Speech delivered by Cherry Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of
Engineering and Applied Sciences at the Second Drexel ELATE
graduation on March 15, 2014.
CHANGE AGENTS
I’m pleased to be here today to celebrate the graduation of the second
class of ELATE fellows – this year there are 18 of you: Alexis, Jennifer,
Naomi, Alisa, Molly, Julie, Kimberly, Kristi, Margaret, Diana, Janice, Ratna,
Elena, Patricia, Margery, Anne-Marie, Hong, and Sara. Congratulations!
Having looked at the ELATE syllabus, I’m sure you worked hard in this
program, while at the same time carrying on a full time normal workload at
your institution. I could tell this by seeing your presentations and posters
on your institutional action projects earlier today.
I’d like to reflect a bit on how I see leadership in The Academy.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but being a leader/manager in academia is
much more challenging than being a faculty member in academia. If any of
you has spent time in industry, you might notice that it’s more challenging
managing in academia than managing in industry.
I can tell you from experience managing in three sectors: first as manager
in various roles leading up to Sr. Vice President of 500 brilliant scientists
and engineers at Bell Labs in industrial R&D, next as deputy director for
Science and technology of 3500 fantastic scientists and engineers at a
Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and now as a dean for the last 4 years of
85 superior faculty members in a new school just launched 6 years ago at
Harvard - the complexities of academic leadership in a major research
university have been definitely the most challenging for me.
Why is leadership in academia so challenging?
The modern US research university has as its core a faculty who are
responsible, in the very important model of shared governance, for
maintaining the standards of excellence in academics – the faculty search
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and vote on promotion and hiring in their ranks; they are responsible for
the curriculum and for championing academic freedom, for leading the
research and scholarship, and for admission and credentialing of students,
as well as for maintaining academic and research integrity.
Your role as a faculty leader/manager and the role of the administration in
general - is to provide the needed infrastructure and support - and some
constructive leadership, nudging, guidance and feedback – to allow the
faculty and students and their learning and research to flourish. Thus you as
faculty leader are a coach - not a general, not a dictator. I like to think of
the analogy of the academic leader to a conductor of an orchestra of gifted
musicians. You must be respected, a great musician yourself, a coach to get
every instrument playing in a coherent fashion to create beautiful music and it helps to be humble!
As you rise up in the management ranks – from department chair to dean
to provost to president - the orchestra becomes layered, tiered, dare I say
organ - piped? and the music more complex. Your orchestra is playing next
to several other orchestras – and your job is to bring all of them in
harmony. Often they are not. Your role is to find the common principles
and vision that motivate all the musicians and all the other conductors to
work together rather than to degenerate into cacophony.
Welcome to leadership in academia!
You are all change agents! If you don’t think of yourself as a change agent
you need to start thinking this way. Your institution needs you to be a
change agent, though many in your institution – including most of the a-formentioned faculty, and probably more than a few administrators - will be
allergens to any change. I want to take some time today to encourage you
in your endeavors.
First, why does higher education need change agents?
There is a sea change happening in the Academy today: Clayton
Christianson has called technology a disruption to the institution of higher
education. He may be right, but in my opinion, even if technology is not in
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itself an existential threat to us, all higher education institutions are being
hit by several winds - hurricanes? - of change all at once: over the last
decade, these have been building up to a crescendo ( keeping the music
analogy ):
How we have been doing teaching for the last several centuries is changing
rapidly:
 There is an emerging emphasis on new pedagogy driven by
neuroscience and data from psychology on how humans learn; and
also how to better assess learning outcomes, not just delivery of
information to students;
 MOOCS are just starting to create universal access to some aspect of
higher ed; emerging technology in education may soon be able to
create a quality on-line educational experience and technology can
increasingly be useful in the campus classroom – there is a lot of
experimentation going on;
 The world IS flat, and developing economies are focusing on the
need for support of R&D and higher education in their countries –
and of course, science and engineering are truly international and
being done well nearly everywhere in the world – the US certainly
has no monopoly on higher education anymore;
 More jobs in our society require a higher education degree and at
the same time the cost of higher education is rising faster than the
GDP;
 We have a growing need for inclusiveness and embracement of
diversity in the US- we can’t afford to lose 50% of the population, or
30% of the population, but many women and underrepresented
minorities will need special encouragement, mentoring and financial
aid in order to give them an opportunity to succeed in STEM;
 There is a continuing need for a formative experience in the 18-22
year old population, but this is coupled with the need for - and
growing importance of - life-long learning;
How we have been doing research for the last 50 years is also changing:
 R&D in industry has changed to focus on the very short term in the
US – academia has to step up to perform the long term research in
STEM fields that used to be done by Bell Labs and other major
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




companies that is of importance to our national economic
productivity;
For breakthroughs in science and engineering there is emerging a
strong need to break down disciplinary boundaries – something Phil
Sharp has called “convergent” research, where physical science and
engineering meet life science and social science head on. Nearly
every major new field of science and engineering requires
collaboration; we must come out of our traditional silos;
Federal funding for research is stalling;
As a result of the Affordable Care Act, clinical medical facilities –
teaching hospitals- within academia will soon not be able to use
clinical revenues to offset administrative costs.
