Keynote Address
Robert Edwards
Sept. 23, 2005

President Robert Kennedy of Maine’s Land Grant University

What will be the great tasks of this excellent man we install today to lead the University of Maine in this still-new century? What are the forces that will frame Bob Kennedy’s job as President of Maine’s land-grant university?

Well, not all his work will necessarily be dignified. For example, in these litigious times President Kennedy is likely to be sued more than once. One university president has said that he was sued so often that his mother used to refer to him as, “my son, the defendant.” He will have the occasionally diminishing experience with his faculty that led even Charles Eliot to conclude gloomily that, if a man would know humiliation at the hands of his fellows, let him become president of Harvard.

It is perhaps the nature of our times to perceive relationships as inexorably conflicted and poisoned by uncivil debate. But conflict—with Legislature, Chancellor, faculty, alumni, staff, students or factions yet unborn—will clearly not be the way of the Kennedy administration. Bob is surely one of the most optimistic and least contentious of mentalities. As a much-awarded scientist, a botanist, agricultural researcher and research director, he could not be closer to the heart of the land-grant university. As Provost and trial President of our own institution, we have come to know his intellectual and human qualities, as well the breadth of his interests in the University. There will be no “honeymoon,” that misnamed period of wary circling and suspended campus engagement. We know the man and his energies. We hope he will bring us a distillation of the wisdom he has gained in Minnesota, Ohio, Washington and Texas—and that the University of Maine will be his last job.

The times or the “spirit of the age,” however, do imprint rather forcibly all universities and their presidencies—and none more forcibly than a state’s land-grant institution. Think of this University’s beginnings in the 1870s: Presidents Allen and Fernald strengthening “agricultural education,” to win the support of Maine farmers who wanted to “keep the boys home” after the Civil War, but also feeling the powerful currents from Europe of the new German research university. “Teach to do, as well as teach to know,” they and their faculty urged for a state of Maine still developing its own economy and character apart from Massachusetts. The new Maine State Industrial College, as we then were, believed in labor, not “fashionable foppery and elegance”—probably a deserved crack at Bowdoin graduates who had opposed its creation. But even in that precarious time of poverty and legislative insistence on practicality, Allen, in 1875, managed to define for Maine in enduring words the challenge and mission—the very idea--of what will become its University,

….to be no mere professional school to fit students for any one department of business, where the art of farming or any other art, engrosses the entire thought. But…. to be a college with ample facilities to lay the deep foundations of liberal culture, especially adapted to the utilities of life….Education in the field and in the laboratory are necessary to fit one for success in life.

What then is the spirit of our times, what are the great issues that willy-nilly thrust themselves upon Maine’s land grant university? In these few minutes I’d propose three that inspired and drove this University from its beginnings, which present it and the Kennedy administration with fresh challenges today and which will require of all of us the greatest understanding and lively support.

First, Public Education.

The University and its President have unfailingly spoken and worked to raise the educational aspirations of the State and to strengthen public education.

It is wonderful but troubling that in this year’s national spelling bee the top four contestants were of South Asian origin and that an Indian student taking remedial math in Bombay was placed in the top of his class in his new American school, as reported by an Indian parent in the N Y Times. But this is no longer news. We know that in our own state of Maine our primary school students place well in national standardized tests, but that our students drop into the anonymous middle by the time they reach high school—the point at which science and math teachers are hard to recruit, boredom rises and aspirations of students and parents fall as school seems less linked to a better job.

The 1862 Morrill Act was really about brainpower. It created land grant universities focused on the “agricultural and mechanic arts,” to introduce the ideas and methods that improve crop yields and animal production; and to provide the engineers and mechanical innovations to power the industrial revolution. Maine’s S. L. Goodale underlined the point: “Nothing speeds the plow or fattens the crops like brains,” he said, “and the more they are cultivated before application to the land the better.” Today, when agriculture, the forests and fisheries have uncertain futures, must not the State turn to its land grant University to honor its land-grant mission by cultivating afresh the brains of its young citizens?

Innovation and change in public education are possible in Maine, and we made some unexpected discoveries in the State’s program to provide computers to all seventh and eighth graders. Previously disengaged students developed passionate interests. Shy or uneasy parents themselves became involved when the schools seemed less abstract and authority-driven and more clearly linked to the lives they wanted for their children. Poor areas of the state were enthusiastic backers of the program. The point here is not that computers are an educational panacea; they aren’t. Teachers—guiding, goading, questioning, encouraging—are still the key and information systems are their new avenue for stimulating clear thinking and problem solving.

Just as agricultural innovations changed teaching in the 19th century, when Maine looked to the University to take agriculture away from conventional wisdom and into the research and experiment stations, so public education needs the brain power of the University to help think through with the State’s most able teachers and principals how to motivate and strengthen in students the attributes of mind that will equip them in this new global economy, in President Allen’s words, for “success in life.”

