) - At the Wisconsin Academy, we're known for programs
and publications that explore, explain,
and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture.
The work that we do and the events that we host,
like the one you're attending tonight,
are all designed to bring people together at the
intersection of the sciences, arts,
and letters to inspire discovery.
Tonight, I'm very happy to introduce Tom Pleger.
In 2014, Tom became Lake Superior State University's
eighth president.
He's held positions at several University of Wisconsin
campuses, including Baraboo Sauk County, Madison, La Crosse,
Marinette and Fox Valley, and also at Lawrence University.
Tom also served as a member of the Academy's board of
directors for several years, and we're privileged that we
have him here tonight.
He's written extensively on the importance of liberal
education and is a champion at the
University of Wisconsin System.
If you're interested in learning more about the Academy,
membership, or our programs, please find me or any of the
other Academy staff after the talk.
Help me give Tom a very warm welcome.
[applause]
- Well, good evening.
It's an honor to be back in Wisconsin,
to be back at my alma mater.
It's a privilege and pleasure to talk with you about
something I'm very passionate about,
and that is liberal education and the liberal arts.
We're at an interesting time in the history of higher ed
in the United States, particularly in the states
in the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan,
in thinking about what kind of public education do we want
and where are we headed.
What is our history been, and what kind of graduates do we
want, and what is the purpose of higher education?
That will really be the substance of my talk this evening.
But before I get into the issue at hand this evening, I want
to mention a few people that are here in the audience.
My wife is here.
My in-laws, Dave and Linda Schaffer,
and it's my mother-in-law's birthday
and she decided to spend it with me.
Here at the Wisconsin Academy talks.
So thank you for coming.
My former major professor Jim Stoltman from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison is here.
It's an honor to see him again.
And I see Tony Evers is here, a colleague of mine, the state
superintendent and member of the Board of Regents.
Willie Larkin, a past colleague of mine, is here.
And I want to make one last mention,
I was in Baraboo Friday for the dedication of
a new science facility.
There was a partnership between the state of Wisconsin,
the University of Wisconsin System, Sauk County,
and the city of Baraboo in this three-way unique partnership
based on the Wisconsin Idea to bring the university
to small communities.
Beautiful facility with a green roof.
If you have a chance to visit Baraboo, I encourage you to visit it.
And at the dedication I mentioned all of my former team
members, but one I forgot, and she's here tonight, Cindy McVenes.
Thank you for being here, Cindy, and being a part of my team.
Well, in order to set the stage for the talk tonight,
I need to tell you a little bit about my background.
And the kind of education I had and the history of my family
and the kind of education they received that led to what I
studied and my interests as a scholar, as an administrator,
and as an advocate for higher education.
I grew up in Marinette, Wisconsin, right on the border with
the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
in a small town of about 12,000 people.
It is a twin city with Menominee, Michigan.
12,000 people on the other side.
Approximately 12,000 to 15,000.
And there's a University of Wisconsin campus there,
right in the backyard on the shoreline that was a big part
of my life growing up, having access to the arts,
to the humanities, to plays, lectures.
My parents knew most of the faculty there.
And the campus became part of my upbringing in terms of
being able to just walk down the street and access the
library, to see a theater performance, to engage in the
arts, to listen to scholars visiting from the
Madison campus and all around.
And, at the time, I didn't realize what a luxury it was to
have a university in your backyard.
When I went off to college I thought everybody has a
university in their backyard, realized what a unique model
Wisconsin has to have to 26 campuses dispersed across this
landscape and including campuses in some of the
smallest communities in the state.
Well, my background, I attended the University of Wisconsin-
La Crosse, studied anthropology and political science,
and then went on to the University of Wisconsin Madison
where I earned my master's in anthropology,
my doctorates in anthropology and Great Lakes archeology.
And I was fortunate that my parents did not say to me,
"We don't want you to study archaeology
"because it's impractical.
"It has no benefit to society,
"or it will not lead to employment."
And my parents were pleased and excited to see me studying
something that captivated me that they thought
was a value to me.
It would contribute in terms of whatever I did and went out
into the world and would contribute to society
but also would lead to a valuable future of my own.
And thinking about that, I'm constantly reminded about the
stories of both sides of my family
and how it impacted my choices in higher education of what I
studied and what I was interested in.
