Workshop on The Engineer of the Future Welcoming Remarks by Provost Linda Katehi Wednesday, September 5, 2007 Good morning. I take great pleasure in welcoming all of you to an important public conversation, and particular pleasure in welcoming Bill Wulf and Sherra Kerns to our campus. I hope to frame some of today’s discussions by recalling that John Seely Brown has defined the value of higher education by the relationship it creates between knowledge, communities, and credentials. Because our own digital times have created instant access to widely-shared information and to disparate points of view, traditional academic and professional communities must expand and open to accommodate multi-ethnic or multi-cultural perspectives. As we emphasize the interconnectedness of cultures and professions, we must also change approaches to technology and to the teaching of science and engineering. We know that knowledge is increasingly central to the creation and maintenance of a viable economy. We know that the ability to use scientific discovery to solve critical social problems is key to prosperity. And thus we have come to recognize that our ability as a society to remain prosperous depends on our ability to be creative. Whether we term this ability “innovation” or “entrepreneurship,” we know that creativity refers not only to a supplement enhancing our leisure, but also to what is likely the essential requirement for sustained competitiveness, leadership, and fulfillment in the age of globalization. Creativity, collaboration and problem-solving shape our efforts to create knowledge.
Universities have developed potent cross-disciplinary communities including technology, the arts, and the humanities. These evolving communities serve as hubs within a grid of creativity for explorations of such phenomena as interactive virtual reality, technologyenhanced live performance, high-end scientific visualization, and complex webs of online gaming. These communities can develop, and be developed, to accomplish much more. New collaborative dialogues across a variety of disciplinary domains can engage creative thinkers in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and commerce. And these dialogues can help us address critical and socially pressing issues leading to far greater cultural impact on both local and global concerns. Let me position this call for cross-disciplinary communities within the context of contemporary university education, …to recognize that it must produce an intellectually flexible workforce capable of retraining and retooling intellectually as it faces global competition and accelerating change. For the students we educate today, learning must become a lifelong habit. To provide a suitably durable education for these students poses challenges and a wealth of opportunities. We can begin to take advantage of those opportunities by recognizing that the core competence of our universities is not transferring knowledge, but instead developing knowledge within the support networks of intricate and robust intellectual communities. Such communities lie at the heart of contemporary university education. Students learn within these communities through experience, exposure, and cultural interpretation.
And universities can appeal to imagination and curiosity, those durable human qualities, by developing a curriculum that appeals to the human desire to help society and improve the quality of life. Such a curriculum, which can attract all segments of the population, must collapse barriers between disciplines and cultures and focus on innovation to develop a diverse and agile workforce. The curriculum, which lies at the center of the university and its administration, can obstruct or accelerate progress towards the developing communities I have described. Inevitably, universities must move away from knowledge-based instruction and toward experiential, collaborative, creative problem-solving. We need curricular flexibility to provide sufficient freedom for the creation and testing of new courses, new class structures, and new teaching strategies. Arguments opposing the core curriculum against these innovations mistake the relationship between the two: the core curriculum must feed new initiatives, and new initiatives must sustain the core.
To become leaders in innovation, we must change the intellectual landscape of the university to eliminate vestigial lines of disciplinary demarcations; we must move experience, instead, to the center of the curriculum, and help students acquire knowledge as they need it to provide creative solutions. As we make experience in problem-solving and creativity central to the curriculum, we will educate a workforce with the skills it will need to readjust, reshape, and retrain. The professional and intellectual communities we educate, and the future of the U. S. workforce, depend on our ability to teach innovation and promote learning through experiential and cultural interpretations. I am suggesting that technology and cultural understanding must be combined within diverse, intellectually vibrant communities that emphasize student experience rather than the transfer of rote knowledge at prescribed
intervals. Collective work at the intersections of technology, the sciences and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities, build on universities’ long legacy of accomplishment. Collective work at these intersections sustains this legacy by re-imagining the contemporary university as a vibrant, creative, energetic, and forward-looking institution poised to influence the future of culture in the twenty-first century. And I close by suggesting that we now enjoy a unique and critically important opportunity to teach technology by exploring the creative instinct common to all of us. By seizing this opportunity, we can help universities expand and enrich their cultural impact on our communities, our state and region, our nation, and the world.
Thank you.