Remarks by William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University
Association of Independent Maryland Schools Country Heads Conference
"The Intellectual Climate in the U.S."
Thursday, April 19, 2001
Harbourtowne, Eastern Shore | 6:30 p.m. [Introduction by St. Paul's Head Bob Hallett] Thank you, Bob. It really is a pleasure to be here this evening. My thanks as well to the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, and to executive director Ron Goldblatt, for thinking to invite me to participate in this conference. I'm told I'm the first university president to address the group in recent memory. I'm not sure by that whose memory is in question — at this time of year I hope it's not mine. People think university presidents live in big houses and beg for a living. Tonight I'm pleased to be speaking to a group of people who already have a pretty good idea of the challenges and time constraints involved in dealing with students and their parents, with alumni and of course, with the faculty. In my five, nearly six, years as president, I have come to realize that the job is not unlike being the caretaker at a cemetery: you have a lot of people beneath you, but no one listens much to what you have to say. So I am delighted to find myself this evening in front of this very warm and receptive audience. I'm hoping that what will follow will be something less of a speech and more of a discussion, because I believe very strongly that the most fundamentally important issues I face — issues beyond budgets and class size and parking and athletics — are issues we face jointly. They are the same challenges, only in a slightly different context. Therefore, I want to leave plenty of time for your comments at the end of my remarks. I am as interested to hear your ideas on these matters as you may be to hear from me. And I will warn you right up front that I have some observations and some ideas, but not a lot of answers to offer this evening. Some of you may have seen the article that appeared in the Sunday New York Times on April 9th. The writer, who is a graduate student in comparative literature at Stanford, wanted to know if the stories she'd been hearing about how competitive college entrance criteria have become are really true or not. By way of illustration, she describes a recent high school graduate who scored an 800 verbal SAT, was on the honor roll all four years of high school, lettered in field hockey and won awards for music, Latin and horseback riding. This is the kind of outstanding student we have all come across. What makes her story newsworthy is that this student had the distinction of being turned down for admissions by Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Wesleyan — and then, after being wait-listed, turned down also by Amherst and the University of Chicago. She literally did not go to college after high school, because none of the nation's elite universities or colleges would have her. So the writer of the article — who graduated from high school just 15 years ago — set out to see if she could get into the schools she applied to and was accepted at in 1985. She dug up her high school transcript and started making phone calls. As you might expect, her B+ average and combined 1280 SAT scores would not get her into her alma mater, Brown. It did not qualify her for her safety school, Vassar. In fact, the "name brand" prestige schools were out of bounds for her entirely. Her high school guidance counselor, acknowledging the new reality, suggested that she look into schools he calls "regional gems" — such as Earlham in Indiana or Rhodes in Tennessee. This, of course, was providing that she wouldn't complicate her chances of acceptance by requiring financial aid. Obviously, and as you are all aware, things have changed profoundly in the past two decades. Last year, a record 1.26 million high schoolers took the College Boards. There is flood of students — the children of the baby boomers — looking for a place in the next college class. As you would expect, the deeper the application pool, the more selective colleges and universities can become. We've seen this trend played out at Johns Hopkins. In 1990 we had 5,244 applications for the freshman class. Their average SAT at that time was 1320. Ten years later, instead of 5,000 applications we had 9,445. And their average SAT had risen to 1430. Like most schools, we did not greatly expand our class size to accommodate all these new excellent applicants. So our acceptance rate declined from slightly more than half to less than a third. It's much harder to get into Johns Hopkins today than it was ten years ago. Ditto for Princeton, Harvard and Yale — or the University of Maryland, Loyola and Goucher College for that matter. I think it's generally well understood and widely accepted why this is the case. As I mentioned earlier, there was a baby boomlet resulting in larger numbers of college-age students. But that is only part of the cause. The other part has to do with the change in our economy, and in our society as a whole. We are now in the information age. We are part of the knowledge economy. As late as 1976, economist Richard Freeman could argue in his book, The Overeducated American, that higher education wasn't a sound investment; that it no longer appeared to pay off in the marketplace. At that same time, of course, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were creating a revolution in their Palo Alto garage. As the Information Age progressed, the rewards for education exploded. Kevin Murphy, a labor market specialist at the University of Chicago, notes that in 1980, college graduates earned about 35 percent more than high school graduates. By 1995, they were earning 70 percent more, and those with graduate degrees were earning 90 percent more. The wage value of a college degree had doubled in 15 years. Furthermore, it is well-documented that the more elite schools amplify this wage differential. A 1995 study