Welcoming John Bassett

John Bassett was officially inaugurated as the eighth president of Clark University on March 30, as winter leveled one of its last fits of cold, wet weather on Worcester. But neither wind, driving rain nor ankle-deep slush could dampen the festive spirit on this historic day. After week-long celebrations and academic panels, Clark faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees and friends gathered in the Kneller Athlectic Center for the installation ceremony. Red carpeting, stars projected on the ceiling and dramatic banners painted with cosmic motifs by Clark graphic design students and faculty transformed the gym into an elegant performance hall. Potted tulips, hyacinths and daffodils added a welcome hint of spring, while the cold wind and rain howled outside.

John Bassett began his address by thanking his wife Kay and children, Laura and Greg, and the many other family members, friends, and colleagues who helped him along the path to this moment. He outlined the many challenges facing higher education generally, and Clark in particular, and reaffirmed his commitment to continuing the University's tradition of excellence.

Inaugural Address: Friday, March 30, 2001

On my way over to the Kneller Athletic Center in the rain I was gratified to hear a delegate say, "Some of the least successful college presidents were inaugurated on bright and sunny days." I do appreciate all the delegates and distinguished guests who drove to Clark, some from quite a distance in bad weather, to be here today. While listening to the comments about me so far, I kept thinking these speakers were talking about someone else. Surely I must be an imposter on stage here. When Lawrence Krauss says such nice things about me, he usually wants more money for his Department of Physics, and I am no longer in a position to provide that. When Agnar Pytte says such things, he usually is asking me to serve on another committee, and I don't expect that. But I do appreciate the kind words and hope to justify them.

Feeling like an imposter reminds me of an often told story of the writer William Faulkner. He did not make much money from his novels and so would go to Hollywood to write scripts for the movies. He liked to go hunting also and one day was on a hunting trip with Clark Gable. Sitting together in the back seat they struck up a conversation. Gable leaned over and said, "What do you do for a living, Mr. Faulkner?" Faulkner said he wrote books. Gable asked what kind of books and Faulkner told him. Gable asked who the best writers in America were, and Faulkner mentioned Hemingway, Wolfe, and a few others. The conversation went on for three or four minutes. After a minute or two of silence, Faulkner leaned over to his fellow rider and asked, "and what do you do for a living, Mr. Gable?" A little humility is becoming for all of us.

While listening to Lawrence's comments in praise of nonsense I was reminded that one of the first presents I received after moving to Clark was from a person who was my best friend, believe it or not, in elementary school and is sitting here in the audience - Jim O'Brien. He sent me a copy of the Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers. To those of you who know this burlesque with Groucho as a university president, I have to say I am still not sure whether my friend was sympathizing with me in taking on the position of president or suggesting that my administration was likely to be much like Groucho's. Do not think, Jim, that I was not thankful for your generosity.

On a more sincere note, the number of people I must thank is longer than the time available to thank them. Some must settle for apologies. There is no question, however, that without the support of my family - particularly Kay - someone else would be here before you today. Greg and Laura - they may not believe me - have always been positive forces. While my parents are no longer living, I am grateful Mary Anne and Steve and their families can be here. Mary Anne surely finds it hard to believe that the little brat who long ago pestered her boyfriends could possibly be president of Clark.

The person who really started me down this primrose path is out among the delegates representing Ohio Wesleyan. Richard Smith taught me how to take education seriously and stayed by me even in my apostasy when I switched from History to English. Howard Horsford, at Rochester, who guided me into the profession, cannot be here. There are many colleagues at Wayne State and North Carolina State who helped me grow professionally, and it is especially meaningful to have my friend of 35 years - Joe Gomez - in a sense represent my years at Rochester, Wayne and NC State. I regret Bill Toole, my extremely supportive dean at NC State, could not be here.

I am overwhelmed by the number of friends and colleagues from Case Western Reserve among us today. You have already heard Agnar Pytte tell all sorts of fibs about me (good fibs) - with the humor and wit to make them less saccharine. He had faith and confidence in me, and together we built for the first time a real college of arts and sciences at the heart of a great university in Cleveland. But so many others played a part - Dick Zdanis, our splendid provost with whom I worked so closely; Sam Savin, my associate dean and right-hand everything [he and Kay were the two primary reasons I accomplished anything], 200 faculty members and chairmen - and you already can guess how much fun it was to stir up mischief with Lawrence Krauss in physics and John Orlock in theater, for example; vice presidents like my good friend Dick Baznik; fellow deans like Jim Wagner (I only regret he and I did not have more time to stir up mischief together), and so many others.

Finally, my thanks to the trustees of Clark University, who decided Kay and I needed one more new adventure in our life, to my distinguished predecessor Dick Traina, who left Clark in excellent shape for his successor, and to the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of Clark - and the Worcester community, who have done so much to make this first year not only a pleasure but a year of such exciting planning for Clark's future.

