll do those things. And if you reward them for doing the other things, they'll do the other things. And part of what's happened is, oh, I guess since the end of the Second World War to today, we've been rewarding faculty for research and for publications and frankly counting them and then promoting people and giving them raises dependent on their quote-unquote productivity. We have about 10 minutes or so left. Is that right, Dan? No? Are we out of time? And I always have more questions, but if there was anyone at this moment, why don't we open it up here and then back here? Yes, go. You haven't spoken. Okay. You haven't spoken very much about the role of the research university in the world. I mean, we've even talked about the professors being Americans. And that may be true, but so many of the students now at the higher levels are from all over the world and in a sense, there's an increasing tension between the fact that we are investing in what is a world venture. Did you identify yourself? I'm Lisa Marganelli. I'm with the New America Foundation. That's certainly true and a source of concern, particularly in the states where state universities are funded by taxpayer money and they notice that a great many of the graduate students are from abroad and frequently complain that their children, the children of the taxpayers can't understand the instruction that they're receiving in the classes. And I can tell you that my own son had this experience at Yale, so it's not merely the taxpayers, it's the tuition payers. I think we have some obligation as the United States to have done this. Increasingly, I think China and India and Korea are going to have to step up and we're seeing them building universities hand over fist over hand. You travel abroad and there was one building there this year and you come back two years later and they've got a whole campus. And many of these people are going back to their countries and building these universities. So I think you're going to see increasing interaction and the capacity for electronic collaboration is increasingly going to result in people doing teaching together. I mean, two classes studying a single subject in the Soviet Union, the old Soviet Union, now Russia, and in the United States can meet concurrently to discuss peace or any issue you want and similarly, scientists are doing work together. I've got faculty and I've got to stop doing that. I used to be president there, I'm not. I used to have faculty, now I have colleagues. That's what I have. Who do work with scientists abroad all the time and on the phone constantly and I think you're going to see more of that and you're going to see more of that funded by international companies as well. Just very quickly, I've written increasingly about what I call noosphere. It's building on the Greek word, newosphere, planet of the mind from a long time ago. Basically, I'll give you one example. In Johannesburg there was a riot that actually people died in a riot outside of university because the students couldn't get in. There were students who couldn't fit in and I said, what an opportunity, given the telecommunications revolution that's underway, six billion cell phones on the planet right now and increasing internet connectedness even in faraway places to dive in and offer that free portal. This is not the research and so much as the basic university education. You can't build schools fast enough in developing countries right now, whether they're universities or lower down the chain. So finding ways to leapfrog that the lack of bricks and mortar is really essential right now and doable. I'm on the advisory board now of a university called the People's University and notwithstanding that sort of strange name, it is an effort to deliver undergraduate education to people in third world countries who have an ability to get to a computer and speak enough English to get courses that are transmitted for free. Sponsored by an Israeli entrepreneur named Shair Ashif, who made a lot of money and is trying to give back in this way. So I think you're going to see just a great revolution, a planetary revolution as a result of the capacity to communicate now. Back here. Hi, my name is Susie Kim. I'm a reporter from the Washington Post. I wanted to go back to a comment that Dan Sarowitz had made at the beginning, which is that in terms of investments and the change in the new be made, it's not just a question of funding and I guess specifically government funding that I pointed to. I was wondering if you could give me some specific examples of what the role of government could be, what it should be, I guess since we're talking about universities in terms of creating this knowledge enterprise architecture, what we need to make innovation happen if it beyond just dollars for R&D. I'd love to jump on that briefly. I recently wrote a piece after I went to Rensselaer about this young innovator who created this business growing mushrooms, turning them into packaging material, even bear. And then Andy Hargedon, who basically studies the ecology of innovation, he's at UC Davis, wrote me a long interesting comment that became another post about one of the first steps to, again like what I said about the dangers of global warming, deconstruct the issue. It's not just basic science, but as Andy Hargedon says, there's two kinds of networks you build to make progress in this world. One is idea networks and one is action networks. So making sure that if you have a finite pool of money to invest in this pipeline that we call the human journey, make sure you absolutely need all that bubbling random, almost random science at the beginning. But then you need to have the capacity to turn that into action. This goes back to the invention of the steam engine. Hargedon did paper on that. I can't remember. Yeah. What? And it took 10 more years than it might have to take us into the coal age and create global warming. You don't have to carry that far. To have the innovation of the steam engine. Did you want to also address