I am delighted to be here today in this my first address to the Arts & Sciences Council. I had a chance to visit with you last spring, and with many of you here over the summer, so I will not be starting de novo. But this is my first chance to address you as a member of the Duke community, albeit a member who is rather wet (dare I say flooded) behind the ears. One of the most pleasant things I had a chance to do this summer was visit with Ernestine Friedl, the Dean of Arts & Sciences from 1980-1985, and whose name decorates the Friedl Building. Ernie is, at age 91, learning French and to play the piano. We talked of our common interest in the relationship between classical languages and the contemporary world, hers in Greece and mine in India. We talked of the challenges to higher education today, including what it takes to be academically courageous and creative in this kind of economic environment. She has all the vitality that I hope to have at her age.
And in our conversation, I was struck by the power and the particularity of intellectual legacies. They are powerful because they have a way of enduring over time -- even disappearing and then reappearing decades later. Such legacies are particular because they are created by a specific set of institutional habits, and they require constant care and nurturance. Ernie came to Duke to chair the newly formed Anthropology Department. Before Ernie, this department did not exist. She founded the Women's Studies Department. Before Ernie, this department did not exist. Would these worlds have existed without her leadership? Perhaps they would have. But without her work, they have developed as they have, with the particularly Duke character that they have now. We could say the same thing about a department that was formed in our more recent memory: the Statistical Science Department. Such intellectual legacies are compelling in their complexity and diversity and their uniquely Duke character; perhaps because of this character, they require care and nurturance in order to thrive.
When I asked Ernie what helped her make these changes, she said, "I tried to listen to the questions underneath the questions." I call this "listening for the big ideas." This phrase is in part inspired by a Neal Gabler article (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html ) and circulated by Provost Lange, about how we at our own peril stop engaging with the big ideas in an era of specialization. Although I disagree with much of the article, I think we must always return, as a matter of daily practice, to what is at stake in our intellectual projects. Otherwise, we risk, as my colleague Hans Hillderbrand put it, becoming an academic field which may have vitality but which does not possess a vital mandate.
And, in continuing Ernie Friedl's and many other decanal legacies, I want, in this first year, to begin by listening -- listening for the big ideas that shape that delicate, complex, and yet vibrant ecology that makes up the Arts & Sciences at Duke. I would like to help shape it for the second decade of the twenty-first century, because I think it is an ecology deserving of protection and nurturance.
At Duke, we have the luxury of being at a place where the Arts & Sciences exist at the center of a research university. We know this, and we say it all the time. And, we know that there are other such places. But there are very few such places that have put interdisciplinary research at the center of their culture the way that Duke has -- or, as I think more accurately, interdisciplinary research in interaction with traditional forms of excellence. We have many faculty coming to us this fall, some of whom were hired two years ago and are just coming on now, while others were hired just last year. If you look at this 2011 list of our new faculty, we have leading scholars in the fields of dance, chemistry, cultural anthropology, economics, English literature, evolutionary anthropology, literature, political science, religion, sociology, and statistics. As I reviewed their research profiles, I discovered that almost all of them have interdisciplinary research at their work's core.
I begin with this point because faculty hiring is central to everything we do, how we dream about growing, and how we think about our fields changing. Faculty hiring is at the center of that ecology of ideas, that vibrant legacy that led to cultural anthropology and women's studies and statistics.
And faculty research and writing is key to that vitality of community. Many of you know that we have recently received rankings from Academic Analytics, a firm that looks at overall productivity of departments on a per capita basis. We will be sharing that data over the course of the semester, with the important caveat that these data are to be used to support the departments, not punish them, and that one can criticize the data as well. But that "National Ranking of Institutions Across all Programs" underscores the vitality of our community in a clear and encouraging way: Duke ranks fourth nationally among all research universities in research productivity -- above Chicago, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell, to name a few. While these data include all programs across the university, I wanted to point it out to you, because, in a significant sense, these data are you.
