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Engineering
Sesquicentennial THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY AS AN ENGINE OF ECONOMIC GROWTH I am pleased to be with you this morning, as we celebrate the sesquicentennial of engineering at Yale. On such an occasion, I might normally be expected to recount some of the history of engineering at Yale and convey to you my great enthusiasm for its future. But Paul Fleury asked me specifically to draw upon my experience as an economist interested in the study of technology and to say something substantive. So I will reluctantly pass up my opportunity to lavish praise on Dean Fleury and his predecessor Allan Bromley, who have taken dramatic steps toward restoring Yale engineering to its proper glory. I will not indulge you by saying how pleased I am with the high quality of faculty recruited during the past few years. Nor will I spell out in detail the reasons why Yale is poised to assume national leadership in emerging fields such as nanotechnology, quantum computing, molecular electronics, biomedical engineering, and environmental engineering. I will say none of this; I will only say that Dean Bromley, Dean Fleury, the Provost and I have worked hard these past nine years to ensure that the next half century of engineering at Yale will not encounter the perils of the last. I salute you all. I share your pride in the history of Yale engineering, and I encourage your confidence in its future. And so to the substance Dean Fleury has required of me. My topic for this morning reflects both my work as an economist and my experience as a university president. My title is "The American University as an Engine of Economic Growth." Introduction My point is a simple one: our universities are an essential source of America's economic competitiveness and, ultimately, a wellspring of worldwide growth and prosperity. To persuade you of the truth of this point, I would like to develop a two-fold argument. First, I want to illustrate that the way research is funded and organized in the United States makes our universities the principal worldwide source of new scientific discovery, and hence, ultimately, the principal source of technological advance and economic innovation. Second, I will claim that the spirit of critical inquiry and the pedagogical methods that prevail in leading American universities and colleges are also powerful engines of creative leadership, in industry and commerce as well as in science and technology. The Contribution of University Research to Economic Growth Fourteen years ago, when U.S. trade deficits first reached the level of $100 billion annually and many were questioning the long-term competitive viability of the nation’s industries, I offered a seminar for Yale College seniors entitled “The International Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturing.” I asked each student to choose a particular industry and make a report to the class on all the available indicators of the competitive status of U.S. firms in world markets: sales, employment, productivity growth, market share, exports, imports, and patents obtained, among others. The students were required to collect data for the United States, Germany, and Japan over a time span extending from 1960 to the mid-1980s. The results were very revealing. The data the students collected indicated that the alleged decline in U.S. global competitiveness was largely concentrated in a handful of industrial sectors. In essence, the United States had suffered an enormous absolute and comparative decline in the performance of two industries that were the nation’s largest employers in the 1960s, automobiles and steel. But in most other sectors of manufacturing, we were holding our own, and in those sectors with technologies most closely linked to recent advances in scientific knowledge – pharmaceuticals, specialty chemicals, and segments of the electronics industry – America led the world. Competitive advantage based on the innovative application of new scientific knowledge — this has been the key to American economic success for at least the past quarter century. And the pattern is no different today. America remains the world’s leader in the industries where science-based technologies are changing rapidly – software, communications equipment, and biotechnology. As technologies mature, labor cost, quality control, and other factors become more important in determining competitive success, and the United States tends to lose its comparative advantage. The dynamic sectors of the American economy – where new jobs are created and productivity growth is most rapid – remain those that create innovative new products based on the application of recent scientific knowledge. As the nation's principal locus of basic scientific research, our universities play a key role in this pattern of economic competitiveness and growth. Basic research, by definition, is motivated purely by curiosity and the quest for knowledge, without a clear, practical, commercial objective. Yet basic research is the source from which all commercially-oriented applied research and development ultimately flows. I say ultimately because as you know it often takes decades before the commercial implications of an important scientific discovery are fully realized. The commercial potential of a particular discovery is often unanticipated, and often extends to many, economically-unrelated industries and applications. In other words, the development of innovative, commercial products that occurs today depends on advances in basic research achieved ten, twenty, or fifty years ago — most often without any idea of the eventual consequences. U.S. academic institutions now spend over $30 billion annually on research, Nearly 70 percent of these expenditures are directed toward basic research. Over the past three decades, academic institutions have accounted for approximately half of the total basic research undertaken in the United States. The universities’ role as America’s primary basic research machine did not come about