Our University – The Fourth and Tenure

 

Independence of thought for a collected group of people and independence of thought for an individual are so tightly wound together that you cannot have one without the other.  First, the case of our nation.  The coercion exercised upon the early colonists of our nation was suffocating… they could bear no more.  Taxes, freedom to worship, freedom from social stratification, and freedom for opportunity to grow and change were all passions of early European citizens of the new world. 

The colonists wanted to be able to pursue their own lives in their own way without the intervention of any government, near or far.  While it was freedom from English law and rebellion against coercion that lit the fuse, freedom from all coercion carried the spark to the charge.

I re-read Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense’ a few times recently.  I consider myself reasonably thoughtful and able to understand complex ideas.  I was taken by the simplicity of the ideas Paine so graphically portrayed in this pamphlet, but perplexed by the depth and pervasiveness of them from another perspective. 

As I reflected on my small view of this great expression, person for person the most widely read document ever produced and circulated on the continent of North America, a number of emotions ran through my mind. 

I was, and I am still moved by a kind of patriotism that I know many of us feel for our nation.  A freedom to pursue personal faith, a pride in individuality, a freedom of expression of thought or a way of life that is particular to any one of us, unencumbered by intervention of any kind from any person, or any place.

What does this have to do with our university?

Not to over-make the case, I would argue that tenure provides to a faculty member the provision that our forefathers fought for, so that any man or woman might have the opportunity to think freely. 

The coercion that happens at many universities today is not the same as the one faced at the birth of our nation.  What was English was known to be English, and it was clear to many colonists that England was a coercive force. 

Coercive forces today lack that clarity in universities, and they have for a very long time.  Contemporary coercion comes in disguise, not in a Red Coat.

Coercion caused Galileo’s excommunication for the idea of a helio-centric universe.  It undermined the authority of the Catholic Church in the eyes of leadership at that time.

It was coercion that made the Protestantism of mid-twentieth century Yale University so challenging for a catholic boy named William F. Buckley. He should have thanked God he wasn’t Jewish.

It is coercion that makes traditional expressions of faith unacceptable in contemporary universities.  This is the coercion of trying to live in an offense-less society… a society where your ideas might offend another.  This impossibility might be the most noxious form of coercion in any setting.

It chokes free thought.

Our nation might be giving up certain freedoms through the force of courts, and our political leadership may be allowing and encouraging that strangulation for the friendship of the ballot box.  Academic freedom should be maintained at all costs. 

Coercion against intellectual freedom from any source, no matter how well intended, will undermine the nature of our university as surely as British rule undermined the freedom of this colony to pursue its destiny.

Our nation’s freedoms should ensure the academic freedoms of the university as surely as those same freedoms ensure the freedom of family, faith, and friendship.

The university should abound with patriotism for the power of Independence Day.

Our University – The Fix is In

There is a cloister of monks that makes wooden bowls from green, uncured lumber.  The bowls are very beautiful but they immediately begin to crack as the wood dries out and shrinks as wood is prone to do.  This is no surprise to the monks.  When the cracks occur, the monks very carefully begin a process of repair.  The repairs are made with a type of white plaster and, as the plaster sets, the bowls are sanded and rubbed smooth again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  The white plaster against the blood black wood makes traces and lines that look like river systems, arteries and veins.  The bowls are things of absolute beauty.  They do not look broken or like they have ever been fixed.

This process is a radical combination of planned obsolesce and deferred maintenance.

Our culture disdains maintenance.  People want things new, clean, and neat.  However, it is common that those things that are maintained take on the character possessed in the heart of the workers.  You need not be an aficionado to appreciate the beauty in it.

Universities across the nation suffer from scant funding and the strong heart to perform deferred maintenance.  Not much glory in repair.

A new building can easily and appropriately support a plaque that proudly proclaims it to be The John Smith Memorial Hall.

Can you imagine The John Smith Memorial Roof Patch?

The photo opportunities that are available when a new building is completed draw elected officials like a golfer in back swing during a lighting storm attracts  electricity.  Pictures of elected officials at ground breakings abound.  A shot of the painters after they have refinished the wood windows that have thirsted for that coat for twenty years cannot be found.

For our students, the purpose of the whole escapade, the opportunity to watch stewardship in action is a form of education – accentuated loudly by a society that largely disparages it, sometimes tolerates it, but never sees it like those monks.  It is an art form that a university and her students should aspire to.