My father, who's shown here as a lieutenant in the Army,
would be on your left, grew up outside of Detroit in a
family that had been in the Detroit area
for several generations.
No one in his family had attended college.
My grandfather on that side of the family was a bank teller,
not a banker but worked behind the line in the front
of the bank.
And my grandmother on my father's side had attended
education to the eighth grade, not beyond that.
And someone in dad's history suggested he was bright enough
to go to college.
And he attended Michigan State College,
before it was Michigan State University, at a cost of about
$180 a term, which was big money for my dad's parents
at the time to send him off to school.
He studied art and became very interested in the fine arts,
particularly drawing and painting, and psychology.
Had no idea exactly what he was going to do.
Took a variety of courses in the sciences,
then went into the military, and through the GI bill was
able to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison
for law school.
And he attended here at a cost of about $500 a term
back in the 1950s.
And that's what brought my dad's side of the family
to Wisconsin.
My mother, by comparison, attended UW-Madison,
earned a degree in sociology and social work.
Her parents attended Lawrence University in the '20s.
And this is my grandmother's diploma all in Latin from
Lawrence University with a bachelor of arts.
And her parents' grandparents, my grandparents' parents,
attended Princeton.
Family had been in Appleton since the 1860s.
And so on that side of the family there was a great
tradition of liberal education.
My mother's parents had English and French degrees.
And her grandparents had degrees in law
and a broad liberal arts education.
And it was this merger of my dad, first generation,
and my mother, third generation college, that provided
opportunity for our family and for me to attend college
and to explore a variety of topics without the pressure of
feeling I needed to study something that would lead
to immediate employment.
In fact, that wasn't even in my parents' concern
when I went off to college.
They were concerned about was I going to become a well
rounded young man, an educated citizen,
and was I going to do well and enjoy something in life
that I might study regardless of how long it took?
And I will comment, both grandmothers are very interesting.
My grandmother that attended Lawrence and earned a degree in
French wanted to do chemistry but the number of majors were
limited for women at the time, and she ended up a degree in
French, and she still had some feelings about that.
But she was very excited about me going out to pursue a PhD, thought it was great.
It didn't matter how much time it was.
And my grandmother on the other side, who had gone to the
eighth grade, would ask me questions when I was home.
Why are you still in college?
You've been in college for a decade.
And what is anthropology?
And where do you go to work in anthropology?
And what are you going to do with this?
And it was interesting having those sort of dual heritage
influencing what I was going to study and what I might do.
But, again, very fortunate that my family supported me to
explore topics that were outside of the family tradition,
so to speak.
Well, when most people think of the liberal arts as an
educational path, it's a very old path,
and it's often a vision of the ivory tower
educational experience.
And the humanities and the arts are what most people think
of, often history, philosophy.
This is Professor James Moody, our most senior historian
at Lake Superior State University.
He's still teaching.
Great liberal arts professor in history.
And you can see he's quite a renaissance professor
by his office.
Every time I go to visit with him,
I get engaged in all kinds of topics that are sometimes
far and wide ranging, from history to politics
to sociology to anthropology.
And he truly embraces and loves and is passionate about
teaching history, not only to future historians but to our
business majors, our engineering majors, our fishery science
majors, and everyone that comes across his class is enriched
and sees the relevance of history.
I am located in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, today,
which is where Lake Superior State University is located.
We will turn, the city will turn 350 years old in two years.
So we are a city that sits at a strategic point in the
Great Lakes with a tremendous Euro-American past but extends
far further back into native history.
And that's part of the curriculum on campus that students
learn something about the region.
How did Canada come to be? Why is the border there?
Why is the UP not part of Wisconsin?
Those are things that Yoopers need to know going
to college in the UP.
Well, the liberal arts, as I mentioned, in most people's
minds tend to revolve around the disciplines of the
social sciences and the humanities.
When you ask someone, often that's what they think of first.
But, really, the liberal arts are a series of disciplines
that include not only the humanities and the arts,
the fine arts and the performing arts, but also the
sciences, the natural and social sciences.
And so when you hear this division,
this new creation of an
academic grouping of disciplines referred to as STEM,
science, technology, engineering and mathematics,
half of it is in the liberal arts.
The sciences and the mathematics are part of this core
series of disciplines.
