>> Jonathan Grudin: [inaudible] and I are pleased to have John King speaking here this
morning. John King is invited to give a lot of talks. He's made it very easy on those introducing
him by living almost his entire life and career in two places. John grew up and went to high
school and undergraduate and graduate school in Orange County in Irvine California. He then
joined the faculty at the University of California at Irvine which is where I met him when I went
there exactly 20 years ago and that makes him uniquely positioned to address this issue of
change, change brought about by technology among other things because Irvine was in his
early days not much more than a ranch and some orange groves there in Orange County, and
today, of course, there is no ranch and no orange trees left in Irvine, so he has seen change
firsthand through his life there. He left a little bit before I left Irvine to come up here to go to
Michigan where he was the dean; I'll mention two of his positions. He was dean of the
information school at a time around 2000, was it 2000?
>> John Leslie King: That's when I moved there.
>> Jonathan Grudin: Yeah, moved there, so the modern information school movement was
beginning and John was one of the key people promoting that. Lee Dereks has been a
supporter of that effort over the last several years and he then after being Dean he then
became vice provost looking at information technology for the University of Michigan system as
a whole, looking at these very issues of what are the effects of information technology
particularly on education, but also in other fields which he had been studying as part of his
research. He is now working on a book on this topic and we are privileged to have one of his
first presentations, some of the thoughts that he's exploring, so thank you very much John.
>> John Leslie King: Thank you Jon. I am writing at least one book out of this; MIT press says
they want it but they haven't seen it [laughter], so we'll see what happens with that. I spent
the last 12 years doing University administration and now I'm trying to sort out some of what
I've learned. It would be crazy to think that in a talk that goes for an hour that you can put all of
the stuff that's on the title of the slide in there. It's actually probably going to be three books
when it's done and it's going to be one book each dealing with the three things that I'm going to
talk about in a moment, but if you're hoping to get the answer to the question, where is this all
headed, I don't have that yet, and I actually don't have a lot of hope of having that ever because
it turns out that predicting the future is a lot harder than it looks, but I'm trying to get situated
on this. Let me tell you the two things that are kind of governing me in this work. The first one
is a story I got from Ken Arrow; he's an economist and this was almost exactly 20 years ago and
this was a meeting in Europe and he told a story to I think it was about 40 people that were
there and I was one of them, about his experience during the Second World War. Arrow is in
his ‘80s I guess now and he was a PhD student actually during the war and he was a very smart
guy and he was very good at math and so he got stuck into the U.S. Army/Air Force
meteorology group and this was at the very early days of weather modeling. Now the Japanese
had created these balloons that were pyrotechnic devices. They were trying to send them
across using the prevailing winds across the Pacific Ocean and start forest fires in the Pacific
Northwest. It was a harebrained scheme, but it was a Japanese military scheme and they were
launching these balloons and they were making it across the ocean landing in forests. I mean
typically they didn't work, but occasionally they would light a fire and it would create problems.
The American Pacific Command said we want these Japanese balloons stopped and so it's like
well, who knows about this? And they said they're coming over on the wind, so let's give this to
the weather group. So they got this weather group assignment, stop these balloons. So the
first question was where are these balloons going to land? And they started building these
models and the guy who was running the group was an experienced meteorologist from years
and years of experience. This is crazy. This is stupid. Let's stop this modeling. Get me one of
those balloons. Well it turns out that several of them didn't go off and they were attacked and
so he said I want about 50 balloons made exactly the same balloons. So they made the
balloons and they gave them to the Flying Tigers who were flying over from India to China and
the Chinese resistance that was fighting the Japanese, and they gave these guys the balloons,
and they went to the same latitude on the Chinese coast that the Japanese were launching
from on the Japanese coast and they let them go. And where they landed, that's where they're
going to land. So it's like forget your models; forget your scientific analysis and calculations,
just release some balloons in the same place that the Japanese do and that’s how we're going
to find out where the balloons land. So, we're all listening to this. It's a great story from Ken
Arrow. And so it's like okay, what's the punch line? And he says sometimes prediction time is
equal to performance time. So this is one of the real problems in the business of understanding
complex often ecological change, particularly socio-technical changes. Sometimes you not only
don't understand it even when you finally see it happening at performance time, but
sometimes understanding happens way after performance time. You look back and say oh,
that's what happened. So we're going through that now and a lot of what I'm doing here is tied
to that effort. So let me start with a second story. When Nixon visited China in 1972, the
historic opening to China, he spent most of his time talking to Zhou Enlai, which is the guy who
is not Nixon in that picture [laughter]. And there's this famous story about Nixon, and this was
1972 and this was the run-up to the bicentennial of the United States Declaration of
Independence in 1776. Nixon asked Zhou Enlai in English translated by a translator into
Chinese, what do you think the impact of the French Revolution is. And Zhou Enlai said it's too
early to say [laughter]. So this was taken as a double dose of oriental inscrutability and deep
wisdom [laughter]. Well, in 2011, of course, everybody thought it was the revolution of 1789,
and 2011, this guy in the lower right, Charles Freeman who was the diplomat who was fluent in
Chinese and doing the translating, he was there, he said oh, that was a mistake. In the
translation Zhou Enlai thought that we meant the student uprising of 1968 [laughter], which
wasn't 180 years before; it was four years before and Zhou Enlai said, it's too early to say. Now
the question is when is it not too early to say? And that turns out to be a hard question to
answer because it depends on what you are trying to talk about. So Jonathan and I when we
were talking about my doing this, we had this discussion about whether this was epistemic
infrastructure, which I wanted to talk about or knowledge infrastructure and Jonathan rightly
pointed out, no one is going to know what epistemic infrastructure means. Knowledge
infrastructure is close enough. And I said, okay, fine. And he said you can change it during the
talk, so now I'm changing it [laughter]. So why epistemic versus knowledge? Well, I am an
undergraduate philosophy major and I just found out that Lee was as well. It's like I learn this
word and God dammit I'm using it [laughter]. But there actually is an argument for it that may
or may not appear in the final text. I don't know what's going to happen; it depends on what
the editors say. But epistemology is the theory or science of method or grounds of knowledge,
sort of how it is that you know things, and epistemic means of relating to, or relating to
knowledge, so when I talk about epistemic infrastructure I want to know what we know, how
we came to know it and why we trust what we know. This is the question that is driving this
work, this knowledge infrastructure. And the gist of my argument is that when you change
infrastructure, you change access and when you change access, you change agency. So it's
essentially a functionalist welfare argument. When you really get down to it that's the
argument that is being made here is that there are functions that are performed by these
things, and particularly infrastructure. One of the functions is providing access. When you alter
access, you alter agency and sometimes you can have very big changes and some very big
changes have occurred, so this is the general shot and what I'm interested in in particular is the
academy, or the organized production of ongoing knowledge and this thing exists primarily
because everybody dies. I mean, you have to continue to train successions of new entrants into
the system or you will lose it. Systematic collecting is very tightly connected with the rise of
part of the academy, which is the higher education component which is what I've been thinking
a lot about and this crowd source knowledge I think is a big change. Now it's not old, and it's
not brand-new. This crowd sourcing of knowledge has been going on in for a long time in
various forms and I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But what's happening in crowd
sourcing of knowledge right now as a result of things like the intranet and so forth is really
pretty spectacular and I think it has big implications. The hard part is what are they? And when
people say oh, we are going to totally change everything we've done. It's like, no we're not.
We never totally change everything we do. That doesn't happen. It's like 2000, September 11,
2001 changed everything. No it didn't. I mean, remember when President Bush got up and
said don't change anything. You know, 9/11 changed everything, but don't change anything.
