Gee at Spring Faculty Assembly: graduate education must improve

Chancellor Gordon Gee addressed members of the Vanderbilt faculty April 2 at the second annual Spring Faculty Assembly. The Headnotes, Vanderbilt Law School's a capella group consisting of students, faculty and staff at the Law School, began the proceedings. James F. Blumstein, professor of law and Centennial Chair in Law and chair of the Faculty Senate, introduced the Chancellor, whose remarks follow:

This occasion is, as it always is, a celebration of your talents. It is not a "State of the University" speech, but rather an occasion for another meeting of our minds in the course of this rather long conversation that we have been having. And we simply do not do this enough and we simply do not have enough time or do enough of these things.

Before we move any farther in, allow me to congratulate our former provost, Tom Burish, on his recent appointment to the presidency of Washington and Lee University.

I know, as all of you know, that he will fulfill his duties at that post with the same dedication, integrity and civility he always brought to his role as Vanderbilt's Provost.

And I want to acknowledge Tom's successor here, Nick Zeppos, who has just assumed the office of provost, and is already full-speed-ahead -- as only Nick can be -- in his new role, bringing his vision and talent to the articulation of the values that are ours.

As always, I meet you here on this occasion as Vanderbilt's Chancellor and as your colleague, to report to you and then to converse. We have some microphones here and I look forward to your questions. We have so much to do today, with real celebration at the end. In the best spirit of the word, we eat our beets first, in order to get sorbet later!

I feel impelled, before we go even deeper in, to give you a prognosis of Vanderbilt's health, to reassure you that the University is indeed very healthy. This fact is fundamental, because so much depends on our good economic health. Our soundness and mobility as an institution rest on the rather prosaic foundation of our resources.

This past year especially, the economic world has been fraught by wild fluctuations in the higher education marketplace; the New York Times recently reported on the cutbacks major public and private institutions are being forced to make.

But Vanderbilt is healthy in spite of this financial crisis in higher education, in spite of economic challenges. Vanderbilt endures, ladies and gentlemen, as a hale and hearty institution, and our well-being grants us the luxuries of flexibility, of innovation, of continuing to make good on the goals we have set for ourselves. We've had to compromise nothing, to postpone nothing. Our financial strength allows us to talk about our future, rather than forcing us to worry whether we will survive the present. Of course, in saying this I have to be mindful of my caste as an administrator: I am not making a declaration that encourages prodigality, libertine or licentious spending. I am only assuring you of our health. But of course, knowing what we do of what current institutions suffer and thinking, "There but for the grace of God go we," we must continue to take care, to operate with prudence.

Our talk today is going to have one focus, a singleness of direction, a fierce pointedness of gaze. You know that we have enjoyed remarkable success in four of the five goals that I set forth as missions in my very first address to you. Our successes have been amply reported and discussed and as our time is precious, I will not go into great detail now.

Undergraduate community life has deepened and revivified. Our students have gone activist: this year staging walkouts, hanging anti-hate walls, papering the campus with guerrilla feminist flyers and starting three -- soon to be four -- campus publications. Indeed, I want you to note that I received this e-mail from one student, "Dear Chancellor: Just a note that one has been added to the scant few of Vander-kids with crazy hair. I just dyed mine blue. I am a freshman in Arts and Science and I met you at the beginning of last semester. I figured you might appreciate the news." This is from Dana. In the spirit of what I try to do, I responded to Dana, "Dear Dana: Indeed I do appreciate the news. Keep that hair blue. When you graduate in four years, I will give you a job in fundraising. Just imagine what a road show we would make together! I will entitle my alumni club speech 'From Tints to Quinks: How Blue Hair of all Ages Made a Difference at Vanderbilt.' ''

Our dialogues have begun to involve far more tongues than two, as our campus life becomes more and more intellectually diverse. Students along with faculty have shown unprecedented interest and involvement in the residential college philosophy, in the transformation of this campus into a residential college system. And I want to tell you now that I fully embrace the goals and philosophy of a residential college system and will do everything I can to support and enable the efforts of all of those on campus who are working toward its actualization here and now. We will create -- indeed we are creating -- a new paradigm for residential life at Vanderbilt: an evolving and dynamic learning environment that builds on the strengths of our intellectual life, our social character and our geography. Such a transformation cannot happen in one cloudburst, but has to occur over time. I am committed to examining the first phase in this important initiative and I obviously will have much more to say about this in weeks to come, to you, to our students, to our trustees; but be assured that we are committed to an aggressively evolutionary approach to this future.