The publishing industry and the manner in which we publish our
research is undergoing a complete upheaval with open access and
requirements for data and sample sharing.
The regulatory environment is becoming more and more onerous.
Each of these things would have a major effect by itself on our institutions,
but compounded together they add up to a perfect storm: we don’t have a
sustainable business model in the long term, and we are under severe
competitive pressure and must change in many ways in the short term.
Because of these external pressures, our institutions need to start doing
things differently. We are not living in the 14th or even the 20th century
anymore. But as institutions, we don’t necessarily know exactly what to do
- we need to foray into the unknown territory with strategic experiments.
This is frightening to faculty, in particular, who may be very creative and
bold in their scholarly domain, but at heart just want to keep doing things –
such as teaching - the way they did when they were in their early career
stages – after all that’s how they became so highly successful in the first
place.
And humans and especially those who have been successful in the past do
not like to change at all. So being a change agent is not easy.
There is a large literature on change management; I encourage you to
familiarize yourselves with the six stages of grief after a major change is
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announced – this happens to every human being, including yourself, the
change agent. These are the same stages of grief that every human goes
through when his or her loved one dies. It is an intense, emotional
experience for everyone, even if the change is to your benefit, such as a
promotion. It is as if your place in the universe, once so solid, has been
ripped away from you suddenly.
Your response to change is not logical or rational; it is a response of your
limbic system. Some people go through these stages very quickly, others
get weighed down in the morasses of the early and mid-stages, get very
angry, fearful and very depressed. The whole organization becomes
unproductive until most of the people in it have come out of the first
stages. The later stages, by the way, are when you feel back on firm ground
and are ready to live with or even embrace the change.
Since everyone in an organization goes through these stages in their own
way in their own time, you as leader/coach/change agent need to
understand where each person is and act accordingly. Some who cannot
get past the third stage of despondence, confusion and anxiety may leave
the organization - as people really can’t stand not knowing what to do or
where their place is. Others quickly become cheerleaders and are way out
ahead. It can be an exhausting and exhilarating experience for the leader as
change agent.
Great, sounds wonderful – you say. How do you get started as a change
agent?
Your institutional action plans are the first step to leading change. Believe
me, you will experience resistance as you are trying to interest people in
your plan, however rational and needed your plan is – remember it is a
change, and resistance to change is completely natural and you must not
become easily discouraged. I suggest that you have 17 peers - your class at
ELATE – as a support system for talking over how things are going for you.
And of course, there are your ELATE teachers and those deans and provosts
from your institution who nominated you to ELATE. Do lean on them for
moral support.
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As inspiration, we can look at what women change agents were able to
accomplish in our own institutions: I was recently reading Lucy Allen
Paton’s biography of Elisabeth Carey Agassiz written in 1919. Elisabeth
Agassiz was the second wife of the great Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz,
and a naturalist herself, who helped organize and manage several of their
major exploration expeditions, took notes and wrote down all of Louis’
teachings, as well as three of her own natural history books and a
biography of her late husband. She was one of the first women to be
elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1869.
After Louis’ death, Elisabeth Aggasiz was instrumental in launching in 1882
the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, otherwise known as
the Harvard Annex, in which Harvard professors provided the same
instruction to women students as they provided to Harvard men – at the
time a completely radical idea. In 1883, the University's treasurer stated, "I
have no prejudice in the matter of education of women and am quite
willing to see Yale or Columbia take any risks they like, but I feel bound to
protect Harvard College from what seems to me a risky experiment."
Elisabeth Agassiz was president of the Annex for 12 years, and through
incredible “power of persuasion” was able to raise money for the Annex,
expand its number of students, continue to attract Harvard professors to
teach and to negotiate a deal with Harvard to launch under its auspices
what came to be known as Radcliffe College, named after the first donor of
a scholarship to Harvard in 1643, who happened to be a woman, Lady Ann
Mowlson, whose maiden name was Radcliffe.
In her commencement address on the 10th anniversary of the Annex in
1892, one can hear the change agent in Elisabeth: “The whole subject of
collegiate education for women has advanced with amazing strides in the
last ten years and our present students may wonder that I should speak of
our first attempt as if it had been kind of exciting adventure. But I assure
them that it had something of this character, for it was surrounded by
obstacles and prejudices. Remonstrance and expostulation came to me
from some of my nearest friends, who felt the dignity and reserve of
Harvard were threatened and the whole tone of the College to be lowered.
The Annex kept on its quiet way…”
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Elisabeth Aggasiz became the first president of Radcliffe in 1894 - and the
rest is history. The first joint degrees between Radcliffe and Harvard were
in 1963, and Radcliffe students became Harvard students in 1977. The
complete merger with Harvard happened in 1999. Today Harvard College is
50% women.
I look forward to observing similar accomplishments from all of the ELATE
graduates in the next few years!
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