Many of the people on university campuses who want to hold onto the “old buildings” are seen as backward-looking, rather than future-focused. While that is possible, I frequently find those who want to look back positively do so as a way to frame a future. 

I work in one of those old buildings that have, embedded in it, a history.  Here it is Home Economics, from the head, heart and hand of Professor Quigley.  Home Economics is not cool anymore.  It is not “in”.  At one time, by the look of what this building was, it was about the coolest thing in the world.  The building was beautiful, now it continuously cries for the hand of the monk, like so many buildings on so many campuses.

When I look at this place I see a lost art but I know that at the time of the original conception it was high art.  Passion at work.  Like great scholarship and emotionally charged teaching.

How to balance the complexities of building a modern research university is not a task for the faint at heart.  We need to see the campus as a wooden bowl, and when it cracks, we need to fix it.  Not because it is broken, but because a heartfelt fix begets beauty.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said “I see my trees repair their boughs”

At our university, the fix needs to be in.

Our University – Like a Church

I know I am trouble already with that title, but hear me out. 

For all the discourse about universities being like businesses, they are not run in a business-like fashion. Great businesses run on the nexus of merit, productivity and bottom line.  The best universities pay real attention to these ideas, but most only give them lip service, while the poor ones neglect even that.

Some think the university is a state agency: They miss the boat!  Some also think that its operation should be subject to the rule of patronage: They are all wet!

Universities are universities, unlike any other organizations; but if people insist on analogizing them to some other enterprises, we would be best served by thinking of them as churches.

Churches, temples, mosques, and almost all places of worship exist for a single purpose.  They exist to help people voluntarily change how they think about themselves in relation to the larger world around them.  From a Christian perspective in the plain language and tradition of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Saint Paul, and, by definition any man or woman who claims to be Christian, there is but a single purpose for any church:  for a man or woman to become more Christ-like. 

This is not something you can buy, not a ballot you can cast, not something you can trade, and most troubling in contemporary society, not something you can earn.  Rather it is a “skin in” transformation through the exercise of unadulterated free will.

Absolutely nothing more, and nothing less.

A student and his parents lay a check on the table, twice a year for four years, sometimes more checks for more years.  As these checks move across the table, from the family and student’s side to the university’s side, that exchange of value provides only one thing – the potential to change.

Opportunity.

Our university, and others worth their salt, provides the opportunity for students to change themselves from the inside out. 

Absolutely nothing more and nothing less.

We can’t change the students through any form of discipline, coercion, begging, pleading, threats, carrots, or influence.  We can only provide an opportunity for the students to inflict the burden of growth and change upon themselves.

Just like a church.

To be clear, trade or technical schools may be different, although only in degree.  A trade can be taught with a mild commitment of will, driven by a desire to produce capital to care for a family and provide sustenance.  The craft guilds provide guidance.

In the early first millennium, the guilds in India provided fraternity among workers and the sharing of ideas and insights.  Sounds a bit like a university.  By the beginning of the second millennium, the idea had gained traction in Europe, spreading from Italy into France and Germany and finally Spain.

Guilds bred two modern phenomenons: trade unions and corporations.  Precocious twins from the same parent.  After the 1800’s, they faltered and were seen simultaneously as a barrier to free trade according to Adam Smith, and a stigmatized social stratification according to Karl Marx. 

Talk about a rock and a hard place.

The university cannot provide a guarantee for employment upon completion of a course of study.

The university must be a strong advocate for the exercise of free will.  In the case of a public research university it must be the strongest civil proponent for the exercise of unfettered free will, free moral agency, and the pursuit of truth.  Otherwise it is not a university at all.

Our university should be more like a church than it is like General Motors, or the statehouse.

Our University – Service Motive

 

Anyone paying attention to higher education knows the familiar mantra:  teaching, research and service.  This three legged stool of mission is resident in nearly every public and private university in the United States and it is even leaking into institutions overseas in the rush to imitate what makes American higher education the best in the world.

On many occasions, I have had the opportunity to get involved with communities near the universities where I worked.  Community planning, energy conservation, workshops on neighborhood development, and other manifestations of “service” or outreach from the university to the community are common in nearly every discipline on a research university campus. 

Health and legal counseling, dental work, business advice, lawn and garden care, financial and investment counsel, and a multitude of other forms of service are provided to members of the community through universities all the time.  Our university has a great tradition of such action.  Recently, I had the privilege as is frequently the case to talk with a group of community leaders in one of our towns in southern Illinois about a planning project that may give the community ideas for a brighter future and students a special learning experience.

