John Strassburger's Keynote Address at the 20th Anniversary of the Higher Colleges of Technology in Dubai, August 30, 2007
The following is the text of the keynote address delivered by Dr. John Strassburger, President of Ursinus College, at the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Higher College of Technology in Dubai, August 30:
I cannot fully describe how honored I am to be here. It is a privilege, Your Highness Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, to see this wonderful collection of colleges of Higher Technology. Thank you also to Vice Chancellor, Dr. Tayeb Kamali, for your gracious invitation and for your informative, fascinating history of the Higher Colleges of Technology. Special thanks as well to Dr. Senthil Nathan, for all you have done to make my visit so enjoyable and interesting, and thank you, too, for providing me so much informative background. And for his role in facilitating my being here, I cannot resist expressing my gratitude to my good friend, journalist extraordinaire Pranay Gupte.
Your Highness, Honored guests, faculty colleagues and friends:
Let me begin by noting that what you have accomplished in twenty years leaves me in awe at your achievement. Your Highness Sheikh Nahayan, Dr. Tayeb Kamali, Dr. Senthil Nathan--you and your colleagues have created a series of great centers of learning, starting from scratch, and you have done so in just two decades. There is so much to admire, and so much worthy of praise: your attention to detail and to quality assurance and quality control, the uncommon wisdom of your mission statement as it stresses social good along with individual well being--truly, both your ambition and your accomplishment are worthy of everyone’s admiration.
As I look out at all of you, I find it humbling to be here. Every one of you has at least one expertise that I certainly lack. One of my areas of ignorance is economics, but let me survey what little I know about what might be the demands of the global economy in the 21st century. Since I am not an economist, it will not take me long. But fortunately the World Bank has completed a world-wide analysis, a survey of country after country, summarizing the future of the global economy. The title of the study is: “Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century.” The study describes the sources of new wealth in the coming years.
A distinguished team of economists at the World Bank led by Kirk Hamilton concluded in 2006 that tangible wealth, whether it is oil and copper or factories, and ships--things, as Hamilton puts it, that you could drop on your foot--this tangible capital is only 23 percent of the world's wealth. According to the World Bank then, 77 percent of the world's income generating wealth in the 21st century is intangible. And it should be no surprise that according to this report, the key intangible forms of wealth are the rule of law, and education.
The World Bank report is echoing what the eminent Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, Lester Thurow, said here last June at the MIT Pan-Arab Forum. As he put it, “The need of the hour is to focus, not on natural resources but on the knowledge revolution.”
In short: Education matters.
Success in the new global economy of the 21st century requires education. But what sort of education? Technology is certainly crucial. It is instructive, however, that at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most famous technology institute in the United States, every one of its undergraduate engineers, biochemists and computer scientists is required to take eight courses in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Why are these non-technical courses required of technology students? Because as the MIT catalogue states: “Today’s challenges are global and interdisciplinary.”
It is easy to translate the message about challenges into situations people will face. In the twenty-first century, we need people who understand different cultures--who can appreciate and respect the Japanese society's eagerness to avoid confrontation and disagreement, just as we need people who can appreciate the sophisticated trading techniques and the tremendous, jostling, shoving, shouting, competitive atmosphere among those who deal in oil futures in New York.
Moreover, as the automobile industry in the United States has learned the hard way, the Japanese have approached the manufacturing process differently. Japanese factories place far more emphasis on mutual respect between workers and management than is the case in the United States, so now American auto manufacturers are trying to remake themselves following the Japanese style.
Just one more example: Almost thirty years ago, the Palestinian expatriate and Columbia University professor, Edward Said, made a powerful case, well supported by history, that the West’s startling, misguided, naïve misunderstanding of Arab culture has done untold harm both in the West and in the Middle East, generation after generation even into the present time.
In other words, in some measure, education is needed for any one who wants to be involved in the global economy, because although technology has eliminated boundaries, or in the phrase of one economic commentator, the new economic world is flat, each of us still live in societies as varied as the weather around the world.
Let me introduce an irony--if our only educational focus, however, is on material success--wealth and riches—that is, if we structure education only in terms material success, then we are bound to fail.
