While in Beijing, Brodhead met university officials and senior scholars in the liberal arts at Tsinghua to discuss partnerships between Duke and Tsinghua. He also met with representatives of the State Administration for Foreign Experts Affairs and Peking University. In addition, he participated in an online chat with another education leader and was interviewed by China's largest television network.

Throughout the two weeks, Brodhead met with numerous alumni and students, and with the news media. In Taipei, he visited the Koo Foundation Sun-Yat Sen Cancer Center, which was founded by Dr. Andrew Huang, a Duke professor of medicine. Brodhead also participated in a Taipei educational forum about the future of internationalization in higher education. In Seoul, he toured Seoul National University and met with the president and a dean of the university.

Brodhead and his wife, Cynthia, were scheduled to return to Durham on Friday. Among the Duke officials who assisted them in China were professor Kang Liu, director of the Program in Chinese Media and Communication Studies; Longen Chen, an adviser to vice provost for international affairs Gil Merkx; Yi Zeng, a research professor in the Duke Center for Demographic Studies; and members of the Duke Chinese Student and Scholar Association.

Tsinghua vice president Jining Chen introduced Brodhead Thursday as a "most insightful" university president and "one of the most prominent scholars in 20th century English literature." Following his speech, Brodhead answered questions about university collaborations, globalization and why he chose to specialize in English literature.

The full text of his speech follows below:

“Toward a New University: Research and Education in a Global Society.” Speech delivered by Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead at Tsinghua University, Beijing, June 29, 2006

I am honored to be here today to receive a degree from Tsinghua University, a great university of China that is increasingly recognized as one of the great universities of the world. I am fascinated by Tsinghua’s rise to prominence over the past 100 years. As I understand it, the university I am visiting today began as a preparatory school that aspired to send students on to further education at universities in the United States. Many chapters of history later, Tsinghua has grown into a major international research university with an array of distinguished professional schools, and now students and scholars from around the world look to work done here to further their educations. To rise to such prominence within a 100-year period is unusual, and I salute you on your bright future.

I am interested in Tsinghua’s history because Tsinghua’s growth bears a certain resemblance to that of my own institution. Duke was established as a full-scale university in 1924, just one year before Tsinghua became a four-year university. It, too, began as a much smaller institution with much more narrow goals. Founded in 1839 as a one-room schoolhouse in a remote rural location, the school that eventually took the name of Duke became first a teacher training institute, then a small liberal arts college, before a surge of aspiration led to the creation of a graduate school, schools of medicine, law, business, divinity, engineering, and nursing, and a premier undergraduate college in a research university setting. For these two institutions to have grown so significantly in such a relatively short period of time says something about how they view change and opportunity. If you look closely at the histories of our schools, you will discover key moments when their leaders showed unusual nimbleness and enterprise, a willingness to take thoughtful risks to seize the opportunities of their time. Through such transformations, our two schools have become the noted universities they are today—and through time, further transformations will continue to be required if we are to deliver the full value of our potential.

The title of my talk, “Toward a New University: Research and Education in a Global Society,” has the ring of a manifesto. But I confess that I will not be announcing a unique vision for the future of higher education. If my nearly fifteen years as an academic administrator have taught me anything, it is a distrust for that kind of claim of novelty. The universities of the world have always been shameless borrowers, taking projects and structures from one another and developing them to their own ends. (What could be less “original” than our ideas of the role of professor, department, or professional degree program—ancient inventions that have been widely copied and inform the structures of virtually all the great universities of the world?) Nowadays in particular, the flow of information is such that new ideas are quickly shared across institutional boundaries and developed far from their place of birth, making it nearly impossible for one school to claim a unique approach to higher education. Instead, today I’d like to share my belief that universities like Tsinghua and Duke are in the midst of a major change in how we go about the business of research and education: a new university is emerging, building upon an old one. As this change proceeds, we will witness an evolution in how society values the university, what it needs from us and what it will ask of us. Let me explain.

Sometimes the knowledge generated through university research is instantly useful, and some universities might only want to support research that yields such direct returns. We all understand the value of such institutions. But a great many questions will never be asked unless there is support and encouragement for the curiosity to consider such questions, since it may not be immediately apparent how society can benefit from their solutions. Freed from the demands of immediate usefulness, university environments make it possible to open the mysteries of the world and to understand things that were once opaque. These discoveries may seem abstractly intellectual in the beginning, but with time, they can become the crucial building blocks for societal advances.

When scientists began to explore the genome fifty years ago, they were following their curiosity about the way cells could transmit information, searching for an answer to an interesting puzzle. When the first scientists found the structure of DNA, they could not have imagined the way that future researchers would use this information. Colleagues of mine like Joseph Nevins, Professor of Breast Cancer Genomics and Director of Duke’s Center for Applied Genomics and Technology, are discovering how slight variations in DNA can be used as biomarkers to match patients with more precise treatments for cancer. Instead of guessing which of 50 treatments will affect particular cancers based on generalizations about the entire population, doctors can now group tumors by the way they alter gene expression and find the therapy best tailored for each individual. These and other breakthroughs are helping us realize that the fruits of genomic research will not be the ones that first drove much of that research, the idea that genetic discoveries could lead to the eradication of diseases, but a new idea that was only uncovered through ongoing research experience: the concept of a personalized medicine matching cures to the genetic individualities of an organism.

