by Henry S. Bienen, President of Northwestern University
May 5, 1995
Chairman Trienens, Vice Chairman Ryan, Chancellor Weber, members of the Board, distinguished guests, alumni, faculty, students, family, and friends, I accept these symbols with a full appreciation of their meaning, and I pledge my best efforts on Northwestern University? behalf.
It is with great pleasure and a deep sense of the honor done to me that I accept this appointment as the 15th president of Northwestern University. That my birthday falls on this day is an especially gratifying happenstance.
There is a pause between the announcement of a new president, the official start date, and the inauguration. However, there has been no pause in the press of business and in my commitment to build on the existing strengths of Northwestern in order to advance the work of this great University. Northwestern has many advantages as we build for the future.
At a time when institutions of higher education struggle with budgets and consider cuts, the careful administrators of Northwestern, supported by thousands of alumni, friends of the University, foundations, corporations, together with the strong leadership of the Board of Trustees, have formed a community that has enabled Northwestern to develop exciting departments and programs in the arts, humanities, and sciences and to strengthen its excellent professional schools.
Our advantages at this juncture are many:
We are privileged to have two splendid sites. The School of Law, Medical and Dental Schools, and University College are located in the heart of Chicago, one of the world? most dynamic cities. The Evanston campus is near to Chicago, allowing undergraduates to learn from the city? superb museums?o enjoy opera, an exciting symphony, and a variety of theater performances as well as exhilarating sports events. This great metropolitan region attracts first-rank students and faculty. An outstanding and diverse student body is able to attend Northwestern because we provide financial aid on the basis of demonstrated need. Our strong resource base and well-maintained and attractive physical plant, both dependent on prudent financial management, are crucial to bringing and retaining a faculty of leading scholars and teachers.
One of Northwestern University? strengths is its ongoing commitment to excellence in teaching, as demonstrated by the creation of the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, the establishment of imaginative new programs in musical theater and the Center for the Writing Arts, and the unique approach of the Integrated Science Program and the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. Innovative teaching is rewarded here.
We continue to create and develop new research centers in the life sciences and health policy, engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities. We have recently established the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities and also a new Center of International and Comparative Studies.
The vision of former President Arnold Weber, now chancellor of the University, the foresight of the Board of Trustees under the leadership of Chairman Howard Trienens, have been powerful influences during the past decade. My friend William G. Bowen, from whom I have learned a great deal, has written perceptively about the dynamics of governance by boards of directors and trustees. I can assure Bill Bowen that the Northwestern Board of Trustees exemplifies the traits he properly thinks are so critical for nonprofit institutions: a genuine understanding of the mission of the organization, empathy, and commitment, combined with the ability to think clearly and see the road ahead.
The leaders of a great university necessarily favor the future. And this is appropriate. Superb universities are a gift from one generation to the next. Without a strong financial base the University cannot accomplish any of its educational goals or maintain its commitments to donors, students, faculty, and staff. We must build the University? endowment. We spend only part of the income on the principal of endowment gifts, and we work closely with donors to honor the purposes of their gifts in perpetuity. Our decisions tilt towards the future in other ways as well. We insist that our infrastructure remain viable by budgeting for maintenance. We invest in new information technologies.
At the same time that we are future oriented, an outstanding university also looks to the past. We seek to preserve what makes us, if not unique, at least special. Among the traditions I have found at Northwestern that I especially value are the civility and openness among the faculty, and between faculty and administrators; a welcoming of new people and new ideas; the Midwestern values of hard work and straight forwardness; and a striving for excellence.
As I look at the past and the wonderful traditions here, while I formulate my goals for the future, I know very well that the responsibilities I formally assume today are great. The years immediately before us will not be easy. We are not in a cycle of expansion in higher education. The pressures to curtail spending on teaching and research are formidable. Federal and state budgets face many constraints. There are voices calling to reduce, or even eliminate, financial aid for students from relatively low-income families. There are plans to shift the costs of research by insisting that universities share more of the costs. Indeed, this has occurred already.
Northwestern, like other major private universities, depends heavily on funds from the federal government and on the support of the state of Illinois for financial aid and for research. Both are critical to our ability to maintain teaching programs and research in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We have a responsibility to manage our budgets prudently, and we will continue to do this.
On this occasion, however, I want to reassert the value and necessity of higher education for the good of society, for its long-term health, vitality, and creativity. A country that does not revere learning and cherish its educational institutions will soon be spiritually bankrupt as well as noncompetitive in the global marketplace.
Universities are the place where fundamental breakthroughs take place in astrophysics, in the medical and biological sciences, in engineering and in the material sciences. As we approach the millennium there are new challenges to the post-World War II consensus to expand the scope and deepen the commitment of governmental resources to research universities. The governing paradigm has stated that basic research be performed without thought of practical ends. In this new context, the research community is not well served by the former view within the university and government that stipulated a sharp division between basic and applied research.
The postulating of a sharp distinction between basic and applied research has not been an accurate description in many cases, although there are, of course, real distinctions to be made. For example, theoretical work in astrophysics has had profound effects on the possibility for new energy sources from hydrogen fusion. Work which seems impractical, ?ar out,?and even crazy in the sciences, and also in the arts, frequently is visionary to the eyes of the next generation. And work that was considered merely practical may bring vast new implications.
As Donald Stokes has pointed out, while Pasteur probed the mysteries of racemic acid in the spirit of pure discovery, he also did extraordinary applied research on anthrax and rabies, coming to a new understanding of microbiological processes while laying the foundation for an entirely new branch of scientific inquiry.
Frequently, investigators have been motivated both to understand process and to solve problems. They have been simultaneously, or in sequence, basic and applied researchers. The world can be changed from both; interactions occur in both directions, as each informs the other. Exciting scientific research, and innovative work in the arts, which will prove useful and productive in the future, cannot by its nature be predicted. Nor can it be bounded within a single institution or even within one nation.