With this clear vitality in mind, let me delve more deeply into the themes I think are crucial for interdisciplinary leadership. As I see it, our job in Arts & Sciences is not to educate our students for our world, but rather to prepare them for their own. the culture that we create must anticipate the future, it must predict, with a fair degree of accuracy, what kinds of skills a person will need four years from now in order to make those everyday decisions that create a reflective, engaged, and meaningful life -- in other words, a life worth living and a life connected to the big ideas.
I have come to the sense that a twenty-first century education requires three skills, all of which I believe an Arts & Sciences education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels can uniquely provide. Those three skills are innovation, adaptation, and integration. We know these three words. We probably use them in our everyday decisions. In fact, I have chosen them because I have heard them in everyday conversations since my arrival at Duke. But I think they are uniquely situated to help us continue to be an international example in interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge.
Let me begin with innovation. Innovation is not only the capacity to discover new laws of nature and society. It is sometimes defined, and I think well defined, as a change that creates new meaning for the stakeholders in a culture. Our innovations therefore are, in the re-mix, information-laden culture we now live in, as much in new combinations of information, of data, of social networks, as in the discovery of new laws of nature. Both forms of discovery are important for innovation to occur. But we would have not included research into and about databases, and thoughtful consideration of the economies of scale in data collection, in our undergraduate students' research plans twenty years ago. Only a few of us would have considered such kinds of innovation as a skill which our students need to make everyday decisions in their lives. We do now. Additionally, at the graduate level, such skill in assessing and mining information is needed in almost all the forms of specialization Duke provides. We are teaching our students to learn to innovate and put those innovations to use in the world.
The second is adaptation. Adaptation is not only the ability to be flexible, but hte ability to imagine ways of thinking and working and living that have never existed before. On the one hand, this is a major challenge. It is a challenge because of what Tom Friedman in a recent article also circulated by Provost Lange, called the need for "The Start-up of You" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/opinion/13friedman.html?scp=15&sq=thomas%20friedman&st=cse). Students today need to respond to changing conditions more quickly than ever before. I put Friedman's point slightly differently: the life-script for students, both undergraduate and graduate, is barely legible today. In my parents' generation in America, there was a script, and those who did not follow it were the clear exceptions. In my own generation, there were larger numbers of people who departed from the script, but they knew the script from which they were departing. Today, it is harder and harder to discern what the script is. When students graduate from college, they increasingly must create their own job. When they receive a PhD, they increasingly must find ways to adapt their specialties into the marketplace that may not immediately see the relevance of that knowledge. So, adaptation becomes a paramount skill--indeed a crucial one in a world where everyday decisions have consequences that we can predict less and less. In the Arts & Sciences, we teach our students to imagine those ways of thinking and working.
And finally, we have integration. Integration is not only the ability to put things together, to make new connections, but also to find new ways in which knowledge fits into the world. We live in a world in which the discreet, siloed forms of knowledge remain some of the most powerful driving forces in our lives. Fields of knowledge confer identify, even on our undergraduates as they try to decide their major. Our students are constantly trying to pull those discreet forms of knowledge into a single whole. At the graduate level, the forces of professionalization have created a world where specialization has reigned for the last half century. That has brought us untold riches. But it sometimes has not helped the integration process. Yet, if that process of integration does not occur, young people are left with a kind of incoherent life, a jumbled story to tell about their lives that they do not want to tell. In the Arts & Sciences, we help students learn to make those connections and make their knowledge fit, as they build their lives.
Our capacity to teach these three skills of innovation, adaptation, and integration is in part based on the capital economy in which we must all exist. So, before I share my vision for where we might go in the future, I thought I would reverse the usual order of such addresses, where one begins with vision and ends with budget. (This is a deflationary process at best.) Instead, I would like to begin with where we are and to build a vision from there. This will be the first clue to the way I will operate, and the way I would like to operate with you as much as possible. I want to ask: what is the reality on the ground, and how can we build a vision from that reality? What are our limits, and how can we be creative with those limits? As a faculty member, I always appreciated knowing the nature of the ground, and I never appreciated being asked to do the hard work of dreaming and then being told that it was not possible after all. In most of the decisions I will make, I hope to address the following question: here is our landscape; how can we make something happen within it?
