On Our Watch

Remarks by Chancellor Richard Herman
University YMCA's Know Your University Speaker Series
November 8, 2005

I ask you today: Why does a great institution strive to be even greater?

The answer is simple: because it is a great institution.

The drive, ambition, yearning, obsession with being always better is bred in the bones of a great institution. We know that, and we know that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a great institution.

Yet institutions are not alive. They only seem alive. They are inanimate bricks and mortar, elevators and phone networks. They are flow charts and administrative systems. They are products of history and, sometimes, accidents of history.

They are rules and regs and bylaws.

Institutions do not have drive, ambition, yearning, or obsession—these are human traits that we breathe into our institutions when we animate the lifeless creature. We empower our institutions—as all of you empower this great institution, this great university.

You know that higher education in America’s public research universities is in a period of upheaval and that a new order of excellence will eventually emerge. It is not up to the institution to assure that when the dust has settled the U of I will rank among the nation’s preeminent universities—it is up to all of you, and me, and Joe White. And the men and women who make the phones work.

We are the sentinels of our generation.

It is our watch.

President White’s framework for long-term strategic planning is the first step in what must be an unvarnished evaluation of how well we do all that we do—from academic programs and departments, to front-line student services, to high-level administration. We will look hard and steady at ourselves in the mirror. From this unflinching self-examination will emerge a community vision and a practical plan for achieving what must forever be our singular shared goal: excellence.

We must declare excellence our ordinary and only standard.

That means we must all be better at what we do. Excellent programs must inch closer to unachievable perfection.

Programs that are drifting must find their way. People who are satisfied with their accomplishments must rekindle the lost spirit that first made them accomplished. People who are burning to do their best must know that Illinois is the place for them, the place where their ambitions will be backed and realized.

We have inherited one of the nation’s distinguished and historic educational institutions. Illinois helped the country invent the public research university and deliver the finest of education to people who could not afford an education in the past. The men and women who came before us literally created the opportunity society that was the hallmark of America in the 20th century.

Now, in the 21st century, it is our watch.

The story of Illinois is the story of remarkable people - individuals with names and faces and personalities who built from their own knowledge, creativity and commitment a place of excellence. Today, you are those remarkable people. You are now writing the story that will be handed down to those who take the next sentinel’s watch.

We do not need to make Illinois anew, because Illinois is already strong. Yet the nation and the world are changing at breakneck speed. What affects the people of Illinois affects the people of India and China and Peru—and what happens in those nations affects us.

In this new world, where opportunity is being redistributed around the globe, we will need to be quick on our feet. In this new world, ideas, innovation and creativity will be the currency of exchange. I agree with the wisdom of Vartan Gregorian, now President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York: “(I)n this age of globalization, Americans need to know more about diversity than uniformity… and more about other people’s ideals, aspirations and anxieties in order to understand the rest of the world.”

Yet back in Champaign, on the ground, in our classrooms, we will continue to be dedicated to the whole student, not just that part of the student who must go on to earn a living and navigate in a globalizing world and economy.

The historian Will Durant has famously written: “Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.”

By academic training, I am a mathematical physicist. Let me tell you, there is a lot to life beyond mathematical physics. I recently spent a week with my grandchildren in Alburtus, Pennsylvania, and the pleasures of mathematics just don’t compare. As educators, we must never forget that a life well-lived is about more than making a good living; it’s about life on the banks.

Think of the student whose artistry was first tweaked in Kamiko Gunji’s class in Japanese flower arranging. Or the student who was first moved to consider the beauty of jazz music upon hearing the Joshua Redmond Quartet at the Krannert Center.

Or the student who first pondered her own place in the sweep of existence upon hearing Professor Stuart Shapiro describe the ancient cosmology of the universe. Or the student, who in a literature class, first opened his ears to life on the banks when he heard the words of poet Wendell Berry:

“The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.”

I do not want Illinois students driving through life deaf.

I want our Illinois students to be touched by the widest range of insights, from the joy of literature that can stop and make them remember to smell the roses, to the beauty of art and music that can touch their souls, to the wisdom of the social sciences that can make them step outside themselves and see society whole, to the wonder of the physical sciences and the mysteries they reveal.

I want Illinois students driving through life always creative. Because creativity around the world is bursting forth, and we must make creativity itself one of our fundamental products. That is why the arts, humanities, and social sciences will always remain at the core of our liberal education.

Today, scholars are more and more often crossing their traditional disciplinary boundaries to address public issues and even pure knowledge from multiple perspectives. Art and computing are fused; biology morphs into information science; and physics and materials science give birth to nanotechnology.

We must hold firm to our disciplinary boundaries when tradition generates fresh insight. Yet we must be ready and able to bridge our boundaries when knowledge is our reward. The idea of “multi-disciplinary research” must stop being trendy, catch-all lingo and exist at the very heart of our mission to unravel the subtleties of science and humanity and to educate students to see the world around them as an ever-entwined system.

We live in a post-9/11 world, a world made small by that awful event. We have seen the devastation wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We have been forced to remember that we are, each and every one, only a piece of the fabric of society.
We have been painfully reminded of our responsibilities to our communities, our nation, and our world. We have been reminded that citizenship and civic ethics and leadership must be the personal responsibility of us all, if we are ever to live in a truly just society.

The great challenge of the Information Age is figuring out how to transform mountains of “information” into knowledge, wisdom, understanding, compassion—and action. Our great challenge is to assure that our expanding knowledge also expands our humanity.

Think of the wisdom of W.E.B. DuBois: “There could be no education that was not at once for use in earning a living and for use in living a life.”

