Albert Einstein once articulated what many scholars have felt in their own work:
The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us the human race is poor in independent thinking and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the right idea comes.
esearch universities provide the context in which the external stimuli operate with the greatest effectiveness, in which stumbling against the thing should happen with the greatest ease and frequency. The interaction of many kinds of stimuli creates at a university a special kind of intellectual environment, with the health of the whole a manifestation of the health of each part. That environment should become an intellectual ecosystem. Universities are communities of learners, whether those learners are astrophysicists examining matter in the far reaches of space or freshmen new to an expanded universe of learning. The shared goals of investigation and discovery should bind together the disparate elements to create a sense of wholeness.Searching for a Shared Mission
The ecology of the university depends on a deep and abiding understanding that inquiry, investigation, and discovery are the heart of the enterprise, whether in funded research projects or in undergraduate classrooms or graduate apprenticeships. Everyone at a university should be a discoverer, a learner. That shared mission binds together all that happens on a campus. The teaching responsibility of the university is to make all its students participants in the mission. Those students must undergird their engagement in research with the strong “general” education that creates a unity with their peers, their professors, and the rest of society.
Unfortunately, research universities are often archipelagos of intellectual pursuit rather than connected and integrated communities. Fragmentation has increased drastically during the last fifty years. At many universities, research faculty and undergraduate students do not expect to interact with each other, and both groups distinguish between teachers and researchers as though the two experiences were not inextricably linked. Even those students who encounter an introduction to research technique in one narrow field too often remain ignorant of how diverse fields overlap and intermingle.
The institutional goal of research universities should be a balanced system in which each scholar--faculty member or student--learns in a campus environment that nurtures exploration and creativity on the part of every member.
A Beautiful and Efficient Concept
Ideally, the campus environment is enriched by interaction among faculty members in disparate fields, with graduate students enlivened by their exploration of faculty roles, and with undergraduates, whose questions and fresh approaches may open new paths of inquiry. The faculty member, unlike the full-time non-academic researcher, has interactions with other faculty and with students that broaden his or her intellectual vista and simultaneously provide the opportunity to develop future generations of professors and researchers. The baccalaureate student shares in the environment and develops his or her own research capabilities. The university setting for research is, therefore, much more valuable to our society than the environment in corporate or non-profit research laboratories and institutes. As Charles M. Vest, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out, government funding of research in the universities is also an investment in the education of the next generation, with every dollar doing double duty, "a beautiful and efficient concept." What is more, the university’s investment in research faculty also does double duty, with teaching ideally enhanced by the research experience of both faculty and students.
Teaching Teachers to Teach
In contrast to this ideal, there is now a distressing and, in the long run, a destructive lack of connection between undergraduate study and the creation of future research faculty. The use of graduate students, particularly in certain fields, has been treated as a necessity for the operation of both research programs and undergraduate instruction. This perceived need has often led to the importation of foreign students new to American education. The international graduate students have been and must be welcomed in our universities; they have added incalculable strengths to research programs and, after graduation, to university faculties and research institutes. But the classroom results of employing teaching assistants who speak English poorly, as a second language, and who are new to the American system of education constitute one of the conspicuous problems of undergraduate education. Unless fully proficient speakers of English are attracted to the professoriate in the United States, these problems will continue to exist. Research universities have, therefore, a strong interest in introducing research-based education to undergraduates who are proficient in English in the hope that many of those research-trained undergraduates will be drawn toward academic careers. Joined by the bright and eager international students, they will furnish unprecedented pools of talent from which future faculties will be drawn.
Needed Now: a Synergistic System
Undergraduates who enter research universities should understand the unique quality of the institutions and the concomitant opportunities to enter a world of discovery in which they are active participants, not passive receivers. Although shared knowledge is an important component of a university education, no simple formula of courses can serve all students in our time. Collaborative learning experiences provide alternative means to share in the learning experiences, as do the multitudinous resources available through the computer. The skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis will become the hallmarks of a good education, just as absorption of a body of knowledge once was.
The phrase "student-centered research university" has sprung into the language of several research universities recently. At first glance it seems an oxymoron, and certainly it does not clearly describe the relationship between students and research—can universities be both student-centered and research-centered? The possibility exists that a "research university," properly defined, could embody what the phrase attempts, through a synergistic system in which faculty and students are learners and researchers, whose interactions make for a healthy and flourishing intellectual atmosphere.