Prepared Text
Remarks by William R. Brody
Administrative Leadership Conference
The Johns Hopkins University 942 and Counting:
Preparing for Arrival at C-21 M O N D A Y, J U N E 2, 1 9 9 7 [Introduction by Gene Sunshine, senior vice president for administration] Thank you, Gene, for sharing that information about the university's finances and for your kind introduction. And as long as I have you here, I want to also take this chance to thank you for your tremendous contributions in overseeing and directing these leadership conferences. I think everyone here is aware that Gene will be leaving us to return to his alma mater, Northwestern, in July. Gene's departure is a great loss to Johns Hopkins, and as anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Gene will tell you, the loss is both professional and personal. Gene has a magnificent record of accomplishment here at Hopkins, helping us focus on what was important and overcome some very tough times. But more than that, Gene is just a tremendous person to be around, and we will all miss him a great deal when he is gone. Thank you, Gene. I would also like to express my thanks, briefly, this morning to Bob Sirota and the Peabody Institute for hosting this second annual leadership conference. If any of you are here for the first time let me assure you, you have landed in one of the absolute jewels in the cultural life of this country, going back to when this building was built right after the Civil War. I heartily recommend coming back to witness our students perform a symphony by Shostakovich or an opera by Verdi or any one of the hundreds of programs that occur here each year. They are world- class and are not to be missed. I would also like to thank the members of the Conference Planning Committee, and especially Dick Kilburg, senior director of the Office of Human Services. The committee has done a terrific job of bringing this together, and I am sure we are going to have a very successful and valuable session here today. My thanks, in particular, to committee members Jan Moylan of Continuing Studies, Paula Einaudi of Nursing, Mike Taylor from Public Health, Steve Golding and Joan Magruder of Medicine, Doug Green of Engineering, Joan Spoltore [Spol-tor] of Arts and Sciences, Jim Neal from the Eisenhower Library, Mike Sullivan from Homewood Student Affairs, Emma Stokes from Human Resources, and Meg Sonneborn, Barry White and James Zeller, all from University Administration. If I missed someone's name here, I apologize: my intent was to name everyone who contributed to making this event a success. A month or two ago, Gene Sunshine approached me about delivering the keynote address to this gathering. I said I would be delighted, and asked what topic I should speak about. Gene suggested "The Future of Higher Education." I said that was great. I'd need about four hours to really talk about that. Gene's never one to say no -- unless of course you re asking for money. So he thought about it for a bit, and then said, "What about, 'Johns Hopkins and The Future of Higher Education.'" I said that would even be better. I need six hours for that. Well, that set Gene to thinking some more. After a few moments he said, "What about, My Plans and Johns Hopkins and The Future of Higher Education." "No problem," I said, "but we better have a lunch break, and I'll speak for about four hours on each side." Gene didn't say anything to that; he just sort of went away scratching his head. A week later, I received a memo from Gene that read, "Dear Bill: We are delighted that you have agreed to deliver the keynote remarks to our second annual leadership conference. As we discussed, the topic of your address will be, 'Rising Costs and Competition; Information Technology and Globalization; My Plans and Johns Hopkins and the Future of Higher Education.' We'll set the podium up Friday. Good luck." I've thought about it a little more since then, and I've chosen a somewhat different title for this morning: "942 and Counting: Preparing for Arrival at C-21." I will try this morning to speak for just minutes, rather than hours, because I am particularly interested in engaging this audience in a free and frank discussion of some of these issues we raise. That 942 in the title may have startled some of you. It is, of course, the number of days remaining until the year 2000. Just 942 days. By the time this conference ends this evening, we're really looking at 941. Now there are some that will tell you that we don't really enter the 21st century until the year 2001 -- that the year 2000 really marks the completion of the 20th century. That may be so. But the fact of the matter is, 942 days from now, all those digits are going to flip to zero, and half our computers are going to become instantly obsolete because they can't tell the year from 2000 from 1900. That's good enough for me. As far as I'm concerned, 942 days from now we will enter the 21st century. That is, if we haven't already. Because as you know, if you heard me deliver my inaugural address, or have been to some other event at which I've spoken, I am convinced we are already in the midst of a profound reordering of the political, social, and economic fabric of our global village. It is fueled by dramatic advances in science and technology. Facing this, we must ask ourselves how to preserve the fundamental tenet of the university: the freedom to explore new ideas no matter how bold, no matter how much they challenge the established dogma. Can we provide a high quality education, one that prepares our students for careers that have not yet been imagined, when we are faced with extraordinary pressures to make our education more relevant -- that is, to prepare our students for the jobs of today? At the same time, we must make this education more affordable. Can we do it? I believe we can, but it will not be an easy task. We are in the middle of a revolution. It