by accident. A half-century ago, in the aftermath of World War II and as the Cold War was beginning, the U.S. government clearly and self-consciously established an unprecedented and heavily subsidized system of support of scientific research, in the process transforming the nature and scope of the American university. First articulated by Vannevar Bush, President Harry Truman’s science advisor, in a deservedly famous 1946 report entitled Science: The Endless Frontier, this system has three central features, all of which remain largely intact today. First, the federal government shoulders the principal responsibility for the financial support of basic scientific research. Second, universities – rather than government laboratories, non-teaching research institutes, or private industry – are the primary institutions in which this government-funded research is undertaken. And third, although the Federal budgetary process determines the total amount available to support research in the various fields of science, most funds are allocated, not according to commercial or political considerations, but through an intensely competitive process of review conducted by independent scientific experts who judge the quality of proposals according to their scientific merit alone. Within constraints set by the overall budget, there is a virtual free market in ideas. This system of organizing science has been, on its own terms and from an international comparative perspective, an extraordinary success. There is little doubt that the United States is the world’s leader in basic research. Over the past three decades, the U.S. has been the source of about one-third of all scientific publications worldwide. Since 1975, more than 60% of the world’s Nobel prizes have been awarded to Americans or to foreign nationals working in American universities. It is also clear that publicly funded basic science has been critical to scientific and technological innovation. A recent study prepared for the National Science Foundation found that 73% of the main science papers cited in industrial patents granted in the U.S. were based on research financed by government or nonprofit agencies and carried out in large part in university laboratories. It is unlikely that this success could be duplicated by industry. The private sector has little incentive to invest in basic research because the returns from the creation of new generic knowledge are difficult to appropriate for private benefit. In contrast, it is much easier to reap the returns from investment in applied research directed toward a specific commercial end, especially if the legal framework governing intellectual property provides effective protection against the imitation of one’s products by rivals. Moreover, the time lags between the initiation of basic (or even long-term applied) research and commercial application are long, far longer than an impatient private sector could tolerate. Scientists cannot schedule fundamental breakthroughs, and the eventual applications that arise from them may be surprises, both in form and in timing. Ordinarily, the ultimate commercial applications are entirely unforeseen when the initial, enabling discoveries are made in university laboratories. It has been forty-eight years since Watson and Crick discovered the double helix, and the enormous practical benefits of this discovery are only now beginning to be realized through new medical treatments and a whole new technology for developing pharmaceuticals. Universities, in their unending, unadulterated search to know, are uniquely situated to undertake such long-term research without worrying about its commercial application and payoff – a luxury that profit-seeking private industrial firms cannot afford. Examples of how university-based research has yielded enormous and unanticipated benefits are abundant. My favorite story involves Bill Bennett, the C. Baldwin Sawyer Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics here at Yale. In the 1950s, Bill began working on the phenomenon of coherent light. After he came to Yale in 1961, he continued his work on lasers with the support of grants from the U.S. Department of Defense. For many years, the laser was what Bill called "a solution looking for a problem." Today there are so many uses for lasers that it would be impossible to describe them all in the time that remains. Lasers are used to cut cloth, to lay out the foundations of a house, to make microchips, to pinpoint and treat brain tumors without surgery. In fact, when Bill Bennett suffered from a detached retina in 1995, the treatment he received was accomplished by using precisely the same Argon Ion Laser which he developed at Yale in 1964. Aside from stimulating scientific discoveries with long-term and unpredictable economic consequences, the deliberate decision to locate most fundamental research in universities rather than government laboratories or private research institutes had another equally significant benefit. It enabled the next generation of scientists and engineers to receive its education and training from the nation's best scientists and engineers, who are required to teach as they pursue their own research. I cannot overemphasize how conducive this model of graduate education is to the creativity of the students and also to the vitality of the research enterprise. Of course, some of these well-trained graduate students become professors after they complete their degrees and post-doctoral study, thus ensuring that the academic research engine is continually replenished with new, skilled scientists. But the many who enter industrial employment after graduation take with them invaluable assets — state-of-the-art knowledge obtained by working at the frontiers of science and experience with the most advanced research tools and equipment. They also take with them a particular way of thinking, a topic to which I turn next. The