This is exciting.

Judging motives is like trying to hold a fish.  Every time you think you have a handle, it goes in another direction.

Nothing is more important in the value of service to a university and the communities it serves than the motive for service.  And there are many.

Sometimes service is rendered because a person needs service for annual review or promotion.  This is a cynical but reasonable perspective.

Occasionally, a departmental or college leader may encourage faculty and staff to render service as a means of promoting their unit within the campus environment.  A kind of bragging right that might help with the budgeting process on the campus.

University leadership service many be rendered to gain political favor.  A well served community, or interest group within the community might have impact on a local legislator, and she might have impact on funding for the university. 

At different levels within the structure of the organization different motives might exist for the provision of service.  No matter the internal motives if the service provided is not excellent, what starts as a positive step for the university ends in a ditch.  The fact that the service provided is “free” will not matter if it is not well executed. 

All service provided must serve the student.

If getting promoted outweighs excellence in educational opportunity for the student both service and learning will be low in value, even if the promotion goes through.    

If departmental or college prestige is held above the experience of the student, the unit and individual will suffer, even if the budget grows.

If political sway for the university is valued over the students’ acquisition of knowledge and insight the university loses, even if it gains political support for a season.

Most dramatic and important for me, if the motive for service is not excellence in educational opportunity, the service rendered to person or community will be second rate, and nothing is more hurtful to a university than the perception of second rate effort and, therefore, result.

“However brilliant an action, it should not be esteemed great unless the result of a great motive.”  Francois de la Rochefoucauld.    

Our university, in every action it takes, must pursue only one high motive: the enlightenment of the student, even as we serve the community.  All else will follow.

Our University – The Ivory Tower

 

The concept of “the Ivory Tower” is used in a negative sense when referring to universities to indicate a separation from reality and the practical concerns of the world. “Ivory Tower” first appears in the Song of Solomon 7:4, but I believe the reference there is more about the appearance of a women’s neck and its beauty, than the separation and neglect of practicality purportedly resident in universities.  

Another passage, I Kings 22:19 says that King Ahab’s palace, a place of isolation, was “inlaid with ivory”.  This is clearly a pejorative reference to the separation, high-mindedness and distance implied in the modern concept of the university as an Ivory Tower. 

In one more case, the Proctor family, of Proctor and Gamble fame, was a benefactor to Princeton University and provided resources to build a graduate education facility and a dining hall named after William Cooper Proctor.

Guess what they manufactured for the unwashed masses?  Ivory soap.

Where does the expression Ivory Tower originate?  Trying to understand why Southern Illinois is referred to as Little Egypt is equally confusing.  I can cite three stories all of which make sense, all believable and different.  No matter, we know what we mean when we say Little Egypt.

I have a friend known to many of us in Southern Illinois – especially after our recent storms and his tireless reporting on the recovery process – Tom Miller. When discussing a particularly difficult and perplexing subject with me a few years ago, he suggested that one purpose of a university was to be separate and to focused on tough issues and problems. 

Tom suggested that the implication of height was important.  Sometimes, in order to see things clearly you need to get up in the air… survey the whole landscape.  Tom gets it. 

The momentary and fleeting detachment from the pragmatic realities of the day- to-day shuffle allows reflection and study that helps society sort things out.   

That is our job.

I go to a great family physician in Carbondale.  He is in a state of perpetual diagnosis.  I went in one day and, after I had taken my shirt off, ready to be examined, he walked into the exam room. 

He said, “Are you coughing a little?”, “Yes” I replied.   “A dry cough?” “Yup”, was my retort.  “Are your eyes watering?”  “Yes”.  “Do you have a low grade fever?”  I said, “I think so.”  He acted like he was going to write a prescription.  I said, “Wait a minute! Don’t you have to examine me?”  He laughed and said, “The last forty people who came in had exactly the same stuff.” And he examined me. 

He did his job.

He was not an epidemiologist in the true sense of the word, yet he was. This was applied epidemiology.   No theory, just enlightened practice.

When the epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University undertake one of those Ivory tower studies for which the university receives over one billion dollars in federal funding per year – nearly twice that of any other university – they are expected to get up in the ivory tower and take a look around…see what is going on and why. 

 It is Johns Hopkins job.