has been brought about by the new manner in which knowledge is generated and information disseminated. And the university is at ground zero of this information explosion. The force of these changes is so extraordinary that we must adapt or lose our relevance to society. I came across a statistic the other day that illustrates this point perfectly: by 1997, the world production of microchips has reached something on the order of 60 billion units annually. In other words, worldwide, we are making more than one billion microchips per week. That's a staggering number considering we are talking about a commodity that, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist thirty years ago. As impressive as that number may be, the implications behind it are even more profound. We have all heard the terms "computer revolution" and "communications revolution" so often that they have begun to lose meaning. They have lost the sense of urgency and danger that the term revolution implies. If I say "South American Revolution" we begin to think of calling in the marines; but after ten years of a communications revolution the typical reaction becomes What's the newest gadget? That one-billion-microchips-per-week number should be our wake-up call; the world's needs and the world's expectations and the world's direction have profoundly changed in the last ten years. And those changes are going to have an especially disproportionate affect on higher education. Don Chamberlain, a professor of computer engineering at Santa Clara University and one of the co-inventors of the SQL database language, made an interesting observation in a recent article titled "Sharing Our Planet." Allow me to read this brief passage that I think speaks directly to the issue our libraries confront: Human society is largely based on the premise that information is scarce and expensive. Many human institutions, ranging from a small company to a large city, are primarily collections of information that have been concentrated in a particular place. Since information has traditionally been expensive to store and transport, humans have been forced to spend enormous amounts of energy on moving their bodies to places and times where information is available. For us, one of the most important implications of the new digital inhabitants of our planet is that information is becoming free and ubiquitous. Every human activity that is based on moving people to information is about to be replaced by an activity that moves information to people.
Professor Chamberlain makes this point in context of the larger ways in which our society will probably begin rearranging itself. But his central thesis, that we have organized society and created institutions based on the premise that information is scarce and expensive and are now entering an age when information will be free and ubiquitous, strikes the very core concept of what universities have been about for the past 1,000 years. We were created on the premise of information being scarce and expensive. And now it is becoming free -- at least relatively free -- and ubiquitous. Especially ubiquitous. I am amazed whenever I read an article about the joys of instant access to information through the Internet. Are there really people out there who crave more information crossing their desk or their desktop? Uncontrolled information has become a burden, in my view, not a resource. Who among us fails to suffer from information overload? With hundreds of cable T.V. channels added to the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, books, to say nothing of junk mail, one hardly has time to waste surfing the net. In fact, what we crave is better access to knowledge, not information. Knowledge is content that is assimilated, collated and interpreted to provide a unique perspective that helps us perform a task, solve a problem, or stimulate our intellect. The paradox of our times is that we are inundated by information yet starved for knowledge. Central to our mission as a research university is the way in which we discover new knowledge and disseminate that knowledge through education. How will the information age change the way we carry out that mission? I believe there are three ways we may be affected. - First, I think we will witness the transformation of the university from a physical campus, or specific geographic locus, to a dispersed, virtual campus. It will be a university campus in which bits and bytes replace bricks and mortar, one in which scholars and students can communicate and collaborate electronically without the necessity of proximity. Such a network of scholars can preserve the essence of our Hopkins 'hand-tooled' education envisioned by our first president, Dr. Gilman, one in which the student is stimulated to learn by working closely with a faculty member to find answers to unsolved questions.
- Second, the university will need to expand its horizons to become more global in its outlook and its outreach. This must include the way we reach students, an increasing number of whom will come from other countries. It means we must also provide a truly international education to our U.S. students. We have already established campuses in Italy and China. By capitalizing on information technology we should develop ways to establish our presence in other countries as well, providing innovative programs for both American and international students.
- And third, and perhaps most fundamentally, we must view the educational process not as a finite encounter lasting a few semesters, but as a life-long continuum. During this process, there is a term of intensive collaboration -- mentorship, if you will -- in which we educate students in learning how to learn. These are the traditional undergraduate and graduate years. They will be followed by repeated, periodic encounters with Hopkins faculty for continuing education and training.
