TRACING THE ENDLESS FRONTIER
Steadman Upham, President
Claremont Graduate University
Remarks delivered to the Sixth Biennial World Conference on Integrated Design and Process
Technology, Pasadena, California, June 24, 2002
A few weeks ago I invited four Clinton Scholars who are studying for advanced degrees
at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) to the president’s house for dinner. Clinton Scholars,
as you may know, are Palestinians who are in the U.S. to pursue graduate degree programs in
finance, pub lic health, information technology and management. These young visitors are the
beneficiaries of a U.S. government- funded scholarship program aimed at developing and
enhancing Palestinian government and commerce through education.
There are 93 Clinton Scholars enrolled in master's degree programs across the United
States. They come from Gaza and the West Bank; 23 of them have never before traveled outside
of Gaza, the West Bank or Israel. 1 Most obtained their undergraduate university education at a
Palestinian institution, and many were students during the fractured, tense period of the first
Palestinian Intifada (1987-1990). 2 Claremont Graduate University enrolls the largest number of
Clinton Scholars of any U.S. university.
Our dinner conversation focused on the Middle East and the deep historical roots of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The violence rending this land had personally touched each of the
students. All had lost loved ones in the fighting; all had experienced the pain and terror of a
protracted and complicated conflict; all shared deep concerns about the safety of their families.
Yet these young Palestinians were also filled with hope, fired by the belief that they were
acquiring the knowledge and skills they needed for the future by studying for an advanced
degree at a U.S. research university.
As they departed the house that evening, I couldn’t help but wonder what it was about
U.S. graduate education that so motivated these dynamic young people. What was it about the
U.S. research university and its uniquely American model of graduate education that gave these
students such a profound belief in the possibilities of the future? My answer to this question is
the subject of my remarks this evening.
The form and character of both the contemporary research university and its model of
graduate education are directly traceable to the way that Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of
Scientific Research and Development, answered a charge set forth by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt at the close of World War II. President Roosevelt asked Bush how,
1
2
The four CGU students are from Jenin, Ramallah, and East Jerusalem.
The Washington File. http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/summit/text/0219scholars.htm
2
the information, the techniques, and the research experience developed by the
Office of Scientific Research and Development and by the thousands of scientists
in the universities and in private industry (during the war), should be used in the
days of peace ahead for the improvement of the national health, the creation of
new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of
living. 3
In his now famous report, Science: The Endless Frontier 4 , Bush answered this question
by setting forth a basic framework for the training and renewal of scientific talent that placed
colleges and universities in partnership with the federal government. Over the years,
implementation of the Bush plan has defined universities as centers of basic research, shaped the
structure and financing of U.S. graduate education, and placed science and technology at the
center of American life.
Of the 3,400 colleges and universities in the U.S., about 250 are doctoral research
universities. These 250 have educated the vast majority of the scientists and engineers on the
planet today. They produce more than 40,000 Ph.D.s annually, as well as tens of thousands of
other graduate and professional degrees. Graduate students attending these universities along
with the faculty who supervise them constitute the bulk of America’s research work force.
The discoveries and innovations springing from university-centered research have
spawned myriad new technologies, led to countless new businesses, created innumerable new
jobs, and led to the most massive episode of wealth creation in the history of humankind. So
important is this arrangement between research universities and the federal government, it has
prompted Erich Bloch, former director of the National Science Foundation, to remark that,
the solution of virtually all the problems with which government is concerned:
health, education, environment, energy, urban development, international
relationships, space, economic competitiveness, and defense and national security,
all depend on creating new knowledge—and hence upon the health of America’s
research universities. 5
Science and technology have, indeed, become sovereign, and their impact is crosscultural and global. But more than the ascendancy of science and technology is a triumph of
what might be called a “technical” approach to problem solving that has grown out of the
research university. The success of the sciences (and engineering fields as well) in attracting
substantial extramural financial support for research is not the least of the reasons why these
disciplines have become so influential. The grant funding and attendant perquisites of facilities,
instrumentation, competitive salaries, graduate student support, and credence in the university
have motivated every academic field—including those in professional schools—to emulate the
model of graduate training in the sciences. American graduate education has thus become more
3
President Roosevelt’s Letter to Vannevar Bush, November 17, 1944.
