Vanderbilt University - Commodore Yearbook (Nashville, TN)

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be intellectually free. It must encourage the distinction between ul- timate social values and short-range personal prejudices. It must be blind to differences in color and deeply knowledgeable of differences in culture. It must aid and inspire its students to develop skills, knowl- edge, understanding, toward the goal of full awareness of the ultimate realities of our world and of the lives we live. It must be supported morally and financially by the society it serves. Even under' favorable conditions, Vanderbilt will encounter critical issues in the years immediately ahead. These issues will challenge the validity of many conventional university assumptions. They will test our educational creativity and ingenuity. And they will require effective interpretation of university values to the wide range of public and private constituencies on whose understanding and convictions the life of all universities in the long run rests. I point to four issues of special importance to Vanderbilt's future. lk We in the universities have acclaimed the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, have held that discovery and new knowledge are their own sufiicient rewards. The premise has been that in the long run the results would be good. Without denying the deep philosophical roots from which con- cepts of intellectual freedom spring, in our culture and in our time the justification for freedoms of expression and for freedom to inves- tigate the unknown-and our rationale for public and private sup- port-has been the ultimate value to the society that has guaranteed, tolerated, and supported these freedoms. The celebrated, tangible result of these processes has been pm- gress, especially material progress, the undergirding postulate has been that progress would result and progress would be good. The current challenge comes from the apparent consequence of assuming the open-ended goodness of knowledge and its discovery. We face the startling apparition that our technology demands for energy may exceed within a short, predictable time the supplies of energy that can and will be made available. The proper response to this condition is not anti-intellectual despair, but rather to direct research and thought in purposeful ways to make man and his environment compatible with each other. A national effort is called for comparable to waging a total war, a war for survival with our planet at to live on. Institutions of higher education will make their contributions to this national effort. The task calls for a sustained attack on a national and world condition and will inescapably change the social, economic, and politi- cal environment in which Vanderbilt will live in the future. ll' Now, a second issue. The severe impact of knowledge-based tech- nology on the culture of societies and the psychology of individuals has been profound, and has been largely unanticipated in the range of its consequences. The elasticity of human capacities is being tested daily: ability to adjust to unfamiliar pressures, to operate effectively in unstructured and changing environments, to meet new expectations, to sustain unanticipated living experiences. Within a remarkably short time, traditional conditions of continuity and stability in societies, within which individuals have functioned in t.he past, have altered at their roots. The strain on individual personalities and social institutions is ex- traordinary. The challenge to education is to help individuals develop internal, stabilizing gyroscopes. In stable cultural settings where values are clear and consistent, rules of conduct known and continuing, changes in expectations and contexts moderate, an individual has guidance and support from his heritage and environment. Within the limits of his cultural setting, a person knows what is right and what is wrong He is not bound to the status quo, but he knows what the status quo is. A multitude of technological changes have fundamentally altered the conditions of human life, even in remote tribal societies. One consequence has been a decline in the traditional socializing and stabilizing influences of education-and also of religion, of the family, of the tales of elders, of national legends, of creeds and command- ments-as these influences have been diluted by the incessant bom- bardment of new ideas, new skepticism, newly generated appetities. The cumulative result is a severe test of the individual's psychological stamina and strength of personality, as can be read in many indicators of personal and societal maladjustment. if Those are two issues that bear on Vanderbilt's future. They lead to a third: the scope and purposes of a university education. Every influential exposure an individual experiences is part of the educating forces that shape him. At one time higher education affected a relatively small segment of the population and constituted a relatively isolable segment of a person's total educating experiences. Other institutions that contrib- uted to the total education of a person, e.g., the church, the family, community opinion, appear to have declined in setting standards of conduct, defining moral values, creating allegiances and goals, and otherwise guiding the lives of people. Colleges and universities have been drawn into the partial vacuum created, with mounting hope by some that the institution will accept responsibility for developing the whole person, and with resistance to that expectation by others. At Vanderbilt, I have said, our first concern is the human intellect, but our ultimate concern is the human being. Certainly its primary contact with students is an