Other discoveries at research universities affect the natural world we depend on. I might choose as an example the work of another Duke colleague, Robert Jackson, Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences. By looking at the chemistry of soil in 55 different locations around the world, Professor Jackson has found that planting trees in an area can increase the salt content of the soil and that new plants can also substantially reduce the flow of water in local streams. Together, these two effects can significantly alter the environmental balance in an area. While planting forests has become a common recipe for combating greenhouse gases, Professor Jackson’s research reminds us that environmental alterations have multiple effects, all of which must be carefully considered lest we create a new problem in the act of solving an old one. By quantifying exactly how certain plants affect water flow, this research sets up clearer guidelines to determine where on earth this environmental cure is a feasible solution. This inquiry, which began as measurement of specific characteristics in specific areas, is now affecting environmental policy in far-flung areas of the globe.

Sometimes these companies emerge directly from discoveries at universities, as research directed at one aim yields unexpected results. David Brady, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, discovered a way to use noninvasive lasers to look at the amount and location of important molecules under the skin of human beings. While this colleague continues to explore this process as a pure intellectual challenge through his research, a separate company has already been created to develop the commercial potential of his discovery. This scenario of abstract knowledge spawning business ventures is certainly known to you as well. I am told that when students at Tsinghua developed a way to improve circuit diagrams called the Fly Fire Electronic System Design Platform, the mechanism was immediately purchased by a company that makes components for electronic devices. This reminds us again that the byproducts of intellectual investigation expand in many directions and influence many aspects of life.

While universities are indeed problem-solving places, a significant amount of research focuses on aspects of life that are less tangible, though no less important. There’s no saying what ideas and objects we may one day desperately need to understand, so inquiry with no immediately foreseeable application remains crucial to what we do. And when I think of research with hard-to-quantify usefulness, I certainly include the enriching understandings that arise through the study of literature, history, and art. A modern American writer has said that literature is the history of the soul; and indeed, we read literature not just as a mirror in which to grasp the possible meanings of our experience, but as a sensitive register to the way human hopes and anxieties have been formed in places, times, and circumstances different from our own.

I have yet to mention what is perhaps the most obvious and valuable “product” to come out of universities: I am referring to educated people. We speak of knowledge-creation as a good in itself, but no knowledge is ever created without the prior action of an inquiring human mind, and no discovery ever becomes useful until we have people who know how to put it to use. When we look with pride at our graduates, universities are recognizing the chief good that we give to the world. This is the steady flow of men and women with a core of knowledge and discipline that allows them to bring trained intelligence to the fundamental processes of social life: to business, education, government, medical care, and all the rest.

But in this regard, our value does not lie in giving students fixed knowledge they can practice on for the rest of their careers. Modern universities have the challenge of educating individuals to participate in a world that will continue to change in ways that we cannot foresee and to cope with challenges that we cannot yet name. Lacking knowledge of what the future will hold and what exact skills will be necessary to thrive, we need to give our students the mental discipline and internal intellectual dynamism to keep learning how to understand and act on an emerging world long after their formal education is complete. More particularly, in the future, an educated person will need to be able to pull together and integrate disparate bodies of knowledge, and to do so not by some unified formula teachable in advance, but improvisationally, opportunistically, and in response to changing arrays of facts and resources. Our challenge is to breed the versatility and creativity of thought that will enable people to address whatever world arises to confront them ten, twenty, or fifty years from now.

This brings me to my vision of the emerging “new university.” The university as it was perfected in the 20^th century is largely based on the idea of specialization, a goal expressed in such familiar artifacts as the separation of departments and disciplinary subfields, specialized programs of professional study, and so on. The logic of specialization gave us most of the great discoveries that were made in the last century in every field, and I have no doubt that it will continue to be essential to future advances of knowledge. But we live in a world where, increasingly, problems are no longer contained within the boundaries of disciplines, and narrow foci that carry us deep into a single dimension will not solve the many-sided problems we confront.

We already begin to understand that every diplomatic question has an economic, a political, a historical, a cultural (and possibly a military) dimension, in addition to many more. This means that the successful negotiation of international conflicts will require people trained not in one skill but in a multiplicity of them, and in the ability to connect them constructively.

As we become increasingly aware of the global dimensions of human health issues, and as new health issues emerge through the process of globalization—we are now highly aware of new epidemics being produced by dietary changes in rapidly changing societies and new environmental health threats produced by new energy uses, to name only two—we face the increasing recognition that these problems are medical, but not medical alone. Their full analysis requires expertise in physiology and pharmacology and genetics but also in earth science, history, and the sociology and anthropology of health. Their solutions will require knowledge of science to be sure, but also of the particularities of cultures, health management economics, and social and environmental policy.

