Spring 2000 Dear Alumni and Friends, In January I had a unique opportunity to get to know some of our undergraduates a little better. I taught an Intersession class about decision making and analytical thinking called "Uncommon Sense." The students in my class were typical for Hopkins, which is to say they were a most decidedly atypical--and remarkable--group of young men and women. As a class exercise early on, I asked each of them to stand up and "sell" themselves to me and their classmates in under a minute. This is no easy task at any age, but as we all know, it's a skill each of us needs from time to time. What a group it was! There were football players and an editor from the Newsletter, an aspiring theatrical director and one of the chairs of the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium. Some stood up and talked about their career goals. Others talked about their passion for solving problems, or conducting scientific inquiry, or helping others. One young woman, reaching for something higher, gave her pitch as if she were standing at the gates of Heaven, talking to none other than St. Peter himself! That these students were so exceptional came as no real surprise. One of the results of the tremendous success of the Johns Hopkins Initiative--which now stands at more than $1.4 billion raised through January of this year--is that we have been able to raise our profile and enhance the desirability of a Hopkins education among the very best students. In this letter I want to tell you something about the state of undergraduate education in the Krieger and Whiting Schools. In subsequent correspondence I intend to examine some of the serious challenges we face in graduate education across all the divisions. Last year, on the basis of Michael Bloomberg's lead gift and literally hundreds of other private gifts for scholarships and financial aid, we were able to change the way in which aid is calculated, reducing the proportion of loans and increasing outright grants. The result this year was a record number of applicants to the undergraduate programs in the Kreiger and Whiting Schools. We received a total of 9,500 applications, up from 8,600 the year before. These increased numbers have allowed us to be extremely selective, admitting just one-third of applicants (compared to 41 percent the year before). This is our lowest "admit rate" since we started keeping such records in 1950. It indicates the increasing desirability of our undergraduate programs. The combined average SAT of our admitted students was an impressive 1420 and our "yield," which is the percentage of admitted students who choose to come to Hopkins, was 32 percent, the highest level since 1966. But more than numbers and statistics, Hopkins students are exceptional individuals. I was reminded of this fact earlier this month, when USA Today announced its annual Academic All-America teams. Hopkins placed two seniors on the academic first team, and one student each on the second and third teams. Having two of our students selected for the first team--an honor that goes to only 20 students nationwide--is just incredible. But, then, so are they. Space is limited, but let me take a little room to tell you about just one of them. Sarvenaz Zand is a senior majoring in biomedical engineering who has maintained a very high GPA although she elected to concentrate in two of the most rigorous and difficult programs-- electrical and computer engineering. She has been a research assistant in the neurological surgery laboratory of Dr. Henry Brem, conducting experiments involving cutting-edge cancer treatments. Based on that work, she is an author of several papers published in scientific journals. Outside the classroom and lab, she is director of the Hopkins Peer Counseling Center and president of the Biomedical Engineering Honor Society. Sarvenaz also developed a project to teach photography to inner city elementary school students in Baltimore, and she set up a peer counseling program at a city middle school. She has also found the time to volunteer in the Pediatric Oncology ward at Hopkins Hospital. I'm always astonished at how our students manage to excel academically and yet still get involved in literally dozens of activities. What's most impressive is the service ethic that seems so prevalent among them. I recently received a letter from the director of the Peace Corps who informed me that among smaller colleges and universities, Hopkins ranks seventh nationally in the number of alumni who join the Peace Corps. This year, seventeen of our graduates are serving their country by serving others in the Peace Corps. Another example is the growing popularity of the undergraduate Public Health major--the only program of its kind in the country--among Krieger School students. Only a few years ago, we were graduating about 20 Public Health majors a year. Today, that number has nearly tripled, and to judge from applications, can be expected to continue to rise. With as much as our students bring to Hopkins, it's worth asking ourselves what it is, precisely, that we can offer them in exchange. I had ample time to consider this question as I prepared and taught my course this January. In fact, it's a subject to which I've given considerable thought recently. Three years ago, at my Commemoration Day inaugural as Hopkins' 13th president, I spoke about the new paradigm of post-secondary education. I said we need to view a university education not as a finite encounter lasting eight or so semesters, but as the keystone in an arc of lifelong learning. The university years mark a term of intensive collaboration--a sort of mentorship--in which we educate our students in learning how to learn. They are not here merely to come away crammed full of historical dates and mathematical formulas and abstract ideas. Rather, the key task they must master lies in using this raw data to analyze, to extrapolate, to reasonably predict. In other words, to think. Thinking is probably humankind's most underrated hard work. But undeniably, it is also its most rewarding. Mark Twain commented that "so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be satisfied, too." Good thinking is immensely hard--but immensely rewarding. And many would say it is uncommonly rare as well. The irony at the dawning of the information age is that as raw data seems to increase exponentially, our relative store of wisdom only seems to diminish. Thinking--never an easy task in the best of times--has become all the more difficult against the steadily increasing background noise of journals, specialty magazines, endless cable TV channels, e-mail, faxes, phone messages and every other modern "convenience" to which we're now subjected. Our lives have become, literally, "so noisy we can't hear ourselves think." This seems particularly true among today's students, young men and women who were raised with Gameboys, cell phones, computers, the Internet and a whole culture of almost constant electronic diversion. Theirs is a world where information comes fast, it comes frequently, and with lots of