Other goals are gaining form optimally well. Our professional schools are forming a web of co-operation among themselves. Our budgetary system has been revised within an inch of its life, so that it is no longer so arcane and abstruse, so that it has gates between areas instead of fortified walls, so that it allows movement among and between budgets. And whether the issue was of how well known we were as a resource to the community, or what sort of resource we were to begin with, we are now more deeply interwoven with the life of our city than we ever have been. The pace of change on this campus, I will submit to you, fairly vibrates.

Bolstering all of these goals is the development of an overall strategic academic plan. In order that we continue on a forward and upward trajectory, I ask from each of you the fullest participation possible. The last four years have seen perhaps more extensive, detailed planning than ever before in Vanderbilt's history, throughout the University and obviously including our great Medical Center. As a result of this planning, many new initiatives are arising in nearly every academic area. Across the past several months especially, our new provost has engaged the faculty both individually and collectively, encouraging you to create focus, excellence, and distinctiveness in our scholarly enterprise. That effort now bears fruit.

Over the coming weeks, you will hear from the provost of a number of innovative initiatives, and your response to these will be sought, even questioned and valued. These new ventures should not be interpreted as announcements from on high, nor as referenda on where we should spend the Academic Venture Capital Fund, or the bounty from our upcoming campaign. As we know, the best academic plan is one that is never completed, that we can never declare "over" and then go off to rest on our research grants. This plan, one that you will shape, will be a work in progress always. To succeed, our academic plan, our economic models and fundraising priorities, must be subject to an ongoing process of critique and examination from the best minds. So I call on you, especially those of you in the Faculty Senate, to support it by investing yourselves in it, and, if necessary, challenging it. I have asked our new Provost to issue a draft of the Academic Plan that reflects the generation of ideas that has occurred over the last three years. This draft, which will issue on the nineteenth of April, is not a final plan, is not the end of our planning process, but rather the beginning, and the Provost will be soliciting your responses to it.

When I set forth my five goals, two autumns ago, I referred to them as "challenges."

Out of all of these five, then, graduate education remains our greatest challenge. For some reason, we have not been able to cure what ails us. Graduate education must be, now, the major priority at this University.

I have been illuminated by the lively debate in the Faculty Senate concerning graduate education and by the thoughtful report issued last year by the Committee to Review the Graduate School. Mack Mellor, the chair of that committee, as well as Jim Blumstein, Jay Clayton, the Faculty Senate Academic and Policy Services Committee, the Executive Committee of the Senate and dozens, indeed hundreds of faculty members at this University involve themselves passionately with this cause and have succeeded in setting a model for the functioning of a faculty-centered university.

So, what have we learned, in our process of examination? How we strengthen graduate education is a difficult issue, and potentially even a divisive one. However, it is an issue we must face, because how we treat it reflects back to us our very idea of ourselves as a University.

If we do truly intend to strengthen graduate education, we have to confront the fact that such strengthening may -- probably will -- require us to eliminate and consolidate some programs even as we create and enhance others. We must have the will to face conflicting choices, to grow by substitution and reallocation rather than accretion.

Vanderbilt has 41 Ph.D. programs, some of which are the finest in the world, the vanguard of their disciplines. Others are less than they should be. Which should lead all of us at this institution to ask the question: if we cannot devote the time and the resources and the expertise to do something in the highest and most excellent manner in which that thing can be done, should it then be done here? Vanderbilt does not have the luxury of harboring the less-than-splendid, if we ever want to jump through to the tier in graduate education to which we know we should belong. We must make that leap now. In order to go forward, we need ongoing debate on graduate education. Our hesitancy to define a proper structure is responsible in part for our inability to put all of our Ph.D. programs on a trajectory toward the same success as has been found by, for instance, our programs in religion and education.

But structure -- and we have been spending this time talking about it -- is just a conveyance, which is of no use unless first you know where you are going. You should know that at the recommendation of the Faculty Senate and other constituents, I called off an incipient search for a Dean of Graduate Education because I was chary of placing someone in charge who was supposed to operate with no budget but be accountable for an entire program, while School Deans would hold the funds but not have to account. Before we design a new structure, we have to set our aspirations, clear our vision, determine our goals. I, in that regard, am not confident in recruiting a person to answer questions and set goals that we ourselves, already here, have not decided how we would answer, have not decided where we would set. We cannot foist the responsibility that was ours to begin with onto somebody new. We must converse about aspirations and goals before we even begin to engage talk of structures.