Go out and spend money. Right, this is how we're going to show these guys who hate freedom,
who we are, travel, spend money. It's like, what? So I'm interested in the occlusion and I'm
interested in particular how things become occluded and ultimately things are often not what
they seem and I want to give you some examples of this. This one struck my fancy. This is a
place called Göbekli Tepe. I don't speak Turkish so I don't really know exactly how to
pronounce this, but anyway this is an archaeological excavation in modern-day Turkey. This is
the oldest known temple in the world. And so why do I put that up there? Well, they used to
think that people settled down, created agriculture, settled down and then created religion.
This thing is like 12,000 years old. They can't find any village near this. And so now they're
thinking that maybe people created religion and then they created agriculture and settled
down. Which of these is right? Well, it's too early to say. [laughter]. It's 12,000 years ago that
this happened, but it's too early to say because we don't know what the archaeological record
is. They didn't, they actually thought this other story until they found this place, and then the
guy who found this place said well, that can be right because if that was true then there would
be like a village nearby and there's not a village for like kilometers that they been able to find.
Now maybe they'll find the village and okay. This is a picture of the ruins of Takshashila in the
Indus Valley in modern-day India. This was probably the first University, but was it the first
University? I don't know. It's too early to say, because we don't have any records of that. So
when people ask what was the first University, well, Plato's Academy, right? Well, we have a
picture of that. Now of course it's not a photograph. Somebody painted it a long time later
looking back and I would guess that that particular scene never really occurred at Plato's
Academy, but we have an academic tradition that stems from Plato's Academy and it's an
important tradition. So just to tell you one story about the kind of surprise that comes out of
this, in classical antiquity, as Plato's Academy started about 2500 years ago, they basically
divided the world of knowledge into seven chunks, the trivium on this side, grammar, rhetoric
and logic, and the quadrivium on that side which was music, astronomy, arithmetic and
geometry. An historic accident occurred; that stuff got destroyed in the West, the quadrivium
got destroyed in the West. It was maintained by people in the Islamic world and it found its
way into the Islamic libraries. These were the Greek texts mind you, not--they were translated
into Arabic but they were original Greek texts. This stuff survived in the West and this is what
gave rise to the Academy of the late Roman Empire, that was done by Cassiodorus and Boethius
and people like that. It was grounded in the trivium because that's all they had. They didn't
have the quadrivium. Those documents were lost to the West. They were reintroduced to the
West when the Moors, remember them, the Moors from northern Africa, the Islamic
[inaudible] dynasty. They took over Iberia, the Iberian Peninsula in Spain and they colonized
that and they had an empire that lasted for several centuries there the [inaudible] dynasty and
one of the places that was very strong in the [inaudible] dynasty was Toledo. Toledo had
actually been the center of [inaudible] learning as well. And so it had a deeply established
tradition of learning and the library, the Moorish library, Islamic library at Toledo was the
largest library in Europe and when the Christian forces under Ferdinand and Isabella the same
ones who sent Columbus on his way, re-conquered Toledo, they captured that entire
infrastructure intact and over the next hundred years or so all of the stuff in that library was
translated into Latin and circulated in Europe and that's why we have the academies of Europe.
Actually the oldest still functioning University is Al-Azhar in Cairo and that was created in 970
and Bologna was created in 1088. It's a pseudo-generality and it's an old story and I won't, I
won't really go into that, but basically it was a med school, because you had to train doctors. As
ineffective as doctors were, they were better than nothing. The Bologna actually organized
around a medicinal garden and that gets to the whole business of the infrastructure, the
apparatuses for learning and propagating knowledge. Francis Bacon is reputed to have written
this thing called Gesta Grayorum. It was actually a play that took place in Gray's Inn in London
and in this play there is a supplicant, essentially a straight man who is talking to this highly
learned person about what you need to become a learned person, and this is what the
interlocutor says, you need a library, a garden, a stable, ponds, cabinet and still house and
these of course are library, botanical gardens, zoo of some sort, aquaria, the museum, and a
laboratory. So this in 1594 was kind of a description of what the research university of today is
and of course a lot of our educational production system is derived from that and I'll get to that
in a minute. A lot of this was stimulated by the discovery, the European quote discovery of the
New World because there was a lot of really strange stuff that was coming back to the UK and
the continent from this age of exploration and people didn't know what to make of it. Well,
one of these people, John Tredescant, created a collection which became known as
Tredescant’s rarities. He assembled these rarities in something called the Ark and this was in
West Lambeth across the river from London and he became, his son took it over eventually and
that family became well acquainted with a much more highly educated guy. Tredescant and his
son were gardeners; they were gardeners to the royal family of the UK and Ashmole was very
closely connected to Oxford University. Ashmole eventually came into possession of this
collection and he gave it to Oxford and that's what became the Ashmolean Museum. The
Ashmolean Museum is the oldest extant scientific museum on earth. A lot of what is modern
about Oxford as an educational institution grew up around the Ashmolean and the Bodleian
Library. These were both systematic collection repositories. The magic didn't really begin to
happen until Ashmole and another guy, a guy named Peter Mundy produced this thing The
Museum Tradescantianum, which was a catalog of all of the things in the museum. There was a
movement in Europe at this time of creation of these cabinets of curiosity. It became one of
the things that courts did. Paul David has a great article on this where he talks about how there
was this kind of crucial period where among the court leaders in Europe, having a really
talented fool and a really talented scientist were like the hot things because they were so
entertaining. You think times have changed and you think maybe not [laughter] actually. So
anyway, the fact that Ashmole and Mundy created this catalog and began to distribute this
stuff, this was the first crowd sourcing of knowledge and the--this was remember, you know,
many centuries ago now. Means of preservation were not that great so the things that made it
were things that were abiding objects. So the first place where this really took off was in sea
shells because sea shells are, they last a long time. So it wasn't the Tredescant catalog that
really stirred things; it was a catalog of sea shells that began to circulate among all of these
collectors in Europe and they began to do compare and contrast stuff which is kind of one of
the most fundamental ways that you establish reliable knowledge, and people began correcting
each other. We call it today peer review. What these, these weren't the monarchs and the
members of the royal family; these were their entertainment that they hired and kept on
retainer, and it's like, I want the best shell collection. Aye, aye, you know, so how do you know
you have the best shell collection? Well, you have to look at the catalog. We don't have that
one. We don't have that one. We don't have that one, right? So we have to go get these shells
or we won't have the best shell collection, so this was how a lot of these collections got going,
so I want to shift gears here and say this kind of raises a fundamental question when you are
thinking about change in knowledge infrastructure. You think there is a [inaudible] for this
stuff, there's a core explanation. Then you ask yourself what's obvious and what's hidden. And
one of the questions you have to ask yourself is is the stuff I'm looking at which is typically the
obvious stuff, the important stuff, or is the important stuff what's hidden? So I want to tell you
the superficial story of education in this society and then I'll go to the deep story, the hidden
story. The superficial story is the Industrial Revolution. It's not a minor thing; I don't mean to
make light of it, so this is the Erie Canal in 1825. The Erie Canal is arguably in the United States
the discriminating point. This is when things began to tip. 1825 was when Daniel Webster gave
his famous speech on Bunker Hill talking about there was this vast opportunity that lies before
us, the unexplored territory kind of thing. As you can see they are draft animals pulling canal
boats up the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal is what opened up the Great Lakes and the Great Lakes
were the access to the interior of the country. They opened up the bread basket of what was
essentially the North American continent and this was true for both British America, Canada
and the United States for a long period of time. But in relatively rapid succession, during the
same period, was growing the use of carbon energy, so this is a picture of the Newcomen
engine which was first created in 1712 and then James Watt with the steam engine and of
course after a while carbon energy began to be crucial in factories and transport and so forth
and, you know, not very long after you had people painting pictures like this, of foundries and
stuff and the age of iron and the age of steel came in and so forth. When you had lots of this
going on, you had environments that looked like that picture, prosperous, productive, but not
very pleasant places to live, but that didn't matter because nobody lived for very long anyway
[laughter]. And people living a lot longer is something that I will come back to a minute. So this
had begun to catch the attention of leadership in the society because when you had something
like this, you were a lot richer than people who didn't have this.
