Remarks to a Symposium on
Understanding Complex Systems

Ancient tradition holds that the jobs of after dinner speakers are to be amusing and brief, as an aid to the digestion. Unhappily for me, and luckily for you, I don’t know any complexity jokes. I do know some mathematics jokes, but they are an acquired taste.

So instead, I will make a few serious remarks. Although my remarks will not be amusing, at least not intentionally amusing, I hope they will be of interest. And I will discharge at least one of the obligations of postprandial speakers: I will be brief.

I struggle every day to understand the most complex system I know, which is the public research university. That’s what I want to talk about this evening. Okay, it’s a bit of a stretch for a complexity conference. But if you will indulge me, I’d like to make some points about research infrastructure, organizational change in research and education, and what will be required for research universities to be successful in the future.

My theme is the absolute necessity for universities that wish to play leading roles in research and education to be agile institutions. A couple of months ago, I spoke to the Royal Irish Academy, which had asked me to try to define the attributes that are responsible for the excellence of the best American research universities. I described one of the most important of those attributes in this way:
Our best research universities are adept at creating new structures and allocating resources to support groundbreaking advances in newly emerging fields and research directions. The hand of tradition rests but lightly on these institutions, which give high priority to trying to anticipate and lead transformative developments. As a result, these universities are constantly refashioning themselves . . . to stay in the vanguard of research and discovery.

When I wrote those words, I was thinking not only about the leading research universities in general but also, of course, about our own university in particular. When I reflect upon how our long tradition of leadership in the basic and applied sciences was built and sustained, the story I see played out again and again concerns organizational agility, willingness to take risks by investing in new directions when their promise is uncertain, willingness to invest in exciting new ideas and the exceptional people who create them, and an institutional culture built on a shared sense that what we are about is excellence.

It is these attributes that led to creating the Beckman Institute a quarter-century ago, which has since become the world model of an agile, interdisciplinary scientific institution. These attributes led to recruitment of generations of outstanding scientists who would shape the contours of new fields and whose presence would attract succeeding cohorts of exceptional colleagues and students. In recent years, these attributes have led to major ventures in genomic biology, nanoscale science and technology, and many other areas.

We take great pride in Illinois science. As we do so, we must also recognize that our ability to sustain the attributes that made Illinois a scientific powerhouse has become strained.

One source of strain is the increasing difficulties we face in recruiting highly qualified international students, and the increasing problems that arise in recruiting international faculty. As I know you all appreciate, our ability as an institution and as a nation to continue to attract the best scientific minds from around the world is essential to maintaining our advantage in science and innovation.

Another source of strain is all too familiar to us: The long-term trend of declining State support for the university. I will not belabor this point, but I must note it for the record.

The bright spot in our finances is our great success in research funding, which continues to increase at annual rates of ten to fifteen percent. This success is a tribute to our faculty and programs, but it cannot pay faculty salaries, or provide instruction, or fix the woefully inadequate operating budgets of our departments. Nor is the environment for research funding all that we would wish. Over the last quarter-century, funding for the life sciences has increased dramatically in constant dollars, while funding for engineering and the physical sciences has remained essentially flat. To be sure, these are national trends. But they are felt on this campus every day.

Another encouraging development was our success this year in winning approval for a more realistic tuition policy, which includes a more substantial general increase as well as differentiated tuition levels in engineering and the sciences that are more in line with actual costs of instruction.

Faced with financial difficulties and contemplating a financial future that, at least where State funding is concerned, doesn’t look much more promising than the present, the temptation to become more cautious and conservative is strong. I believe that is precisely what we must not do. Illinois science was not built by caution, and its future will not be served by conservativism.

Whatever our financial constraints and other difficulties, we must continue to recruit and support exceptional faculty, domestically and internationally, and we must provide them with the facilities and infrastructure that cutting-edge science demands. Toward that end, I have committed to a major effort to rebuild our research infrastructure. We will refurbish existing space, and we will build new space.

And I will revive the Faculty Excellence Program, which was discontinued when State funding for it ceased. The program will be restored through internal reallocation, and it will resume its key role in supporting faculty hires of exceptional quality.

These things all cost money, of course, and money is in short supply. But in my judgment we cannot afford not to make these investments if we are serious about maintaining and enhancing the quality of research on this campus.

A third challenge to our future arises from the rapidly changing contours of scientific knowledge and the emergence of new kinds of fields that do not fit well, or at all, into our traditional, discipline-based organization of research and education.

