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I’m Jonathan Cole, University Professor at Columbia and for fourteen years its provost and dean of faculties. Last year I published a book, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected, which I suppose is why I’ve been asked to introduce our two distinguished authors this afternoon.
It is indeed a pleasure to say a few words about Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein, the authors of Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century published by the University of North Carolina Press. Holden Thorp is Chancellor of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Buck Goldstein is the University Entrepreneur in Residence at Chapel Hill. Chancellor Thorp’s background as a chemist, a discoverer of technology for an electronic DNA chip, and as an entrepreneur and educator of the first rank who is devoted to both undergraduate education and to discovery at world class universities, makes him almost uniquely qualified to write this book. And Buck Goldstein’s, who has a home in Chilmark, has a background that makes him an ideal co-author of this important book. A graduate of UNC Law School, he became involved with entrepreneurial work as a practicing attorney. He was the co-founder of Information America, an online information company that has developed products from databases to public records. He has founded a venture capital fund and has taught entrepreneurship for many years.
Let me put this thoroughly engaging book in social context. The United States faces a paradox: We dominate the ranks of the great research universities of the world – far outstripping those in Europe or Asia. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is among those great seats of learning and discovery. We are kings of the mountain – we occupy the place where the brightest young students and professors want to be. It is perhaps America’s only industry with a favorable balance of trade. Yet, despite our preeminence, there is a growing sense that our system of higher education is under threat – that it is ossifying, that it is not adapting to the needs of the larger society, and that despite the need to do so, it is highly resistant to change in structure and orientation,. When we add to this internal tardy adaptation, the disinvestments by States in higher learning, then, unless we take it upon ourselves at the universities to change in critical ways, we might well be in trouble. If “we’ve seen the enemy and it is us,” as Walt Kelley’s cartoon character Pogo said, then what are we to do? If we cannot expect help, at least in the near term from government, from ill informed and I daresay, wrongheaded legislators or regents, then how can we help ourselves?
Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein address part of this more general question in the compelling argument found in their book. What, then, is the book’s central message? They begin with a premise, with which I surely agree: The university has become the engine of innovation in the United States and it is essential that universities address the great and complex problems that we face as a nation as part of an increasingly global community: problems of global climate change; of poverty and disease; of inequality of wealth; to mention only a few that our authors address.
Universities are in a unique position to provide ideas and potential solutions for these massive problems. They can bring together the most talented people from a wide variety of fields as well as energetic and creative students to work on these problems – both at their home universities and with others at universities throughout the world through the use of new technology. Scholarship without borders is becoming a reality. This book is about how universities can go about building an entrepreneurial culture and fashion structures and organizations that will enable them to build new companies and to incubate even radically new ideas – ideas that focus on the nation’s most pressing problems. They are very persuasive that the great university of the future will have to embrace entrepreneurial thinking and structures for the society to thrive and for these universities to remain the best in the world. I should add that both Chancellor Thorp and Professor Goldstein are acutely aware of the potential risks involved in universities becoming too much like a “business.”
In the final chapter of this superb book, which I urge each of you to read, they begin with a wonderful brief quote from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead that is extended by Harvard’s current president Drew Faust. Whitehead said: “Universities create the future,” and Faust added, “in two fundamental ways: by educating those to whom the future belongs, and by generating the ideas and discoveries that can transform the present and build a better world.” This is a mantra that is reiterated throughout Thorp and Goldstein’s book.
Our two authors will speak for about 40 minutes and then there should be time for a brief question and answer period. It is a great pleasure to give you, now, Chancellor Holden Thorp and Professor Buck Goldstein, who will elaborate on their ideas of the university as an engine of innovation.
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