A New University New Age - Polytechnic University

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1 ✯ Jerry MacArthur Hultin, Polytechnic University This is exciting! To stand here before you is exhilarating! I am thrilled about harnessing your energy and your talent to grow this gem of a school into an even more vibrant university. I feel privileged to have been chosen to be your president. ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ Today, we have celebrated our past. Now, let us chart the course for our future. ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ This new age is a product of new technologies: radar, the microchip, the satellite and the laser. The power of these technologies is evident all around us…in our cell phones, the Internet, our global positioning system, precision warfare, new medical cures, the global economy — and our iPods. Our new age is also a product of big ideas: democracy and free markets. We saw the force of these two ideas in the end of the Cold War, when Inaugural Address ✯ September 29, 2005 ✯ 2 the innovative power of the western world toppled the centralized Soviet state and unleashed new energy and opportunity not only in the United States, but around the world. Nearly 3 billion new workers joined the global marketplace. Information, capital, goods — even terror — now move easily across borders into all corners of the earth. This is the world that Tom Friedman declared “flat!” Not only is the new world flat, but the global economy’s business model is deeply flawed. For China and India to make and finance the goods and services the United States and Europe consumes is lethal, not just to the United States, but to India and China. In this new age, we must help create a thriving middle class in India and China that consumes the goods and services it produces. To do this, we must not only educate our own country’s workforce, we must educate workers and build innovative enterprises throughout the world. As this new era develops, the people of the world are flocking to cities; over one million new urban dwellers arrive every week, demanding new roads, houses, schools, factories and offices. As this happens, the consumption of resources escalates and our effluence and waste begin to overwhelm the earth’s resilience. We must expand the value of resources and tame the impact of waste. The scale of this assignment is daunting, since the earth’s population will swell to over 8 billion people by 2030. Unless we think anew, more than half of these people will live on less than $2 a day. In this new age, advances in science and technology seem to threaten the moral and ethical foundations of the world’s religions. The concerns raised by genomics and evolution are visceral. We— especially the humanities and social sciences—must address these issues; otherwise, we will be denied the benefits of science and technology in this new age. President Jerry MacArthur Hultin Our new age is a product of big ideas: democracy and free markets.
3 ✯ Jerry MacArthur Hultin, Polytechnic University Aerial view of Polytechnic’s campus Already, our young graduates are pursuing this new era’s opportunities. Last week, two recent graduates of Polytechnic visited with me to discuss their ambitions. One graduate has the rights to an engineered-housing product designed for developing countries, such as Latin America. On the heels of the recent hurricanes, he is gauging his capacity to supply housing to the Gulf Coast. With him came a second Poly graduate who has raised $2M of venture capital and is about to return to the capital markets for more. He has invented a new product. The product will be branded by a powerful European corporation, manufactured in China, and marketed to customers in the United States. Neither of these new age graduates has a traditional job, or depends on traditional skills, yet both are making a living — and both are excited about their future! [You] Our current undergraduates see this not as a “new era,” but the only era you have known. You were born after 1984. The Soviet Union disappeared before you graduated from grade school. Cell phones and the Intranet appeared during middle school. Before you finished high school, the human genome was decoded, the World Trade Centers fell and China and India arose. Young or old, we are in a new age with new demands. Our students and the world are calling on us to invent a new university that meets the needs of this new age. ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ ✶ What are the qualities of a new university? In the tradition of great universities, I propose we enter into a dialogue of ideas about this new university. To begin this exchange, here are my thoughts. I am sure you will add others. Inaugural Address ✯ September 29, 2005 ✯ 4 First, the new university should be the home of academic entrepreneurs, to borrow a term from my friend, Erich Kunhardt, who once roamed Poly’s halls as a faculty member. This new university should be composed of bright faculty who have the capacity and desire to invent and apply new science and technology to our most significant problems. Its fields and disciplines for research should be redefined: • computer science and biology are becoming bioinformatics, • energy requires chemistry and nano-physics, • management and computer science are creating something new called service innovation. Our goal should be to collaboratively advance science, math, engineering, management, the humanities and social sciences to help people at home and abroad. Second, the new university should open doors. As David Brooks wrote last Sunday in the New York Times: “…in an information society, college is the gateway to opportunity.” At Polytechnic, nearly 30 percent of our students come from families with annual incomes below $20,000, a higher percentage of low-income families than either the State or City Universities of New York. Our role in creating opportunity in the “land of opportunity” sets us apart from private schools of privilege and to a surprising extent, the public schools around us. Now this distinction has gained Polytechnic new fame. This month, we were ranked by Washington Monthly as second in the nation for “social mobility” surpassed only by UCLA. On the east coast, not Yale, Harvard, Columbia, or NYU, but Polytechnic University is at the top of the charts for making the American Dream. And why not, Poly alumnus and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, James Truslow …the new university should be the home of academic entrepreneurs…
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