So, let us turn for a moment to the realities of economic capital, before we move to the exciting prospects of intellectual capital. The good news is that we have no deficit for FY 2010-11 and a balanced budget for 2011-12. And, we need to continue to find a way to maintain that practice throughout 2012-13.
We have been able to contain those costs through the maintenance of the new business manager program that is now holding at a steady state, by using staff more efficiently, and through retirements. We have ways to increase this income through four major venues: first is the Annual Fund, which has steadily increased, and our goal for this coming year is almost $1 Million more than it was for this past year. If you look at the numbers over time, you see a dip in 2008-09 and then a very remarkable rally from 2009-11, which we hope to continue to focus on over time. We have steadily increased the number of grants received in Arts & Sciences, which therefore increases indirect costs. And, 2010-11 was a significant increase in indirect costs compared to earlier years. Summer school and MA programs (to a lesser extent) continue to be a source of revenue, and I hope to focus on the former intentionally in the future.
I want to remind everyone that we are grappling with the same question that Dean Al Crumbliss explained to the faculty last year: How to deal with the structural deficit cased by the "walk-down" of A&S faculty from the Provost's Strategic Investment Plan (SIP) funds over the course of several years. A reminder of a critical point: faculty costs are more than just their salaries: faculty require space and building renovations, graduate students, start-up costs, and staff support. This year, we have made remarkable strides. Currently 24 of our 645 faculty are supported by the Provost and SIP funds, as compared to 35 faculty this past year. These 24 salaries will walk down onto the Arts & Sciences budget over the next 3-5 years, and this creates a structural deficit, which must be solved by faculty attrition.
So our challenge here is to do several things: First, we need to continue the walk-down from SIP funds. Second, we need to deal with the annual challenge of the funds we have committed in start-ups for faculty in space renovation, new lab equipment, and the like (a large fraction of which we have to raise ourselves in Arts & Sciences). Third, we need to find a way to fund, through our own resources, the Undergraduate Education programs, some of which are covered by SIP. Fourth, we need to continue to focus on faculty salary alignment. Fifth, we need to continue to contain costs developed by the Energy Conservation Committee, headed by Randy Smith, and to integrate that committee's recommendation for efficiency and sustainability more into our ongoing Arts & Sciences' work. We continue to work with the modified business manager and staff model to increase efficiency and to collaborate with Senior Associate Dean Sandy Connolly's leadership team to think about this model. I will also be reviewing with Ruth Day and ECASC the faculty poll on budget cutbacks and working with the Arts & Sciences Budget Advisory Committee to make our decisions.
Finally, in 2011-12, we have made some significant increased because of our slightly better, but still very much restricted budget situation. This year, we had a 3.0% merit pool for staff, we had a s.5% merit raise pool for faculty, and we invested in salary alignment, a principle about which I hope to be vigilant throughout the coming years. We have begun to move undergraduate research funding off of the Duke Endowment grant. As I know you will appreciate, we have reinstated faculty research accounts to 100%. We have also increased graduate student lines in Arts & Sciences. Al Crumbliss began this latter initiative as a way of making sure departments who did not receive searches in the last year continued to get support for research through graduate student lines. Furthermore, I am pleased to announce here that we have found funds to make a small increased to the Arts & Sciences Committee on Faculty Research fund. And, we will continue limited searched for new faculty, a point to which I will return later.