showed that it is particularly pronounced for minority students: while white males graduating from a group of 28 elite private and public universities and colleges earned, on average, 61 percent more than their peers at non-elite schools, (and white females earned 55 percent more), black male's earnings were 82 percent greater, and black female's 72 percent higher. So attending the best, most competitive schools is not merely a matter of prestige. There is an overpowering financial imperative to do so as well, and arguably more so for minority students than their white classmates. As I said, we have a pretty good handle on why the best schools have suddenly become so much more competitive. And we understand that this phenomenon has a trickle-down effect, meaning that schools once deemed only fair by the quality of their applicants are now considered pretty good, and those that were already good to begin with have moved up a notch to highly competitive. Perhaps you saw the recent Wall Street Journal article about the "new Ivies" describing a number of schools that now have an ability to pick and choose among applicants with a degree of meticulousness once reserved to only a handful of the most elite schools. We know that increasingly, the power to shape and form the contours of the new upper class is in the hands of college admissions officers at the nation's most competitive schools. But what we don't know is how good a job we're doing at making those selections. We have upped the ante tremendously, and created a kind of winner-take-all mentality among our applicants. At Hopkins, where we've always sent a relatively large number of our graduates on to medical school, you can see the look in our applicants' faces: 'I have to get into Hopkins so I can get into medical school, so I can be successful.' This mind-set creates incentives for a whole set of behaviors that tend to emphasize grades and test scores as a measure of worth, often to the exclusion of other values. This evening I want to question if perhaps we're creating incentives for the wrong behavior — or more accurately, creating incentives that are out of all proportion to the kinds of behavior they promote. Let me illustrate this by way of a personal example. I teach a class for undergraduates during our winter intersession. The class is called 'Uncommon Sense: A Practical Approach to Problem Solving for Your Personal and Professional Life.' At the end of the course, I have all the students over to our house for dinner, and afterwards, a discussion in the living room. This year, during our discussion, I presented them with the following problem: Suppose you are new to a job at General Electric and your boss has you prepare projections for your division for the coming year. Two other new employees hired at the same time as you are also asked to make similar projections. Your numbers show unequivocally that the division will suffer losses in the next 12 months. A week later you are asked to attend a meeting with your boss, the two other new employees, and CEO Jack Welch. At the meeting, your boss stands up and tells Jack Welch that next year, your division projects growth of 20 percent and earnings off the charts. When questioned closely by the CEO, he says, 'I had these three new employees work the numbers. Go ahead and ask them.' The other two mimic what the boss said. It's now your turn. What do you say?
Fundamentally, this is a problem about issues of honesty. Do you tell the truth and ruin everyone's meeting, and possibly — probably — eternally alienate your own boss? Or do you go along?
What disturbs me in recounting this story is that of my class — who are some of the best and the brightest that higher education has to offer — about 40 percent said they would go along with their boss. In other words, that they would lie. When I asked them about this, they tended to reply that they saw this as the way to get ahead. In their perspective, winning is all. They are so goal- oriented that issues of honesty and integrity were not consciously violated. They were simply deemed irrelevant. That concerns me, as I'm sure it concerns you. I think this is another aspect of the same issues raised by Francis Fukuyama in his article and book, The Great Disruption. I can't tell you how pleased I am that you've chosen to read this article, and to invite Dr. Fukuyama to speak to you tomorrow. Your insightful and sagacious decision gives me bragging rights. One of the last things the dean of our School of Advanced International Studies in Washington did before becoming deputy secretary of defense was to hire Dr. Fukuyama as our newest faculty member at SAIS. We are immensely pleased that he is joining our faculty and look forward with great anticipation to the contributions he will no doubt make. Dr. Fukuyama writes, in his article, about the tendency of contemporary liberal democracies to fall prey to excessive individualism. He calls it "perhaps their greatest long- term vulnerability." The Great Disruption — marked by skyrocketing increases in crime, illegitimacy, divorce, and other socially aberrant behaviors — represents a shift in values, away from community in the direction of greater moral individualism. The community becomes less and less a fulcrum of moral suasion. The results of this shift have been profound, and for many of us, profoundly disturbing. A 1992 survey of the American workplace found that three-quarters of respondents believed that the 'breakdown of community' and 'selfishness' were serious or extremely serious problems facing America. Four years later, another poll found only eight percent of Americans believing the 'honesty and integrity of the average American' was improving. Half of those polled believed just the opposite to be true. Eighty percent responded that we as a nation have become less civil in the preceding 10 years. Some of these observations — in particular Dr. Fukuyama's suggestion that the rise of individualism at the expense