>>: What town was this?
>> John Leslie King: This is Manchester back in the day when the British were leading the world
in production and the British Navy was the strongest military force on earth. Well, that all
began to change. In 1806 Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Prussians at the battle
of Jena in a single day. By the middle of the 19th century Prussia had overtaken England as the
largest industrial producer and in 1871 the Prussian army defeated Napoleon III at the Battle of
Sedan. Now if you were a leader at the time, and remember the United States was extant at
this time as the United States in the 1570s, you asked how the hell Prussia did that. And the
answer was compulsory schooling. They were the first country in the world that said
everybody, which of course meant men, everybody has to go to study. This is the rule and it
was one of the kaisers that created this rule. And these two guys, the Humboldt Brothers,
Wilhelm von Humboldt and Alexander von Humboldt were the two people who sort of created
the division of what became modern higher education. Wilhelm von Humboldt is Humboldt
University in Berlin and Alexander von Humboldt was an explorer and scientist; the Humboldt
Current is named after him. And what these guys argued was this is not something that we do
just because it's a cool thing to do. This is something we do because it is essential to the
welfare of the society. You have to make this investment or you won't make it in the modern
age. Well, this was picked up by a couple of other guys in the United States, Justin Morrill is the
guy on the right who was the prime architect of something called The Morrill Act of 1862 and
then Abe Lincoln signed it into law in 1863 before he was killed. This Morrill Act was a landgrant colleges and universities act and this act stipulated, I have it here, a grant of land to be
sold to create at least one college in every state where the leading object shall be without
excluding other scientific classical studies, so the traditional Academy is absorbed here, and
including military tactics to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the
mechanics. So scientific agriculture, this was the origin of extension services, agricultural
extension services and engineering. Now lots of people think that the University of Michigan is
a land-grant college, but of course the University of Michigan in its typical snooty fashion holds
up its nose and says, we are the progenitor of the land-grant college. Michigan State is the
land-grant college, you know. So…
>>: Cornell is a land-grant college.
>> John Leslie King: Well, Cornell is a land-grant college and of course states that started early
it's like we got this grant like what, who do we pick, because we've got all of these existing
schools to pick among? Well, Michigan Agricultural College had started in 1858. This was
passed in 1863, signed into law, so they were like, we'll do that and the University of Michigan
was like yes, you'll do that, government issue. So, you know, that snootiness still exists in the
institution. The other thing that happened not too long after this was Andrew Carnegie and his
Carnegie library enterprise. And these are all just pictures that you can find of Carnegie
libraries. This in fact is the one that was built in Ann Arbor, Carnegie Library, which they
decided was an historic building. It's like, now the entire thing is part of the historic building.
It's a long story, but anyway a lot of Carnegie's buddies, rich tycoons like him said, this is like
stupid Andrew. Why are you doing this? And he wrote an article about why he did this and
published it in 1888 and this is a very interesting comment. He said, I think it fruitful in the
extreme because the library gives nothing for nothing because it helps only those that help
themselves, because it doesn't sap the foundation of manly independence, an important thing
of sapping of manly independence was a big issue at the time I'm sure, because it does not
pauperize, because it stretches the hand to the aspiring and places a ladder upon which they
can only ascend by doing the climbing themselves. This is not charity. This is not philanthropy.
It is the people themselves helping themselves by taxing themselves. So this is very much an
age of enterprise sentiment. Now what was interesting, and this was a juxtaposition here that
hits systematic collecting and a whole bunch of other things. This was at a period when people
who ran institutions like that were starting to think of themselves as cultural institutions and if
you talk to people who are involved in cultural institutions, the gist of their story runs
something like this, any successful society sets aside resources for culture and that's what we
are. We are cultural institutions and we take the social surplus, part of the social surplus and
we do these important cultural things because that's what successful societies do. That's
backwards. You got rich because you created those institutions. Those institutions don't follow
getting rich; they precede getting rich. The library at Alexandria fell and then Rome fell. Right?
I first came up with this idea when I was working with [inaudible].
>>: The Mongols didn't have any [inaudible].
>> John Leslie King: No, but the Mongols were actually pretty straightforward in how they did
what they did [laughter]. It's like, we've surrounded your city. You can surrender or we will kill
you all. I'm sure that there was a think tank somewhere saying is that the best strategy?
[laughter]. Genghis asked us to work on this, you know, so [laughter]. When I first started
coming up with this notion I was working with a historian Margaret Hedstrom. Margaret is like,
excuse me, you don't have proof that this is how it happened. It's like, hey, who needs proof?
I've decided that this is how it happened, right; it's a better story for what I want to do. And
she's like you can't do this. It's not historically accurate. And I'm like uh, whatever. Well, I
made a list of things that happened between the late 15th century and the early 20th century
that I think are relevant to this, including this statute of Anne, the first copyright legislation that
really had teeth [inaudible] is here. Carnegie libraries are here and the only purpose of this, I
mean, you can dwell on that in your leisure, is the purpose of creating this thing was to simply
say the societies actually in the United States and Europe and actually in Asia too made a lot of
investments and crucial pieces of this came together and you can pick out one of the things and
say that was the turning point. And I'm willing to listen to that, but I am much more at the
moment interested in the kind of ecological flow of what's going on here, because if you look at
what happened relatively quickly following this, you had mechanized agriculture which
profoundly changed the world. When the University of Michigan was, first opened in Ann
Arbor the United States was primarily an agrarian economy. We started school in the fall and
we ended in the spring so people could go home and plant and harvest crops. Hey, we still do
that. The university is like two ages out of date. It's still in the agrarian age. We went through
the industrial age and now we're in the information age and we still operate as though we're in
the agrarian age. That's interesting. How do we think that that's okay? But we do; this is the
established model and I've lived through many attempted reforms, all of them by the way to
save money even though they were exactly the opposite of earlier reform because, you know,
this is something that is very hard to change. Find a university that operates 24/7 and I'll tell
you it is not a traditional university. There are some, but they are not traditional universities.
So there was mechanized agriculture. There was mass production. Henry Ford in 1907 said the
magic here is not in standardizing production and lowering the cost of producing these things.
The magic is in lowering the cost and paying the workers more so the workers can buy the
things. That's going to be the magic. Between 1907 when the first model T rolled off the line
and 1921 when the last model T rolled off the line they had reduced the price of the cost of
making a model T from $850 to $250. In that time the wages have grown, so suddenly owning
a car was within the reach of almost everybody, so this was a huge, huge change. During the
Second World War with the arsenal of democracy which was largely around Detroit, they got
the guts. Give ‘em more firepower. This was the, the United States’ role in the Second World
War was basically to be the engine through which the war of attrition could be prosecuted.
And as a member of--a German colonel, the Battle of Monte Cassino said to the US soldiers who
accepted his surrender, I ran out of shells before you ran out of tanks. It's like, yeah. This was
Hiroshima. This was kind of a game changer, and so was this. This was Joe 1; this was 1948, the
first successful atomic bomb detonated by the Soviets. Then Stalin pulled this out of the hat.
It's basically a B-17 bomber that's been reverse engineered and renamed the Tupolev 4, the T4.
