Remarks by William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University "Undergraduate Life at Johns Hopkins"
Family Weekend 2003 Welcome Address
Saturday, November 1, 2003 Good morning. Thank you for joining us this morning. It's gratifying to see so many of our parents here today. We have a terrific weekend of workshops and other activities lined up, and to top it off the Parents Association has arranged for flawless weather. I'd like to thank them for that. I have been at Johns Hopkins for a total of about 14 years now, and for the past seven of them I have been president. I think I have what is probably the most interesting job in America, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to lead what was America's first — and I am convinced remains — its preeminent research university. One observation I will make from my experience is that this is a job that seems to come with a lot of advice. People write in and send me advice. Faculty members stop me on my way across campus and offer advice. Students come to see me with advice. I get e-mails from alumni full of advice. For a while I thought that perhaps this was a unique reaction to Bill Brody. But I asked my staff to do some digging to see if this was so, and they came back and told me, no, the president of the university always gets lots of advice. It comes with the job. And to prove their point they gave me this piece of advice from the archives. It came to our first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, in 1888.
This particular advice came from a gentleman by the name of Mark Twain, who would occasionally have dinner with President Gilman. Mark Twain later recalled offering the president and his staff this advice. He said: "I told them I believed they were perfectly competent to run a college, as far as the higher branches of education are concerned, but what they needed was a little help here and there from a practical commercial mind. I said the public are sensitive to little things, and they wouldn't ever have full confidence in a college that didn't know how to spell 'John.'" Well as it turns out, the public has been able to see past matters of spelling and has put great trust and confidence in Johns Hopkins. One measure of that trust is that for many years now we have received more federally sponsored research dollars than any other university — by more than a factor of two. This is a very tangible means of measuring the quality of the work we do since the peer review process awards grants based purely on merit. The research grants we receive are based entirely upon the quality of work our faculty produces. This year, for the eleventh straight year, Johns Hopkins remains first in National Institutes of Health awards which are given not only to our Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Public Health, but also to faculty researchers here on the Homewood Campus within the Kreiger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering. And it is not only in NIH grants that our research excellence has been recognized.
Sometimes people are surprised by the many areas in which we lead the nation in research. When the director of NASA came to Hopkins to speak a few years back he mentioned to me that he had run some numbers prior to his visit and discovered that Hopkins received more NASA research grants than any other university. When you think of Johns Hopkins, you may not think of world leadership in astronomy, but in fact, it is one of our major but often unrecognized achievements. Last year, one of our faculty members, Riccardo Giacconi, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering work in radio astronomy. And I should mention, of course, that this year, just a few weeks ago, professor Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. So you can see that across a wide range of disciplines we have tremendous expertise at work pushing at the boundaries of knowledge. Now the question becomes how does all this affect undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins? Are we focusing so much on research and discovery that the quality of the undergraduate experience suffers? How can we assure that in addition to leading the nation in research, we are also pioneering the very best educational opportunities for our students? As you can imagine, this is exactly the kind of challenge in which the president is very much in need of advice. So in January of last year, our provost, Steve Knapp, and I assembled a group of faculty, alumni and students to look at this issue and to make some recommendations about how we can better support what is excellent about undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins. We also asked the group to point out where changes need to take place. I am pleased to say that through much hard work, they were able to offer some excellent advice about how we can improve and enhance the undergraduate experience. I would like to take just a few more minutes of your time this morning to tell you, based on that report and my own observations over the past seven years, what undergraduate life is like here at Johns Hopkins now, and how it is likely to change in the coming years. As I see it, there are three main currents at work which profoundly influence both the present and future realities.