 And when they do it well, eventually it trickles down to my guy in Carbondale. Our university needs to provide theory, background, and foundation so that those who practice can do so with excellence.

Our University – Graduate School

At this time of the year, it is hard not to reflect on graduate education and its rising importance to many students in colleges and universities.  We send students to some of the best graduate schools in the United States: Columbia, Penn, Rice, Cornell, Virginia Tech, Colorado, Georgia Tech, and Michigan, to name just a few that come to mind.  And this is only from our School of Architecture. 

And it happens all over campus.

One of the measures of success for our university is where our undergraduates go to graduate school.  It demonstrates our students can compete on the international stage and win contests for admission in places where the acceptance rates are often only as high as 10 percent.

I am happy for our students who go to these institutions.  I even find myself recommending them to places that will give yet another view of our profession, challenge students in a new environment, and provide an expanded set of conditions through which to assess their world.

But I cringe at the “trade deficit” that is being created.  These very good schools are taking our best students.  This is good, but we are not getting our share back. 

Graduate schools play a significant role in the reputation of a research university.  They are all there is.  We have excellent undergraduate programs.  The ability of our students to effectively compete for limited spots in the best graduate programs proves that.  In order to move to the next level, our university must improve its graduate programs and eliminate the trade deficit that exits. 

This is accomplished in only one way. 

There is no shortcut, no secret formula, and no silver bullet.  We must seek out and hire the very best faculty who teach with passion because they teach ideas, concepts, approaches, and methods that they have discovered or invented themselves.  They energize students and peers alike, and bring power to the reputation of the university.  The heat comes from teaching, but the fuel for the fire is discovery and research.

This is why our students go to the best universities for graduate study, and in order for our university to address the trade deficit there is no shortcut.

In addition, if the economic impact of a university on a region is measured, the money students and staff spend on food, housing and entertainment is significant, but pales in comparison to the long term sustainable impact of new knowledge on new business and general employment, albeit with a longer gestation period. 

There is never a convenient time to seek and hire the faculty excellence that breeds a strong research reputation.  Sometimes this kind of hiring creates internal strife over salaries.  In order to bring the very best, you may have to break salary scales.  Current faculty members may bristle at a new hire, as yet unproven, who comes in at a rate that is twice the norm. 

There is great risk too because, sometimes, you will bet on a horse that won’t run.

But without that boldness, the university will languish as a research institution.  That does not mean that we cannot “grow our own”, but sometimes the seed corn for that growth must be imported and developed with determination.  The importance of this strategy to increase the quality of our university cannot be overstated. 

And this focus on research and graduate education creates enviable problems of burgeoning enrollment at all levels because people relentlessly seek out quality.

Our University – The Power of the Hire

 

I recently had the opportunity to attend a reception in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Arts.  It was an alumni event to celebrate the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller.  Fuller was a remarkable man by any university measure.  A free thinker:  a futurist with a challenging mind, a non conformist, an ideologue but only for his own ideas, a leader, not a follower.  

Just the kind of person you want at a university.

There are a series of photographs on the wall behind our reception area in the School of Architecture related to Fuller’s ideas and projects: a dome over Manhattan, the Dymaxion car, and a Dymaxion house that looks like a tea kettle, innovative certainly, but a place to call home for nobody but the Tetleys.

One of the images on the wall is of Delyte Morris and Fuller striding across the campus, Fuller with his face to the breeze and Morris with a package of stuff under his arm.  They were on a mission.

Both wanted to change the world.  Fuller wanted to treat it like a great big machine with an operating manual.  Morris wanted to provide educational opportunity to the people of our region, state, nation, and world.  Both, men of substance with big ideas.

Vision.

They needed each other.  Fuller needed a big thinking president who did not sweat the small stuff and saw the university as a market place for ideas.  Morris needed big thinking faculty members who were not afraid to ruffle a few feathers and stand up for something that was not the status quo.  Clark Kerr, the greatest university system leader of the twentieth century, said that the only thing that would get a majority vote from the faculty on a university campus was the status quo.  He understood how these places worked.

I don’t think Fuller felt the need to please everyone he met when he came to visit.  The idiosyncratic thinker and the university leader knew the power of the hire.

They understood that to make a place like our university really work, good hires had to be made.  Good hires are risky.  Good hires don’t always satisfy a committee.  Good hires often look best in hindsight.

It is difficult to find someone associated with our university that would ever suggest that Fuller was a bad hire.  I have met people who remember the era well… that hire and a number of others were controversial.