This, I believe, is the new paradigm of post-secondary education. The pace of discovery is so rapid today that one cannot accumulate sufficient knowledge in a four-year undergraduate curriculum to fuel a lifelong career. Or more probably, a life of several careers. We must make a commitment to lifelong learning for our students. This represents not only a challenge, but an incredible opportunity for Johns Hopkins. Already, we are active with pre-college students through the Peabody Prep, the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth, and the Center for the Social Organization of Schools. We have pioneered adult continuing education since the first part of this century and now participate in one of the largest elder hostel programs in the country. We can capitalize on this intrinsic strength in non- traditional education to expand our commitment to lifelong learning. It is imperative that we do so. What all of this demands, fundamentally, is a new approach to our understanding of the university. In the past, and up to this day, the word university has meant, primarily, a place. The ivy-clad walls. The stately clock tower. The manicured grounds. We need to change our mind set that the university exists only as a physical place. To be sure, the traditional residence-based education has significant merit. But already, many of our students and faculty are geographically dispersed. We must, therefore, redefine the university community more globally, with connections between scholars and students that transcend simple geography. Now these new technological capabilities open all kinds of vistas of new possibility for us. We can attract students from all over the world, educate across cultures and across geographical boundaries; explore new fields and integrate disciplines electronically to bring radically different perspectives to bear on age-old problems. In one sense, we are entering a potential golden age of advanced learning and higher education. There's just one problem with this picture. We are not entering this new era alone. The simple fact is that higher education is going to become an intensely competitive battleground in the coming decades, fought not just between the Harvards and Heidelbergs, Oxfords and Johns Hopkins of the world, but increasingly, by a whole new crop of for-profit entities that look at the need, and the demand, and the dollars in potential revenue and jump into this effort feet first. Today we consider our competition Princeton and Duke and Stanford and so forth; but what we need to start considering is that it is all these great universities, plus Microsoft and Lotus/IBM and Sylvan Learning Systems and a whole host of new competitors we don't even know about yet. The November/December issue of "Educom Review" had an interesting article by Peter Denning, associate dean for computing and chair of the Computer Science Department at George Mason. Professor Denning titled his article "Business Designs for the New University." In it, he looks in some depth at this need for post- collegiate education that I mentioned earlier. "Our curricula are organized for the undergraduate who comes to us straight from high school and earns a bachelor's degree in four years," he writes. The master's program covers two more years beyond that. We offer very few programs for the remaining 45 years of a person's professional life. Most continuing education programs are not part of the regular academic program and are not staffed by the regular faculty. Those 45 years -- or more -- of continuing education are the market that these new for-profit entities will be -- at least initially --trying to win. And they are likely to do a very good job of it. Using the new technologies and responding to a segment of the market that is demanding certification for the mastery of very specific skills, these organizations will establish their foothold in higher education. Many would be inclined to ignore this development. After all, the market for post collegiate training and education is big, and getting bigger all the time. These people would say we should keep to what we ve been doing and not pay attention to what the new guys do. There are others, however, who argue that these new educational offerings represent the future -- that this is the direction in which higher education is headed. One of those persons is Lewis J. Perelman, and if you've never read any of his incendiary articles, I suggest you do so. You ll find them on the Web in places like "Wired" electronic magazine, or at Perelman's website ( http://www.cris.com/~Kanbrain) or in his 1992 book, "School's Out." I call Perelman's writing incendiary because he likes to beat up on higher education and the educational system in general. He refers frequently to the empire of educational institutions and says things like "Education is the last great bastion of socialist economics." Despite what we might think of these statements, Perelman's ideas are worth exploring. He talks about a future of non-linear "hyper-learning" that combines new technologies and new processes to create a new educational paradigm that is need-driven and time independent. Currently, almost all our teaching follows a linear model: a traditional course is a sequence of topics covered in a series of lectures, held in classrooms at weekly intervals, with homework practice in between. Everyone proceeds at the same pace, regardless of their interests, prior experience, talents or demands on their time. At the end, grades indicate the level of achievement a student was able to make in the fixed time period allocated for the course. This is how professor Denning, of George Mason, describes the hyper-learning model he is already helping to create: "Imagine a new model," he writes. Instead of a classroom, see in your mind a large "learning room" with an entrance, an exit, and a number of learning stations. You meet the teacher on entry. The exit is guarded by a certifier, whose job it to assess your competence against well-defined standards. You visit the stations to learn particular topics or practices. Colored lines on the floor suggest paths among the stations. You can visit as many stations as you need, and in any order consistent with your current knowledge, to prepare yourself for final certification. You can take trial certifications and then backtrack to the stations needed. You can take self-assessment tests at any time, and call on the teacher whenever you are stuck. In contrast to the linear model, everyone gets the same grade (which is a certificate of competence); the variables are the length of time required and the specific path followed. Obviously, this is a very different model and a very different approach to education than what we are now pursuing. Or, for that matter, what we as universities have pursued for the past 1,000 years or so. Yet, if my earlier thesis that we are entering a new age driven by new technologies holds true, it is not only conceivable, but likely that the very model of learning will change. The question becomes, will we be prepared to respond to the changes that may be necessary? That is what I am hoping we can consider today. We will be breaking out into groups to look at these issues -- Information Technology, Competition and Globalization -- in some depth. I look forward to hearing what develops. But in the meantime, I think the most effective approach is to stop here, for the moment. I hope I have raised more questions than provided answers. That was my intent. Gene gave us a good overview of the economic and financial picture; I tried to define some of the issues we are facing. What I'd like to learn now are what questions are coming to your minds. Thank you. | 