intellectual one, but in the long run Vanderbilt must be concerned with the total human being who emerges as an educated person. The concept is clearly ambitious, to some doubtless presumptuous, in any event more a definition of concern than a description of duties. It will not be possible, however, to avoid the issue. It is a more complex question than deciding what kinds of vocational, professional, or continuing instruction to offer what kinds of students-issues that are themselves demanding enough. The concern for personal develop- ment stems from the need to cope with those conditions of a tech- nological society that have led to the decline in the authority of other institutions. The institution that can help its student become a better integrated person, with a sense of command over his own destiny and a sense of how he fits into his complicated and mercurial social environ- ment, will have achieved the most demanding and significant educa- tional objective of our time. lk Finally, a fourth issue. the kind of independence and autonomy enjoyed by colleges and universities when Vanderbilt was founded is gone. There is now functional interconnectedness among all elements of higher education and between higher education and the rest of the society. The enormous volume of material resources, for one thing, now involved in higher education ensures that the rest of society will assert its stake in what we do. Beyond that, however, the inherent importance of all a true university does makes certain that the func- tions it undertakes will be scrutinized, evaluated, and supported or' not supported, by others. Vanderbilt is now more integrally a part of its larger communities than ever before. Participants in higher education will inevitably need to become more effective participants in the councils of society where public policy and public opinion are formed-if they wish to influence the policies and opinions that ultimately determine their welfare. There will be no proper alternative to taking as effective a part as posible in shaping the nation's strategies of higher education and its policies as they bear on Vanderbilt. To identify issues that must be met is not to predict the shape of the future. The form of what we do will change continuously, but our largest goal will always be to create and stimulate the kind of learning that breeds strength and honor and hope within a person, and that helps build a society outside him that stirs his pride and commands his affection. THE SECOND CENTURY I 9

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f'7 X Comments for the 1974 Commodore by Alexander Heard, Chancellor, Vanderbilt University: As Vanderbilt begins its second century, I cannot help reflecting on the feelings of the first Chancellor when the University opened 100 years ago. All Vanderbilt's chancellors have been filled with gratitude, determi- nation, and hope. All have faced a future weighted with difficulties, some known in advance, some not. Chancellor Landon C. Garland worked in a world that moved more slowly, however, and it is fair to say that he was plagued less than his successors by conscious uncertainty about the future conditions under which his university would function, and especially less than a Vanderbilt chancellor today. As it turned out, whatever stability in the social environment Chancellor Garland assumed would continue in the years ahead was radically altered. In turn, Vanderbilt's own nature was radically altered during its first century, suggesting the difficulty of seeking now to look ahead to the university's future in a different second century when changes will probably be even more rapid and fundamental. Chancellor Garland was a profesor of physics and astronomy, and also a mathematician, and was well equipped to appreciate the dynamic force of scientific discovery and invention. Yet I find no prediction from him of the avalanche of technical innovations that would follow the founding of Vanderbilt and have profound impact on the societal institutions, cultural values, intellectual insights, occupational pat- tems, and educational expectations that largely mold a university's life. When the comerstone of the building that is now Kirkland Hall was laid April 28, 1874, there was no telephone, phonograph, automo- bile, airplane, radio, television, photocopier, computer, antibiotic drug, nuclear fission, subcellular research, nor any of a multitude of other creations and highly sophisticated systems of knowledge that have made ours a new world. The rate of change has so accelerated that when Vanderbilt opened its newest school, the Graduate School of Management, in 1969, the 8 I THE SECOND CENTURY School's proclaimed purpose was to train managers of change, leaders for whom change was not a condition of transition from one previously normal state to a new one, but rather was the continuing state of the social environment, the norm itself. ln retrospect, it would have been futile to expect Chancellor Garland to look very far ahead into Vanderbilt's future, the task is just as ambitious today. li If one looks back, in fact, instead of ahead, it is easy to despair of the whole enterprise of education, past or future. Mr. Garland, speaking in 1870 in Memphis at the General Conference of the Method- ist Episcopal Church, South, three years before he was to become Chancellor, observed as follows on the relationship between education and human welfare: Never was there a greater mistake than that which is becom- ing so prevalent at the present day, thatmere intellectual culture is of itself adequate to exalt the virtue and secure the happiness of a people. It was never so at any period of the world. The contrary is susceptible of the clearest