So to be a liberal arts major means, generally, at an
institution, you've earned a degree in one of these fields,
but it means much more than that in that you've had a broad
liberal education experience.
And what I want to do from this point is depart in terms of
terms and make you understand and aware of the differences
between the concept or the term liberal arts,
which refers to the disciplines, the collection of these
disciplines, and liberal education, which refers to a broad
collection of courses and experiences in the liberal arts
regardless of what your major is in.
Okay, does that make sense? Those two differences?
And it's important,
with this audience I don't think I need to say this,
but I will anyways.
The first time I gave a talk on liberal education in the U.P.,
I had someone in the community say,
"We don't need anymore democrats up here."
So I'm obviously not talking about the political definition
of liberal, but I'm talking about the broad collection of
disciplines that includes the natural, the social sciences,
the humanities, the fine arts and mathematics.
A more sort of relevant definition is thinking about liberal
education as this broad base of courses that everyone would
take in a modern university setting regardless of their
field of study.
Now, the pure liberal arts, which makes the U.S. unique.
Just a few years ago I was visiting Shanghai and Yan Zhou
and with some sister campuses in China.
It was very interesting to see the conversation they wanted
to have with me is how do you integrate the liberal arts
and these broad disciplines into things like science
and technology.
We want, meaning China, our graduates to be more creative,
innovative, and we think that the problem, what we're
missing here, is this broad collection of courses that
produce a more well rounded individual that can do more than
simple a technical task.
It was interesting.
Over and over again, in that visit,
that's what I was asked about.
How can we bring a liberal education and liberal arts to
China, and how can we connect them with where they excel
in science, technology and math?
Well, the example I gave of my parents.
The liberal arts in the United States were traditionally a
curriculum or a set of degrees that were reserved
for the elite.
They existed in the Ivy League colleges,
in the private colleges.
What changed all that was the Morill Act,
which basically created the land-grant mission in the United
States in the 1860s, signed into law by President Lincoln,
that allowed for the sale of public lands
and states to produce and build up public universities
to transfer knowledge to the citizenry.
Part of it was based on practical knowledge, the industrial
arts, agriculture, but a second component to it was to bring
a liberal arts education to the masses.
To make it accessible to all and not just to the wealthy few
that could afford or attend the traditional long-lived,
at that time, private institutions in the country.
That changed the landscape in the U.S. forever.
It opened the doors to many individuals that otherwise would
not have been able to afford or come and have this broad
educational experience.
That, coupled with the GI bill after World War II, opened up
universities, and particularly liberal education,
the liberal arts, to families and people that otherwise it
was inaccessible to in the United States.
And the result of that was an explosion of creativity in all
kinds of areas where the sciences, the humanities,
and the arts intersected in the undergraduates experiences
of having coursework in all of these disciplines
and seeing how they were related
and relative to one another.
I mentioned this is the modern definition of liberal
education that is used by the American Association of
Colleges and Universities, which most higher ed institutions
that have a liberal education base embrace.
And I don't want to read this word for word.
You can read it.
But, basically, it's the concept that all students,
regardless of whether they have a technical major,
a business major, a professional major, or a major in the
liberal arts, should have a broad liberal arts curriculum as
part of their experience that is interwoven with the major
so that they have the power to see the relationship between
the sciences and the humanities, between ethics and creation
so that they have the power to understand and interact with
people different than themselves, to have a sense of empathy
and a sense of global awareness.
That is the core liberal education experience,
and it's more important than ever before.
It's not an outdated, outmoded type of education.
Rather, it's a tool for the future
In a time where information is ubiquitous.
Around us at fingertips at any minute's notice to access on
the web, a liberal education base is how we make sense
and take that information and combine it to produce things,
to produce policies, ideas, and connect with the world.
It, I would argue, is as relevant or more relevant
than it ever has been.
And depending upon where our country is heading and where
the states in the Midwest are heading, the liberal education
and liberal arts should play and should be considered in
policy for thinking about what kinds of graduates we want
and how we want to fund and move higher ed forward.
Interesting question and something I ask freshmen
all the time.
Why are you here and why would you go to college
and why should the state, wherever you are,
invest in you to come here?
What is the output of your experience that benefits you
and benefits society and the state that helped pay for your education?
What is it?
Why do people invest in higher ed, and why do people go?
And what does it mean to be an educated person?
There's a great deal of discussion about this right now.