All places of commerce, and the university must be a place of the commerce of ideas, need to make good hires.  It is unfortunate that, too frequently, good hires are risky.  They stretch the organization and challenge it to its core.   

Our alumni in Chicago are proud of our university for many reasons and act as if hiring Fuller was the most natural thing in the world.  They may feel he would have easily been hired at any number of universities.

But he wasn’t.

He was hired because our university leader had the presence of mind, the confidence of experience, to take a risk and hire someone who might challenge the way we think.  Morris and Fuller wanted to change the world.

No greater testimony exists in confirming the power of the hire.  Bill Gates demonstrated his knowledge of it. 

“The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.” 

Our University – ACT

 

For many, these three letters may spell something that happens in front of an audience or television camera.  For millions of high school graduates seeking entrance at a university of their choice, they are the bane of their existence in the brief interlude between high school and the rest of life.

 The ACT and the SAT – these are letters without names anymore because the idea of achievement and aptitude in and of themselves are seen as negative by many university leaders.  They were created as a way to level the playing field in college admissions with data, rather than social status.  The founders believed equal access to college would provide, through unfettered opportunity, a better world.  James Conant, a President at Harvard during the thirties was a strong proponent of this new view of merit-based admissions.

 Fast forward to 2009.  In the early twenty-first century, many want to level the playing field in college admissions with something other than data.   The value of standardized testing is being diminished. Now college presidents claim that the very thing that Conant and others thought was leveling the field, actually creates unfair advantage.  Wake Forrest and other universities say they cannot achieve a healthy, diverse student body with socially biased ACT or SAT tests.

People who live in large houses perform better on them. People who live in affluent suburbs perform better on them.

If you ranked all ZIP codes in the nation by mean family income – this is easy as J. C. Penney and L.L. Bean already do this to decide where to send catalogs – and listed the ACT takers side by side, nearly perfect correlation would exist.  People who come from “privilege” do better on these tests than those who don’t.  They also drive better cars, wear genuine leather, and rarely buy knock-off bags and watches on street corners.

These tests all create exclusivity, the same kind that makes a high school half-back who runs a 4.3 second 40 yard dash more valuable on a football field than one who runs a 4.9 second 40 yard dash.  Speed is a form of merit, just like the ability to score well on a standardized college entrance test. 

In both cases there is the presence of a more or less objective measure. 

There are some half-backs who might be a bit slower and actually be better football players. Likewise there are some entrance examination test takers who might score a little lower but still make an excellent contribution.

The student with the 34 on the ACT and a 4.3 in the forty makes both admission officers and football coaches salivate. Not one or the other in this kid’s case, but a wholehearted effort to bring them in at any cost, no matter the socio-economic status or zip code.

The admission officers need to always look at a combination of indicators to determine fitness for study.  The ACT, class rank, high school GPA, courses taken, activities participated in, creating a flexible formula of sorts, will give a pretty good indication of potential success in the university. 

No university president or admissions office can argue that.  History denies them the ability to do so.

If the current disaffection with standardized tests for their bias leads to throwing away other measures of potential in college admissions, American higher education is in very deep trouble. 

The exclusivity of one indicator is wrong, but throwing all objective measure is tragic.

If you do not perform well on standardized tests here is a suggestion, one that I took myself. 

Go to a community college, take demanding courses, and prepare for the university.  If you perform, you will get accepted to a university or find a good career that brings you satisfaction based on strong performance and ability; you will have succeeded.

You, your work… bias-free.

Our University: Moral, Ethical and Legal Decision Making

 

In the study of architecture at any university there are always a few courses on professional practice.  They are required by accrediting agencies, but that burden is of little consequence.   Practitioners want the discipline to flourish; therefore standards of behavior that meet a generally accepted level of propriety are essential. 

Moral, ethical, and legal considerations form the basis of guided professional judgment.  This is a means of self-preservation.  People are smart and will eventually not go to professionals who do not hold high standards of behavior if they have a choice.

In the season of graduation, reflecting on the primary purposes of study is always useful.  The educational process is incomplete if moral, ethical and legal forces are left to chance.  Professionals who are licensed, regulated, or selected by the state or its constituents to ply their craft, are obligated to this tripartite constellation of decision making.  Neglect leaves us short of our aspirations.

We see the impact of such neglect daily in public and private life in service, commerce, and family.

