A NEW UNIVERSITY FOR A NEW AGE
September 29, 2005
Inauguration Speech
by Jerry MacArthur Hultin,
10th President of Polytechnic Institute of NYU
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This is exciting! To stand here before you is exhilarating! I am thrilled about harnessing your energy and your talent to grow this gem of a school into an even more vibrant university. I feel privileged to have been chosen to be your president.
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Today, we have celebrated our past.
Now, let us chart the course for our future.
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This new age is a product of new technologies: radar, the microchip, the satellite, and the laser. The power of these technologies is evident all around us … in our cell phones, the internet, our global positioning system, precision warfare, new medical cures, the global economy – and our IPods.
Our new age is also a product of big ideas: democracy and free markets. We saw the force of these two ideas in the end of the Cold War, when the innovative power of the western world toppled the centralized Soviet state and unleashed new energy and opportunity not only in the United States, but around the world. Nearly 3 billion new workers joined the global market place. Information, capital, goods – even terror – now move easily across borders into all corners of the earth. This is the world that Tom Friedman declared “flat!”
Not only is the new world flat, but the global economy’s business model is deeply flawed. For China and India to make and finance the goods and services the United States and Europe consumes is lethal, not just to the United States, but to India and China. In this new age, we must help create a thriving middle-class in India and China that consumes the goods and services it produces. To do this, we must not only educate our own country’s workforce, we must educate workers and build innovative enterprises throughout the world.
As this new era develops, the people of the world are flocking to cities; over one million new urban dwellers arrive every week, demanding new roads, houses, schools, factories and offices. As this happens, the consumption of resources escalates and our effluent and waste begins to overwhelm the earth’s resilience. We must expand the value of resources and tame the impact of waste. The scale of this assignment is daunting, since the earth’s population will swell to over 8 billion people by 2030. Unless we think anew, more than half of these people will live on less than $2 a day.
In this new age, advances in science and technology seem to threaten the moral and ethical foundations of the world’s religions. The concerns raised by genomics and evolution are visceral. We -- especially the humanities and social sciences -- must address these issues; otherwise, we will be denied the benefits of science and technology in this new age.
Already, our young graduates are pursuing this new era’s opportunities. Last week, two recent graduates of Polytechnic visited with me to discuss their ambitions. One graduate has the rights to an engineered-housing product designed for developing countries, such as Latin America. On the heels of the recent hurricanes, he is gauging his capacity to supply housing to the Gulf Coast.
With him came a second NYU-Poly graduates who has raised $2M of venture capital and is about to return to the capital markets for more. He has invented a new product. The product will be branded by a powerful European corporation, manufactured in China, and marketed to customers in the United States. Neither of these new age graduates has a traditional job, or depends on traditional skills, yet both are making a living – and both are excited about their future!
Our current undergraduates see this not as a “new era” but the only era they have known. You were born after 1984. The Soviet Union disappeared before you graduated from grade school. Cell phones and the intranet appeared during middle school. Before you finished high school, the human genome was decoded, the World Trade Centers fell, and China and India arose.
Young or old, we are in a new age with new demands. Our students and the world are calling on us to invent a new university that meets the needs of this new age.
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What should be the qualities of a new university? In the tradition of great universities, I propose we enter into a dialogue of ideas about this new university. To begin this exchange, here are my thoughts. I am sure you will add others.
First, the new university should be the home of academic entrepreneurs, to borrow a term from my friend, Erich Kunhardt, who once roamed Poly’s halls as a faculty member. This new university should be composed of bright faculty who have the capacity and desire to invent and apply new science and technology to our most significant problems. Its fields and disciplines for research should be redefined:
Our goal should be to collaboratively advance science, math, engineering, management, the humanities and social sciences to help people at home and abroad.
Second, the new university should open doors. As David Brooks wrote last Sunday in the New York Times: “…in an information society, college is the gateway to opportunity.” At Polytechnic, nearly 30% of our students come from families with annual incomes below twenty thousand dollars, a higher percentage of low-income families than either the State or City Universities of New York. Our role in creating opportunity in the “land of opportunity” sets us apart from private schools of privilege and to a surprising extent, the public schools around us.
Now this distinction has gained Polytechnic new fame. This month, we were ranked by Washington Monthly as second in the nation for “social mobility” surpassed only by UCLA. On the east coast, not Yale, Harvard, Columbia, or NYU, but Polytechnic Institute of NYU is at the top of the charts for making the American Dream. And why not, NYU-Poly alumnus and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, James Truslow Adams, coined the expression, ‘the American Dream.’
Third, the new university must be a global gateway to urban centers, both here and abroad, not an enclave, but a hub of collaboration and alliances with links around the world.
To teach in this new age, we can use the urban landscape that surrounds us. Where better, than the hurly-burly, rough and tumble boroughs of New York to comprehend and design urban security, communications, transportation, and quality of life. Internships with companies, governments, and non-profits will expand our students’ skills and enhance our communities. As Bob Kerrey, president of the New School, notes: one of the best places to hold a fruitful dialogue about the problems of Kashmir is not India or Pakistan, but rather Brooklyn or Queens.