There's a great deal of discussion about it in Wisconsin.
Even though I'm a state away, I'm watching what's happening
here in terms of the discussion.
And a similar discussion is taking place in Michigan.
Michigan felt the recession first.
We're the only state in the country that had a million
people leave our largest city in Detroit.
And there's a great deal of thought right now in the state
of Michigan, like Wisconsin, that manufacturing is the
future of the state, and there will be a return
and a resurgence of manufacturing.
I hope that is true.
And there's an interest in focusing on trades
and technical disciplines that will aid in that
resurgence of manufacturing.
Michigan is making a comeback,
and Michigan is also reinvesting in its higher ed.
The last two budget cycles, the governor's invested 5%,
four to 5%, each budget cycle because higher ed is clearly
part of the future of Michigan.
And it's clearly part of the future of Wisconsin.
But the question is, what kinds of graduates
do we want to have?
There's no question we need people in the sciences,
technology, medicine, mathematics, business,
and engineering, but we want them to have the tools
and the skills to navigate the future.
To be flexible, adaptable, and to be a person that can
engage in a global culture.
So we need to think about what does it mean to be educated,
and what is the purpose of higher ed,
and what's the difference between training and education?
People, when they ask me what is my educational background,
I will tell them I'm a liberal arts graduate
and I'm trained in anthropology, which sometimes I tell
people is the master discipline because it's the study of
humanity across time and space.
But I think of anthropology as my training in a major in a
specific field, but the skills that allowed me to move from
one job to another, to be flexible, adaptable, to move from
a research archaeologist to a professor to a college
administrator to a president, are skills that are part of
that liberal education experience.
The ability to speak publicly, the analyze, think
critically, and connect with different people,
those are the skills that get you your second and third
and fourth job, not necessarily your first job,
although they should get you your first job as well.
The purpose of higher education and the way it's discussed
right now, most people, I think if you look at most
universities, public universities, will have in their
mission somewhere developed human potential.
That was, still is fortunately,
part of the University of Wisconsin's mission.
It's also embedded in Lake State's mission and Michigan
State and many other higher eds of allowing people to become
and enjoy a life, a liberated mind to develop to the
furthest they can, to give them the skills
to become lifelong learners.
To develop curiosity and creativity, discovering
and research, to discover new things, to be engaged
and passionate about discovery
and pursuing the truth, innovation.
And two terms that have popped up over and over again that
are now front and center in the nation's debate about the
future of higher education is workforce development
and talent development.
To what degree is a university, a public university,
responsible for workforce development, and is workforce
development compatible with human potential development?
Should it replace, or is it something that should be integrated?
I would argue that it should.
We are about providing careers and opportunities,
but front and center is developing the individual to become
an educated person, to connect disciplines, and then apply
it to a specific task or series of tasks
and disciplines in a work environment.
What's troubling is that workforce development is becoming
thought of as the primary focus of the public university.
And the primary focus should be the public good is producing
an educated citizenry that has a wide array of options once
they leave the university in terms of how they
employ that education.
This is a great slide that I show first year freshmen
students at university.
That is a survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education
across a whole sector of different types of higher education
institutions in the United States.
And I've highlighted in yellow those responses of why are
you here and why did you decide to go to college that I
think refer to becoming an educated individual versus those
in white are connected more with training.
And still today most college students are there to learn
something about themselves and in interest,
but right number two and inching up is to get a better job.
To get training in a specific career.
To gain general education, appreciation, ideas.
To be able to make more money, prepare myself for graduate
or professional school.
To find a purpose in life.
The last two I think are rather interesting.
I could not find a job, and there was nothing better to do.
Not a good reason to go to college, the last two.
What's troubling is that the discussion in the media and in,
often, the political sphere about college
and the potential debt that one amasses and the probability
or possibility of amassing significant debt
and being unemployed is having a profound impact on first
generation families about what you should do when
you go to college.
And I'll tell you an anecdotal story about this.
Recently, a year or so ago, I was invited to give a keynote
address on Mackinac Island to the scholarship recipients
from the top positions of the 13 school districts
in the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan,
many of whom were first generation college students.
Very exciting to meet these young people and to see their
excitement of heading out, also nervousness,
to college of what they're going to study.
Of nearly 50-some students, the majority, all but maybe a
half dozen, listed science, technology, engineering,
mathematics, business, or a health field as to what
they were going to do.
