Inaugural Address of
William R. Brody
President, The Johns Hopkins University
at Commemoration Day Sunday, February 23, 1997 (Note: This is the prepared text of President Brody's address. It has not been checked against delivery.) Mr. Chairman and members of the Board of Trustees, students and colleagues on the faculty, honored alumni, and distinguished friends of Johns Hopkins: I accept this presidential insignia and the responsibilities it represents with gratitude and reverence and a profound sense of optimism for the future of this great university. Today's ceremony continues the unique Hopkins tradition of conducting the installation of a new president on Commemoration Day. It provides an opportunity for the president to gain some months' experience in office before being called upon to speak formally to the university community. At the beginning of the year, Wendy and I moved into Nichols House, here on the Homewood campus. Since then, we have had many wonderful opportunities to interact with students, faculty and staff. We have sampled various activities from a rather extensive menu, including concerts, lectures, athletic events and celebrations. Living on campus has enabled us to get to know this university in a very close and personal way, and we are enjoying it immensely. Perhaps the special nature of Hopkins is best exemplified, however, by a letter I received last fall from the parent of Hopkins undergraduate student.
Dear Dr. Brody,
Here is a story which I think both is entertaining and makes a point. It represents one of my top ten reasons why I feel good about my son, Daniel Blinn, class of 2000, attending Johns Hopkins. "During the recent soccer match between JHU and Western Maryland, one of the Blue Jay starters was knocked silly by a violent tackle. A bit groggy, he had to be taken out of the game. Later, the player was standing on one foot with his arms extended. This was to demonstrate he had regained his balance enough to go back into the game. At that point, Coach Smith, wanting to assess the player's mental condition, asked him, "What's the square root of pi?"
It's nice to know Hopkins coaches know that there is something called a square root, and something called pi, and might actually expect an athlete to respond intelligently to such a question. Sincerely yours,
Guy M. Blinn
That letter reminded me that we educate exceptional minds here at Johns Hopkins, but that we also do something else. We provide our students with countless opportunities to explore and grow and be challenged. This facet of student life is important, and it is one of my personal priorities to lead the university to a renewed commitment to Hopkins student life.
This afternoon is a celebration of that life. We are here to mark not just one event, but a continuing legacy stretching back 121 years. The Johns Hopkins University is justifiably renowned as a premier research university in the United States, both for being the first so organized, and for continuing to be among the best such institutions dedicated to this essential mission.
In engineering, the sciences and the arts; in nursing, medicine and public health; from international studies to continuing studies; through scholarly publication, the graduate seminar and the Ph.D.; and touching on many other fields and specialties besides, Hopkins faculty have been advancing the development of higher education for six score years. We have achieved much in that time, but we have not done it alone. From the start, and throughout our history, we have been aided and encouraged in this enterprise by individuals, foundations, corporations, by the City of Baltimore, and both the state and federal governments. We are enormously grateful for this continuing support. All of us assembled here today are keenly aware of the legacy and accomplishments and unique character of this university. Hopkins is a place where new models are created to solve vexing problems, where a spirit of entrepreneurial adventure imbues our activities. It is a place where individual initiative is prized. Indeed, we can say that spirit is not only prized, it is expected, and this university has prospered greatly because of this tradition. Although each of my 12 predecessors, stretching back to the renowned Dr. Gilman himself, has had to confront the simple fact that Hopkins has limited financial resources, I would contend today that in many respects we are a very wealthy university. We are rich in reputation; we are rich in talent; we are rich in innovative capability; we are rich in dreams. And, I would like to point out, in the past we have been very rich in the leadership of this university. Beginning in August 1867, when Mr. Hopkins assembled the first group of 12 trustees, this university has been uniquely fortunate in the commitment and devotion they have demonstrated. From that day to the present, we have benefited by the leadership of men and women of outstanding talent and great vision. The same must be said of the dozen individuals who preceded me as president. They have been an exemplary group, and I am delighted that the last four presidents of Johns Hopkins University are here with us today.
