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JIM DUDERSTADT: I'm Jim Duderstadt, President Emeritus
of the University of Michigan, but I also have a university
wide appointment as University Professor of Science and
Engineering. Vannevar Bush, of course, was head of the war
research effort and was tasked by President Roosevelt as that
war was still under way to take what he had learned with his
colleagues and apply that to the post war environment.
He developed the policies eventually manifested in the
Acts of Congress in 1950 creating the National Science
Foundation and the National Science Board that really made
America the world's leader in science and technology. But
beyond that those policies also invented the research
university. Prior to the Second World War we didn't do that much
research on any American campuses and we now do. So, he's
responsible for science technology and education as we
know it today. And so for that reason it's a very meaningful
award for me because it kind of explains my career. When I used
to give the convocation address to new freshmen arriving at the
University of Michigan I said, "I've got some good news for you
and I've got some bad news for you. The good news for you is it
really doesn't make a lot of difference what you major in as
an undergraduate. What you want is a broad education,
specializing in things you're interested in, and hopefully,
can do well in. But the bad news is you have to realize that your
undergraduate education is not preparing you for your first
job; it's preparing you for your last job." One of my colleagues,
John Seeley Brown, who's been heavily involved with NSF,
portrays the core competencies of the university as first
building learning communities, students, faculties, so forth;
providing access to knowledge, faculty, laboratories,
libraries; and then certifying that knowledge is true or false
and that learning has been achieved, that's called a
diploma or what have you. But if you step back a moment there are
other things in our society that now do this. Wikipedia is
building learning communities of millions of people that are
coming together, testing each other and so forth. Google has,
Google's goal is to capture all of the knowledge of the world.
But all of that together is happening in a world in which
over half of the world's population is connected, mostly
with cell phones that will only continue to expand. And so
access to knowledge, the capacity use of access to
learning, is now becoming available to a substantial part
of the world. We've already seen corporations shaken to their
foundations, governments toppled because of this, think of the
Arab Spring, and what about institutions that have lasted
very, very long like universities? Don't know, but it
could be the university rather than at least in concept rather
than being yet another social institution that vanishes in
face of this wave of the technology, it becomes the model
for the rest of our society. To some degree I've always been a
change agent. The irony today is that when I arrived at Michigan,
higher education was viewed as one of the most important
investments that could be made in this country. It was what
economists would call a public good. You invested heavily in
higher education because the knowledge produced by
particularly research universities, students who
graduated, were really the key to the strength of the nation;
it's security because the cold war was still in; the public
health, economic strength and so forth. Today, almost a half
century later, unfortunately, my generation which benefited from
the commitments made by the Greatest Generation, our fathers
that won the war made all these commitments, we seem to have
forgot about that. Again, that's a structural problem in our
society of priorities recognizing that investment in
science, investment in education is not an expenditure, it's an
investment in our future.
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