President Woodrow Wilson said, ?e are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are our own. What affects mankind is irrevocably our affair.? This should be taken not as a call for American intervention everywhere but as a call for engagement with the world and for pursuit of knowledge about it.
The Midwest was once a bastion of isolationism in the United States. Today, Chicago is a cosmopolitan center, no less a window on the world than New York or London. Northwestern must be for this metropolitan region an increasingly central institution, furthering the understanding of global patterns of change as these are affected by the movement of trade, capital, and people, and speeded by new technologies of information transfer and communication.
Northwestern, like all great intellectual communities, has benefited from being able to include among its faculty, postdoctoral students, and graduate students, people from all over the world. A few weeks ago, one of our eminent scientists, Professor Manijeh Razeghi, invited me to her laboratory, the Center for Quantum Devices. Professor Razeghi is Iranian born, and she worked in France for many years. At this center, I met undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral students and professors, who worked together in learning and research teams. Different members of the research group explained the various operations of the laboratory. The students and professors were from France, Scotland, Russia, Poland, China, and the United States, and I am sure I am leaving out a few countries. Among the Americans were those whose ancestors had come from Latin America, Africa, China, and Korea. These were people who came to Northwestern to learn because it is an exciting intellectual community where pathbreaking research is being done. A great strength of the United States has traditionally been that we have been able to benefit mightily from the many talents and contributions of immigrants.
A university generates new knowledge and technologies while also acting as the storehouse for existing knowledge. A great university preserves and creates intellectual capital. Its books of credit and debit are not just those of its financial balances and budgets. We also try to take the measure of history? accounts and travails.
A great university transmits knowledge across time and across space with effects no less than those of the movements of capital within the international monetary system. A great university must nurture experimentation and originality; it must provide the opportunity for new investigations. New approaches in the humanities and arts foster creativity and expand ways of thinking about our universe, with ramifications that may prove to be as profound as those which followed from the invention of mirrors and telescopes, which allowed for the evolution of new paths in astrophysics and cosmology. Philosophical and mathematical reflections about the origins of the universe and the nature of time have also been inspired by the invention of lenses that literally enable us to peer backwards.
Northwestern has a long and distinguished tradition in the performing arts. Our Schools of Music and Speech and our departments in the arts are resources for the University community, for Evanston, for Chicago, and for the larger world. Northwestern people contribute to the great Chicago art institutions: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera, the Goodman and Steppenwolf Theatres, the Art Institute and many others.
The arts and humanities enable us to reflect upon who we are and where we hope to travel. The arts and humanities also have the capacity to change the world. They are under severe funding pressure and being attacked as elitist, or political, or removed from the mainstream culture. Universities have become places where the arts flourish, in part because they are relatively protected.
In a democracy we expect the people? representatives to determine aggregate levels of public funding in a world of competing demands. We should nonetheless insist that peer review govern the academic, scientific, and artistic judgments concerning merit and future promise. In a diverse society we should expect tolerance for our multiplicity, not conformity to a single vision of the world.
It is tempting but unwise for federal and state governments to threaten the existence of the arts and sciences by withholding what is needed for them to flourish. It would be similarly foolish for a university to ask the arts to ?ay for themselves.? To do so will diminish us, weaken our spirit, and narrow our vision.
There are those who are impatient with or intolerant of pluralism. There are those who see only the tensions and conflicts that are inevitable in diverse communities. We should instead focus on the distinctive singularity of persons, the richness of the individual differences that people offer one another.
Northwestern is privileged to attract outstanding people from the wide world, as faculty, staff, and graduate students. I hope that we can modestly increase the number of international students in our undergraduate body. Whether this occurs or not, we will continue to engage our students in the world. We do this through the study of foreign languages, cultures, and history. We do it by creating international studies programs and internships, by having distinguished international visitors lecture and teach.
Historically in America, universities have been a vehicle for social mobility for the newly arrived, whether defined by class, country, region, or ethnic origin. True, universities in the past practiced their own versions of exclusiveness, resorting to formal or informal quotas to exclude. In the second half of the 20th century in America, however, universities increasingly have become places where perceived merit governs access and advancement for both students and faculty.
At Northwestern we have not understood affirmative action to mean quotas and set-asides. We value diversity not because it has been mandated by government but for its own sake, because as a community we find differences exciting. If the political winds change, we say at Northwestern that we will keep our commitment to make Northwestern a hospitable place for women and men of different backgrounds. For me, the strongest argument for diversity is not the one of righting past wrongs, although we must always guard against subtle discrimination and exclusion. The argument for diversity is that we learn from difference. Exclusionary practices and policies deprive us both of understanding and of talent. At the same time, if people from different backgrounds come to Northwestern and sequester themselves, without interacting with those who seem different, both in and out of the classroom, then we have failed to make this University a place that furthers understanding of our society and the complex world. We have cheated ourselves.
Northwestern University cannot create a utopia. The conflicts and pressures from without, racial and ethnic tensions, generational differences, ideological and cultural divisions, will all influence us, and sometimes they will overwhelm our best attempts to create community and understanding here. But this is not cause for despair. It only signifies that we should work harder for mutual understanding.
I thank Northwestern University, the Board of Trustees, and the Northwestern University community for this opportunity to serve. I serve in partnership with my wife, Leigh Buchanan Bienen, who will provide her own great enthusiasm and abilities to this community.
A great university is an institution of excellence and, yes, of privilege. It must be guided by the highest standards of probity and decency. I will do my best to be guided by Northwestern University? own motto from Philippians 4:8.
Whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are just,
whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are of good report;
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things.
Thank you.