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Commencement Address
Harvard University
Neil L. Rudenstine
President of Harvard University
June 10, 1999
AS DELIVERED
Now, at the end of this century, we are in the midst of another major transformation, with a number of challenges that parallel those of Eliot's generation. I want to talk briefly about just three of these, and I'll begin with a glance backward.
We do need to try to imagine how small and how local a place Harvard was when Eliot began his tenure in 1868. There were just 450 undergraduates. Our three graduate schools (combined) had barely the same number, for a grand total of around 875 students--about the size of a modest suburban high school today. Close to 90 percent of our undergraduates came from New England and the Middle Atlantic states. There were fewer than 10 students from abroad. And there were no educational opportunities for women.
By 1899, a great deal had changed. The total student population of Harvard had jumped from 875 to 2,300. More students were coming from distant parts of the nation. Radcliffe College had been established, and was closely linked to Harvard. We were-- institutionally-- very much "on the way."
Even more sweeping, the whole approach to teaching and learning was being redefined. It's difficult for us to imagine how rudimentary so much of the College curriculum was at that time: no introductory laboratory courses in the sciences, and a notorious course on plane geometry--at the end of which the undergraduates carried out an elaborate ritual that ended with a mock-burial of Euclid and a real burial of all their texts. There were "recitation classes," based on memorization and regurgitation. The majority of the curriculum was required--with scarcely any variation, from year to year.
By the 1890s, all of this had a new look. Recitation groups were turning into discussion groups. Eliot's famous free elective system gave students the ability to choose the subjects they most wanted to pursue--from a larger and larger gourmet menu--because Eliot was expanding the curriculum and infiltrating more and more fields of knowledge into his course catalog, from Mandarin Chinese to art history to the new social sciences. In addition, the lively "case system" had recently been introduced by Dean Langdell at the Law School.
Eliot could report, by 1899, that a major emphasis at Harvard was now being placed on what he called the "Socratic method." The process of inquiry--of exploring alternative methods and interpretations--had become as important as the sheer transmission of knowledge. By "asking a sudden question," said Eliot, "the...[teacher] may keep a large class [continually] on the alert." Eliot's fundamental aim was to keep the entire University on the alert.
Henry Adams's innovative seminars in history at Harvard were an excellent case in point. He turned his undergraduates loose to do genuine research on special topics. "They worked," said Adams, "like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic society; no difficulty stopped them; unknown languages yielded before their attack...as they chased] an idea through [as] dense [a] thicket of obscure facts as they were [ever] likely to meet in later life."
Students were no longer relatively passive receptacles--listeners and memorizers who broke out in only occasional, brief bouts of feverish thinking. They were becoming more probing, energetic learners who were challenged to make the best possible use of their otherwise dormant cerebra.
Finally, the most dramatic change during Eliot's presidency was the full creation of that human and technological system which we now call the university research library. The catalyzing factor was the development of inexpensive book publishing on a mass scale, due largely to the 19th-century discovery that wood pulp could provide a cheap, inexhaustible supply of paper.
Suddenly, it was possible to unleash vast numbers of affordable volumes, filled with information, disinformation, facts, conjectures, errors, wisdom, and absurdities on virtually every conceivable topic.
The net effect was to revolutionize research and teaching. Many more subjects could now be attacked--sometimes mutilated--without respite. In a short period of time, students were being provided with long reading lists. Genuinely demanding term papers began to be assigned, and these made it possible to integrate teaching, research, and learning in ways that were simply not possible before.
This transformation--with its great flood-tide of books and journals--also produced its fair share of anxieties. People wondered what would prevent students from disappearing into the stacks for days on end, pursuing a subject from volume to volume, shelf to shelf, never to emerge again from the dark recesses that apparently swallowed them up without a trace. Meanwhile, a public health treatise warned that excessive solitary reading could induce "a susceptibility to colds, headaches...heat rashes, gout, arthritis, asthma, apoplexy... migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy."
People were advised to read only when standing up, and to wash their faces frequently with cold water.
Most of all, it was feared that excessive reading would make people socially dysfunctional--that it would take the place of direct human contact and lead to a society composed mostly of certified misfits. Let me summarize--briefly--what the enormous changes were at Harvard a century ago. The institution grew rapidly. It also became much more national in its reach. Many more fields of knowledge were established. A powerful new pedagogy began to connect teaching and research that stressed inquiry, exploration, discovery, and new learning. Graduate and professional education expanded. Harvard was no longer a small college with a modest sprinkling of advanced studies around the edges. It was well on the way to being a major university with a stronger and more effervescent college at its center. There is not time today to describe even a fraction of the great transformations now taking place at Harvard, or in higher education more generally. But let me single out just a few points.
First, like the library system of President Eliot's day, the new information technology systems are already producing massive amounts of new information, on-line texts, and new materials in other media--including video and sound. One order of business for us, therefore, is to solve several problems similar to those that surfaced a century ago: how to help people find what is actually available and what they need; how to use the new media and information to improve courses; to strengthen teaching and research simultaneously; and how to decide what and how much we should do in the field of distance learning, where many for-profit organizations and some universities are already offering not only courses for credit, but entire degree programs, on-line, to people in various locations across the country.
Let me say that I do not believe that distance learning will ever become a substitute for the kind of powerful residential undergraduate education that takes place face-to-face among outstanding faculty and exceptional students at Harvard. Nevertheless, even granting all that, our own educational model obviously has to take into full account the new technologies as we design our courses, as well as our methods of teaching and learning. And we have to do that very imaginatively and effectively, as well as carefully and selectively.