One missing element of graduate education here, has been a system of involvement of the deans of each school that allows them to be active leaders. Our school deans have said clearly that graduate education is indeed their challenge, their problem, which puts us more surely on our way toward a transformation of the graduate program here at Vanderbilt.

Tinkering -- I believe this as much as I say anything to you today -- will only result in marginal improvement and new resources will not be of any help if they are distributed across programs without any sense of strategy or accountability. Our own process of planning should focus on directed excellence, rather than upon comprehensiveness. We have to accept that we cannot jury-rig success in any endeavor here, but must undergird every effort: with the highest standards of achievement from our faculty; with libraries and laboratories of the first caliber; with multi-year stable commitments to our graduate students; and with every effort to generate additional support for research.

The Academic Venture Capital Fund -- to which I spoke to at my last convocation -- has proven itself a boon, allowing us to develop programs that have no traditional boundaries, programs such as the Learning Science Institute, the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience and the Law and Business Program. Such "postdisciplinary" sites offer new possibilities for the style of graduate education, by laying their groundwork differently. As you know, though, they do not of themselves solve the problem. We can involve our University in a constantly rotating reinvention, but unless there is a "there there" in the first place, even our most trendily exciting and dramatic efforts will avail nothing.

The possibility exists that undergraduates and alumni will fear that bolstering our graduate program will come only at the expense of the undergraduate program, and that our efforts will then find resistance both politically, and with departmental dollars. Such resistance must be broken down with patient persuasion. We must convert doubt with the truth that we already know: that we are a University College; that we have the distinct ability to be both a powerful university and a college in a way in which few other institutions could ever lay claim to, even if they desired. We know that research and graduate education determine the quality of our undergraduate programs, and the quality of our own teaching. We know that we cannot woo talented faculty to Vanderbilt, or maintain the happiness of the talented faculty already here, if they, and if you, do not have the best minds to mentor, to collaborate with, to cultivate as new colleagues, and certainly to be your colleagues in your chosen field.

Just as Vanderbilt may reasonably expect each member of the faculty to contribute to the quality of both undergraduate and graduate life here, each member of our faculty may reasonably expect access to the intellectual ferment that is activated by involvement with graduate students and graduate-level programs. You trust us, as we trust you, to bring the highest level of talent here to Vanderbilt. We know that you would be frustrated to work with anything less.

Vanderbilt will succeed in substantially improving the quality of our graduate programs only if we are willing to apply the same principles we have used to develop our undergraduate programs: uniqueness; distinction; interconnection across intellectual boundaries; multidisciplinary relationships; and work with other strong institutions.

We must make the same commitment to graduate education as we do to undergraduate education. Why do we owe graduate students anything less, when they entrust us with their futures just the same? Undergraduate and graduate education are not rungs on a ladder; you cannot skip one step to swing your leg up to the next. They are spokes, instead, on a web: strategically affixed, equally supportive and equally dependent.

Our attention to every strand, every spoke, must be devoted and ardent. I, by the way, am not so self-satisfied as to think that even the other four of our five transformational goals have already been met. Constant practice is the only path to evolution, and we must see Vanderbilt's evolution as a continuous endeavor, requiring intense, disciplined, sustained effort in every aspect -- every limb -- of our growth. We have the resources in our ideas to evolve everyone else in the world. We should also see to ourselves.

Q: Can you talk about the campaign a bit in terms of its future?

A: We are making tremendous progress even in this time of economic distress. We are well on our way to achieving goals that we thought unattainable even a year ago in terms of our campaign. I am not ready to announce what those goals are, but of course I can whisper that it is at least a billion dollar campaign and the focus though has not been buildings, has not been on the cranes we see out here, even though we have a half a billion dollars worth of construction going on right now. This is what I like to call a people's campaign focused on two things. One is on the quality of our faculty by providing resources to support our faculty though chairs and other kinds of support for our libraries and other things that really go to the quality of our scholarship and the intellectual life of the University. The second is to make certain that we bring in the most talented students in the history of this institution, both at the graduate and the undergraduate level. If that is the case and the college is obviously at the center of much of this talent that we are seeking, then the college of Arts and Science is going to do very, very well indeed. We have 10 colleges here and they all play a very integrative role. All have a very important role. I know none of the other deans will be offended when I say this, though. We need to make certain that at the core of this institution is a very strong college of Arts and Science. Without that what we have is a University connected by heating plant or telephone lines not a university that is at its core a liberal arts institution. And that is what we are about and so much of this focus, which is going to be on talent, is also going to be focused on the talent we can bring into the college of Arts and Science.