It is that future I will address now. But rather than repeat comments I have recently made elsewhere on campus about our commitments to enhance instructional technology, to increase national visibility, to improve science facilities, to enrich alumni programs, to increase diversity, to build more collaborations with the Worcester community, and to expand the Higgins School for the Humanities, I will speak briefly to five issues that confront higher education nationally and then locate Clark's challenges and opportunities in relation to them.

First is the tremendous explosion and acceleration of knowledge during the past half century - an explosion still continuing in all fields of the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the boundaries of what is important have greatly expanded. Let us agree, however, that information has expanded more than knowledge, and both more than understanding and wisdom. Amid the excitement about new breakthroughs, however, is the loss of that certainty once felt as to what undergraduate students should learn in four years of college - or rather what an educated person should have as a foundation. Older cores and group requirements have in most places disappeared, succeeded if at all by limited requirements for a little breadth or varied perspectives on how we learn about our world.

Even within disciplines the changes may leave the meaning of a "major" unclear. At times the broadening of a perspective - as in history or literature - has created a field of study much broader than in an earlier eurocentric age and a discipline that defies us, within eight or nine courses, to build both coverage and coherence. In other disciplines expanding knowledge, as in Biology, has forced a reshaping of the major that may reduce or exclude such topics as study of the phyla or anatomy or even physiology in the interest of more courses in molecular biology or genetics. Such changes can be both good and bad.

I am not seeking a nostalgic return to an earlier period of common cores and simpler paradigms. On the contrary, I am suggesting that, we may need new paradigms to make sense of education in an age of rapidly changing knowledge - new justifications of the purposes of breadth, concentrations, and varied perspectives. Perhaps even the sacred numbers - four years in college, two semesters or three quarters per year, fifty minutes per class and so forth - will no longer seem sacred in a world of rapidly advancing knowledge and new options for seeking knowledge. Perhaps Clark will test some new paradigms.

It is also clear that even as students learn more and more about their own field they may understand less and less of how it connects with other fields; and it is through those connections that their knowledge becomes truly useful. In some areas our knowledge from science - for example, food production and distribution, and medical care - is actually way ahead of our mastery of the politics and economics to use that knowledge to its fullest extent. We desperately need educated people who can solve the political and economic problems to maximize use of our new scientific and technical knowledge and people who can connect technological and social understanding.

One of the best educational goals a college can establish is to develop in its students an appreciation of the connections among the parts of their education - the connections among, for example, the historical and economic and cultural factors in China's unique path back to a market economy or between the chemical, economic, and political factors in pharmaceutical research.

I am reminded of the comment made by Tom Anton in Tuesday's splendid forum on urban development. Brown University students working on real-world projects in Providence needed to break out of their disciplinary cages in psychology or economics or geography to realize that in the real world problems are not divided up by discipline. All of us need to be reminded at times that our disciplines and departments are pragmatic conveniences not platonic realities. In the sciences, of course, the older disciplines have all been redefined and reshuffled, and the humanities have been greatly altered by influence of social sciences. From my arrival I have said that understanding the connections between the parts of their education should be one goal of students' education at Clark, and in effect the five other cardinal educational values I have stressed are all in one way or another about connections - 1) the ability to communicate effectively to non-specialists and specialists, 2) an appreciation of the ethical issues in one's field, 3) a commitment to lifelong learning and new discoveries, 4) a sense of the global, international nature of today's society, and 5) an understanding of how any institution is related to its community. None of these, moreover, are new to Clark.

A second challenge facing higher education is maintaining balanced commitments to research and teaching. Perhaps teachers are better today than 50 years ago, and an excitement about new knowledge in one's field should make for a better teacher. But research is accorded a far higher place in the system of rewards and prestige at most of America's best colleges and universities, and Ph.D. programs understandably are designed to emphasize the development of outstanding researchers, even though most academic openings will not be at research-intensive institutions. Bruce Alberts said Monday that more professors need to commit themselves to mentoring undergraduate students other than those who will be researchers in their own field. Similarly doctoral advisors need to be sensitive to the range of positions open to their students.

Also in question is whether America can maintain the remarkable integrated research-teaching system that grew out of a federal decision a half century ago to make universities (and a handful of national research labs) the key to government-sponsored research in America. The strategy has been successful in most ways, but clearly the pressure to win grants has become a bigger factor in personnel decisions, in budgeting decisions, and even in the shaping of academic departments - in ways that at times may run counter to the educational needs of undergraduate students. Moreover, whereas 50 years ago, faculty at relatively few universities received large NSF or NIH grants, now scientists at many more institutions do, some of them at schools that recently were regional normal colleges or at schools not even in existence a few years ago.

