Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
I realize that 9:00 AM is incredibly
early for many of you, so thank you all for being here.
I am just thrilled.
And I think this is just another indication of how important
this conference is for a wide, wide segment of the Harvard
community and many people beyond Harvard as well.
I'm, of course, delighted to be here.
I have to tell you, this is the eighth health conference,
and I have not missed one of them.
And I can only say that I think about commencement is
the only other thing I attend every single year.
And let me just say, commencement, I
have to be there.
Here--
[CHUCKLES]
And I do love to be there too, but this
is something I really look forward to
for truly unique reasons.
Part of this is my role.
I'm the Chief Academic Officer of the university.
If that concept has any meaning in the Harvard context,
I'm not quite sure.
So I'm responsible, in many ways,
for the education across the university.
At least, I will be called to task if we don't perform,
even though we all know that responsibility is extremely
widely distributed.
I'm also all for connecting the schools with one another,
drawing all kinds of connections across the university
and the different units of the university that
are not necessarily schools.
For example, the library and the art museum,
which both play big roles in pedagogy in the university,
as well as in research.
This conference is a great match to those responsibility.
This is all about education and it's
all about making connections, and it's
been extremely successful in both regards over the years.
Every year, the attendees of this conference
have found that we all have a lot to learn from each other.
There's all kinds of exciting work going on
around the university.
We have some channels to learn about what other people are
doing, but I doubt that any other channel
is as consistently as effective as this conference is
for drawing people together and learning from each other.
Let me say also that I think this year is an especially
important year for considering education at Harvard
and how we can improve it.
Now, some of you know I say something like this every year,
but I really mean it this time.
So first of all, liberal education
is being questioned in ways that have not
been quite as true in the past.
It's not new, but the intensity is new.
The actual value of higher education
is being called into question by broad segments
of the American population in ways that were not
true two or three years ago.
That's something that we all need to be very much aware of.
There are particularly concerns about how higher education
and education in general prepare people for a future where work
is certain to change, and it's changing now
at a very rapid pace.
How will we prepare the graduates of Harvard,
the graduates of other colleges and universities,
the graduates of our high schools for that matter,
for a future characterized by rapidly increasing automation
and the need to be able to gain new skills quickly,
to change jobs as work requirements change over time.
And the one thing that we can be sure of
is that work requirements are going to change with a rapidity
that we have never before seen.
So how do we prepare our students
for this highly uncertain future?
There is no more important time to ensure
that we are educating everyone in our community in the best
ways possible.
This is not a time for complacency.
And I know that there is not a single person in this room who
is complacent about the future of education
at Harvard and elsewhere.
That's what this conference is all about.
Some of you, many of you have heard me say this before.
I'm often asked, what was my greatest surprise
about returning to Harvard as provost eight years ago
after having spent almost all of my academic career
on the faculty at Stanford?
And my answer has been consistent, starting
from about my second year.
And that is, I have been surprised
at how widespread the deep dedication to teaching
and education is in our community.
I don't mean to imply that everybody is deeply dedicated,
but let's be realistic.
We attract people who take on too much all the time.
That's how you all got here.
We are as overcommitted a community as you could find,
and our faculty are deeply involved in research.
The amount of attention that they pay to teaching, given
how many other demands there are on their time
is truly extraordinary.
And this is not only about faculty.
This is about many, many people throughout our community.
The genuine dedication to teaching, I think,
is extraordinary.
You can't expect to see every single person be
a great teacher, but the effort, the attention,
the enthusiasm for teaching is simply extraordinary.
That is what has surprised me that people
will make a point of carving out so much time
to improve the educational experience here.
And let me just add that, as I mentioned this last year,
the innovation across our university and teaching
in approaches to curriculum is truly extraordinary.
And that's happened in recent years and it's continuing now.
To name just a few schools, we have the recent change
in the Gen Ed curriculum for the college, which is one
of the most visible changes.
And Amanda Claybaugh, who is--
I saw over here should take a lot of credit
for the successful execution of now
the first year of the new Gen Ed curriculum.
The medical school introduced a new pathways curriculum
within the last five years.
We have, in the law school, a major curriculum reform
effort that's underway.
In recent years, the business school
created the field program, which is an oversees hands
on business experience that's complementary to the classroom
education.
The Ed school is revamping its master's programs.
I could go on and on, but there is just so much activity
here, it is truly extraordinary.
And these are not minor tweaks.
These are major reforms that we're undertaking.
We are not standing still.
Let me just briefly make a few comments about peer learning.
Peer learning is ubiquitous here and elsewhere.
And I think we all know that so much of the future in education
is about peer learning, even if it's not called peer learning.
Think about hybrid courses, what we're
doing using online materials in the classroom.
A lot of that is to facilitate discussion among students,
recreating what have been some of the most
powerful educational experiences we offer.
I taught a course for many years,
at Stanford Business School, where
the centerpiece of the course was a project conducted
by teams of four.
Students in the course came from different backgrounds.
And there were predictable problems with grading,
for example.
If you had a team of four, how did you know who did what?
Sometimes there are big disparities
in the effort they put forward.
We dealt with that.
We didn't have perfect solutions,
but the reason we put up with the problems
is that the rewards were just extraordinary.
The amount that they learned from each other
was simply extraordinary.
And that extends also to non-group projects.
Here at Harvard, I teach a freshman seminar
on health reform and understanding
the big challenges to health policy.
And although the projects are individual,
the students critique each other.
And they're able to do that in a way that I as a faculty member
can't.
It's complementary to the kinds of feedback I provide,
but it is interpreted in a different way
and it's often much more germane to the big issues
that the students are dealing with.
We are all familiar with the power of peer education,
and I'm delighted that we'll be talking about that today.
So I want to wish you all a great day working, discussing
these issues.
But before I turn the podium over to Dustin,
again, I just want to thank a few people.
First of all, a huge thank you to Rita and Gus
Hauser, whose generosity made Hilt
possible in the first place.
And these are not passive donors.
They have very strong feelings about what needs
to be done with education.
Rita made some memorable comments at the very first Hilt
conference, saying that we needed
to burn down the existing educational edifice
and create something totally new.
Larry Bacow, at the time, said that universities
lived for a long time, because they evolve.
I don't know where we fit on that spectrum between evolve
and burn it down, but we have definitely moved since then,
and I know that Rita has been very happy with what's
been done through Hilt. So this is
an extraordinary, extraordinary gift that
made what we're doing possible.
I want to thank Bharat Anand, the Vice Provost for Advances
in Learning, who has now completed
his first year in the position.
As you all know, he has done extraordinary work
in many domains here, having a huge impact on the university.
And I think he would admit that his success would not
be possible without the Deputy Vice Provost
for Advances in Learning, Dustin Tingley.
Dustin is an extraordinary leader,
and I have to say visionary, truly,
who is doing so much in so many ways
to change the face of education at Harvard.
And for those of you who haven't tried it,
you should definitely check out Link, his latest project that's
been released, which provides targeted links to you
for seminars, all kinds of things
you might be interested in, including
identifying people who are potential collaborators
for you.
Extraordinary work.
He oversees Hilt and the research component of VPAL,
and does an extraordinary job there.
This also would not be possible without the truly extraordinary
Hilt team more generally.
And I want to thank everybody on the Hilt team
for making this conference and everything else Hilt does
possible.
So enjoy the day.
Make the most of it.
Thank you for taking the time.
[APPLAUSE]