In addition to the College of Education and Human Development, the talents of the total University are needed to buttress public education. Some of its innovative physicists have shown the way by creating the Masters degree in physics for teachers—with the goal of sustaining high school physicists over their careers. Let Maine’s land grant institution engage with teachers and principals, so that start-ups of the sort powered in the Silicon Valley by the brains of Indian arrivals are powered in Maine by the brains of graduates of our own newly and vividly inventive and rigorous schools!

Public education, then, is one great subject for the President’s “bully pulpit.”

Second, Money.

The anguishing search for money to build and sustain the University is in the bones of most academic institutions—and in those of weary presidents. Most of you know something of the painful history here: dribs and drabs from the Legislature in the 19th century—a total of about $250,000 in the University’s first 25 years. Public funding itself was debated between those who hoped for a secure, permanent charge on property—a set mill rate—and those who wanted the Legislature to keep a tight rein on its aspiring University. The tight rein—some times looser and more generous than others—was the rule: $3500 annually from the beginning; then $6500 in 1883; then special appropriations—for green houses, to replace the daily herd struck down by tuberculosis in 1887, $1000 for the library and money for a water supply for the campus. Tuition came early; then went when the Legislature suspended it after the second Morrill Act in 1891; and then came again. President Fernald campaigned tirelessly for an endowment to give the institution a solid independent base, but succeeded only in obtaining the bequest for Coburn Hall.

The funding struggle was an honorable one. But the University’s only real funding base, the State, was only fitfully rich and never populous; and even the sale of the founding grant of land could raise rather little—not from skullduggery as was alleged, but because land in this vast state was so cheap. Successive governors and presidents did their best—and they would be amazed at the flowering of their early cultivations into today’s University.

But, in the last generation, as the mission of land grant institutions has become only more deeply public, and more brilliantly scholarly and scientific, their funding theory has fundamentally changed. Formerly totally state-dependent universities now seek money everywhere. All state universities have their foundations, their alumni annual funds, an array of contracts and grants and growing endowment bases. A recent issue of the Economist quotes one president as saying that his institution “had evolved from being a ‘state institution’ to being ‘state supported,’ then ‘state-assisted,’ next ‘state-located’ and now ‘state-annoyed.’” The luxury or the illusion of annoyance with Maine will never be ours, but there is a vital point here. All strong land-grant institutions are now public-private hybrids. Most of Europe’s universities, for hundreds of years state funded, in the last years, despite political opposition, faculty strikes and student riots, have begun to charge tuition, grant loans, form private partnerships and raise private money—even here in our country! The modern state has too many urgent claims on it, and the modern university is far too complex, ambitious and long-term in its development cycles for state dependency. So it is in Maine.

Our president already is planning ways to relieve this University from the slow starvation that has been its lot. He will be the leader of its national fund-raising and in establishing for us, in all its complexity and ambiguity, the public-private model that will rejuvenate us as a vivid land-grant institution in this new century. He will need all of our help, and the unity and sustenance of all parts of the University’s fund-raising apparatus.

Finally, the idea of the university.

The modern research university is the creature of the great 17th Century Enlightenment. Its giant was Isaac Newton, the polymath scientist and discoverer of the laws of motion, gravity, optics. Nothing suggests better the excitement of those times—the release from cramped, dogmatic, fanatical thought—than Newton’s description of himself as, “a boy playing on the seashore…while the great ocean of truth lay all about me.”

Think of the enormous gains that have stemmed from the scientific, professional and artistic expressions of the great universities over the ensuing centuries. But we live today amidst a certain unease about the academy: we seem to hold society’s keys to success in life, but are we a new self-centered priesthood, worried more about our own welfare than society? More troubling to others is a darker fear that the scientist T. E. Huxley saw in the debates about Darwinism: that the new knowledge to which he was firmly committed would be widely seen to reduce life to a mechanism. He worried in 1868 that,

The consciousness of this great truth weighs like a nightmare upon many of the best minds of these days…; the tightening grasp of [scientific] law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed lest man’s moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom.

What the 19th century feared from Darwin, people today still fear—augmented by the great genetic discoveries of the 1950s and the engineering possibilities that engage the mysteries of life itself. In effect, they are asking, as a molecular biologist friend of mine, a scientist for years at Sloan Kettering, has written: “if natural cause and effect govern our lives…even to the innermost pattern of our thoughts and feelings…what does it mean to be human?”

For the university, these are great questions to engage our best scientific, philosophical, theological and artistic thought. But we also have a duty to see that theological and humane concerns about ethics and society, vital as they are, do not infect and weaken the rigor of the natural sciences in education at all levels – for much would be lost and only a false, nostalgic security gained.

Public affirmation of the great purposes of the University, then, will be the unending task of our humane scientist president. As a human organism, our university will survive and prosper to the extent it interacts publicly, honestly and effectively with its environment. As a land grant university this has always been our enduring strength and opportunity.

Bob, they say a university president has three boxes on his desk: IN; OUT; and TOO HARD. We shall all work with you to make sure that that third box does not overflow!

Godspeed!

Bob Edwards
23 September 2005