This bomber was capable of flying over the North Pole and attacking Canada and the United
States with nuclear weapons. Well, the Berlin airlift happened in 1948 and this is when the
people in the West began to realize that this guy Stalin was a bit much and he really was
planning to take over everything he touched. So this was the beginning of the Cold War and
science was enlisted in the Cold War, so the guy on the left was time man of the year, Vannevar
Bush. He was at MIT. He authored this famous document, Science, The Endless Frontier. This
document contains the blueprint for what became the National Science Foundation. If you
want to read the document, the original full text document, it is on the NSF website. They see
it as sort of their founding legislation. Project Sage, I wrote something for Jonathan about this
several years ago. Project Sage, nobody's heard of it now, the semi automatic ground
environment. Project Sage produced the ballistic missile early warning system, what we now
call air traffic control, the worldwide military command-and-control system, so Bemews and
WWMCCS are both gone, but air traffic control remains. NASA's deep space tracking and their
ability to track objects in orbit, the semi automatic business research environment was SABRE
and that created the world’s first airline reservation system because it turns out that airline
reservation systems like air defenses basically is an air traffic control problem. This was George
Valley’s insight. Well, if you treat it like an air traffic control problem, you can solve it. And that
turned out to be true. Systems management came out of this project. The programming
profession came out of this project. Walt Stuckey one time told me about seeing a photograph
from this era of a guy with a sandwich board walking around the beach in Santa Monica and the
board said, become a computer programmer [laughter]. Ask me how. The MIT-TX2, which
became the PDP-10 came out of this project and actually the IBM 360 came out of this project,
the most successful mainframe in history. Then of course the Russians launched Sputnik and
the United States was freaked out and launched its own satellite a little better, a little later and
the question was whether our Germans were better than their Germans and this was 1958,
January of 1958, the Explorer was launched and at the end of 1958, the national Defense
education act was passed. Now it's very important to understand the connection here because
during the Second World War radar, nuclear weapons et cetera and actually development of
early stages of human computer interaction the ergonomics and human factors work at
[inaudible] labs because they found out that pilots were crashing airplanes because they would
hit the wrong control and it was kind of inefficient. We would rather have them get shot down.
So the NDEA was the national government saying hey, we need to do something about this.
What we've got here isn't working right. [video begins].
>> Dwight Eisenhower: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex. The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let
the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Akin to and
widely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial military posture, has been the
technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution research has become central.
It also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted
for, by or at the direction of the federal government. The free university, historically the
fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct
of research partly because of the huge costs involved a government contract becomes virtually
a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The prospect for domination of the nature's scholars by
the federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present and is
gravely to be regarded.
>> John Leslie King: Now, people at universities know the first part of that speech, the militaryindustrial complex; they don't know the last part of the speech [laughter], right? So…
>>: [inaudible].
>> John Leslie King: No. One of the things that you have to do when you do this kind of work is
keep digging and it's not too difficult to find writings where people say stupid Eisenhower. He
gave the talk about the military-industrial complex. He created the military-industrial complex
[growl]. It's like, yeah, yeah, I got it. So this was January, his farewell speech to the American
people, January 1961, right? Kennedy had been elected. So five months later. [video begins].
>> John F. Kennedy: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before
this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No
single space project in this period would be more impressive to mankind or more important for
the long-range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
>> John Leslie King: Or being boiled down to a few words, shut up old man. [laughter]. And
then of course, the victory lap a year later. [video begins].
>> John F. Kennedy: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and
measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to
accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win, and the others too.
>> John Leslie King: So this was the shift, right? I mean, this was a crucial shift that was nailing
down some decisions and realizations that were made earlier which was wow, this knowledge
is important. It's important to our national welfare. It's important in all kinds of ways, so the
strength of the state is to many people the rise of the education system, but that doesn't
explain why education as we know it has been around for 1000 years. The deep story of
education is the story of liberation. I'm going to talk for a minute about this guy. This is John
Henry Newman. John Henry Newman was an Anglican Bishop. He became a Roman Catholic
bishop and eventually a cardinal, so he is sometimes known as John Cardinal Newman and yes
the Cardinal Newman Society drew their name from him. I can't find a lot of relationship
between the Cardinal Newman Society and John Henry Newman, but they do. The Newman
Centers on university campuses are the Catholic centers that are organized for those typically
secular universities. Now he wrote a book called The Idea of a University. He wrote it in 1852
but it was published in the United States in 1854 and his concept, he was the one that coined
the concept of liberal education. The rural education was not a political term; it was in contrast
to servile education. Actually this goes back to Aristotle, so you can trace the roots of this
notion back, but basically Newman's idea was that liberal education lists the person above the
servile, liberates Christian virtue in service to society. That's what liberal education was for in
the idea of John Henry Newman. Now what was motivating this? What was motivating it was
slavery. Slavery was the dominant political and moral issue in the United States and Europe in
the 19th century. Nothing else came close. Temperance followed that and suffrage followed
that, but the big issue in the 19th century was slavery because slavery was still legal in a lot of
places. The British Empire outlawed the slave trade in 1807. They outlawed slavery through
most of the Empire in 1833 and of course the 14th amendment was passed in the entire states
in 1868 and that was the changing of the Constitution to prohibit slavery. This book was
written in 1854. The subject of slavery was very tied to the creation of education in the United
States. Now this is a map showing the Union forces, the Union states, the Confederate states,
the border states, and the states that were not participating in the US civil war. And I draw
your attention to the states up there. Those states are just full of small, private four-year
educational institutions. Almost all of which were religious when they were created. They may
be secular now, but they were almost all religious when they were created, and all of them
were created as abolitionists production centers. They were created to create a clergy and laity
who opposed slavery and if you reach back into their archives you find this. This is the big deal.
If you go to Michigan State capital which is in Lansing and you go inside, it was built in 1869. It's
a shrine to the Civil War, to the Michigan participation in the Civil War. Michigan had the
largest percentage of its male population in the Union army of any state of the union. So it was
like a huge thing. We can't today imagine how big this was. And Frederick Douglass who was
of course a very highly regarded African-American at the time said there is power in the human
mind, but education is needed for its development. He gave the speech in Manassas in 1894.
So this is the link between the strength of a society and the liberation doctrine. If you could
join an apparatus, a process by which you became essential to the strength of the society, you
were liberated and it didn't matter what your birth constraints were. You could be born black;
you could be born female. If you went and participated in this, you would be liberated from
that and this is of course what gave this enormous power, this enormous thrust to what was
known as the G.I. Bill, The Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 and it was--the
desegregation of America society began in the military through an executive order by Truman
and of course Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 was crucial in this and the watershed
period was 1964, 1965. Not only was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed into law and The Voter
Registration Act, but The Higher Education Act. The Higher Education Act subsumed The
National Defense Education Act of 1958 in the United States, and that has to be reauthorized
every five years and the most recent reauthorization was The Higher Education Opportunity Act
of 2010. That's the most recent reconsideration, reauthorization of the American commitment
to higher education. The free speech movement at Berkeley, 1964, and shortly thereafter the
rise of so-called studies movement, women's studies, black studies, Chicano studies, gay studies
et cetera. So this is where the liberation doctrine really has come into full flow into the
university and of course it's a largely pluralistic model. It's like you have to decide what
member you are of this class and then affiliate with this group and declare your position, and
this is something that we were talking about earlier where it seems to get back into a diversity
issue. In the 19th century the primary role of diversity in higher education was to allow people
who were not like the people in charge of the society into higher education so they could
become like the people in charge. Now the role of diversity is to bring people who are not like
the majority and make the place more like them, right? This is the only salient, I mean if you go
back to the Supreme Court case, the Michigan one in 2004, 2003, the Gruder case where the
Supreme Court--they are about to overturn that in my opinion, but at the time they declared
that the use of race and ethnicity in admissions was not unconstitutional. The entire case is
based on educational effectiveness. The entire case is based on the argument that if you have
a more diverse group, you will have higher educational performance, no social remediation of
past wrongs; none of that stuff was in the case. It was all that we are higher education. We
know what we're doing. You need to leave us alone on this because this is important and we
can demonstrate that this connection is there. That's what's happened. Now, of course, this is
a picture from Oberlin. This is actually the issue that the robot Shaky is in and coed dorms,
wink, wink; you know what's going on. So the sexual revolution was happening at the time.