That's great.
The reality is probably most of them will not end up with a
degree in that field, but what was absent,
not a single English major.
Not a single sociology major.
Amazingly, there was an archaeology major.
I was very pleased to see it. One political science.
If you were to look back 20 years ago, you would have seen a
group of the most talented high school students talk about
what they were going to study, a much broader array of
disciplines and pursuing something that
they're passionate about.
What is happening in high schools and in the discussion in
the national debate about college is a fear being put into
many first generation families that you should steer away
from anything, anything, that you have not heard about
getting a job in, or certainly where there's not at least a
job in my community that has a name attached to it
that's related to this major.
And that's unfortunate.
It is setting up a situation that as we move to the future,
we will probably outproduce in a certain series of
disciplines because of what is happening, of what people are
hearing about the return on investment
and why they should go to college.
What we should be saying, in my mind, is students should
pursue something that excites them
and that they're passionate about.
Something that will make them well rounded, will make them
flexible, and today the discussion maybe, I think,
should be not about necessarily what do you want to major in,
but what problems do you want to tackle
in your adult life?
What areas do you want to explore, and what disciplines
might you invest in that would let you explore that topic in
such a way to make some meaning and contribute to society?
This plaque is a quote by Alfred Whitehead,
and it adorns our science and engineering building at
Lake Superior State University.
I stop and look at it every time I walk into the building.
If you look at the date of Whitehead from 1861 to 1947.
He was a scholar, a proponent of higher education.
Wrote and talked about the importance of higher education
and K 12 education.
And this particular quote, I think, is as relevant today.
"There can be no adequate technical education which is not
"liberal," meaning broad and depth,
"and no liberal education which is not technical."
That meaning one that does not possess at least the skills
in a particular topic to allow proficiency
in a particular topic or major.
"That is, no education what does not impart both technique
"and intellectual vision."
This is as relevant today, and this is the kind of
educational experience we should be telling every STEM
major, every student going into medicine, that they need to
take a broad discipline where they can see interconnections.
One of the concerns that I hear regularly the legislators
talking about is, well, with college debt and the cost of
college, what we need to do is shorten the time to degree.
All right, now, there's several ways you can do that.
In other words, move from four years to three years.
One is offer a lot of courses in their senior year
in high school.
That potentially could shorten college.
Another way is to get rid of this broad educational
experience or reduce it.
And there is discussion happening in the country in a
variety of states to do just that.
To take the liberal education base and compress it
and make the primary focus of the college experience on the
major to produce the most technically proficient graduate
that we can.
Mistake in terms of the need for this kind of education for
our future and to create a creative economy.
A liberally educated person is able to understand natural
and social science to make sense of the natural world.
Up in your upper left, you're looking at our Plover Research
Project in the upper Great Lakes.
We have a program where students are involved in monitoring
and protecting habitat of piping plovers.
And these students are not only taking courses in biology
but also taking courses in philosophy and ethics to
understand why is it important to preserve plovers,
why is it taking courses in political science to understand
the political dimension of the problem that they're working
in, and why it is necessary to have protective legislation
to protect plovers.
Liberal education students are able to see the natural world
and appreciate the aesthetic to apply the aesthetic to a
problem to produce a superior end product that is visually
and aesthetically pleasing.
In liberal education, graduates are able to understand
themselves in the context of a global world to understand
people who are different than themselves.
I would argue that one of the most important points or
attributes of an educated person is the skill of empathy.
The ability to see other people and to connect with them
and understand their experience and apply it to your own.
That particular skill comes from the humanities and the
social sciences embedded in undergraduate curriculum.
And finally, the side that would be your left of the
robotics, we have one of the first engineering robotics
programs in the country.
A very highly sought after robotics program
for our graduates.
They're employed even sometimes a year out
before they graduate.
We want our students to be able to solve robotics problems,
work with robotics in an engineering set up, build these
machines, operate them, see applications for them,
but we want them to do it in the context of understanding
the people they work with, the environmental conditions they
work with, and the impact this has on the particular
industry that they're in.
They need to be, if you're going to be in this particular
field of robotics, a well rounded individual, not just
someone who can repair and operate smaller robotic devices.
The humanities, and this is a great image.
This is an image of my colleague's installation at
Algoma University, immediately across the river
from my institution.