Moral behavior is defined by a code of acceptable conduct.  That code is derived from social standards and laws that are given birth by belief systems held by the people who make up a society.  Traditionally, belief systems evolve from private to public life and have as their genetic code religious or faith practices and values. 

Find an adage that most people accept and you can, almost without exception, trace it back to a biblical principle.  In other non-western societies different foundational tenets will guide.   Many treatises show strong similarity of acceptable day-to-day behaviors in all societies. 

Ninety-nine percent of the time the Golden Rule rules, no matter where you live.

Ethical behavior is similar to moral behavior but defined more strongly by the interactions of various personal belief systems, and codified into appropriate behavior by the larger social group.

Legal behavior, the lowest form of guidance for our actions, is defined by men and women arguing various manifestations of moral and ethical action, and codifying them into laws which then guide the community, not from deeply held personal convictions, but publicly agreed upon canon and rule.

In a word, laws.

The challenge in this thinking for architecture students is that, while a particular action might be legal, it could also be morally or ethically unacceptable.  Even judges and attorneys retreat into a safe place by suggesting that a decision that does not feel “right” is guided by the simple premise that “It is the law.”  Public officials are sometimes seen running to this same safe haven. 

This is not to suggest that the legal barometer is unimportant; it is foundational and binds a society together, but it is simultaneously low as a standard of decision-making.  Conscience is high, harder to come to grips with, and absolutely worthy of our day-to-day consideration and reflection. 

The law is simple and direct.  It is the head not the heart.  Morality is the highest form of guidance for decisions.  Ethics is the bridge between the two.

Our students should become professionals who know the law and accept it as a yardstick for professional decision making, but more importantly, they should live by moral and ethical standards that are the precepts upon which the law rests.

The three lenses of moral, ethical, and legal behavior are powerful in every aspect of society, and should hold a preeminent place in our heads and hearts at our university.

Our University – Teaching and Research

 

Job prospects for graduating students are as challenging as anyone has seen in decades.  There is scarcely a bright light to be found.  In a rush to address this complex socioeconomic and political issue some universities might be led to rethink mission and worry more about job placement than education. 

 

Well intentioned but misguided.

 

Such a posture may work at a trade school or technical institute and many community colleges, and even some very limited mission universities, but should not be the case at a research university.  At institutions like ours, teaching students to think and solve problems, provides the framework for gainful employment. 

 

Last August I traveled to Viet Nam, where a lament from national leaders about the inability of Vietnamese students to be productive in the work place was heard over and over.  It was interesting that the students I met, considerable in number, were thoughtful, kind, respectful and deferential, and seemed dedicated and hardworking.

 

Officials in higher education, leaders at U.S. embassies, presidents of the best universities in this nation crying for new ideas to employ their people and make an economy work,  are concerned about the fact that the students are weak in the area of problem solving and critical thinking. 

 

Students can give back everything you give them but they don’t innovate.

 

I hear consternation at Wal-Mart, Denny’s, in the state house, and at times to my great discomfort even on our campus, about how too much emphasis is placed on research and not enough on teaching.  I think what my friends in all these places really want to say is too much emphasis on poor research and poor teaching.

 

Research, scholarly and creative activity in any manifestation, is the only way that teaching can ever really be excellent.  It can be good with limited intellectual curiosity but it will never be excellent.

 

When research and scholarship are driven by a passion to know, a desire to find a better way through something, a heart to develop a new way of seeing the world, or the beauty of a human voice, teaching can begin.

 

Until then, all you have is training or instruction; valuable in its own right, but not the mission of our university. Teaching not infused with new insights, the real by- product of research, is not teaching. 

 

Ask the people of Vietnam.

 

The first department chair I ever worked with at LSU was Fountain Tillman Smothers, an old fashioned Tennessean with character more unique than his name.  Professor Smothers was the genuine article. 

 

He believed distinctions between teaching and research were hollow and naive, and that teaching and research were connected like inhaling and exhaling….one without the other was of no use. He took a broad view of research, he was an aficionado of the arts and loved poetry, and could quote it like a Tennessee gentleman.

 

Fount knew that thinking people study, inquire and create.  They find solutions to problems.  They invent.  They create work for others.  And while he never said it to me directly, he knew that thinking people would be successful in the market place.

 

At our university, the desire to know should be an industriousness fueled by discovery and transferred from teacher to student.

 

Students so equipped find work, or work finds them. They are educated, not trained.