To Dan Nathans, to Bill Richardson, to Steven Muller and to Lincoln Gordon: I thank each of you most sincerely for honoring me by your presence on this occasion. And I salute your distinguished accomplishments during your presidencies. Even though it is very early in my tenure, already I have grasped some of the dimensions of this office: some of its demands, some of its opportunities. In so doing, my admiration and esteem for each of you grows daily. To each of these gentlemen we owe an immense debt of gratitude for shouldering tremendous responsibilities, and making the difficult decisions that have ultimately propelled us beyond even what President Gilman dared to dream. I would ask that the entire audience join me in expressing our thanks and appreciation for everything these four individuals achieved, and all they endeavored to do. Earlier, I remarked that today's gathering is a kind of celebration. To those of you assembled here in Shriver Hall, or watching a live remote broadcast across campus, and to our many friends literally around the world who may be receiving a transmission of these proceedings through the Internet, I extend heartfelt thanks on behalf of myself and my family for your warm support. Truly, we have much to celebrate together. But we cannot ignore what lies ahead. Poised as we are at the end of the millenium, with more than a century's worth of accomplishment defining our past, we find the greatest challenge in our future is the matter of continuity. How do we continue, and enlarge, the legacy Mr. Hopkins, President Gilman, and all their successors have bequeathed us? For the past century, American universities have provided extraordinary leadership, and Johns Hopkins has been a leader among that group. Now the question confronts us: what must we do to continue our role as a premier research university? For we find ourselves 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 powerful that we must adapt or lose our relevance to society. Those who predict the demise of the university from the new proliferation of bits and bytes are perhaps missing the point. To be sure, the university, and the research university in particular, will have to be configured very differently in the 21st century. Exactly how this difference will manifest itself we cannot predict with certainty. But a look at the past is telling. Throughout history, significant changes in the communication of information have profoundly altered the landscape of knowledge. Let me briefly cite three examples. The first occurs nearly 2,500 years ago, in Athens, at the founding of the Academy. Plato's prototypical institution of higher learning was a place--reputedly an olive grove--founded on the concept of logos, reason manifested through speech. Yet already in Plato's time another system of information distribution was evolving: book publishing.
In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato warns about the dangers of book learning, claiming it is fundamentally inferior to knowledge gained through speech. Book publishing, he says, will "produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory. It is to be mistrusted, because it brings the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself." Two thousand years later, in west-central Germany, the abbot of Sponheim publishes a book of his own, De Laude Scriptorum. The year is 1494, the printing press is less than 40 years old, and many books are still hand-copied by monks. For hundreds of years the monastic scriptorum had been the wellspring of learning. It was the seat of knowledge that began the universities, which at this time were a comparatively recent innovation. But printing threatened all that, and so the abbot wrote a book extolling the moral value of hand-copying. It is a book solely devoted to explaining why, in the words of the abbot, "monks should not stop copying because of the invention of printing." Ironically, to get his message across, the abbot produced a large number of copies of his book. How did he accomplish this task? By using Gutenberg's printing press, the very invention he scorned. It is rumored that in so doing, the abbot thereby invented the term "publish or perish." A final instance: The year is 1876, and a university bearing the name of Mr. Johns Hopkins is established in Baltimore. Like other universities in its day, it is deeply devoted to the culture of the printed word, although at the same time it professes a new and equal allegiance to the discovery through research of those things that have not yet been published. At this same time, Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the newly invented telephone is offered to the world's largest corporation, Western Union, for $100,000. Any one of us today would consider it the deal of the century. But Western Union declined, claiming a lack of need