In fact, we are already well along the way. Our dormitories have long since been wired. Core courses have their own Web pages. Class discussions continue on-line at all hours of the day and night, as students pose questions to one another by e-mail, offer answers, sometimes scribble to their professors electronically, solve problem sets, and engage in the active and continuous process of Socratic learning and self-learning that President Eliot so prized.
Beyond integrating the new technologies into what we do on-campus, we also--as I suggested--face serious questions about the extent to which we should use these tools in order to reach out to students in distant places--whether in our own country or in the rest of the world, and how much to do on-line. Especially in the area of continuing and mid-career education--where distance learning offers the powerful possibility of engaging large numbers of advanced students and practitioners--Harvard will cease to be a leader if it does not begin to create excellent programs that maintain our level of excellence based in a residential system, while also extending our capacities.
A second major transformation arises directly from the sweeping changes in international affairs that have marked the last decade. Our world is now more fluid, more unpredictable, and more open to serious study than even a short while ago. Faculty and students can now search hundreds of archives, in many societies, that had previously been closed. They can interview individuals in countries where genuinely free expression was, until recently, largely impossible. And the opportunities for working cooperatively--with scholars, practitioners, and government officials from other countries--have greatly expanded and are obviously significant.
So, just as President Eliot worked at the end of the last century to turn Harvard into a national university, it is our job to strengthen and broaden Harvard's presence, and its work, in the international realm. We have, in fact, been a leader in international studies for a long while. We offer our students courses in more than 60 languages, literatures, and cultures, more than any other single university--while also inviting students and scholars from abroad to come to Harvard. For example, there are about 3,000 full-time students in residence--from approximately 150 countries and territories--at Harvard's different Schools and Faculties this year out of 18,000 students--1,000 from Asia alone. We have more than 33,000 alumni living abroad. And we are beginning to establish small-scale Harvard research centers in other parts of the world--one already in Hong Kong, another soon to be opened in South America, with others to follow.
Nonetheless, there is much more to do. How can we best increase and deepen our knowledge of the growing number of societies that have recently become important actors on the world's stage? How can we prepare our students best for the intensively internationalized environment in which they are already living? How can we work effectively with universities and other institutions abroad in order to help solve common intellectual, social, economic, and other problems?
We are already a university that exists partly "abroad" as well as "at home." The job of guiding this process--of managing a far-flung empire on which the sun never sets, and of sustaining quality at its highest level in all our international pursuits--that job, like the tasks facing us in information technology, is new in its scope, in its dimensions, in its rate of fast-paced change, and in its deep effect on so much of our entire educational program.
Finally, if one of the major academic tasks in the late 19th century was to create individual departments for new specialized disciplines, our challenge today is to develop more and better programs across the established disciplines, as well as across our different Schools and Faculties.
Bringing more parts of the University closer together, so that we can make much more of what we already have, is a crucial priority for Harvard's future--not as an abstract idea that has a nice ring to it, but because so many important academic and societal problems demand knowledge and expertise from several disciplines if they are to be addressed at all: questions related to health policy,public school education, economic development, international security, and the environment, as well as many subbjects in the liberal arts and sciences--all these issues require the combined efforts of people from different departments and schools, if we are to make any real headway at all in addressing them.
Our most recent dramatic example of such collaboration is the recent decision by Radcliffe and Harvard to combine their resources in a new venture that builds on the past, but is clearly designed for the future.
For one hundred years, Radcliffe College has been a leader in providing access to outstanding educational opportunities for women. At the time of its founding during President Eliot's tenure, the idea of a women's college positioned in close proximity to Harvard was--we must candidly admit--not exactly embraced with either rational or irrational euphoria.
Nonetheless, Radcliffe College grew and flourished--often against strong odds. There were difficult and even some stormy passages along the way. But the extraordinary achievements of Radcliffe, and its abundance of distinguished graduates, made a cumulative, definitive, and indelible mark on Harvard--and on this nation.
We have now reached a new stage when equally significant contributions will be made, with the creation of the new Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute will fulfill a number of important purposes. First, it will form a distinct community of advanced scholars and practitioners, representing a wide range of academic fields, pursuing work at the outer limits of knowledge. As an important part of its mission, the Radcliffe Institute will also provide absolutely unique resources and opportunities for the study of women, gender, and society. Institute members will bring fresh stimulus to all of Harvard's Schools and Faculties, while Harvard will contribute its own intellectual and other resources to help this important new venture to flourish.
At the time of this new beginning, looking toward the next century, I want to express my admiration and thanks--on behalf of all Harvard--for everything that Radcliffe has accomplished during its remarkable history. I also want to thank the Board of Trustees of Radcliffe College; its Chair, Nancy-Beth Sheerr; and President Linda Wilson for their boldness of vision, their trust, and their courage in deciding that our two institutions should hereafter be joined in perpetuity.
And now, as we do look forward to the inauguration of this next century, let me finally express my thanks to all of you who are gathered here today: for your presence, your interest, your advice, support, and generosity. We have, all of us, been given an incalculable treasure--this extraordinary University--to keep in our trust. Thank you for your constant commitment to it, your willingness to help sustain it, protect it, and guard it. Meanwhile, those of us on campus every day pledge in return to settle for nothing less than the best that can be achieved in education, in learning, and in service to society-- at home and around the globe.