The strengths of the academic enterprise

In the Western world, 66 institutions have enjoyed a continuously visible identity since 1530. Among those 66 are the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man. What makes these 66 so interesting —and I owe the knowledge of this fact to our President Dr. Berdahl— is that the remaining 62 are all universities! It strikingly demonstrates that universities have a potential for "longevity", but we should not make the mistake of concluding that they are "immortal" or invulnerable, for they are not: if they have existed for centuries, that is because successive generations of scholars and students have nurtured them well and with devotion. It is the obvious task of the current generation to hand over to the next what it got from the previous one, and in order to do so well, we had better understand how the strengths of the academic enterprise are maintained most effectively. Hence my title.

But before I can turn to my topic proper, I must make a few introductory remarks lest I be misunderstood.

The first one is that when we move from one society to another, all important words subtly change their meaning, and in connection with today's topic I must mention: university, education, training, teaching, scholar, scientist, engineer, theoretical, experimental, and applied. This was brought home to me in 1968 at a conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. I worked at the time at the Department of Mathematics of the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and told at that conference that the official academic title our graduates earned was 'Mathematical Engineer", and most of the Americans began to laugh, because for them it sounded as a contradiction in terms, mathematics being sophisticated and unpractical, engineering being straightforward and practical. To give you another example, in the early 80's I learned that professors at Stanford University could use their grant money in the name of their research to pay someone else to do their teaching. When I heard that, I was shocked, when my wife heard it, she could not believe it, because we grew up with an academic culture in which teaching and research were considered warp and weft of the same fabric. In that view, a professor who does not get valuable inspiration from his own lectures and therefore does not regard his teaching as a precious experience, is just in the wrong business: he should teach at a vocational school or work at a research laboratory. So please, keep in mind that all important words I use may mean something different from what you are used to.

My second warning remark is that I shall refuse to discuss the academic enterprise in financial terms. The first reason is that the habit of trying to understand, explain, or justify in financial terms is unhealthy: it creates the ethics of the best-seller society in which saleability is confused with quality. The other day we had to discuss the professional quality of one of our colleagues, in whose favour it was then mentioned that one of his Ph.D.s had earned lots and lots of money in the computer business, and few people seemed to notice how ridiculous a recommendation this was. We also know that the financial success of a product can be totally independent of its quality (as everyone who remembers for instance the commercially successful IBM360 should know). The second reason for my refusal is that the value of money is a very fuzzy notion, so fuzzy in fact, that efforts to understand in financial terms always lead to greater confusion. [Remember this, for it is quite likely that this afternoon will give you the opportunity to observe the phenomenon. Note that money need not be mentioned explicitly for the nonsense to emerge, a reference to "the taxpayer" can do the job. The role of "the taxpayer" then invariably leads to the conclusion that of State Universities at least the undergraduate curriculum has to be second- or third-rate.] The final reason for my refusal is that the habit appeals to the quantitative mind and I come from a culture in which the primarily quantitative mind does not evoke admiration. [A major reason that we considered Roman Catholics to belong to a lower class was precisely their quantitative bent: they always counted, number of faithful, number of days in purgatory, you name it.....]

My third remark introduces you to the Buxton Index, so named after its inventor, Professor John Buxton, at the time at Warwick University. The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2,for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner. The party with the smaller Buxton Index is accused of being superficial and short-sighted, while the party with the larger Buxton Index is accused of neglect of duty, of backing out of its responsibility, of freewheeling, etc.. In addition, each party accuses the other one of being stupid. The great advantage of the Buxton Index is that, as a simple numerical notion, it is morally neutral and lifts the difference above the plane of moral concerns. The Buxton Index is important to bear in mind when considering academic/industrial co-operation.

My fourth and last introductory remark draws attention to a whole spectrum of techniques by which one generation transmits its insights and abilities to the next. At the one extreme we have the techniques of the guilds which treat their insights and abilities as valuable property, as a treasure to be kept secret. Their technique for protecting the secrecy is by keeping the secret knowledge unformulated; therefore, the apprentice has to join a master for seven meagre years, during which he can absorb the craft by osmosis, so to speak. The university is at the other end of the spectrum: it is the professor's task to bring the relevant insights and abilities into the public domain by explicit formulation. It is no accident that the universities as we know them started to flourish after the art of book printing had been established. There is more to be said about that spectrum of educational techniques, but I shall not do so now; I mentioned it to remind you why the absence of secrecy, or, more positively formulated, openness and honesty are characteristics that touch the heart of the academic enterprise: a university that hides or cheats can close its doors. The essential role of openness is something to remember when considering academic/industrial co-operation; it should also be remembered whenever a government invents reasons of national security or prosperity for the prevention of free publication of the results of academic research. Universities are not part of the nation's security organisation, they are not the nation's research laboratory either: they are the nation's universities.

In passing I would like to mention that in a rather different sense such openness is a precondition for academic survival. Just for being different and doing things the uneducated cannot understand, the academics are hated and feared, vide Socrates, executed in 399 BC, Archimedes, killed in 212 BC, and, more recently, Hypatia, AD 415 barbarously murdered by a Christian mob. The original Oxford Colleges were buildings fortified in order to protect the students against the rabble, and if you think that that is old hat, I refer you to the DDR or the People's Republic of China of only 25 years ago. It is a miracle whenever, these days, the academic world is tolerated at all; personally I am convinced that what tolerance there is would completely disappear, were the academic world to become secretive.