That observation that pursuing gain at the expense of all else will amount to failure is one I would like to dwell on just for a few minutes. I am willing to accept the possibility that I am wrong-- pursuing wealth may bring happiness in its highest form. But I think as educators one of our responsibilities is to test that proposition. We must not only test that proposition, we must craft ways in which students are enticed into testing that proposition as well.
I use the word enticed advisedly. In the United States it is clear in the current climate most students come to college preoccupied with getting that education which will get them the best jobs, whether the job is doctor, or lawyer or engineer or investment banker or research scientist. And the challenge in America is to figure out ways to get students to think beyond their material well-being, and to think beyond their immediate self-interest.
One way to begin to educate students is to somehow compel them to reckon with first principles. Goal oriented students may not automatically ask about the meaning of life, but that is exactly what I am talking about. As educators we have the upper hand, but we have to conceal our authority in a velvet glove. For example, to create those people who will be leaders in the global economy, we need to create people who are sensitive to different cultures, curious about different mores, and sympathetic to differing world views.
Conceivably one way to approach this sort of education is by making a list of books all students should read. There are hundreds of such lists, and American academics delight in making them. But I am going to suggest another approach, one that is often linked to the University of Chicago. That university has an astonishing record of producing Noble Prize winners, either as faculty members or as former students. Chicago is also famous for its general education program. And the program most often described is the one prescribed in the 1930s by its president then, Robert Hutchins. Hutchins heaped scorn on Chicago’s general education courses at the time, deriding them for doing no more than drilling facts into students. He opined that information when it is simply pored into students will then pore out almost immediately. Students, he thought, were as porous as sieves. Instead of poring in facts, Hutchins prescribed a way of engaging students by having them encounter great works of philosophy, literature and science.
One goal is to entice -- there is that word again -- to entice students into encountering the intellects of other cultures, and the intellects that invite us to reconsider our own most heartfelt assumptions. Let me give one example of how Hutchins’ theories play out. I used to teach first-year students in a general education course in which the first reading was the novella, “The Death Of Ivan Illyich,” by the famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Forgive me if you know the story. But let me repeat it.
Tolstoy begins by describing the funeral of Ivan Illyich. We learn that Illyich had been ambitious, had married a woman from an aristocratic family, had become a lawyer and then a judge who had worked his way up the system. Finally his ambitions were realized, he had become all he had dreamed of being, an eminent and important person. Then Illyich fell off a ladder; a lingering illness and then his death followed. The initial “disconnect” comes early in the story, just after Illyich’s associates leave the funeral.
Obviously unmoved by the death of a colleague, his associates and would-be friends, go straight from the funeral to play a card game. For Tolstoy, clearly, the card game sums up what we are to make of Ivan Illyich--his life was about winning and losing, but about winning and losing a game of life as meaningless as a game of cards.
Tolstoy then, treats us to a fuller account of Ivan's life--and of his dying. Ivan realizes his life had been meaningless, his trophy wife is portrayed as bored with Ivan’s illness and then annoyed by it. The only redeeming character is someone who was not successful at all, a peasant who is hired to care for Ivan as he slips into death. As he lies dying, Ivan realizes that that peasant has a dignity, a meaning to his life, that for all his success, Ivan never, ever had.
This text will not help anyone do business with Russians, beyond, perhaps providing the basis for a conversation or two. But I am suggesting that that novella, if it is taught in a way that first compels students to read it, and then to comes to grip with it, will, indeed, suit people for the 21st century.
Students need to be enticed into reading it; one way we all can do that is to surrender some of our classroom authority, making the students responsible for bringing questions to us. And in the end, we are asking students to figure out what Tolstoy is telling us. And it is such a famous story in part because his point is obscure, but in part, in the contrast between the meaninglessness of the card players and the dignity of an uneducated peasant caring for a dying eminence, we see Tolstoy's suggestion that life acquires meaning only if we think in terms other than measuring our life by the wealth or the titles we might accumulate. The challenge is to find ways to have the students read Tolstoy and reach their understanding of him on their own.