for the new device. The technology was unwieldy, they said, and the cost of wiring tens of millions of homes prohibitive. Besides, what benefit could be had in saying over a wire that which could be more eloquently written in a letter, or more succinctly transmitted in a telegraph? Western Union's president Orton himself turned the offer down. He had seen the future of communications, and he knew that it was Morse code, transmitted across copper lines. In each of these instances, new technologies that fundamentally changed the way information was disseminated brought tremendous new opportunities. Yet at the time, many perceived them as threats to learning, and in particular to the sense of community that is so important to the academy. We may laugh at the abbot's insistence on hand-copying, or Western Union's failure to grasp the potential of the telephone. Yet here we are in 1997, and many of our discussions--and worries--revolve around the effect the Internet and the World Wide Web will have on education, on commerce, on socialization, and democracy. We should be wary, lest we also underestimate the importance of this new mode of communication. On Friday, we had a very stimulating symposium to discuss the impact of the information revolution on the university. Our keynote speaker, Mario Morino, a leading authority in the field, said, and I quote: "Not only will the unimaginable happen, but it will happen faster than you can imagine." Fundamentally, we must come to understand that we are just one player, engaged in a worldwide effort to expand and exploit knowledge. It is a pursuit that is no longer the exclusive domain of the universities. There is a very real "knowledge industry" outside our doors now--it is the foundation of the new economy--and that industry is in the midst of cataclysmic changes. For our part, we need to acknowledge that universities are no longer the sole focus for the creation of new knowledge. Neither will we have exclusive rights to provide education and training. As universities, we must remake ourselves in the context of this new information age. This calls for a process, not a single event. It is a process bound to last longer than the term of one university president. But it is a process that, irrefutably, is already under way. In the course of events that are to come, I would suggest that several areas bear particular attention. The first of these is the way we organize and access information. The academy is changing its role as the central, physical repository of our civilization's intellectual content. To understand this change, we need to distinguish between information and knowledge. We are in the so-called "information age." This age is quite different and distinct from what I would call the "knowledge age." Perhaps if we're lucky, the knowledge age will come next. In the information age, the progress of analog and digital communications technology -- from telephone and radio to television, satellites, faxes and computers -- has increased our access to information at a dizzying rate. 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, not a resource. Who among us fails to suffer from information overload? With hundreds of cable TV 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. Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in the heart and soul of the academy -- university libraries. Libraries have fulfilled a critical role over the centuries, but that role is now being challenged by opposing forces. On the one hand, they are choking on an ever-increasing diet of printed materials, while the costs of such acquisition are quickly outstripping our resources. On the other hand, ubiquitous access to information via digital databases and electronic networks has already begun to diminish the library's role as the primary repository of intellectual content for the university, as well as for society. In the past, libraries have assembled collections of scholarly material--journals, books, and manuscripts--and made them available on a "just-in-case" basis. Materials filling our library at Hopkins are duplicated in thousands of other libraries, just in case a student or faculty member needs immediate access to the material. Today, few libraries can afford to maintain such collections. So librarians on the cusp of change are looking at "just-in-time" libraries. These are facilities that will provide access to materials when you need them, using electronic access or express delivery. They will not necessarily be required to maintain that information in their own physical collection. Such "virtual" libraries are technically possible to introduce today. But they will require enormous investments in computerized databases and the networks to support them. Copyright and intellectual property issues also create significant barriers to their implementation.