But in the face of the issues emerging before us, it would be naïve to assume that individual men and women could master all the relevant intellectual skills. Therefore, together with supplying more range to the expertise we hope to impart, we must work to promote the sharing or pooling of understandings, and teach our students how to combine their bits of knowledge with those of others in the service of larger goals.

Already people in certain fields—particularly science and engineering—have the habit of working in teams. In the future, I am guessing, such collaboration will be increasingly necessary across the whole organization of knowledge, and these teams will need to become more inclusive, to bring people together across wide disciplinary arrays. From here it is only a step to the idea that these collaborations will have to reach across the bounds of individual universities as well.

Universities as we have known them have a habit of thinking competitively, each advertising its special strengths and hoping to leave its rivals in the dust. The reasons for competition—for research funding, for the brightest faculty and students—will continue to exist. But to meet the challenges humanity will face in coming decades, higher education will need to be far less about institutional competition, and far more about institutional cooperation and partnership. Universities like ours are already gatherings of intelligence where experts interact in such a way as to produce greater creativity. In the future, we must take on the task of joining together, in flexible and opportunistic ways, to create communities of intelligence focused on complex problems.

This idea was highlighted for me in a recently established group that has been brought together to develop a vaccine for HIV. Dr. Barton Haynes, Professor of Medicine at Duke, has been chosen to lead the $350 million venture called CHAVI, the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology. But this is not a Duke project alone, nor even a traditional partnership on an old or familiar model. To face this great international health challenge, which infects and kills thousands each week, funding sources that have typically worked independently of one another have recognized the need to come together in a massive coalition of government agencies, private foundations, and industrial organizations. Spurred on by this support, the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology has been constructed as a consortium of researchers from universities and medical centers from around the globe who are exploring the challenges of HIV from different but complementary angles—a massive research project that will now be integrated and coordinated through the CHAVI grant. The launch of this initiative in Durham last August was a veritable United Nations—a display of potential rivals working together to do the task no one of them could do alone.

The kind of partnership that allows individuals to study in another culture and bring its lessons back home is still a valuable piece of education. However, with the increasing interdependence of economic systems and financial markets, and a technological network that allows instantaneous communication across geographical distance and political boundaries, we have recognized the need to build these individual interactions into a deeper and broader exchange. This teamwork is what I see in the more mature version of Duke’s relationship with Chinese universities, and notably with Tsinghua. Last summer, faculty and alumni from Duke Law School met here to explore corporate governance and investing in China with faculty from Tsinghua. Overlapping research interests led to that meeting, and in its wake the bonds between our universities have strengthened as scholars explore similar questions from their separate perspectives, drawing upon academic, industrial and government experience. From disparate global locations, colleagues are fostering a network of exchange and mutual stimulation that can influence how those issues will be addressed in the actual world.

Such alliances have the chance to create solutions that no one university or nation could arrive at by itself. And we will increasingly need them. There will be no Chinese solution to the problem of renewable energy whose benefits will be confined to China. There will be no American solution to the diabetes epidemic that will not benefit people around the world.

But such international problem-solving partnerships have their preconditions, and their growth is not inevitable. It helps to reflect on how new this kind of collaboration is. I had already been a professor for five years in 1977, when Tsinghua began to advance toward its current status as an international powerhouse of education. In 1977—not so very long ago—the technology did not exist to support these cross-oceanic collaborations. And until very near that time, political or diplomatic circumstances would have restricted such exchanges even if technology had allowed them. I vividly remember my colleagues who were among the first American academics to visit China, in the middle years of the 1970s. So short a time ago, our people were virtually total strangers to each other, and exchanges carried a magical air of novelty and wonder. Cultural openings on both sides helped create the possibilities for partnership that have become everyday realities today. And the free exchange of information and scholars will continue to be the prerequisite for us to realize the promise of these collaborative opportunities.

Universities everywhere must recognize the legitimate claims of national security, since we all rely on that security to protect our lives and work. But we have nothing to gain from intellectual protectionism or exclusivity in the life of the mind. In the modern world, no country’s intellectual establishment has thrived by shutting the doors to brilliant foreigners. Where would 20^th century American science and technology have been without the stimulus provided by a parade of brilliant immigrants—in recent years, many of them from Asia? In economic terms as well, trying to keep foreigners from stealing one’s trade secrets has never been as successful as welcoming strangers and creating a culture of creativity that invents new ideas faster than others can copy them.

For this and many other reasons, the intellectual and educational missions of modern universities require the freest possible flow of people and ideas. Life is not only more interesting in such an environment. To the extent that intellectual collaboration across national boundaries will be needed to deal with the challenges of our shared world, we will need the freedom that permits this collaboration if we are to make progress on fundamental problems.

source: www.dukenews.duke.edu