A Johns Hopkins Undergraduate Education is Unique The first of these is that what we have to offer here is something truly unique. The Johns Hopkins academic experience is different. It is not cookie cutter. It is not what you will find at the state universities, or even at our peer institutions in the Ivy League. And for that reason — and this is important — not every kind of student would do well coming to Hopkins. Even very bright students, if they are not the right kind of student, would probably not succeed here. Now what do I mean by the right kind of student? Every year when I have an opportunity to address the parents of new students who have just arrived, I describe the typical Hopkins student. I say that this student is a self- starter, highly motivated, extremely hard working, and tends to lead rather than follow. If the student finds a new interest, she or he will not just pursue this new field, but very often master it. There is this ability to intensely focus, and go further and deeper into a project than his or her peers. Every year after I give this description there are parents in the audience who say, yes, that is my daughter or my son exactly! How did you know? If truth be told, that is no accident. We screen our applicants very carefully and we are looking for a specific type of student — one who has the focus, the drive and the passion to excel. This is the kind of student that has always been attracted to Johns Hopkins, and it is the kind of student that tends to get the most from what we have to offer. Traditionally — and up until a very few years ago — almost all of our undergraduate students came to us from high school already knowing their major, and already having a pretty good idea of the career that awaited. The model we embraced in the past enabled those students to declare their major at once, move in with their department, and set to work. We were very good at producing students who were so focused on their particular academic pursuit that they were sometimes described as >an inch wide and a mile deep.' In recent years we have backed away from that model, because of its obvious deficiencies. We now work very hard to make sure that our students are exposed to a broad and diverse body of knowledge before they begin to focus too intently on their chosen major. We emphasize the need for experience in a range of disciplines. But the weight of history and tradition does not easily dissolve away. Nor do I think it should entirely. Johns Hopkins still sends a higher percentage of its students onto graduate school and professional studies than almost any of our peers. Students who excel tend to focus, and indeed, there is a need to focus if you intend to excel. So one of the things that has always been unique about the undergraduate experience at Hopkins, and I think will continue to set us apart, is the intensity in the focus of studies our students experience. Hopkins, by and large, is not a school for generalists wanting to dabble in everything and gain mastery in nothing.
Johns Hopkins Aspires to Offer a 'Hand-Tooled' Education This brings me to the second important current at work in our undergraduate studies. The paradigm or the model of a fully-realized Johns Hopkins education has always been based on the idea of what we call the hand-tooled education. What we mean by that is that we want to have our students experience working at the right hand of a mentor, closely observing and interacting with this individual who is engaged in research and discovery. We want our students to learn not just by sitting in a lecture hall and hearing how others have done something, but by actually being involved first hand with the process of discovery itself. The reality in fact is more difficult to achieve, and one of the important issues considered by the group of students, faculty and alumni we convened was how we insure that the experience for our undergraduates is not just high- tech, but also high-touch. In the humanities, for instance, the idea of working side-by-side with a researcher in a lab doesn't quite translate. There is no exact equivalent. In engineering, a considerable amount of time must be devoted to mastering certain basic mechanics that are most efficiently taught in larger settings. Where does the hand-tooled component of the Hopkins education come into play in these examples? Thanks to the advice we have received, we are now working to expand the number of seminars and small group offerings available to our undergraduate students. We have instructed each academic department to appoint a director of undergraduate studies and we are going to be working closely with the faculty to promote mentorships and expand faculty advising for our undergraduates. In the years ahead we want to find new ways to encourage closer interaction between students and faculty, and provide more opportunities for undergraduates to learn by doing and participating first hand. This is the model that has served us so well in the past, and to the extent that we have moved away from it we want to innovate new ways of making it the model that will define us in the future.