The greater promise of the libraries of the future is to provide material "just-for-you." In these libraries, faculty and students maintain a database of their scholarly interests and the library will, using intelligent searching methods, provide material that is individually tailored for each person. Such methods are being investigated already on the Internet. This is an area where I believe Hopkins can, and should, establish a leadership role. Financial pressures alone may make this effort a matter of necessity in the near future. One of my goals is to see this university take up the challenge of designing and implementing the library of the future. This is just one aspect of the profound changes brought about by the information revolution. 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 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 lifelong 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 lifetime 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. Why? Because we already have a headstart in this arena. Already, we are active with pre-college students through five different programs at Hopkins. We have pioneered adult continuing education since the first part of this century and fully one-half of our students are now enrolled in part-time programs. In addition, we participate in one of the largest Elderhostel 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, traditional residence-based education has significant merit and we hope it will continue into the foreseeable future. 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. And finally, I would be remiss were I not to comment briefly on the challenges facing our world-renowned medical and health enterprise. The abrupt transition from a regulated health care environment to a competitive market-driven approach is hurting our nation's academic health centers. We are the envy of the world in many regards, yet our academic health centers have been whipsawed by market forces beyond their control. The crux of the matter is that the new arrangements do not recognize--and therefore cannot reward--the enormous and vitally important contribution to education and research we make. As difficult as these times are, however, I am convinced that the new structure of Johns Hopkins Medicine and our new leadership team will chart a clear course. We will not abandon, but will continue, the tradition of excellence and leadership that has characterized the Hopkins health enterprise for over a century. Our friends and neighbors from around the block and around the world will continue to look to us for the very best in the science and humanity of health care. We shall not let them down. For the university, the whirlwind of change brought about by new technologies and new expectations poses distinct challenges. The goal of continuity, to which I first alluded, means developing new programs, new models and new relationships suitable to the 21st century. It means not standing still. Yet we must accomplish this within a new world economy that places major constraints on our ability to take bold and decisive steps. These new economics dictate that the steadily rising costs of higher education cannot continue unabated. Therefore, it is imperative that we control our costs and stem the historical growth of tuition at the same time we expand our endowment. We must make higher education more available, and more affordable. As we look to the future, it is important to remember the university does not exist within a vacuum. Hopkins has always been responsive to problems of national and international significance. Today, more than ever, we cannot ignore the divergence of our world into what former Secretary of State George Schultz calls the two societies: one "rich, aging and stagnant," the other "poor, young and growing." Our sense of community, increasingly an international one, dictates that Hopkins will focus on finding the means to address these inequities across the world, as well as here at home in our own neighborhoods. We will need to bring that focus to bear more globally, sharing resources and building partnerships that extend across departments and divisions, across the street, across town, across the country and around the world. Education, we believe, is the key to economic and human potential. And so our mission of teaching and research is not merely an avocation, but a sacred responsibility, forming the basis of our commitment to service in the cause of our fellow human beings. For Hopkins is just one part of a community of scholarship, founded on humanistic principles. I hope the cordial and constructive relationship shared by all the schools represented here today will only grow and deepen in the years ahead. I pledge my personal support to foster this effort in every way possible. The state of Maryland, which has long been a stalwart supporter of higher education, can only benefit from our collaboration. In the next few years, new for-profit corporations will be entering the education arena, once the exclusive domain of colleges and universities. I envision an entrepreneurial drive to transform the mid-Atlantic region by helping to create new companies from the educational technologies and content many of us are now developing. The corridor from Washington to Baltimore is headquarters to many corporations engaged in education, telecommunications and software development. Coupled with the large number of public and private colleges and universities in the area, we can set about to create the Chesapeake equivalent of Silicon Valley. I call it " Education Alley," a world center of entrepreneurial leadership in educational technology. Such a strategic alliance of university and corporate partners could provide significant economic benefits to Maryland and to the entire mid-Atlantic region. The events I mentioned earlier—that of the introduction of book publishing, and later printing, and then electronic voice communications—were times of great change. They were also moments of extraordinary opportunity. Some of that change was traumatic. All of it made for an exciting moment to be alive and engaged at the frontiers of knowledge. It is our fate, and I would say our good luck, not only to be witness to, but to be players in, another such epoch of human history. We have within our hands—now—the chance to build the new academy, founded on an underpinning of mature experience, and flown on the pinions of youthful idealism. For Hopkins, after all, is at heart a young institution, still brash in our second hundred years. Our efforts to shape the future must be well-considered, but they dare not be timid. Too much is at stake. The unique opportunities of our times are too great to squander. If we lose them, it is unlikely they will come again. And yet, standing before you today, knowing this university as I do, and having met and worked with the superbly talented faculty who define and shape our efforts, I cannot help but be optimistic. I believe the future for Johns Hopkins is very bright indeed. It is a pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much.
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