Let me turn to another example, because my point is that general education occurs in the process, in the process, not in the information we might present. Let me describe a little more of the process. At Ursinus College, a college famous mainly for its science and pre-medical studies, we have all our first-year students start their college educations by reading Gilgamesh. It is important not only because it is the oldest literary text in the world, or because it is from the fertile crescent formed by the Tigris and Euphrates, it is important because it too, like Ivan Illyich, is the story of someone confronting his mortality, and it is the tale as well of the connectedness of human beings, it is the discovery of friendship, of the rewards of caring, one for another. To American 18-year-olds, the Gilgamesh is mysterious and foreign; and then in the story of the flood and the parallels with the Garden of Eden it is also shockingly, and startlingly familiar, echoing stories in the Bible and the Torah.
But like Ivan Illyich, it is a mainly a story to get students thinking—and such vivid lines as the advice to Gilgamesh to forget dreams of immortality in order to “cherish the little child that holds your hand,” such advice can become the material for a whole class period of discussion. Indeed some 460 18-year old students in groups of 16 were discussing Gilgamesh at Ursinus less than a week ago. One colleague told me his students even got into an intense and heated debate about whether Gilgamesh is the world’s first tragic hero.
Well I say that, “And by now you are thinking, Oh, come along, sure, your students really read Gilgamesh? Who are you kidding, you come from the land of 500 TV channels, of thousands of video games, of iPhones, tivos , iPods, cars, jet skis and skate boards. Sure, students really read? Strassburger, you are kidding yourself.”
First, let me confess, I have never been a great discussion leader. But by working with faculty colleagues who are, I have learned a little, so if we want to break into student habits and get them to read, part of the challenge is for all of us to work together, sharing one another’s best ideas about how to provoke students into doing the reading, letting each other know what works and what does not. As faculty members, we need both the humility and confidence it takes to learn from one another, sharing our successes but describing our failures as well. That humility and confidence that makes the dialogue work is what can enable all of us to get our students to dig into their learning. And if we learn from one another, Yes we are able to get our students to read.
Unfortunately, conversely, as we all know, provoking some students into talking is all too easy. So another part of the challenge of engaging students in reading and reflecting is the task of having students move beyond giving us their opinions and learning how to backing up their points or their observations by referring to specific lines or sentences in the texts we are studying. This is crucial. If your students are anything like American students, there will be one or two in almost every group who are full of opinions, and want their opinions to hold sway. Sometimes it is a matter of asking simple questions.
To that end it useful to look at dialogues, particularly those of Plato. Plato’s dialogues are so useful not only for what Plato is telling us directly, but also because so self consciously he is setting out the search for truth via conversation as a human good in its own right. In every Platonic dialogue there is one of those students who is full of himself and absolutely certain he knows more than anyone else. And then Socrates asks his questions. A perfect example of the model is Plato’s Euthyphro. There Plato describes Socrates questioning Euthyphro, a young man who wants to send his father to death. The son is sure that sending his father to death is something the gods want him to do. Through a series of questions Socrates is asking how anyone can be sure of what the gods want.
Well, during the course of the dialogue Socrates gets Euthyphro to agree that all the gods, every one of them, unite in one teaching, that each and every god that Euthyphro can think of teaches us to love our families above all things. So Socrates’ question becomes: “Can gods command us to kill that which they have also taught us to love?”
To illustrate how I think such education can work, let me describe teaching the Euthyphro to a group of 16 eighteen-year-olds.
When I taught this dialogue it happened immediately that one student asserted there was, in fact, nothing to talk about. She insisted that if someone declares that her god has told her something, then none of us have any way of challenging that claim.
Another student wanted to talk about why different sects of the same religion, as was the case for so many years among Christians in Northern Ireland, would kill each other. But through some cajoling, finally another student suggested that we all look at the way Socrates examined the son and how through questions Socrates got Euthyphro to agree that the all the gods at all times teach us to love our parents. In the class we then focused in on just those few lines of the dialogue, rereading them aloud. Finally, we were ready to consider whether we could draw any conclusions. And there was a conclusion: Plato’s punch line is, if all the gods teach all of us to love our parents, then any given god would not actually tell us to do something against the will of the gods such as kill our father.
In sum Plato forces us to think about how we might sort out competing beliefs or competing ideas of truth and piety.