I want to pause here to say that this year we have done something else remarkable. During the downturn, Arts & Sciences was allowed to spend down its reserves to almost zero as a way of dealing with the financial exigencies that faced. No budget should have zero reserves. This is a precarious situation because it does not allow us any wiggle room for unexpected financial difficulties, something we can likely anticipate in this climate of volatility. So, one of our financial goals has been to replenish those rainy day reserved back to roughly 1% of our budget, and we have been able to do so. This improvement in our situation was partly due to extraordinary performance in the annual fund, and I want to thank Hank Woods (Assistant Vice President, Annual Fund), Jennifer Spisak-Cameron (Director, Alumni Giving), Heather Bennett (Director, Parents and Young Alumni Programs), Gayle Leezer (Director, Communications), and all their team for their invaluable work. In addition, we have had larger than expected enrollments in a number of our educational offerings. The vision and work of several offices need to be acknowledged for creating such an inviting environment and vital educational experience for students, and I urge you to join me in thanking Margaret Riley (Director, Global Education Office) and Paula Gilbert (Director, University Summer Programs).
This then is our larger picture: we are slightly better than we were last year, but we still exist in a volatile market and cannot count on being out of the woods yet. We can continue to hire, but in order to continue to address our structural deficit, we must continue to hire at a more modest rate than in the halcyon days of the mid 2000's. Our faculty search plan for 2011-12 includes 15 new hires. In addition to focusing on efficiencies, we will be vigilant about increasing our revenue streams and watch for those which we can build on a more permanent basis.
I would like to turn now to how we might think about criteria for hiring. Some of these criteria are a continuation of Al Crumbliss' priorities in this economic limitation, and some of which are new questions I would like to ask: How will we hire in this environment? First searches are allocated to assure renewal opportunities across departments. Second searches should include strategic departmental development plans and opportunities for departmental rankings advancement. Third, hires should include response to serious teaching needs. Fourth, hires should involve continuations of pending searches from 2010-11.
And here are my new questions: How might we work with interdepartmental hires (including at junior level) and interdisciplinary hires that advance big research questions of departments? Second, if as we cover our basic needs, could we continue to attend to the "unfinished business" of diversity? Third, as we cover our basic needs, could we also build faculty strength in global arenas, especially but not exclusively Asia, given our programs in these areas and the growing importance of nearly one-third of the world's population?
Let me turn back, now, to building our vision together from this particular reality. As I have listened throughout the summer, I have learned that there is concern about maintaining Arts & Sciences' identity as it grows to respond to educational challenges. It occurs to me that there are two important strong responses to this concern. The first is that Arts & Sciences is, at its very core, interdisciplinary. At Duke, we are on the only school which has more than one field of knowledge in its title, and therefore the assumption in our very name is that we move between disciplines (a non-trivial point). What if we lived up to the very name of our faculty and assumed connections, indeed interdependence, between these fields of knowledge? What if that were our intellectual mandate?
The second response flows from the first: that the Arts & Sciences are uniquely positioned to provide interdisciplinary leadership from within their resources. This summer I have been asking questions, and I will continue to ask questions throughout this year, about such possible leadership.
Let me being to outline a vision for interdisciplinary leadership with some important questions that have emerged over the summer. I have been working with Natural Sciences Dean Robert Calderbank on how Arts & Sciences can lead on interdisciplinary, university-wide computational initiatives. Robert expects the Provost to constitute a steering committee with representation across schools. The function of representatives on the steering committee would be to identify opportunities within their schools. We expect to see 5-10 proof-of concept studies to provide the steering committee with a window on what is possible. The idea is that the process is faculty driven from the ground up with the idea that in June 2012, when the steering committee reports, we have an actively energized faculty constituency. To take just a few examples, within Arts & Sciences we have a theme on Evolution coordinated by Allen Rodrigo, one on Social Networks coordinated by Jerry Reiter, and one on Art coordinated by Hans Van Miegroet. And we want to center our work on the big questions, such as: How does complex social behavior emerge from simple interactions? What makes a van Gogh a van Gogh? How do Duke students navigate our curriculum, or any students navigate any curriculum? We are just at the beginning stages of thinking how we might formulate this work, and we are interested in your participation and in making connections to Duke's other schools.