Such democratization of research is good, but the national cost of so many research infrastructures is not small and adjusted teaching loads for so many potential researchers also carry a cost, particularly when about 90 percent of the significant research publications come from 10 percent of American faculty members. Meanwhile every large public university in America - and many a large private university - depends on part-timers, temporary faculty, or teaching assistants to teach large numbers of undergraduate sections. Can our balance of priorities be maintained?

Again I do not seek to return to a past when the split seemed less severe but rather to develop creative new ways for a healthy research climate - with our best and brightest professors engaged in teaching - to enhance the overall learning experience of bright and hungry undergraduates.

Clark, of course, is unusual and prides itself on being a doctoral-research institution with only 2,500 students, one in which the graduate and undergraduate programs enrich each other. Can Clark continue, within such a scale, to be both an excellent liberal arts college giving so much attention to each undergraduate and also the research university of Michelson and Goddard, Hoaglund and Pincus, Werner and Wapner, and its National Academy of Science members? Clark's greatest chance of long-term success depends on maintaining just that balance, to which I am personally committed. But in a way I know that our situation is hardly representative of the pressing national issue at larger universities to which I draw your attention.

A third challenge, of course, is posed by new technologies. Just as high speed computers revolutionalized research in the sciences, electronic learning environments now present exciting opportunities to enhance student learning in all areas. But they also present new options for delivering education to Americans - not without a threat to today's colleges. One of America's strengths is its great diversity of kinds of institutions of higher education - private research, liberal arts, land grant, public urban, technical, community college, etc. - and electronic technology will have different impacts on each, just as it is having varied impacts on different kinds of businesses. We want our IT personnel to be creative but to have our university's mission - not the availability of new toys - govern individual decisions about technology; and we want that mission to govern strategic decisions about technology made by trustees and administrators. But believe me, over the next 20 years things will change. On-line institutions will be able to offer the best professors at a reasonable cost to prospective students. You and I value residential campus life and its personal interactions, and the elbow learning with great professors one finds at Clark, but will the next generation, who are raised on computer screens, chat rooms, and the internet? At least will they value such things at the prices we will charge? Clark and its peers must make sure that the education we provide continues to be aggressively competitive with all the other options that will be attractive to the kind of student we want here. And that may well include varied formats of lectures, seminars, individual research, and active, inquiry - based and project-based experiences not easily found or taught on the internet or in large public universities.

A fourth challenge, and one that intersects all the others, is containing costs. Competition for Clark in the future will come not only from other top private colleges plus the better publics - that are so much less expensive for students if not for taxpayers - but also from a higher quality set of competitively priced online educations. Private colleges and universities that have depended for a decade or two, moreover, on tuition discounting strategies - our own income redistribution plan as the publics use taxation - find that at some point they experience diminishing returns. Knowing where to price tuition each year is a bit of a guessing game, like knowing when to buy and sell in the stock market. But the going will get tougher because of new competition, and quite a few weaker privates will fall by the wayside, those that cannot provide true competitive advantages. Moreover, proposed new tax laws will have uncertain effects on the fund raising on which all privates depend. Overall, however, each university will face very tough decisions in the market at the same time it must offer competitive salaries to keep top faculty, who after all provide the education worth paying for, and it must offer good facilities and programs to persuade students to spend three or four years on a campus like Clark's. We will do both of these things.

The fifth challenge is responding to changing demographics, again a challenge with very different meaning for an Amherst and for a Cal State-Dominguez Hills. Not only do we need to adjust to the growing needs of new Latino and Asian populations, even as we still struggle to provide adequate opportunities to our African American and native American populations. But also we face a graying population - one where more older people seek education and continuing education, and where many BA and BS students are starting college well beyond the traditional 18-22 year-old range. We also face, because of our global economy - with all its controversies - movements of people across national lines and seeking education in one way or another related to that transiency. But to return from a different perspective to the new populations - and our underrepresented older ones - we all are facing the crises of American secondary education, particularly but not entirely in our cities, particularly but not entirely people of color and immigrants. We cannot fully respond in our colleges to changing demographics until as a nation - with universities helping to lead - we find ways not to waste huge numbers of our young people in America. We have a disconnect. At a time when thousands of new teachers are needed around the country, relatively few of our best and brightest consider schoolteaching as a career. At a time when we need new scientists, few Americans are going into science - and the way science is taught in school is one reason. Clark is committed to playing a significant role in rethinking urban education, in helping to solve problems in America's schools, in being a constructive partner in its own community of Worcester. But it will need dozens of education partners around the country to assure that America provides all children and teenagers with the education necessary for Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" ever to become a reality, for Abraham Lincoln's "new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" to have relevance in the 21st century, for Jefferson's "inalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" truly to apply to all persons in a post-slavery age, and for Marion Wright Edelman's Children's Defense Fund to be a topic in history and not a continuing critical necessity.

I commit this administration to working with faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees, the community of Worcester, and colleagues at other universities not to do everything but to do whatever we do well.

Thank you!