proof from the history of our race. In all nations, the periods of greatest literary distinc- tion have been the periods of greatest moral corruption, as witness the Periclesian age in Greece, the Augustan age in Rome, the Elizabethan in England, the Republican in France, and the present in America. Education was never more widely diffused throughout the United States than now. Never was there more ado about it. Never were institutions so multiplied. Learning was never more highly valued and sought after, as a means of reducing the laws of nature, and the properties of matter, to human controL and contributing to national and individual wealth and power. . . . Has the virtue of the people increased with their knowledge? Are our public men more patriotic, more self-denying, more honorable, more true to compacts, and more trustworthy than they were fifty years ago? Are the morals of the people improved? Is there less of crime and lawlessness in proportion to population? Alas! to all such inquiries there comes up a negative response which is well-nigh universal.And yet education is, with a vast number of persons, the agency which is to bring us to the perfectibility, so called, of our nature. Mr. Garland was arguing for education under the sponsorship of a Methodist Church that he dearly trusted. He would count heavily on the religious character of the contemplated institution to ensure its pursuit of a higher education conducive to positive social values, where students might receive the largest intellectual culture without detriment to their moral habits and religious sympathies. While the University and Church would part company after four decades, there is little evidence at Vanderbilt or elsewhere that the formal seculariza- tion of some of our colleges and universities can be held accountable for the present intensified form of the difficulties Mr. Garland observed a century ago. The relationship of intellectual culture to moral values and socially useful purposes remains today, nonetheless, a crucial iwue in Vanderbilt's and Americas future. Intellectual capacity distinguishes the human from other forms of life. The first concern of a university is the enhancement of that power. The university is also concerned with the ultimate results. I have never thought that rationality and morality impeded each other, that ra- tionality somehow eschews values. Much the contrary. In the human conduct they commend, highest morality and ultimate realism are one. We have been concerned on the campus during the Centennial period to examine the uses of knowledge, the consequences of knowing. Van- derbilt's task ahead, as it has always been, will be to make itself an ever more useful social institution, useful in the broadest reach of that concept. Vanderbilt pursues this goal chiefly by working to en- hance the quality of thought of all who are azsociated with it. To accomplish this task requires certain conditions. The University must

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A frequently quoted statement on the purposes of a university is that it is an institution for the acquisition, transmission for disseminationj, preservation, and appli- cation of knowledge. That knowledge is the primary commodity with which universities are supposed to deal is undeniably true, but the statement, nevertheless, is deficient in a number of respects. In the first place, the statement fails completely to embrace the notion that universities exist to serve the ends of mankind. While knowledge pursued for its own sake has long provided a powerful impetus to learning, attempts to interpret the meaning of such a motivation do not have to probe very deeply before it is discovered that knowledge for its own sake really means knowl- edge for the sake of humanity. Obviously, the endless search to achieve a comprehension of the natural, social and human worlds refers to a desire to achieve human comprehension. This search for comprehension has es- tablished principles possessed of great power, simplicity and beauty, has expanded the consciousness of man, and has given new meaning to human existence. Surely, knowledge for its own sake means knowledge for pur- poses such as these. Moreover, an emphasis on knowledge as a product or commodity, without due attention to the processes Glen F. Clanton, Vice Chancellor for Academic Planning by which the stated activities of acquisition, transmis- sion, etc., occur, lends a certain sterility and aridity to university activities which are not on the mark. The spirit and zest of an active adventure are altogether missing. In addition, the focus on the product knowl- edge and the body of content, thereof, leads to many organizational and pedagogical problems related to the vast increase of this product, and the specialization, fragmentation and obsolescence flowing therefrom. 'The emphasis on product rather than process is also serious in the sense that the prime actor in the process, namely, the human intellect, is overlooked. Conse- quently, nothing is said about the development of those intellectual qualities which the act of knowing requires. Learning to analyze, to weigh and judge evidence, to suspend judgment, to doubt, to draw conclusions, and to think with clarity, precision, and independence, yet with an understanding of .the limitations, the value, and the consequences of what is known-the importance of all these attributes is missing in the phrases acquisi- tion and transmission of knowledge. The specific words themselves have some interesting connotations. For instance, the phrase transmission of knowledge, to describe the teaching-learning process places the learner in the role of a passive spectator, 'Tian-Q nb 10 I ACADEMIC PLANNING