Second, I have been working with Social Sciences Dean Angela O'Rand on how Arts & Sciences faculty can build, using the leadership of the social sciences, on its traditional strengths in demography but expand out into the larger worlds of the sciences and humanities. This is an open invitation to all faculty to think about the Human Development Studies in Arts & Sciences. The idea here is that quantitative interpretive social sciences study lives across time and space increasingly in collaboration with the natural sciences and the humanities. Quantitative studies track lives using longitudinal survey data increasingly linked to biomarkers and clinical data and field observations requiring collaboration with computational scientists, ethnographers, health researchers, and others. Cross national studies of lives in time and place are compiling comparative views of the human condition requiring deeper understandings of cultural and historical differences. Here we think about the big questions too. For example, what are the impacts of childhood adversity in later well-being? What are the short and long-term impacts of disasters on the course of lives? What are advantaged and disadvantaged pathways to retirement?
In the realms of the humanities, I have been working with Humanities Dean Srinivas Aravamudan on how Arts & Sciences faculty, especially with the recent Mellon grant, "Humanities Writ Large," can continue to provide nationally and internationally new models for how humanities knowledge can be collaboratively produced. This grant funds Visiting Faculty Fellowships, Post-docs, and faculty from Liberal Arts Colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU's), which can be embedded in departments or tied to Humanities Labs or Emerging Networks. It provides Bridge Appointments for New Faculty, to jump-start new hiring in the humanities during a time of scare university resources. It supports Humanities Labs, constituting groups of faculty and students working together for one to three years in discipline-crossing research. These Labs employ pedagogical agendas strongly rooted in the humanities, and use spaces and equipment in Smith Warehouse designed to facilitate their work. The project will also fund Emerging humanities Networks, aimed at broadening the footprint of traditional humanities departments using a project-based structure that encourages cross-departmental collaboration. Finally, the "Humanities Writ Large" includes a rich component of Undergraduate Humanities Research and Library Partnerships, including a Humanities Academic Technology Consultant and two specialized library-trained Research Assistants. The big interdisciplinary questions here include: How do we understand cultures that have survived trauma, such as those studied in the Haiti Lab, and how do we exist across, within, and between human boundaries?
Notice that in each of these arenas, each division of knowledge is reaching out to the other divisions, and engaging with it, in a kind of lived interdependence of in intellectual gifts. It is in this spirit that I have engaged the divisional deans in a larger conversation in which I have asked each one to make a case for the other two divisions of knowledge, and the preliminary results have been intriguing indeed.
Moreover, curricular reform is being driven and supported by these kinds of "big question" intellectual discourses as well as the research interests of departmental faculty. The Department of Romance Studies, for example, is increasing the integration of language and culture, developing greater collaboration between language and literature faculty, organizing area studies, and teaching courses of interest to non-humanities majors. The Department of Biology has restructured its gateway courses and laboratories to focus on hands-on research and real world problems. The Department of Political Science has restructured its graduate curriculum to move away from historic national definitions and toward thematic interests (e.g., political institutions; political economy and development; and conflict, cooperation, and security).
With regard to setting an agenda for undergraduate education, I have held a half-day retreat with Deans Baker and Nowicki, in which we identified common goals in which Arts & Sciences can provide leadership and support across Duke's communities and schools. These include exploring "Graduation with Recognition" in Entrepreneurship (and by implication, Sustainability and Civic Engagement), strengthening science education to enhance the recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minorities (particularly those with 610-640 SAT's); planning strategically for future global education; exploring students' choices of majors and highlighting the accomplishment of lesser pursued ones; and leading teaching innovation. They also include: engaging faculty with the new residential house model; developing a stronger faculty-in-residence system; and working with the West Union design and development.