Q: Intellectually we have to look at our graduate program. What do you envision as the process?

A: We have been through this debate for about a year, and as I said I think our graduate committee did do exactly what they are supposed to which is talk about the structure. But as I have thought more and more about it and certainly as we have had these conversations, what became readily apparent was the fact that we had a bit of a cart and horse problem. We needed to know whether we wanted to go with graduate education before we talk about our structure, we can parallel those. Now we have been doing a number of things. I mean this is an institution that has been looking at itself through a microscope. We have had external reviews, a series that I think have been very healthy. It has given some sense of where we are and our place in the world, some benchmark of what we need to do and I think for an institution, all of that is important. In the end, though, the process has to be this: I have outlined this to some of you but has to be one in which the driving force, the ideas in terms of the broad nature where graduate education is going needs to come from two sources: one from the faculty and one from the administration, and then have this ongoing conversation of what we want it to be and how do we want to take a look at it. Now, the way I think about graduate education is twofold. I think about when you are a great university like we are, we need to take a look at the programs that are really good and we sustain those. Maybe if I was Cornelius Vanderbilt or Alexander Heard I would not start the University that way, but we have some programs that we are better at than almost anyone else. You just sustain those. I think that there are certain programs that are absolutely critical to the greatness of the University. You can't be great in the social sciences and the humanities without have a first rate Department of English. You do not have to be great in every aspect of it, but you have got to have true excellence. The same in terms of natural sciences and certainly the hard sciences just like you can't be a great university without having a first rate department of mathematics. So we have to take a look at those building blocks and make that happen. We then come to the real issue: what is it that is going to make us distinctive and different? What is it that is going to create an opportunity for us to really leap forward in terms of where we are going with graduate education? I mentioned that the building block issues, this is the second part of it: in the end we have to deal with the blocking and tackling. That is what we have to have: long term sustainable support for our graduate students that is better than most places. We have got to have a great library, at least one that can support the kind of research that we are doing. We have to figure out consortiums with other libraries so we can do some of the kind of things to create that opportunity. We have got to have laboratories. We have to have the kind of things that lend to graduate education and then we have to come up with programs that allow people to stream to Nashville because we are doing it better and different. This goes to a wider set of conversations that we have initiated that is some of the structure of our programs. I believe that the future of Vanderbilt is found in the solid basic core of graduate programs that I mentioned that we have. I haven't mentioned them by name. Then secondly, we must create programs that take advantage of the intellectual geography that we have here. We are unique in America. There is no institution in this country that has the breadth of intellectual endeavor on 330 acres and the quality of that intellectual endeavor that we have. We are simply silly if we don't reposition ourselves. On the other hand, and I do not mean to offend our economists, but if you think about building in a very traditional way a graduate program in economics, the University of Chicago is always going to have more Nobel laureates in economics than we will have economists. We are going to have to reposition ourselves in terms of some of our programs because the very traditional building of graduate programs in the teutonic Germanic sense. By the way, I think that is gone and I do believe our future is lying in our ability to be agile in the graduate level with those kind of premises. Now, one of the things that I hope you heard me say is that at this institution we cannot afford to have any program that is not worthy of the University. I refuse to refer to earlier times, but I will do this. When I was president of Ohio State University, it was Noah's Ark, it was two of everything. The people expected you to do everything. I knew there were some programs that were really good and some that were really bad, but we sustained the really bad ones because Ohio State wanted to have them. But here we are not a state university. We are a world-class university. We will always be if everything we do is better than almost anyone else and that has to go with obviously our academic programs and has to go with our quality of life for our faculty and students. It has to be at the center of our core. Every morning we have to wake up and say we are going to be better than anyone else and if we aren't, then we are not going to do that and that seems to me to be the center of where we are.

Q: How do you think we can most effectively help our students and ourselves to confront the fears and anxieties and confusion and uncertainty over the events on Sept. 11 and since? As an institution and as individuals, what role can we play for our students?