Lately I have been involved in the National Innovation Initiative sponsored by the Council on Economic Competitiveness. There, I have come to realize that the adequacy of the traditional disciplinary structure is not just a question for universities. Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM and co-chair of this initiative, recently asked, “U.S. universities are the envy of the world, but are they creating the necessary disciplines that will likely emerge from novel combinations of established fields?”

At the undergraduate level, for example, the National Research Council report on BIO 2010: Transforming Education for Future Research Biologists suggests that, in order to prepare “the next generation of biological researchers for the tremendous opportunities ahead,” we need nothing less than a comprehensive reevaluation of undergraduate science education, focusing on how life science students are educated in bioengineering and computer science as well as chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Among other things, the report notes that faculty will need to “spend more time discussing their teaching with their colleagues both within and outside of their own field.”

The need to revisit traditional models of organization is by no means limited to undergraduate education. Some of the most intriguing challenges arise at the graduate level, where they are closely intertwined with our organization of faculty resources, research support, and frameworks for faculty careers.

Here is where our agility as an institution will be most severely tested, with much depending on our willingness and ability to explore new ways of organizing.

This terrain is not wholly unfamiliar to us. We have for some time offered a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, for example, through a program that is not connected to any department, owns no faculty lines, and lacks any defined pathway for its graduates’ future careers. But even given some successful experiences to guide us, this new terrain presents daunting challenges.

Some of these challenges concern how best to train students for success. The example of the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought comes to mind. That Committee has a long history of producing superbly educated, talent graduates, yet they sometimes have great difficulty in finding positions and in succeeding as faculty members, because they have not been socialized to the culture and structures of any primary discipline.

Even more fundamental than questions about how best to train students are questions about how to identify what are emerging new fields that cannot be accommodated fully in our established disciplinary structure. Genomics is a good example. Is genomics a new science, or is it a new set of techniques? The idea of a Ph.D. in genomics doesn’t seem quite right. Would we try to produce genomicists?

Bioinformatics is another example. Recently we created a masters program in bioinformatics. This was largely driven by student demand and a burgeoning job market for graduates. On the other hand, Stanford created a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, driven by an intellectual agenda. Did we come too late to the dance?

• sophisticated modeling, taking from any number of disciplines including physics and mathematics,
• biology, molecular and organismal,
• bioinformatics,
• perhaps geology, chemistry, and neuroscience, and other fields.

Is biocomplexity a new field in its own right, and not just a new topic best explored from the different perspectives of the established disciplines? How do we tell? What should graduate education in biocomplexity look like? Should it involve research mentors from multiple disciplines? Where would its graduates make their future careers?

There are a number of models of what multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary programs can look like, both in our own institution in fields like ecology, and in other institutions. These models range from degree structures that allow students to combine requirements in two departments, such as Michigan’s “student-initiated” degree programs, to structures that allow students to design their own degree, such as is offered at Texas and Washington University in St. Louis.

In between these two poles of the continuum are ambitious transdisciplinary programs, such as our own Program in Computational Science and Engineering which encompasses fourteen participating departments.

Judgments about what is a new field versus a new method versus a new question for disciplinary research, and about what sort of new program model is needed here, if any, are judgments for the faculty to make, not administrators like me. One of the features of our university that I especially value is its tradition of innovation being led by its eminent faculty, not dictated from above.

To be sure, addressing these questions requires a fair bit of courage. Controversy and disagreement, the allocation and reallocation of resources, and issues of turf and interest are at stake in these questions. Nevertheless, I believe we must address these matters, and our best traditions instruct us to welcome them as opportunities to continue the essential, ongoing process of institutional renewal and reinvention. Illinois has never been a university in thrall to tradition, and it must never become so.

If the questions I have raised must be decided by the faculty, and if innovation cannot be dictated from above, why am I talking about these matters?

It does seem to me that the center has a role to play in creating an environment that encourages and enables innovation.

For example, we must be willing to entertain somewhat different models of faculty work, as we have done recently by finding ways to enlarge our evaluation practices to include policy-oriented researchers, public intellectuals, and faculty who make our research achievements accessible to the public.

We must also find ways to create resource allocation models that make innovation possible. The deans and I have been working on this by taking a careful look at how our resource allocation model needs to be changed to better support both our priorities in research and education and our efforts to explore innovative programs and initiatives.

And, we must take part in an ongoing dialogue about choices and opportunities, about risk-taking and opportunity costs, about what Illinois must do and be. In each decade, our university must look a bit different from the decade before. But if we are successful, the quality of our institution, and its values and aspirations will endure as the compass by which we navigate change. That is our challenge, and I invite you to join me in addressing it.

Thank you.