of community is a direct result of the transition from a manufacturing to an information economy — are mirrored in our experiences in higher education. For the past year I've been making speeches about this very issue to groups within, and outside of, the university. I call this speech The Quantum Physics Model of the University. You all remember the semi-classical model of the atom: a central sphere with electrons orbiting it. I ask you to apply that model in your mind to the typical university. You can think of the campus, in the classical model, as this well-defined nucleus of protons, which are the faculty, and students as tightly coupled electrons rotating around the nucleus. In this model, the faculty and university were tightly bound through commitment and tenure. Students were there full time and physically present, and everything was good except when the students rioted every spring. But the students also felt a lot of loyalty to the university. The faculty members, although loyal to their discipline, only needed to be local experts in their subject matter. They weren't going anywhere, except occasionally away for conferences. So in some sense they had a lot more commitment to their institution. Today, at Hopkins, we have multiple campuses, in fact, more of a cloud-like collection of sites. Johns Hopkins today has more than a dozen sites around the world, and will probably have even more in the next 10 years. The classical physics model, with a core campus of bound faculty members and closely circling students, is obsolete. To understand how things work nowadays, we have to turn to the quantum physics model of the atom. The faculty are loosely bound and they obey the uncertainly principle: the more you try to pin down where they are, both physically and in terms of loyalty, the harder it is to find them. In today's ultra-competitive world, the faculty has to be a collection of international world-class experts. Their primary loyalty is no longer the university. In some sense it's not even to their discipline, but to their sub-field, and they need to work with others with the same focus. This association is natural and is made possible through electronic connections or physical moves. Faculty somehow "tunnel" between organizations in some quantum mechanical sense. We may have a faculty member teaching microeconomics at Harvard in the fall, in Singapore in the winter, and at Hopkins in the summer. Or we may have faculty members doing collaborative research across institutions. The students are wave-like as well, because they've gotten older and have different demands. They will pick and choose between institutions because they need access to world-class expertise for their own education. Look at what is happening in higher education for undergraduate enrollments: full-time enrollments are going down while part-time enrollments are going up, and the average age for students is now in the mid-20s. I should say these numbers are heavily biased to state and community college institutions. Nonetheless, even if you look at Hopkins, our students are getting older, many more are working, and many of them drop out — at least for a time. One of my friends at Stanford called me in great distress because his son, a junior at Stanford in computer science, told him he was dropping out of Stanford to take a job at $55,000 a year programming in a start-up, with options. I told him to stop lamenting and just ask his son for 10 percent of his options. We're going to see more and more students moving in and out of universities. The idea that you have to get educated in a linear sequence and spend time like you do in a prison for so many years is not going to survive — for educational cost reasons, for curriculum reasons, and because of the availability of other opportunities. Students may come in and out of the university at their own pace. After all, Bill Gates was only at Harvard for a year, and he didn't do badly. But again, at some level this represents the expansion of individualism and a consequent miniaturization of community. Among university administrators, this trend is frequently discussed, often in terms of the 'consumerization' of higher education. Admission to a college or university was once viewed as an invitation, of sorts, to study and grow among the learned. Today, increasingly, it is viewed simply as another commercial transaction.Whereas in the 1960s and 70s student protests where inevitably crouched in terms of social justice, of right and wrong, today they are almost exclusively presented in the language of consumerism: 'As a student, I am paying this much, therefore I demand the following...' Again, I must question how much of this phenomenon is a function of the times in which we live, and how much of it is in some way a problem of our own creation. If getting into school — and then on to grad school or medicine or law school — is presented in terms of a zero-sum game, then there are always going to be perceptions of winners and losers. Consider the spate of lawsuits challenging affirmative action on college campuses in recent years. In the segregationist past, the nature of the challenge to integration was exclusionary: we do not want black people sitting in the same classrooms as us. Perhaps this attitude still propels some opponents of affirmative action. But I think most are motivated by a different set of objections: the view that educational opportunity is a finite resource with winners and losers, and that any advantage — no matter how minuscule — given to another represents a disadvantage to me. I don't know how we change this attitude and approach to higher education, particularly at a time when the demand for our services is constantly escalating. I do know that some sense of balance is lacking, and needs to be restored. And at this point I'd like to do as I promised, and invite your own thoughts in this matter. I'd be grateful to hear any comments you might care to make. Thank you. |