that? Okay. Back here. And then I'll move over to this side. Sorry guys. Let me just briefly on what's happening in terms of the erosion of public support for higher education in general. This notion that higher education only pays off for the graduate. I'll let George Will's comment column a little while ago. And that there's no taxpayer benefit to having an educated public. Yes. I think that's a serious issue and I think there's going to be a need for further debate. We see it being played out in many agendas in this country today about whether the state is the beneficiary of an educated populace or whether the individual is the beneficiary of what he or she receives. I know it's James Madison who said education is the true foundation of civil liberty. I know this because it was engraved over the threshold of my school. James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York and I saw it every day for four years. But it seems to me to have some merit and I think unless we are true to the founders on at least the issue of education we're going to find ourselves in desperate position both economically and culturally. John Gardner the old former secretary of health education and welfare once said in a speech that the society which only celebrated philosophers and denigrated plumbers was a society in which neither the pipes nor the ideas would hold water. I think that goes both ways and our society benefits obviously I think almost self-explanatory by the education of our population we needed to maintain a civic environment. We needed to be able to vote we needed to be able to drive the economy and we see that education is rewarded both in the individual and in society by the earning trajectories of people who have education as opposed to those who don't supported by welfare and by the others who do and it seems to me also that to have a large uneducated population in a society like our own is to invite revolution. Did you want to? There's plenty to say. Over here. Robert Hewley, REH kinetics. The comments have been made that seem to be in a way interrelated one the amount of time available at the university you have four months you're not doing anything and Fridays etc. Two, the conflict or the tension between research and instruction and three the problem with people not understanding what research or science is or actually what knowledge creation is and together it seems to suggest that what should be required is that for a real university any student must be required to be a knowledge creator that needs to spend a significant fraction of the time or some fraction of their time doing research or research in humanities science whatever area it is that should be a key component move away from just this linear transmission of knowledge but rather make creation of knowledge a key component. That's a nice model. I'm not sure it's for everybody. People are always saying to me I've got this kid and I'm trying to figure out where to send them to school or send her to school and what's the best school and I say there's no such thing as a best school any more than there's the best suit first of all we don't always size 42 regular secondly in August in Washington you want linen or seersucker and in January you want flannel or you want tweed there are different schools different needs, different curriculum that's why there are 4,400 colleges in the United States we serve a variety of people in a variety of different ways but I like your model for some students and indeed whether we like it or not there are always going to be smarter kids and more elite kids and kids who are going to go on to lives of academic accomplishment for who need a training and a trajectory that's appreciable from people who are going to hold jobs which are useful and sustained society but which call for less challenging educational experiences there's a perfect template for what I see as the ideal learning hub and it's a high school it's the New York Harbor School and if you just Google for that and go to their website it's a public school that takes students 80% below the poverty rate it takes students from across the city they go out to Governor's Island and the whole curriculum is built around New York Harbor but there's something there for everyone the kids who are maybe not as adept at chemistry aren't doing water chemistry they're building boats and they're using the boats to build oyster reefs in the harbor to try to restore water quality and understand the harbor eco system so the school is built around a subject but the subject is the region and it's incredibly rich the kids who come out of there are going to the best colleges in America I'm unbelievably thrilled with the kids that I met there so think about that at the high school level at the college level and you can see some interesting things until the last couple of questions most of the discussion has been in terms of kind of a generic research university do we need a better way of deserogating our universities in Carnegie's research one, two and three does such exist and would be useful James sang retired and that will be the last question out of time, do one of you want to tackle yes, I mean yes I think that's a reasonable question I haven't thought about it and I didn't come in with an answer for it but I can imagine re-categorizing the universities in finer ways that would be more useful to quote-unquote the consumers of education and the work that goes on in universities there are in fact faculty who really love to teach and don't want to be in laboratories and don't want to be writing books and there are others who would just be happy in the laboratory and you don't bother them with students they're delighted and nobody thinks that all souls college is a terrible place at Oxford because they don't deal with students we need we need to see a sucker suits and we need to tweet suits and fortunately in this country we're blessed with a wide variety and assortment of different choices so on that optimistic note we're going to close this panel