Now it's kind of all mixed up together, the liberation doctrine, the strength of the state. In 1964
Rachel Carson published Silent Spring and this was followed fairly quickly by people realizing
that there were connections between things so externalities of the industrial era were starting
to show up, Love Canal, Earth Day and we just celebrated the 40th anniversary of Earth Day
whenever recently. It was Nixon who created the Environment Protection Agency; that's kind
of rich. People then started looking at this whole business of carbon transfer from the
lithosphere into the atmosphere and what is the relationship. In the early ‘90s everybody was
completely astonished that those guys gave up and nobody was more unhappy about this than
the people that were making money off of the Cold War in the United States. I mean they
never anticipated that these guys would give up. So the Berlin wall came down but in the
meantime, in the early ‘90s is when The International Governmental Panel on Climate Change
published its first report. People started getting worried about the accumulation and global
warming and then in 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica collapsed. This was a big deal.
Not so much because ice shelves have never collapsed before; I mean there was a time when
there was no ice there. It's because all of the people who knew about these ice shelves thought
that collapses like this could only happen over like decades, and this happened like in three
days. It was like, we're tired of being on the shelf so we give up and they fell in the water. Now
people are like gee, we've never seen anything like that. Is that important? So I went to
Antarctica for a National Research Council thing and prior to flying down from Christchurch
New Zealand we had a seminar with a grand old man of climate change. He's a
paleoclimatologist, but he was one of the first guys that started doing ice cores as a way of
looking at paleoclimatology. This guy’s name is George Denton and he's a professor at the
University of Maine. He's talking to us and we're taking notes and stuff, and he says most of my
colleagues think that what's happening is warming. I think it's just as likely that we’re going to
have another glacial maximum. It's like, what? And he says well, what's happening in climate
change could just as easily be a new Ice Age, and I'm thinking hey, I thought you guys knew
that. I thought you actually knew if it was going to be colder or warmer. I thought that's what
the rap on global warming meant. And he said no, we don't understand how any of this stuff
works. And all the other climatologists around the table are like uh-huh, that's true. And it's
like we are so screwed, because these people who are supposed to know about this, they are
saying I don't know. All I can tell you is that we haven't seen data like the data that we are
seeing now. The data like this has not existed on earth in the last 700,000 years. It's like oh,
that sounds important. But what's going to happen? Well, nothing’s going to happen until
something happens. My buddy Paul Edwards is just on this book with MIT Press called The Vast
Machine which is a really interesting book about the politics of climate change. He told me at
one point because I was asking him questions about this. He said well, the best climate change
models that I've worked with have told me that in order to get very accurate predictive models
of climate change you would have to be able to sample at a resolution of about a cubic
kilometer, sample the atmosphere. And it's like, okay, how many cubic kilometers are there in
the atmosphere? 4.2 billion, up to 8 km, which is the so-called effective atmosphere; it's 52
billion if you go out to the common limit, which is the theoretical limit. So the largest sensor
network that has ever been integrated is low single-digit millions. Nothing has ever been
integrated to the level of 4.2 billion sensors and that's after you solve the problem of getting
the sensors on station and keeping them there, which we don't have a clue how to do. So after
he tells me this, I got back to him a couple of days later and said does that mean that we're
going to be experiencing the effects of climate change before the science is accurately
predicting climate change? He says oh yeah, totally. So on this NRC committee I was on one of
the people was some member of the International Panel on Climate Change; she's a scientist at
Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and she was on a terror about climate change
deniers and these are people who are in the same equivalence class as Holocaust deniers. And
she was going off about climate change deniers; and I said let me ask you a question, Lynne. Do
you think those people who are denying the science that you're talking about right now are
going to turn to you at some point and say save us? She stopped and then she started laughing
and she said yeah, sure. And I said well, maybe you better start working on that because these
guys are never going to listen to you until it starts to happen, and then they are going to want
you to save them. And her initial reaction was well that's going to be highly unfair. It's like,
Earth to Lynne, that's the way it works, right? I mean, you know, you think they're going to say
we were wrong and you were right? Please accept our apology. When did that happen in your
experience last time? So the 20th century brought a lot of changes and this is one I want to
kind of, this is the ultimate observation I want to make. I never hear people in higher education
talk about this, but this is really important. This is a concept called the Rectangularization of
Mortality. This appeared in a 1980 paper by Jamie Fries who was a professor at Stanford. He
was not writing this about the issues that I am concerned about; he was saying look medicine is
really going to change because medicine up to now has basically been keeping people from
dying and we've just about got that one licked, except for the fact that everyone still dies, which
is kind of a crucial point [laughter] to those who are about to die. And so basically people,
what's happened is you push this curb out and it becomes more and more rectangular and so
what basically happens is people are born, live for a long time and then they all croak at about
the same time and because quality adjusted life expectancy in the 20th century rose in most
cases faster than life expectancy and my simple heuristic for this is go into a drug store and look
for a cane. When I was a kid you went into the drugstore and canes were like the first thing you
saw, the cause everybody over a certain age had a cane because your knees and your hips
went. Now, before I left Irvine, this was in the late ‘90s I asked a guy well, when do you want to
meet about this, and he gets out his calendar and he says oh I can't meet that day; I'm having a
hip replacement [laughter]. It's like a new alternator, right? [laughter]. It's like yeah. And so
there's like two people who have them and said well, knees are different than hips; they take
longer. And I'm like we're talking about a hip replacement, knee replacement that it can be
done is the issue and of course it can be done routinely. So you don't find canes in the
supermarket. You have to look for a cane. You have to search for a cane; you have to ask like
where are your canes? And you go and they have like three canes and they used to have like
tons of them. It was like a fashion statement. So lifespan increased by about 50%; all of that of
course is added to the backend of life, so years of adulthood approximately doubled; years of
childhood it turns out is a pretty fixed time. So what happens is life expectancy expanded and
life doubled and years of work increased by a factor of about 1.7 statistically. So the idea that
you would go to college and get your primary and secondary education and post secondary
education and then work the rest of your life based on that, it's like, what are you thinking?
People live too long for that to be meaningful, before you introduce the fact that knowledge is
accumulating at a very fast rate and that sort of gets into the Hobbesian bargain that we now
have. This is 2000 census data. If your higher education in the state of Washington is anything
like ours, we've been saying for a long time well, do some simple analysis. The longer you stay
in school the more money you make. And that's a really good argument as long as it's true. But
40% of college graduates are living with their parents right now. And tuition debt exceeds
revolving credit debt in this society right now, so it's not clear what this bargain is anymore.
There was a chart like this on my high school books, a local bank provided, you know, stay in
school. Look at the numbers. It's like, yeah, I get it. If you stay in school longer you make more
money, but that only works as long as it's true. Plus there's the question of who benefits from
the changes. You probably all remember Animal Farm. Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote the
story and basically the animals on the farm are all under the sort of tyrannical overlordship of
this evil human and they attack the humans and get rid of them, kill them. And they set up an
animal society. This is a picture of Napoleon the pig who is deliberately chosen and Napoleon
the pig is smarter than the other pigs and he comes up with a great line, all animals are created
equal, but some animals are equaler than others. So animal Farm disintegrates into an
unhappy society. William Faulkner wrote a couple of novels, Sanctuary and a sequel to
Sanctuary called Requiem for a Nun, and in this book he has a famous quote, "the past is never
dead; it's not even past." So this is really about individual pasts and things in people’s lives and
such, but historians love this quote. So when I walk through the stores in the history
department in Michigan it's like yeah, I've seen that before lots of times. It's like yeah, I bet you
have. So the past is never dead; it's not even past. So it's, the real question is how do you link
what's happened in the past with what we see now? And I'm just going to click through these,
Google. The majority of pictures that you see here were lifted wholesale from Google Images.
