Regents' Strategic Planning Committee: Take care of faculty and rest will fall into place, says Baltimore

(Editor's Note: Dr. David Baltimore, president of California Institute of Technology, spoke in January to the UW Board of Regents' Strategic Planning Committee's third planning module on research, which focused on University/Industry Interactions. The session, organized by Alvin L. Kwiram, vice provost for research, was open to the campus community and was part of the Regents' ongoing effort to discuss broad issues facing the University of Washington and higher education. Baltimore won the Nobel Prize at age 37 for his work on the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell. His remarks, based on questions posed to him by UW President Richard L. McCormick, are summarized below. The text of Baltimore's remarks as well as remarks by Wallace Loh, Director of Executive Policy, Office of the Governor, are available on the web at: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~fachome/current/current.html )

Summary of Introductory Remarks
For many years we have heard about the disaster of federal support for the sciences. Some people said it's getting bad, some people said it's getting disastrous, nobody said it's getting good. I want to argue that the picture is not really so bleak.

Throughout this entire time the evidence I have seen says that the American people care very much about science and are willing to spend money on it. You see the fascination with science and the big issues science deals with in newspapers, magazines and movies. What is the nature of matter? What is the nature of the universe around us? What is the meaning of the word "life"? Those are the questions that people care about.

Polls by Research America show that people care desperately about biomedical science and want increased research in the biomedical arena. They are concerned about their health, but that concern spills over into all the sciences. It is well and good to support health research, but unless you support the strength of the sciences overall lots of opportunities in health research won't be available. We in biology are dependent on chemists, on physicists, on engineers, and on computer scientists to generate the materials that we bring into the biological sciences and apply to the questions of life systems.

The federal budget will increase its appropriations for science research, including health science research. Now is the time when people should be designing their strategies for achieving greatness, not strategies to cope. My job at Caltech is to plan our budgets, our hiring procedures, even our child day-care strategies, in ways that will allow us to achieve greatness.

You have to build out from your strengths, and the UW has many to build from, including its medical sciences. This should be thought of as investments in only one resource—people—because that is the only important resource. You want to make the environment of an academic institution as attractive as possible to the very best people you can identify. Once you do that everything else will take care of itself. The best people attract money. You have to make very clear strategic decisions about which direction to move in and to focus your resources in those areas.

What entices people? Space, opportunity, the authority to build in new directions, the ability to realize a vision. Fundamentally, we come down to money.

Let me turn now to some of the questions posed in President McCormick's letter.

What are the essential ingredients that give rise to excellence in graduate education in a research institution?
My answer to that is faculty, faculty, faculty—people. Faculty attract the best students; the best students attract the best faculty. It is an autocatalytic process that works very well once it starts.

What are the factors that can erode excellence?
To a large extent, it's lack of attention: lack of attention to deteriorating facilities, to the fact that the intellectual frontiers of an area have moved off into the distance and you're still fighting the old battles, lack of attention to the living environment of students. There are a whole series of intangibles that make one academic environment more attractive than another that must be nurtured.

What strategy or process can help insure continued excellence?
It's attention to the needs of the faculty and the movement in new areas of science.

How important is research infrastructure to the success and competitiveness of faculty in their research efforts?
It is absolutely essential. Speaking always from the point of view of the sciences, it is the infrastructure that feeds into the ability to do science. Science today is no longer conducted with a few test tubes on a lab bench; it's infinitely more complicated.

How does one anticipate most effectively the areas to invest in for future development and what approaches are likely to be most effective?
The first thing to do is listen very closely to the faculty because the faculty devotes its life to thinking about those kinds of enterprises. But periodically you have to look outside your faculty to calibrate whether they are, in fact, thinking about frontier issues or have lost contact with the moving frontier of science.

What is the balance between interdisciplinary strength and disciplinary rigor? How is this likely to change in the future?
I have perhaps an idiosyncratic view here. I think the traditional disciplines are extremely important, and that you build interdisciplinary opportunities at the interface between disciplines. The strengths of the disciplines is key. The need to have the fundamentals has not changed.

There is no question that a lot of the real intellectual frontiers appear at the interfaces of disciplines. They also disappear from those interfaces. So having structures—like centers—that can come and go over decades makes a lot of sense. They allow you the flexibility to reformulate the goals around the opportunities of the moment.

Often the opportunities are not obvious to everyone. Talk to the youngest people, the people who have just entered the business. It's amazing what a 23-year-old can produce at the interfaces between the sciences that nobody would have thought of as being there.

What are the major forces that are most likely to change the higher education dynamics and in what ways might that change occur? What impact will distance learning have?
I believe that an education on a campus with a strong liberal arts component is a very important framework for developing effective citizens of the world. It is in these institutions that young people can learn enough about themselves to become managers.

Being a manager has a lot to do with seeing structures that are homologous to your previous experience. Dealing with people and understanding an individual's strengths is essential to good management. Where do you learn how to give people the opportunity to be their best selves and to do something successful? You don't learn it sitting in front of a computer. You don't learn it by getting exams through the mail for a course you've taken by readings that came to you over the web. You get it by wrestling with the political problems that come up in your dormitory or fraternity. It is in these situations that you begin to develop the skills to live in the world. I think that the transition from a home-focused life to an outside life that young adults can get at a university is absolutely essential.

If you really want to create people who can work within the world, you must get them into surrogate worlds. The university is, in fact, a surrogate world.

Is industry investment in university research likely to see significant increases?
Probably not, particularly in basic research. Industry is going to leave long-term baseline research to the universities, although it may try to help occasionally in funding. I think what you will hear from industry is this, "We pay our taxes. They should go to developing the understanding base, and then we will take advantage of that." And, I think that is probably a pretty good answer.

What role can and should the Regents play in communicating public policy issues such as the value of education and research to the public, to the Congress and to the legislators?
I can't think of a group that's more important. The Regents have to be the intermediaries between the University and the Legislature. Legislators, in general, don't understand the culture of the research university. It is very important to continually educate them as well as to educate all members of American society. People from the academic enterprise must be the ones to educate legislators because no one else is going to do it.

How far down the path of serving the region as an engine for economic development can an institution of higher education safely go without compromising its core educational values?
The best answer is to look at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). It has been an engine for economic development in New England since World War II and has developed a whole biotechnology industry. The economic health of the Boston area depends on what happens at MIT. Yet MIT remains a very strong institution with very strong academic values. There is no contradiction there. You have to manage the interface carefully because you are talking about two different value sets. When you manage that interface, it can be extremely valuable to the local world.

In your view, where is an institution like the UW most vulnerable?
This is too large of an institution to really say where it is most vulnerable. There is vulnerability in letting buildings get too old, in letting the community around an institution deteriorate, and in losing your relations to the state. There are lots of vulnerabilities. Academic institutions are fragile and have many points at which they need to worry about the world around them.

What is the single most important step the Regents could take to ensure the long-term vitality of the University?
I would go back to what I said in the beginning: to get very strong institutional funding into those areas that represent the investments that attract the very best people. If you do that everything else will take care of itself. The thing never to forget about faculty members is that they are Type A personalities. They are people who aggressively interact with the rest of the world, and that's what you want. ¶