Like all Platonic dialogues, this one is leading us to conclude that ”Reason,” reason with a capital “R,” that reason, can be used to determine if the gods are speaking to us, or if we are merely deceiving ourselves into thinking the gods are on our side. It clearly demonstrates Plato’s attachment to the idea that reason, and reason alone will ultimately tell us what is good.
Let me add that after that session, as I was thinking about the flow of our discussion in class , I was about to congratulate myself for having us grasp Plato’s conclusion about our human need to depend on reason as a way of discovering important truths when a Hindu student came up to me and said she resented the way I had run the class, and resented Plato even more. That brought me up short. But after we talked, and I reached an understanding of her perspective, she consented to start the next class. Her point was simple, Plato makes two assumptions which no one in the class had challenged, least of all me.
First, we assumed that Reason is the source of truth, that reason tells us whether the gods are right or not. Second, we assumed that there is a fixed, natural order to things—that families at all times and in all societies are to be venerated.
And she wanted us to consider that in her religion, Hinduism, there are truths that we cannot figure out by reasoning, that our oneness with the whole is more intuitive than rational.
She was absolutely right on both counts: Plato does venerate reason and he does assume there are fixed, unchanging truths and fixed unchanging principles governing human affairs. Her contribution enabled us to move to another level of understanding, one that stood us in great stead when we read the Bhagavad Gita.
So there is room for being cautious about taking Plato too literally, But even so, for almost any and all works we read, Plato gives us a wonderful model for how to get young people, not just the young people of Athens of 2,500 years ago about whom Socrates was concerned, but young people every where today, to become more reflective.
I hope that in sum, is an intelligible description of one American version of general education. Now let me add a further point: there is a powerful reason there is so much emphasis in the United States on general education, whether at MIT, or the University of Chicago, or at Ursinus. The reason is this: the model I have been describing is seen as a way of addressing the bifurcated nature of American society. The creed of individualism so deeply ingrained in American life produces a creed of self-interest, of pursuing the main chance, of even a gospel of greed. Yet as a European visitor Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out 160 years ago, individualism can become cancerous, it can become a degenerative ideal, if it is not offset by idealism, by a concern for the welfare of others, by reference to the state of the world we will leave behind, by a thought about how to make the world better for our children and our grandchildren.
So perhaps I should have come right out and said in the beginning, one reason to do general education has nothing to do with the global economy, nothing at all to do with the global economy. I think there is no better description of the challenges facing us in the 21st Century than that of Vaclav Havel. A playwright before he became the first president of the Czech Republic in 1988.
In a 1995 address, Havel assessed the state of global civilization. He observed what you all understand so well: we have, in so many respects, become a single world civilization. And Havel noted all the science and technology that made this possible, citing the discovery of the atom, DNA, television and the computer.
But after surveying all the material progress of the last 50 years, Havel asked a simple question: is human responsibility failing us? He argued that the main challenge we face--the main threat we must wrestle with--is not technological. As he said then, “the main task in the coming era is something else: the need for us to foster a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility.” Our reason, he argued--which is to say science and our analytical abilities--our reason has wrought wonderful technological advances. But he said that is not the issue in the 21st century. The issue, as he declared in his famously simple direct language, is a single idea: Our Conscience must catch up with our reason. Our Conscience must catch up with our reason.
It may seem odd for me to be saying this to you, coming from the most materialistic society in the world, but I should add that America is a society that has always been of two minds. Material progress is wonderful, to be sure, but there is also a strain of American idealism, embracing the ideals of caring for and about others, of seeing ourselves knit and woven into the fabric of a society larger than ourselves, a society in which caring about and helping and serving others also matters. And I understand these ideals are central to Islam as well.
Beyond the needs of the global economy, then, general education can invite students to think about how they will find meaning in their lives and the paths they might pursue that will knit them into the larger fabric of humanity. You declare that part of your mission is to produce graduates who will have the leadership potential to make the fullest possible contribution to the development of the community for the good of all its people.
We could have no higher calling, nor no more pressing obligation, at any institution of higher learning, than to aspire to produce graduates who will contribute to the good of humanity. By having students engage in being human, exercising their reason, their powers of analysis and their ability to reflect, change their minds and compromise, I believe we all can produce such graduates in full measure. And as we do, the world will be a better place. Thank you.