And I like giving talks with lots of pictures because they are less boring than words and in the
past it was kind of hard to create a talk because who has an image bank with things like this. All
those videos, the Eisenhower video and the two Kennedy videos, they came off of YouTube, so
in the production of the course material, if that's the right way to put it in this talk, this thing
has had an enormous impact on what I do. At Stanford they just have these big flipped classes.
This class on machine learning and rolled over 100,000 people and of course a lot of people are
running around saying oh my God; this is it. This is the big change in higher education. It's
going to be completely and profoundly changed by this in the same way that education was
changed by TV in the 1960s. And you know I look at this and, I don't know, maybe it won't be
that way. This is actually an e-mail that I got recently from the Provost at Michigan, Phil
Hanlon, today a new online educational organization called Coursera, which of course is a
startup coming out of Stanford, will announce that four top-tier American universities will offer
free not for credit online courses through its website. The University of Michigan is one of
those schools. So the keywords are top-tier and Michigan [laughter], so in case you were
wondering what the signifying here is, it's Stanford first. We're really top-tier. We are really
awesome and by the way there's this Coursera thing. And when we looked down, you know,
does this mean we're going to give up what we do really well? Not at all, of course not. We're
not changing anything. We're not changing anything as a result of this humongous change
[laughter]. We’re going to stay completely the same and do this too.
>>: It's not for credit though.
>> John Leslie King: For free. It's like, how many people did we lose in the 20th century trying
to decide whether communism is a good idea or a bad idea? Well, you kind of lose count at
about 50 million, right? So here's a little prediction made by my study of the 20th century.
Whatever the information economy is it's not going to be communist. Just a little prediction.
So free, free noncredit education. It's like that's actually business we haven't ever been in, but
we think because we are really, really smart and we are the University of Michigan that we
understand this. So one of the things that is a good idea to do is to look around and ask what's
already going on that we are learning? Cern, the large Hadron collider at Cern, they have been
in the news recently because they lit up and they are starting to find stuff. The Atlas project is
one of the big projects there. These are like standard Smithsonian humans down there so the
Atlas program is just this enormous detector. This is part of the 27 km long rings, like 200
meters below the ground. It has 2000 principal investigators, 2000 principal investigators and
all whole lot of worker bees beyond that. They have had to figure out authorship. There are
papers coming out of the Atlas project where the number of pages dedicated to the listing of
the authors is longer than the article [laughter]. And so people say well, we have to deal with
the authorship issue. What authorship issue? We are already dealing with a whole bunch of
authorship issues. Not that least of which, you remember Rosalind Franklin? Does anyone
know that name?
>>: Yeah. Well, what happened to Rosalind Franklin with the Watson and Crick DNA stuff, well
all we know for sure is that she didn't get the Nobel Prize. Could that be because she was a
she? Interesting question. Ownership. Who owns this stuff? We don't know. Remember
Encarta? You know, Encarta was like totally going to change everything, until we killed it. But
then Wikipedia came along and Wikipedia has been growing by leaps and bounds. Now every
time you get on, there's an appeal from Jamie Whale saying give me money, but it's growing
like topsy. If you enter Microsoft, it turns out there's a big article on Microsoft in the English
version. I'm sure it's in other versions too. And one of the things you can do in Wikipedia
which you can't do in most other places, and obviously is getting into the crowd sourcing
knowledge issues, is people debate what constitutes fact. Now Daniel Burstyn had an
interesting comment many years ago, not Burstyn, it was one of the other guys like Burstyn, I
am blanking on his name right now. He said everybody is entitled to their opinions but they are
not entitled to their own facts. It's like, wrong. And all you have to do is watch the current
political campaign and you know that people are entitled to their own facts. Their opinions are
facts. Now this obviously is not a sustainable thing for reasons that we learned in the heyday of
science advancement in the 20th century, but politically it's a very powerful thing right now.
Point of view matters. So you look at science. This is the Foldit website. It's worth going to if
you haven't been there. It started out as a protein folding crowd sourcing of capability and it
has expanded to well beyond that. There's a similar thing, Galaxy Zoo which is built around
Hubble telescope for a lot of astronomy aficionados. Ebird, there are a lot of birdwatchers and
they now drop their sightings into Ebird and then this thing produces lots of crowd sourced
information on migratory patterns and spottings of various kinds of birds and so forth. SETI at
home was one of the first that started doing this. If you go back quickly to Atlas at Cern and
you think what happens when you now have 4 million PI’s; how does the scaling work on this?
Now there are a lot of people that are saying this is the future of science. This is what we
should be doing, because there's all of this ingenious brain power out there, people who are
capable of doing these things. This is true. I mean I believe that's a good argument, but we
don't have a clue how to do this thing. It's entirely new to us. Now the rest of the slides all get
through them quickly. You know, Britannica shut down its print operation just recently and
now the final run of Britannica print things are now collectible. So the price has been bid up
astronomically. We have all kinds of rankings. This is rankings for library and information
studies. We in the ischools look at this and say do we fit in there, and here we are. The
University of Michigan and the University of Washington is ahead of us and the rankings
[laughter] oh my God. So the only thing I can say about rankings is there tends to be two
responses in rankings. For those who are ranked highly they say these rankings are garbage but
I couldn't help noticing that I was ranked really highly. [laughter]. And people who are not
ranked really highly say these rankings are garbage and they leave it at that [laughter]. So the
question of who benefits is still there. This is an interesting piece. I just threw in for the hell of
it. BiblioBouts, this is something that, a gaming thing that, well it started actually by donation
that I got from a benefactor and I nonetheless fund a--this is the thing that we use in classes to
help students to learn how to use online sources to determine whether information is good.