Think of the insight of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The complete education gives one not only the power of concentration, but worthy objectives on which to concentrate.”

And think of the words of Susan Nagele, our 1978 LAS graduate, now a doctor in Kenya who has suffered through malaria and raging civil wars, lived with hot-plate daily temperatures up to 120 degrees, and watched the deadly Ebola virus kill her own friend.

Of her selfless life, Dr. Nagele says simply: “I love the work…. I can see some good coming of it.”

“I can see some good coming of it.”

Isn’t that the prayer we all hope to say when our time is done?

“Would that some good came of it.”

Because knowledge is not all that an Illinois education must impart. Knowledge must be yoked to worthy social purpose. We must be thoughtful about exactly whose definition of “worthy social purpose” we are adopting, but that is not reason to abandon the essential moral question: “What does this great university owe society beyond pure knowledge?”

Not many of us are built to be like Susan Nagele. Yet my goal is to energize our commitment to educating students to realize they enhance their lives and the lives of their families when they give back to society. We must educate students to understand that their careers are not only their careers but a patch of that societal quilt. We must educate them to know that doing well and doing good are pieces of the same fabric.

We must be better at educating, even inspiring, students to realize that citizenship and leadership are the sacred duties of all people who would govern themselves. In pursuit of this goal, I will soon be establishing the Chancellor’s Task Force on Civic Commitment in the 21st Century, a working group of faculty, staff, students and people from the community that will spend the rest of this academic season planning a year-long 2006-2007 series of events, conferences, speakers, research projects and creative endeavors to highlight and figure out how we as a university can and must help students and society meet the challenges of modern citizenship.

I know, I know: These are old-fashioned ideas.

Yet I believe they are old-fashioned ideas needed for new-fashioned times.

The creation of new knowledge, one of our fundamental tasks, is a beautiful thing. Knowledge breeds confidence. It is the foundation of rational judgment. It creates humility because to know a great deal is inevitably to know how little we know. Knowledge inspires curiosity because knowledge is addictive: The more we have, the more we want.

Knowledge fosters social justice because knowledgeable people know that injustice is a cancer in a free society. Knowledge fosters compassion because knowledgeable people know the power of serendipity in their own lives. Knowledge, if it embraces the best values of our culture and society, can even create wisdom.

The true pursuit of knowledge inevitably creates excellence, which is the fruit of our commitment to wanting always to know more, to being always better at what we do.

Just recently, our Illinois colleague, Professor Todd Martinez, a theoretical chemist, was awarded the coveted MacArthur Prize--the so-called “genius award” that goes out to a handful of “maverick geniuses” each year.

Congratulations to our maverick genius--Professor Martinez!

He joins fellow Illinois professors Susan Kieffer, Richard Powers, Carl Woese, and an elite cadre of other MacArthur honorees from the last quarter century—a binder of rare books, a builder of handmade chairs, a climatologist, a crystallographer, a geneticist, and scores of scholars, novelists, artists, journalists, photographers, physicians, even a clown.

All are men and women whose originality, curiosity and accomplishment raced ahead of their times.

What makes them special?

We in academe know that somebody has studied just about everything. And in a study of the characteristics of MacArthur fellows titled “Uncommon Genius,” Denise Shekerjian reports:

“(T)hey were all driven, remarkably resilient, adept at creating an environment that suited their needs, skilled at honoring their own peculiar talents instead of lusting after an illusion of self, capable of knowing when to follow their instincts, and above all, magnificent risk-takers, unafraid to run ahead of the great popular tide.”

Shouldn’t those words describe the University of Illinois?

Many MacArthur fellows are cross-trained in disciplines and perspectives. They are hard and tenacious workers with the ability to laser-focus their minds. They trust their instincts in the face of criticism. They love their work. They are imbued with a native drive, ambition, yearning, obsession to always be better at what they do, never to be satisfied that they have achieved success. They are forever destined only to split the distance between their achievements and their perfect ambitions.

Shouldn’t such people, such values, be everywhere at the University of Illinois?

Yet, most importantly, the MacArthur fellows invest their work with a vision - a dream of purpose and mission - that reaches beyond their personal goals. As Ms. Shekerjian writes:

“Limit yourself to your own private world and you’ve limited your creativity by worrying about how to protect what you’ve got and how to get what you’re missing. Get yourself out of the way in pursuit of some greater good, in response to a strong pull of mission, and you’ve liberated the mind…. (I)t’s the vision that generates the ideas and carries forth the work, not the hope of praise, reward, or glory.”

I must repeat: It’s the vision, not the hope of praise, reward, or glory.

“Give (someone) a purpose,” Shekerjian concludes, “and he will go forward, again and again, heartily, steadily, and creatively…. Dreams … unleash … the … imagination.”

That vision of creativity unleashed is my dream for Illinois.

So, we will dream big. And we will dream big with a worthy social purpose—to make our communities, our country, and the world a better place through our research, creative endeavor, civic contributions, and through the accomplishments of our students.

It is an old-fashioned idea for new-fashioned times.

We will animate our inanimate institution—this university of bricks and mortar—with the breath of our own vision and purpose. We will do this every day in our own ways.

We will forever split the difference between our achievements and our perfect ambitions, never allowing ourselves to believe that we have achieved success.

On our watch, we will dream the dream of excellence. Because dreams unleash the imagination--and we are in the imagination business. And because: “We can see some good coming of it.”

Isn’t that the prayer we all hope to say when our time is done?

“Would that some good came of it.”

Thank you.