flash. But all too often, it is data without context, mere information rather than knowledge. Since this is a trend that will likely only intensify as the Information Revolution moves forward, it seems to me that one of the most valuable skills we can hope to impart to our students is the ability to know how, and when, to slow down and think carefully about what they're receiving. The years I have spent studying the piano offer an insight in this matter. Around the time of Mozart, composers for the piano began adding supranotation to their scores, little memorandums in Italian that give the pianist a sense of the mood the passage is to evoke. This was an innovation that enabled the composer to specify not only what notes in what order, but how they are to be played as well. Thus Mozart might instruct one passage to be played andante, literally, "at a walk," while Beethoven could specify allegro con moto e con brio--quickly, with movement and energy-- as he did midway into the opening movement of Piano Sonata no 8 in C minor, the 'Pathetique' sonata. Different kinds of piano playing require different kinds of skill. Allegro or presto playing demands speed, dexterity, and a nimbleness of both hands and mind: precisely the abilities our current generation of snowboarding, hot dogging, web surfing students seem most suited to master. But there is also larghetto and andante playing as well. This is the slow, methodical, thoughtful approach to the keys that may never be as flashy as a speedy series of scale runs, but is ultimately every bit as important--and as difficult to master. One thing a university education needs to foster is an appreciation of slow, measured reasoning in a world increasingly addicted to speed. We need to foster andante thinking in an allegro world. One way I think we do this at the undergraduate level is through our increasing emphasis on independent research. My vision of a Hopkins education includes the opportunity to do original research for all our students. I believe our role is to try to bring the same paradigm that is used in graduate education to undergraduate education -- learning by discovering the unknown. Recently we've set about trying to do just that. In the last few years we've introduced the Provost's Undergraduate Research Awards, the General Electric Fund Faculty for the Future Program, the Howard Hughes Summer Research Fellowships and other programs to expand our students' opportunities to engage in the give and take of first-rate critical thinking in close contact with a faculty mentor. At last count, over 70 percent of our engineering and arts and sciences students engage in research with faculty members while at Hopkins. In the future, I hope that number will continue to grow. The response to our newly launched Woodrow Wilson Undergraduate Research Fellowship program is indicative of the widespread interest in research among students. The Wilson program combines two elements that draw talented students to independent research: close mentoring by faculty advisors who are themselves engaged in cutting-edge research, and four years' financial support to cover research costs. In its first year, the program attracted 766 applications for the 20 fellowships available to freshmen, and a comparable number for the 10 awards available to sophomores. Another way we aid our students in this process of learning how to learn is by encouraging an educational breadth of focus to match the intensity and depth of concentration that has long been the hallmark of a Hopkins degree. It used to be commonplace that our arriving freshmen would almost immediately declare their majors and head off to the department which would be the center of their focus for the next four years. Since most of our students were expected to go on to graduate or professional schools, this only seemed to make sense, and indeed, within just a few years of its founding Johns Hopkins University quickly became known for the high percentage of its graduates who went on to hold key research appointments, distinguished faculty chairs and other important positions in industry, academia and medicine. Today, of course, our graduates continue to excel and are still expected to become leaders in their fields. After 10 years, 85 percent of them have advanced degrees--one of the highest percentages among national universities. What is different, however, is that in recent years we have begun to encourage our arriving students to take a little more time and give additional thought to choosing their majors. We recognize that original thoughts--and original thinkers--most often evolve from a broad and inclusive knowledge base illuminating many unrelated subjects, rather than a laser-like focus on a particular specialization. To help our undergraduates receive that kind of far-ranging and rigorous preparation, we recently received a substantial grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support the creation of a broad range of interdisciplinary classes just for freshmen. Our goal is for freshman year to become one in which students learn to think broadly. Among the new courses being offered are The City in Disciplinary Perspective and The Origin of the Species, two fascinating multidisciplinary programs that examine urban life and evolution through the intellectual frameworks of some of our most accomplished faculty members. While these changes are important, nothing will fundamentally alter the heart and soul of a Hopkins education: the brightest and most inquisitive young minds joined with some of the nation's leading scholars and researchers to explore together the frontiers of human knowledge. To inquire, to doubt, to dream and to think. This is the challenge we present our students, and as I discovered in my January class, they are ready for it, they are eager, and entirely up to the task. Although my intent in this letter has been to convey a sense of the state of our undergraduate programs at the Kreiger and Whiting schools, I cannot close without a word about Johns Hopkins Medicine. As most of you probably know, academic medical centers have been under siege in recent years. Many of our nation's top teaching hospitals are experiencing serious financial deficits, the result of significant cutbacks in Medicare funding mandated by the Balanced Budget Amendment coupled with decreasing reimbursement for doctors and hospitals under managed care. Johns Hopkins Medicine remains financially in the black, thanks in no small part to the superb leadership of Dr. Edward Miller and his team, coupled with the great efforts of the faculty in the School of Medicine. The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System have made significant progress in reducing costs and improving service quality, which has kept our clinical volumes strong. But reimbursements continue to erode while costs of operating a complex hospital and health system continue to rise. We must remain diligent to meet the many challenges ahead, and in future letters I promise to keep you up to date on these efforts. Sincerely, William R. Brody |