Patterns, well objects in the mirror are often closer than they appear. We see this on our
mirrors. But it's true, and sometimes what's behind the thing you see in the mirror is actually
more important. So I personally believe at this point that this whole issue of liberation, the
relationship between knowledge and liberation, learning and liberation is more important than
the strength of the state in education. I say that particularly in the case of the Western
academic tradition because this is deeply embedded in the Abrahamic religious traditions of
Judaism, Islam, Christianity, all of them are very, very heavily invested in this notion of the
relationship between liberation and learning. This to me is very important. I don't understand
it completely yet, but I think it's very important and it's more important than Sputnik and all
this other stuff. Everything important has a history, but the histories themselves are often
disputed, so sometimes you can't get the history. All you can get is the disputes about the
history, but those are important too and that is a kind of history. Changing infrastructure,
changes access; changing access changes agency. We've seen this repeatedly, but the question
of who benefits continues to rise, so the question at the end of this is what are the causal
mechanisms here, and how do they relate to design? Now some people say John, where are
you going with this? It's pointless to try to understand this stuff. That's not my position. It's
very hard to understand this stuff, but unless you understand it, you can't design things. And if
you can't design things you can't make anything better. And I am personally not a person who
thinks that there's no point in trying to make things better. And I personally am not a person
who thinks that there is no point in trying to make things better. I actually think trying to make
things better is a good idea. Now whether we will make things better in time to dodge
whatever bullets are coming our way is a different question. I had kind of a, it was a fest
shrift/celebration of the creation of this thing at Irvine called The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae;
this was the first ever complete installation of the entire corpus of an ancient language in a
machine-readable form. It started in 1972 at Irvine and Bill Donahue, gave the keynote talk. He
was just recently, until recently the Provost at Georgetown. He's a cassiadoris [phonetic]
scholar. He is a Latinist, not a Greek guy, but he was talking about this. So one of the people
asked him at the end of this talk; this talk was very interesting, Bill, you have been with the
classical scholarship for a long time, what would you think the most interesting issues for
classical scholarship for the next 25 years are? And his response was oh, I think this climate
change thing is going to be really entertaining. It's like, you know, when I heard him say that,
it's like yeah, probably more entertaining than whatever is going on in classical scholarship,
right? And after a while you start thinking can you even have classical scholarship without a
climate where everybody isn't dying? So let me just close with a final observation about the
ischools. First of all, I burst out laughing when I went there because that's my old friend Les
Gasser. Playing his guitar in front of information if information affordances. I mean, it's like
what are they trying to say with this picture? Now if you don't know Les, it's just like this is
some marketing nerd’s idea of a good time. But if you know Les, it's like Les probably thinks
playing that guitar is more important than that other stuff and maybe it is. The problem with
the ischools, and this is the problem and Mike was there at the beginning. He was on the long
march along with me and some others, is we've never really known what the ischools should
be. Now we have an arsenal of things that we tell people who think we should know, but one
of the arguments we used to have early on is people would say we have to define what the
ischools are, and I used to say no, no that is the quickest way to kill this thing, because we
don't, not only do we not know what the ischools are, we don't even know what they should
be. My feeling is they need to be about the kind of stuff that I'm talking about in this talk
because I know that most of the rest of the parts of the university, at least this is true for the
University of Michigan, they don't care about this. They are not paying attention to this. They
are not thinking about it. They have no idea how huge the change that is upon us really is. This
really is a big deal. And when people say what do you mean by this, all I can just do is gesture
and say a lot of stuff like this. Because first of all, prediction time and performance time are
tightly coupled in this. If I could predict the future, I'd be really, really rich. That's one of the
reasons why people like to be able to predict the future is because they want to get rich. I can't
predict the future. I remember back when people told me you should buy a lot of stock in
Microsoft, so I thought who the hell would want to do that. This was like back in the ‘80s. Or
you should buy Apple, or you should buy Cisco and it's like no, no I'd rather put my investment
money into importing Kenyan mushrooms; that business actually didn't do very well. Or I'm
going to invest in this competitor who is really going to kick Mrs. Fields’ ass in chocolate chip
cookies. Actually she kicked our ass, so I'm a terrible investor and this kind of thing. I'm just
trying to understand what the causal connections are here. So I think that's what the ischool’s
movement is about. The ischool’s movement is in response to this visceral feeling that there is
something huge here going on in this information thing and we don't really know what it is. We
think it's important to higher education at the university. We think it's important to systematic
collection. This whole crowd sourcing of knowledge thing is a very big deal, but we don't know
what to do with any of this stuff. And that's the problem. We are, as ischools, we are trying to
chart a course for our own welfare in what is generally a meltdown of a lot of the historical
basis for higher education in this country, because a lot of people think it's tied to this strength
of the society stuff. It's like, yeah, it is. I mean the connections are there and they are real, but
you have all this, you know, national competitiveness and stuff; that stuff is not going to work.
And people are drunk on this. Academic leaders are drunk on this. They think that that is the,
that's the reason. No, it was the reason. There's a big difference between those two things.
Anyway we got a few minutes to talk.
>> Jonathan Grudin: Thank you. [applause].
>> John Leslie King: Yes?
>>: Like to ask question. So going back to the Coursera and the Udacities of the world today,
what do you think their causal mechanism is? I mean it seems like liberation maybe a little bit
but not really strength of state like you are talking about. Is it just free-market capitalism or…
>> John Leslie King: Okay. There's a straight quote by Samuel Johnson that when you see a dog
walking on its hind legs, the issue is not that it's doing it well, it's that it's doing it at all. Now it
loses a little bit of its flavor when you realize he was talking about women preachers, but he
was onto something there. He was saying that you need to discriminate between whether the
thing is good or whether it's just happening at all. And so I look at Coursera and Udacity and
these other things and the public sort of asked me about this at Michigan, because I was
ostensibly working on strategy things, and I said it's really important that they are happening.
The question of what difference it makes, it's too early to tell. We don't know what difference
this makes. I mean it's going to be free and it's not going to be for credit, so why are we doing
this again, given that everything that you've talked about, you know, because of the fiscal crisis
of the university has to do with getting money and the way that we think we’re going to do that
is by giving credit. I mean we don't know why we're doing this. Do you know why we're doing
this? Because top-tier universities are doing this [laughter] and we are one. Princeton,
Princeton, Princeton said they wanted in. Hey, we're Michigan and we want in to. So I called
Scott Paige; he's this guy at Michigan who has actually done one of these things and I said Scott,
he and I know each other pretty well, like what the hell do you think you’re doing with this?
And his answer was I don't know what I'm doing with this; that's why I'm doing it. And I
thought well, that's a fair answer. So I think it's really important. I think that people who
ignore it, ignore it at their peril, but that doesn't mean we understand what it's about. Here is
the biggest dilemma in studying change. When you really want to study change, you have to
really understand the things that don't change. Because all change runs on the rails of the
things that don't change. That's axiomatic. So what do you focus on? That's the hardest
problem. What do you focus on? What you hold constant? What are the things that you
declare to be non-changing? I think, my guess is this liberation thing is one of them, that I, I'm
not, this is early days.
>>: So riffing on that a little bit, a lot of today's education system as you were pointing out, half
emerges from agricultural schedules and half of it comes from guilds wanting people to certify
that everybody can do a certain thing in a certain way, and then you have a lot of different
corporations today, say the one that I work for that that's pretty much going I don't care if he
has a bachelors, Masters, a PhD or no degree at all, I need somebody who can code and can
code well. So there is this great sucking sound desperately desiring people who for example
can code which would seem to me to be a fantastic argument for why you would want to have
a Coursera thing and perhaps what you are seeing is some of the old, the agricultural things
being shrugged off. Now how Michigan makes a buck on this is a fantastic question. I have no
idea.
>> John Leslie King: Yeah, and it's important to Michigan, and parenthetically important to me,
but so, you know, first of all I think that there is some important set of implications between
the existence proof of Coursera and this phenomenon that you're raising which is essentially a
breakdown in presumptions about credentialing. That is a very fundamental issue because if
you look at what we have historically offered at the University of Michigan, not unlike a lot of
other places, we offer a credential. We testify that you are a thing [laughter]. We call it a
graduate of our institution and this carries a lot of symbolic as well as substantive weight. Let's
suppose just for the hell of it, that there was a substitute for that. What would that mean for
us? Actually that's important for us. What people are saying right now is oh yes, substitutes for
this are coming and then you get back to well, what do you mean by this? When I was a dean
and vice provost, I used to the opening complication every year. This is for all of the university
leadership, meet the incoming freshman. And there was a pretty standard routine to this
performance starting with you guys are so awesome to have gotten into the University of
Michigan. Well, let me tell you, this is a crowd pleaser, because a lot of them are there with
their parents, you know, and they already know they are awesome. So having you say that they
are awesome, they are right there. And then there's no talk about what the academy offers; it's
like the football game this Saturday [laughter] and these dudes are like ahh, the football game.
It's like University of Phoenix has the stadium. They just got rid of having all of the teams, you
know. So, you know, it's like now that is a post modern move. Phoenix used to be accredited
by the ACICS, the American Council of Independent Colleges and Schools. They are now
accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools Higher Learning
Commission, the same outfit that accredits the University of Michigan. Why did they do that?