Think of a today’s young science or engineering student, fluent in English and also totally at ease in his or her family’s Chinese, Russian, Spanish or Farsi. Throughout life, he or she will have a special advantage whether doing research, starting a new business, or building a new city.
For him or her, the American Dream will be the “Urban Dream” and the “Global Dream.”
Fourth, as the new university grows, it will need to rethink vestiges of the current model. For instance,
- How will we curb the price of tuition at this new university?
- How will we give undergraduates an exciting role in research?
- How will we re-engineer research so that the artificially linear funding categories – basic, applied, development – are fused into a more holistic, creative and entrepreneurial approach?
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How will we integrate management, the humanities and social sciences more fully into our technical education?
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How will we bring new faces to the governing boards of the new university? For the new university I have in mind will need a fresh contingent of trustees who know the entrepreneurial character of large urban centers around the world.
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How do we create such a university?
One could, of course, repeat history in the manner of Johns Hopkins in 1876 and create it from whole cloth. Indeed, the recently opened Olin College of Engineering near Boston hopes to do just this.
But one can also transform an existing university to meet these challenges. Such a transformation is unlikely at the most eminent of our great universities. They are, in the words of Clay Christensen, caught in the innovators dilemma with ‘rules’ that prevent them from seeing and responding to the perils of obsolescence.
However, a university can transform itself if it has less at stake and more to gain; if it is small enough to be agile and smart enough to think innovatively; if it has diversity within its faculty and students; and if it has friends and supporters who will provide resources.
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Can Polytechnic can be such a new university?
I spent this summer listening and learning from you in one hundred personal discussions, in groups of ten and twenty, and in a university-wide workshop.
Here is what you taught me.
Polytechnic is a university eager to change and grow. A renewal of Polytechnic has been underway for nearly fifty years. First, a renewal in moving from Livingston Street to Jay Street under President’s Rogers and Weber. Then, a renewal in the creation of MetroTech … President Emeritus George Bugliarello’s dream, developed by Bruce Ratner! Most recently, a renewal … with the new dorm, the Jacobs Academic Building, the refurbished Rogers Hall, made possible by the beneficence of the Othmers and the Jacobs under the presidency of Chancellor David Chang.
Polytechnic is a university with an approach to teaching that encourages “first to college” undergraduates. We teach tough, technical subjects with compassion.
Polytechnic is a university filled with exciting research expertise:
- Urban technologies
- Information systems and secure networks
- Wireless communications
- Super-computer design
- Cyber security
- Convex geometry
- Engineered materials
- Polymers and bio-medical engineering
- New energy
- The science of services
- Complex decision making
- Financial engineering
and more.
Our faculty and students embrace a richer range of talents and cultures than perhaps any private university in the United States.
Polytechnic has been tested in the Big Apple. You know the words: “If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere!”
Polytechnic has great supporters. Look around this historic opera house, we are surrounded by leaders, trustees, alumni, friends and family. Ours is a task which is going to need a great deal of help from others. Many are here on this stage and in this audience. Let’s give them a rousing thank you for being with us today!
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Mayor Bloomberg – a believer in technology and education – and all the officials of Brooklyn, New York City, the state, and our federal government. With your support, Polytechnic is ready to build a better society.
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Craig Matthews, Chairperson of the Board -- and all the trustees. Each one cares deeply about our success.
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Charles Camarda – who followed his dreams into space -- and all the great PolyThinkers and honorary degree recipients here today. You make us proud by your achievements.
All our alumni, our guests from universities and colleges across the nation, and our friends and families. Your presence here shows how much you care about Polytechnic.
This summer, you were clear: We are eager to grow; we excel at “social mobility;” we are agile, smart, and innovative; our diversity mirrors the world; we are urban and global. We have powerful friends and supporters who care deeply about us.
We have what it takes to create a new university
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For an institution such as Polytechnic to survive and thrive for 150 years is a remarkable feat. Ours has been a celebrated history – with life-changing education and world-changing research. For a century and a half, Polytechnic has offered the world the American Dream. In social mobility, we are -- like New York City -- “king of the hill, head of the list, cream of the crop, top of the heap!”
So now is hardly the time to hold back. In the words of a contemporary playwright, it is the time for “boldness, a willingness to imagine the future not purely as a continuation of the past.”
Early in life, I learned the hardest part is when the bullets and the bombs stop flying, and you try to build something fresh and new.
Working together and supporting each other, we can expand education and research … in the sciences, math, engineering, management, the humanities, and social sciences … and meet the opportunities and challenges before us.
I will need your help in this noble effort!!
Will you join me … in making Polytechnic a university that thrives in New York City and around the world. Intensify our education, expand our research, raise resources and create a compelling brand. If we focus on our core mission and pay attention to basics day-to-day, we will create the proficiency, leadership, and resources required to build a new university.
Will you join me? … in building a new university for a new age! Join me … in making Polytechnic a university that offers the scientific knowledge, technical skills, wisdom and courage that we all need to compete and succeed.
Join me … in making Polytechnic a university that serves our community, the nation, and the world.
I am counting on you.
Thank you!
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