Contribution of Liberal Education to Economic Growth The knowledge created by the enterprise of academic science is by no means the only contribution of American universities to economic growth. By engaging students in intellectual inquiry, making them active participants in the search to know, and fostering their problem-solving abilities, universities and colleges contribute to economic growth through their teaching as well as their research. And it is not only the education of industrial scientists and engineers that has an impact on economic performance, it is the education of all those engaged in the business sector — executives, entrepreneurs, financiers, and consultants alike. The world we live in is fast-paced and constantly changing. Many successful companies produce products or services based on technology or marketing strategies that didn’t exist a decade or two ago. In such a world, knowledge of a given body of information is not enough to survive, much less thrive; business leaders must have the ability to think critically and creatively, and to draw upon and adapt ideas to new environments. The methods of undergraduate, as well as much professional, education used by America's most selective and distinguished universities and liberal arts colleges are particularly well suited to prepare students for a changing world. Unlike British universities, which require students to specialize early, America's finest research universities and liberal arts colleges are committed to the "liberal education" of undergraduates. And, of course, Yale has long been distinctive for the breadth of education that it provides to its engineering undergraduates. A liberal education cultivates the intellect and expands the capacity to reason and to empathize. Its object is not to convey any particular content, but to develop certain qualities of mind: the ability to think critically and independently, to be creative and innovative, to liberate oneself from prejudice and superstition, to sift through information, to extract what is useful and discard what is irrelevant. Just as the largest social benefits derive from scientific research that is undertaken without any focus on a commercially salient objective, so, I would argue, the largest social benefits derive from a pedagogy that seeks to enlarge the power of students to reason and think creatively without focus on mastering a particular body of knowledge. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that, at America’s best universities and colleges, education is not a one-way street. Information is not simply conveyed from faculty to students. Even as recently as the 1930s and 40s, in many college classes, professors spewed forth information in lectures, students copiously took notes, memorized them, and then "recited" them back to the professor when called upon in class.Today, students can not rely on a good memory to succeed in college. Although lectures are still used in many courses, students are no longer encouraged to recite back what they hear in class or read in a textbook. Instead, students are encouraged to think for themselves — to offer their own opinions and interpretations in seminars and discussion sections. Professors also encourage critical thinking by the form of writing assignments they require and by the kind of examination questions they ask. In the mid-1980s, while he was the President of Harvard, Derek Bok studied the examinations given there in various subjects since 1900. He found that, at the beginning of the century, nearly all of exam questions "sought to have students repeat particular facts, describe the opinions of others, or relate fixed sequences of events. . . . The emphasis was chiefly on memory.”[1] As the century progressed, the nature of exams changed in a way that increasingly “emphasized analysis rather than memory or description.” By 1960, according to Bok, “half of the questions in the humanities and social sciences called upon students to discuss complex problems from more than one perspective.”[2] Bok's survey shows, students today are expected to take from their courses not just facts, figures, and widely accepted theories, but a way of thinking — the ability to use facts and figures to support an argument and to confront one theory with another through critical analysis. The distinctive emphasis on critical thinking produces graduates who are intellectually flexible and open to new ideas, graduates equipped with curiosity and the capacity to adapt to ever-changing work environments, graduates who can convert recently discovered knowledge into innovative new products and services. By producing thinking and engaged leaders capable of thriving in the new age of information technology, American higher education prepares the nation for the challenges that we can’t even imagine today, challenges upon which continued growth and prosperity depends. Conclusion There is doubtless some irony in all of this. For the most part, universities conduct scientific research without a concern for potential commercial application, and liberal education seeks not to train business and professional men and women, but to produce inquisitive, thinking, creative citizens. Still, the research and teaching done in American universities have a profound and hugely positive effect on practical affairs. I hope that I have successfully argued that the organization of scientific research, and the pedagogical strategies used in our finest universities and colleges contribute mightily to America's technological leadership and ultimately to national and worldwide economic growth. Recognition of this distinctive contribution of U.S. universities should not encourage complacency. To the contrary, we must keep extending the frontiers of science and improving the efficacy of our pedagogy. To this end we are not only investing heavily in the support of science and engineering at Yale, we are also in the midst of a major review of education in Yale College. We do not take our responsibilities lightly. We know that in no small measure the fate of our students, the nation, and the global economy depends on us. [1]
Derek Bok, Higher Learning, 48-49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1986). |