It's not because they are so stupid; it's because they are really smart. They are coming after us.
A lot of people think the University of Phoenix is mostly online education; they are not. The
University of Phoenix is almost entirely face-to-face education, but that doesn't mean they
don't use IT. If you go into Walmart, you don't see a lot of IT; it's not like Amazon, right? And
you think well, there's e-tailing and then there's Walmart. No, Walmart is also built its fortune
on IT, supply chain management. That's what they invested heavily in, logistics. Walmart was
the only outfit that had their head screwed on during Hurricane Katrina. It's like what do you
need when you have a big hurricane? Drink a bowl of water. Do we have that? Yeah, we have
a lot of it. Let's put a bunch of it in trucks and start driving towards New Orleans. They did.
And when it got there, FEMA is like turnaround and go back; we don't need your help.
[laughter]. Now I'm not a huge fan of Walmart, but they had trucks loaded with water heading
for New Orleans. It was kind of smart; because of their supply chain management knowledge
and FEMA turned them around and made them go the other way. It was part of the heckuva
job Brownie was doing [laughter]. So that's like it seems somehow broken. I think it is broken.
>>: [inaudible] University of Phoenix doesn't offer [inaudible] or University of Michigan, which
[inaudible]?
>> John Leslie King: I'll answer the intermediate question. Who is thinking harder about it?
And I can guarantee you Phoenix is. Now who is worried more about it? That might be
correlated with who is thinking about it. At the University of Michigan we are a top-tier
university [laughter] and that is all you really need to know [laughter].
>>: So in the last month I've directed four friends of mine to Udacity. And these conversations
feel like I really need to learn more about coding so I'm going to take a [inaudible] course for
2400 bucks [inaudible] and they all love it and I think that credentialing is, it doesn't matter.
Even if you just do self credentialing, I mean if I could just put it on my resume that I did of
course with Udacity and I scored in the 97 percentile of 90,000 people, you know, that counts.
Anyone who sees that is going to say alright; you know how to do this stuff, and that's
credentialing and it's going to matter.
>> John Leslie King: The University of Michigan engineering college accepts no test scores from
applicants from China unless they took exams proctored by University of Michigan people, and I
raise that because you can claim anything. The question is whether it's certifiable, right, and so
these people come out with these astronomically high SAT scores and it's completely fictitious.
>>: But that's for a University, but for a job applicant there are going to look at that and say
okay write some code. Let's see it. And you do it on the spot.
>> John Leslie King: You just added a very interesting additional dimension which is a
performance dimension. And Jonathan and I were talking about this the other night, how often
do you run into these cases where people say I got a degree from so and so and they didn't.
This is an easy thing to check. You call up the institution. Did so-and-so get a degree? No, we
don't have any record that that person was ever here. You know, so you lied about this? Yeah.
So we have to fire your ass. Yeah. They fire him and, you know, it's like that stuff is pretty easy
to check. It's actually pretty easy to check if people know how to remove an object from a
linked list. You give them a linked list and ask them to remove the object, and they can either
do it or they can't. Now, if what you need is people who can insert and remove objects from
linked lists, this is a pretty straightforward thing. If you are hiring them to decide where the
company should go, that's a little harder. We don't actually have a test for that. So, you know,
this is one of the dilemmas of my job. I'm ostensibly advising the university on strategic issues.
I believe it's less now that I'm no longer the vice provost for strategy, but they still ask me what
I think, and my answers very often are of the flavor yeah, that's like a really big one. [laughter].
And they’re like, you're supposed to tell us what to do. Well, how the hell do I know what to
do? And of course, the thing I don't say is for that matter, how the hell do you know what to
do. But they are in charge, which means they know what to do, which is why they are asking
me what they should do [laughter]. I mean this is, it's easy to make light of it, but it's actually a
very tough thing because I mean how many of you accurately prevented, or predicted the end
of the Cold War? And if anybody raised their hand and said oh, I did. You're a liar.
>>: There was somebody on a talk show in the UK who said oh, of course communism will fall
and [inaudible] I didn't catch what he said. And of course a number of telephones and once you
get enough telephones the information can get about the list that's why he was very pessimistic
about China, because Tiananmen Square, if you lived a quarter mile away, you didn't know
[inaudible] but [inaudible] ultimately information [inaudible].
>> John Leslie King: Yeah. So here…
>>: It was one guy [laughter].
>> John Leslie King: There are actually a small number of people who wrote down why this
won't work, why it will break. One of them was Hayek, Frederick Hayek, and he came up with
this thing called the local distant knowledge problem and basically what he said is that it's a
general rule the quality of the decisions declines as the function of the distance between a
problem and the decision maker, so central planning, that can't work and guess what? It
doesn't. Back when I was in my early stage of my academic career in Irvine, we were studying
computers in city governments. The only people in the entire world who cared about this were
city Soviets. They thought computers would save their ass. They would come over, they were
like, actually one of my colleagues went and visited them, and this guy had our working papers
in a safe in his office. He was like doling them out for favors and stuff, it's like, we got to get
this shit published [laughter].
>>: But I do have a question.
>> John Leslie King: Yes.
>>: You have ischools up there, so University of Phoenix as far as I know doesn't have a library,
so what is the purpose of a research library in a modern university?
>> John Leslie King: Gee, that's a really good question. It turns out that I have been lately
getting requests from headhunters about whether I want to be a university librarian at
institutions like Yale and it's like, is this a crank call? Did you get the wrong number? No, no,
this is John King blah, blah blah yeah, I am that guy. Some higher education leaders think and I
think that they are right that the academic library needs to be the center of a set of very
important changes that happen in the academy and when you go and you talk to people in the
academic library they are like we do this. Why do you do that? Because that's the kind of thing
we do. Why do you do that? Because it's the kind of thing that needs to be done. And it's like,
okay, I get it; you are defending what you have been doing all this time. So when we were
searching for a university librarian, I recommended Paul Courant and badgered the hell out of
him until he took the job. He was a former provost. He's an economist and he came in and,
you know, Paul is actually pretty good with people and he started saying, you know, we are
going to have to destroy Carthage, you know, at some point and, you know, after he repeated it
enough times, people were saying like, what about Carthage? What are we going to do about
Carthage? Should be destroy it? And, you know, now they're talking seriously about getting
hundreds of thousands if not millions of volumes out of the building because they are like
online. Why are we storing them in the building? And, you know, at the other end there is
BARL, you know, and BARL it's like we rank you by your metric tonnage of cellulose [laughter].
And the only criterion is that every piece of cellulose has to have a different title [laughter].
And so the librarian is like oh my gosh, we're going to fall in the [inaudible] rankings and it's like,
ah, yeah, we probably will. It doesn't really matter very much. It's like those are the only
rankings we have. Yeah?
>>: Using that as an example, is it possible that this trend can reverse itself?
>> John Leslie King: Of course. And what's difficult to predict is when and how that will
happen. When people say well, haven't you been surprised before? My answer is yes, of
course, I've been surprised before. I mean, you know, when people say, I went to--I was telling
Jonathan about this. The National Computer Conference or the fall computer conference or
whatever it was; it was at the Anaheim Convention Center in 1988, ‘78 and there was a booth,
the Apple booth, and Jobs and Wozniak were both there in this booth. And they were like, hey,
people want computers. What? Nobody wants a computer. Well, I didn't get rich on the
personal computer industry, right? I was getting funded by IBM. I was listening to the guys at
IBM and they were saying nobody wants these things. It's like, well, actually they do. And the
rest is now history. So yeah, really big change can happen. The problem is predicting it, getting
it right and that's kind of the job I am working on.
>> Jonathan Grudin: John will be happy to answer questions. It is 12:10 so why don't we thank
John again and people that have questions… [applause].