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm#letter
4
Science: The Endless Frontier. http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm
5
http://www.news-info.gatech.edu/news_releases/duderstadt/pptweb/tsld002.htm
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technocratic as individual academic fields have followed the success and accomplishments of the
sciences.
This model of graduate education has become America’s most successful export product.
Not only does the world come to U.S. universities for advanced degrees, but universities and
ministries of education around the world are also reorganizing post-graduate training to mimic
the U.S. model in which graduate education is embedded in the culture of discovery of the
research university. Even the venerable Oxbridge model of education is changing to
accommodate the structure and ethos of American graduate teaching and research. Developed
countries are chasing this model, and the countries of the developing world are seeking to
emulate every aspect of it they can afford.
Graduates of this system of education—the highly trained problem solvers in a variety of
fields who shape and structure our daily affair—constitute a kind of global educational elite.
These are the individuals in business, government, and education who define and frame the
problems and issues of our time; these are the people most actively engaged in the social
construction of reality. More importantly, this is the group of people that Claremont Graduate
University’s four Clinton Scholars, and thousands of prospective graduate students like them all
over the globe, seek to join. In their minds, this is the group who will create a future of
possibilities not only for the Middle East, but for the rest of the world as well.
As an educator, I take great pride in the success of American graduate education. Yet, I
am not completely comfortable with the knowledge that we have built a technocracy in the
research university. And I am decidedly uneasy about the fact that we are exporting this
technocratic model of learning and knowing without restraint or qualification to the rest of the
world.
The greatest dangers of technocracy stem from the belief that every problem has a
“technical” solution, and every question has a “practical” answer. Such a framework encourages
unbridled specialization and the pursuit of simple, mostly linear approaches to learning and
knowing. The most pressing and vexing problems facing the world today—underdevelopment,
poverty, disease, pollution, warfare, and the over population of regions—do not have simple,
linear solutions. Rather, they are complex, deeply historical, nonlinear, and evolving.
Technical specialization does not offer an appropriate perspective to address this class of
problems. Specialization narrows the field of view by defining more and more restrictive
domains of knowledge. Technical specialization also creates vocabularies that raise barriers to
communication and understanding. In contrast, more active communication and a shared
understanding of data and information by scientists, managers, and leaders are becoming
prerequisites for solutions to the world’s worst problems. Such problems require the integration
and synthesis of knowledge across many fields of learning. That is, they require a
transdisciplinary approach to knowing.
Regrettably, deep technical specialization is often the result of graduate training in the
research university. The way we “make” Ph.D.s, requiring them to produce original research
that results in a new contribution to knowledge, almost guarantees that each generation of
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scholars delivered by the research university will be more specialized, more compartmentalized,
and narrower than the one that preceded it. It doesn’t need to be this way. Today, more is
required of our educational elite.
In addition to becoming specialists, graduate students in the contemporary research
university must be given the opportunity to think and learn beyond the boundaries of their
disciplines. Students engaged in highly specialized studies, particularly those working at the
doctoral level, should also be required to position their knowledge in the broader world. In the
course of their programs of study, graduate students must acquire the ability to explain the context,
meaning, and importance of their research to interested nonspecialists. Most importantly, they need
to develop the capacity to link their findings and conclusions to the widest possible body of
knowledge.
I need to tell our Clinton Scholars that there will not be a technical solution to the
problems of the Middle East. Real, durable, and long- lasting solutions most certainly will
contain technical elements and practical aspects. But they will also have a humanistic face that
is as faithful to the region’s history, philosophies, and religions as it is with the region’s
economics and sociopolitics. Finding solutions to these problems is not the job of specialists or
technocrats. Rather, the selective pressures of our time call for synthesizers, holistic thinkers,
and transdisciplinary scholars.
The talented faculty at our research universities need to act consciously and explicitly to
counteract specialization as a primary outcome of graduate education. The next generation of
scholars must be able to work beyond the borders of their disciplines to address the world’s most
complex and pressing issues. While the technocracy of the research university has brought us
forward during the last 60 years, a broader, more inclusive, and synthetic framework is now
required. My sense is that this transformation is currently underway at the finest universities. If
they are successful, they will trace the outline of a new endless frontier.