Riding through the Endless Frontier --
right past the students

Donald Kennedy

WHEN THE UNITED States followed Vannevar Bush's counsel and provided unprecedented support to research universities, it was a bold step no other industrial democracy took. The others have reason to regret their choice. There's no question that the decision was good for science. I want to ponder a harder question: Was it also good for the universities?

It may be the best of times and the worst of times: surely the best in scientific vigor and international respect, but also the worst for a whole array of reasons. This awkward sense of doing better but feeling worse resonates with a historic public ambivalence about higher education. On the one hand, we're the escalator of upward mobility; on the other, we're seen as elitist. Our public clamors for their sons and daughters to get in, yet resents the fact that in little more than a decade the lifetime earnings gap between high school and college graduates has increased by 50 percent. Newspapers breathlessly recount our research accomplishments, but parents complain that Susie's calculus teacher can't speak English as well as Susie.

Some of this disaffection is aimed at a utilitarian research culture derived from the Endless Frontier. That decision introduced a new role for America's universities: keepers of the national scientific flame and, hence, the driving force for economic and social objectives. At first we argued that basic research would foster a more innovative society. By the late 1970s, we invoked international competitiveness as an argument for funding university science more generously. By the 1980s, we saw higher education as an engine for improving regional economies. Every valley with a university in it seemed to be made of silicon.

Somehow, though, the public has held on to a vision of the university as a place where scholars introduce young people to great ideas; where students learn to analyze, reason, and develop the habits of inquiry; where intellects can wander freely over ground that may or may not have immediate application, but where the culture is examined and advanced. At the core of this image is the passage not just of knowledge, but of the capacity to gain more knowledge, from one generation to the next. When Americans look at their universities, they sense that utilitarian obligations have somehow triumphed over this older and deeper vision.

The Endless Frontier's benefits to American universities are boundless. Doctoral training has become more effective. Revenue from sponsored research has not only enabled a new level of intellectual activity in scientific fields, but also permitted internal reallocations that have helped the non-scientific disciplines as well. Closer contact with active investigation has enriched educational programs, graduate and undergraduate. There's been a stronger coupling between university research and societal need.

But this very success has produced some second-order problems. The postwar research surge has altered the balance between undergraduate and graduate education, and between research and teaching. Despite students' expanded opportunity for supervised research, the faculty's absorption in their own work has weakened the undergraduate experience. Students spend far more time with para-faculty and teaching assistants and less with senior faculty.

Graduate students, too, are squeezed between an expanded research enterprise and a contracting job market. The growth of research assistantships and the lengthening of time required to complete the doctorate reflect the need for graduate students as labor. This need may explain departmental reluctance to limit enrollment -- a tragedy of the commons producing a morale crisis for our best and brightest young people. We do little to prepare doctoral candidates to pursue alternative careers, to be more effective teachers, or even to confront the professional and personal challenges of academic life.

Finally, the legacy of the Endless Frontier has altered life irreversibly for faculty. The new order has augmented their productive capacity but attenuated their institutional loyalty. Faculty are more peripatetic. Their membership in the invisible international academies of their disciplines is far weightier than their attachment to their own university and their students.

The resolution of these conflicts depends on a simple principle, which in turn rests on a notion about generational equity. We need to return students to the center of our institutional concern. The argument for this is not a moral abstraction; it's intensely practical. It's difficult for me to think of an academic scientist, no matter how distinguished, who has not contributed more through producing students than through the work of an active career. That's how we progress: by finding people with capacities greater than our own, filling them partway with what we have to offer, then watching them go farther than we have. People, not things, are the mainstream of technology transfer.

Resource constraints and retirement disincentives are combining to block a generational transition that offers much hope, because the young people who survive to get the few positions available are extraordinary. The most promising route to institutional change is changing the players -- yet we have a science faculty that won't quit. In two decades, average faculty age at most research universities has increased by six to eight years. The Endless Frontier metaphor has another meaning: My cohort of aging buckaroos has been riding through the Golden Age of the frontier. We've passed the fence that used to be called mandatory retirement, and we're headin' for the sunset, defined contribution retirement plans in hand. There's every incentive to stay in the saddle. So happy trails, partners; the frontier may be endless in more ways than one.

To rescue our successors from discouragement and broaden the influence of science, we need to change graduate education for our best students. We need to open up different opportunities for the very good others. Above all, we need to focus our efforts on the next generation. And the best thing we may be able to do for 'em, partners, is get out of the way.


DONALD KENNEDY, Ph.D., is the Bing Professor of Environmental Science and President Emeritus at Stanford University. This article is derived from his address to the "Science: The Endless Frontier" conference at Columbia, Sept. 21, 1996.