With regard to faculty development, I will be working with Senior Associate Dean Kevin Moore on a set of workshops for chairs on what the particular challenges of working with departments in this interdisciplinary environment are in recruiting, retention, and curricular planning. With Senior Associate Dean Willard and Professor Day of the Arts and Sciences Council, I have also been planning a series of weekly faculty conversations with twelve faculty, four from each of the divisions, on interdisciplinarity itself. This is one of many forms of collaboration with the Arts & Sciences Council in which I hope to engage. With Assistant Vice President for Development in Trinity College and Undergraduate Education, Colleen Fitzpatrick, I have been working on how we continue to build the nucleus fund before the start of the campaign, particularly focusing on raising funds for professorships as well as undergraduate education. And, with Senior Associate Dean Edward Gomes, I am working on making sure the roll-out for Sakai this semester is as smooth as possible. All of these colleagues have given me a wonderful sense of "life on the ground" at Duke, and I ask you too to help with this work by giving us your experience on the ground -- whether it is forms of interdisciplinary leadership from within Arts & Sciences, better ways to connect IT with the classroom, new forms of fundraising about which we may not have thought.
I have also been working with Chairs, meeting with each in a one-on-one session of about two hours, focusing on the following questions:
1. What do you see as the major intellectual strengths within your department or program, and what are the short-term and long-term challenges in hiring and retention to maintaining that strength?
2. What other strategies are needed, besides the primary ones of hiring and retention, to maintain these strengths?
3. What kinds of immediate challenges to building intellectual community does your department face?
4. What kinds of challenges to that community are implicit, but not on the surface yet, and how might you take steps to address them?
5. Who are your interdisciplinary collaboration partners in Arts & Sciences, and how has that shifted in the last ten to fifteen years?
6. What initiatives does your department or program currently sponsor to connect with neighboring Durham or the North Carolina communities outside of the university?
The results of these discussions have been extraordinary, and I have gleaned a wonderful sense of the possibilities for individual departments to engage with their fields, to become more extroverted in relationship to other fields, and to think about how, even at the departmental level, their scholarly work could intersect with public concerns. This kind of departmental extroversion is one of the major forms of leadership already being taken up by each department.
You will notice that I have said leadership and not ownership. I think this is a crucial distinction, and I think we need to think about this distinction as we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century. There will be times when ownership is essential, but there will be other times, and increasingly more of them, where leadership is the better metaphor. I think this is especially the case with Duke's interdisciplinary work. We remain the center of gravity at the heart of Duke, but both owning and leading and discerning when we should do one and when we should do the other.
In this regard, my meeting with the chairs has also shown me that, at all levels, a twenty-first century, administration also involves innovation, adaptation, integration. Such foci require a highly collaborative culture, the kind of culture that emerges in our professional networks on the web all the time. There is no reason why if we emerge with these networks in our research and teaching, we may not also think about this in our university administrative culture. I hope to engage Arts & Sciences Council in constant consultation; I have met with ECASC already, and I hope to have them, as well as other Arts & Sciences committees, as my eyes and ears on the ground. I hope to make most of my decisions about new initiatives as joint decisions, after a number of open fora and small group consultations with faculty that have a stake in the issues. And relatedly, I would like to explore new ways of viewing partnerships between faculty and administration in precisely this new collaborative tone.
And that leads me to an observation: I knew that this change in role from faculty member and director of a university center to Dean would involve many shifts in identity, but I did not realize it involved a change in name. These days I am less Laurie L. Patton than I am T. Allen Building. I like this new name, but it also has some limitations.
But, we teach our students not to use collective nouns if they do not accurately describe the situation. What would it look like if we tried to re-conceptualize such relationships just a tiny bit, so that the individuals emerge within the system? Because I came to work with scholar-administrators who inspired me, I continue to see how Deans at Duke have research trajectories of their own. In the Arts & Sciences team, we meet Mondays and Thursdays on a regular basis to address problems ranging from research accounts to sabbatical leaves to development concerns to IT issues to building plans and progress. The divisional deans meet one-on-one with the chairs on a regular basis. Here is what we worry about: are our promotion practices fair? Are salaries equitable? Are we meeting faculty technology needs now and creating a sustainable system for ten years out?