The Cost of a Johns Hopkins Education will be a Continuing Issue and Concern All of which brings us to the third major current moving this effort, and in some ways the most important one. Certainly it is an issue very much on all of your minds, and that is the issue of cost. I don't need to tell any of you that a year at Johns Hopkins is very expensive. You are all experiencing that first- hand. I can tell you in recent years we have significantly slowed the rate of growth of tuition, while at the same time significantly increasing the amount of direct financial aid we are providing. Currently, more than half of our undergraduate students receive some form of financial aid. But like you, I am deeply concerned that the underlying problem is bigger and more troubling than even the current numbers suggest. Some of you may have seen reports in the newspaper this past week relating to the annual report on college costs just released by the College Board. It found that in the past decade, average tuition and fees at both state- funded and private colleges rose by more than 40 percent. It pegged the average cost of attending a four-year private college, including tuition, room and board, at more than $26,000. We are, of course, considerably above this average. Tuition and fees for undergraduates this year is $28,730 and room and board for those who live on campus is $9,142 for a total of $37,872. This is a very large number — more than $150,000 for four years education at Johns Hopkins. We are very concerned with keeping this number from growing beyond the means of our students and their families to afford it. Unfortunately, there are some fundamental economic realities that are at work against us. And I don't think they are going to go away, at least so long as we continue pursuing the educational paradigm under which we operate. We have high labor content, because this focus on the hand-tooled education requires it. We don't want to give up the small seminars, and we don't want to give up the close interaction in the laboratory. The nut of the problem is that the other sectors of our economy have achieved significant productivity gains over the last 20 years. You only have to recognize this by going into a bank, or going into an automobile manufacturing plant. You go into one of these industries today, and if you had been there 50 or 100 years ago, you almost wouldn't recognize that you're in the same place. In these industries, one worker does what 10 or 20 or more workers did in the past. Computers and automation have miraculously transformed every worker's productivity. But if you went into a classroom at Hopkins today, and you went into a classroom in 1878, two years after we opened our doors, they would look virtually identical (except perhaps for the PowerPoint or the slide projector). We have not changed the educational delivery system. Our labor content remains high, but as I described earlier, this is by design. So while the rest of society gets more productive, it means we are destined to become more costly relative to median family income — which is exactly what's happened. There are only a couple of ways around this problem. One is to change the paradigm. We can make the delivery more efficient, but potentially less effective, by increasing class size and thereby jeopardizing the hand- tooled educational process. Or we can provide more scholarship support and other subsidies that off-load the cost of education, so it's borne by society in a different way. In this model, large amounts of the cost do not have to be borne by the individual student. This is actually where we are at currently. Although it doesn't feel that way when you are writing the check, the truth is that every student at Johns Hopkins is partially subsidized by direct and indirect government support. It costs far more, on a per-student basis, to educate each student than we could ever hope to charge through tuition. Some of that cost is borne by the outstanding generosity of our alumni and friends, who for instance built this building, and many of the other facilities on this campus. But much of it has always been borne by the government. Up until very recently, there has been a general compact in American society that the government would heavily subsidize education — providing free K-12 education and then generously supporting higher education — as a cost-efficient means of increasing economic growth. From the land-grant colleges through the G.I. Bill and up to today, this has been an enormously successful endeavor. But recently there have been signs that the compact has begun to unravel. Changing priorities and an economic downturn have meant reduced government support. But at the same time, we are hearing increasing arguments in favor of mandatory tuition caps. You don't need to be a mathematics professor to see that if you reduce subsidies at one end, and cap tuition increases at the other, then the middle — sooner-or-later — will have to give way. That middle is the expenditures that drive the quality of the education we are able to offer. I wish today that I could tell you there is a simple and easy way we can solve this problem, but if there is, I haven't figured it out. I don't think it will be easily solved, and I am very suspicious of politicians from any party or political persuasion who announce they intend to simply legislate the problem out of existence. In fact, they remind me of another university president, who is something of a legend, and I will leave you with a story about him. Bart Giamatti knew that being a university president would be a challenging job, that he would face many problems, and that yes, he would receive a lot of advice, not all of it good. So he decided to take care of his problems once and for all on his first day of office as the president of Yale University. He wrote the following memo, and had it sent to everyone in the entire university. Allow me to quote it, verbatim: "I wish to announce that henceforth, as a matter of university policy, evil is abolished and paradise is restored. I trust all of us to do whatever possible to achieve this policy." Ah, if only life were that simple. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to meeting and talking with many of you during what is sure to be a lovely weekend. | 