Examples of recent decisions we have grappled with include: how can we recognize a faculty member on the brink of international distinction who has not been adequately recognized? How can we make sure that a faculty member who wishes to retire can still follow a newly discovered research trajectory? How can we ensure an innovative classroom is adequately supported beyond a faculty member's start-up monies?
Innovation. Adaptation. Integration. Those are the words I would like us to think about as we go about making everyday decisions at both the graduate and undergraduate level, and in our collective lives of faculty and university governance. What does that mean on the ground? I am asking Lee Baker, as well as his staff and all the Divisional Deans, the Trinity Advisors, The Trinity Deans, and all the administrators in our offices to do several things. I have also had initial discussion with Jo Rae Wright about these words and their centrality in the second decade of twenty-first century education.
First, as we guide students in their decisions about undergraduate and graduate research, think about what kinds of innovations they are likely to encounter in that research, and ask them to study what kinds of changes will make the most meaning in the most people's lives. When in everyday situations we hear a colleague or student praise something that is new without explaining the nature of the newness, think about the research and teaching cultures of Duke University and ask them if those innovations are making a difference in people's lives.
Second, you all know what adaptation is, and perform it every day. You make the changes in the website, see the shifts in the registration process, and give advice to a student to adjust because they cannot get into the class they chose and encourage another opportunity will open up for them. I am asking my staff, as they build Duke culture, and asking you now, to move beyond the simple acts of adaptation that happen every day, and to reflect upon them more deeply. As I ask a student of colleague to adapt, am I teaching them a skill which they can transfer to other situations? In those everyday moments when either an undergraduate seems too fixated on the DV, or a graduate student too confident about a career path in which we can no longer guarantee them employment, can we transform those attitudes into a question about ways in which the adaptation can be used to build a life-script that is coherent, and a set of job applications that will nurture success and not failure? That is, after all, one of the definitions of a CV: the script, or the course of a life written down.
And third -- integration. Here, over the course of this summer, I have heard loud and clear from faculty and staff about the need to integrate all those things that are so important to us -- such as the Focus Program or civic engagement -- into the fabric of our classroom lives. And so I will be asking the Arts & Sciences staff, and am already working with Arts & Sciences staff, to make that integration happen -- whether it is through a newly integrative course that might be a follow up to the Winter Forum, or whether it is through a systematic set of reflections on how knowledge in the service of society can be better linked to the classroom. The next time you sigh when you encounter yet another undergraduate double major who seems to want to check things off of a list, remember that for them, even more than for us, the student's deeper project might be integration of those two forms of knowledge into some kind of coherent story. And that student lives in a world which makes integration especially difficult, where specialized knowledge tends to confer identity.
So, let us turn together to our everyday academic lives of this year with a focus on interdisciplinary leadership from within the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Let us strike a new educational key by focusing on innovation, adaptation, and integration. The building and maintaining of such an intellectual culture within Arts & Sciences have not been, and will not be easy. It will involve thinking about new forms of collaborative culture. It will involve strengthening a commitment to faculty development that moves beyond just numbers and works as well on deepening our professional profiles in teaching and research. Let us think about leadership as well as ownership.
Ernie Friedl also told me that she wouldn't recognize the departments she started now, some of whom exist in her building. But in a way, she said, "It doesn't matter. It matters that I started them." Ernie, too, was thinking about leadership and not ownership. She gave us a way to hold onto the questions, and in doing so helped to build a unique intellectual legacy. I think, if we stick to the principles above, and continue to ask the big questions in the midst of our specialized lives, we will not only create a community of intellectual vitality, but we will live out a vital intellectual mandate as well.