The twin Saults, Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan,
and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, as I mentioned,
are over 300 years old.
There are four higher ed institutions there.
Lake Superior State University, Bay Mills Tribal Community
College, Algoma University Ontario,
and Sault College in Ontario.
All of us serve a significant Native population.
And, in fact, Lake Superior State University has the
greatest percentage in number of Native students in Michigan.
We're at 10% of our population.
My colleagues across the river, Algoma University,
this is President Chamberlain being installed
in his position.
A great friend and colleague there of a great university,
has almost 20% of his student population Native
and a complex history.
His campus is actually a former boarding Native school run
by the Ontario government that was transformed
into a university.
So there's this complex history of the tribal people that
were educated there when they were a boarding school
and now are returning as a university to further their
careers and their lives.
Algoma has a great liberal arts tradition as well.
The reason I put this slide in is that the humanities
and the social sciences allow us to operate in these realms.
Although many people are surprised when I tell them I'm in
the U.P. that's a cosmopolitan international world.
It is because we're on the border with Canada.
The ability to connect with these diverse populations
and diverse people in terms of the Native history,
the French history, the English history, the Canadian
history, the Michigan history, requires some appreciation
and skills to connect with people.
And all of my colleagues that are involved in
administration, higher ed administration,
have those skills.
They are critical to our success and critical to leadership
positions and being creative and connecting with people in
your own community who are different, but outside the borders
of our own community and becoming more important
than ever before.
The humanities also provide us with an opportunity to think
about the ethics of what we can create and discover.
And this is a great poster from Utah that a colleague of
mine sent to me on social media that I think really drives
home the point of science without the humanities.
Science without the social sciences, natural science,
is half a field.
Without understanding the context of what you're doing
and how you're going to apply what you're doing is very
important, particularly in the context of medicine.
The arts are also critical to making us see the world
and see humanity.
If you think about it, when you travel
and travel around to other cities to visit relatives,
to visit friends, when you travel for the first time,
what is it that people are the most proud of
in their communities?
Their parks, their arts, and their environmental resources,
but more particularly their arts.
Their museums, their sculptures,
their portrayal of humanity.
And this particular sculpture that I chose just to exemplify
that I just think this is an amazing piece reflect
the 9/11 memorial in Rosemead, California.
The hands are made out of stainless steel and they're doves,
each one representing a loss of life in 9/11,
holding a twisted girder from the Twin Towers.
What an amazing piece of artwork to tell us about that
tragedy, that point in human history,
and the impact it's had on humanity.
The arts are critical to all of our undergraduate students
in terms of their experiences.
As I mentioned, I'm an archaeologist,
and I spent many years in the field doing cultural resource
management archaeology.
That means archaeology for compliance construction projects.
Often with road projects, Department of Transportation
projects, sometimes city sewer projects that involved
environmental impact studies and involved archaeology as
part of the project because of an archaeology site that
would be destroyed or impacted.
And I could pick out instantly the engineer I was dealing
with of whether they came from a liberal education base
institution or they came from a pure technical engineering
school without that well rounded experience.
The engineers that didn't have that could not understand why
is taxpayer money being spent on historic preservation
and environmental preservation.
They did not understand the political dimension
of this project.
Those that had that background could see that there is a
historical connection to this project in terms of how it
impacts the landscape, there is an aesthetic component to
their project in terms of the impact of the beauty and the
surroundings of the people that live there,
and there is a social and political ramification
to doing this engineering project.
And that is a better engineer.
An engineer who can see in those dimensions is an engineer
that is more complete and can produce a better product in
the workforce and in the work field.
That's the kind of engineer that I want to work with.
So liberal education graduates are creative, innovative,
engaged, and curious.
They have communication skills.
Surprisingly, if you survey incoming freshmen about what
their greatest fear is, they will list public speaking as
number one, often above death, which is hard to imagine.
Because what's the worst that can happen in a bad speech, right?
Versus death is a bit more final.
Communication, written and oral, is absolutely critical to
creativity, to discovery, to be able to make an argument,
to convey the importance of what it is that you're doing,
and to connect with other people, analytical skills,
the ability to solve problems, and, as I mentioned, empathy.
When I hire and look for people of my teams, I'm usually
looking for a couple of qualities, communication, hard
ability to work, work ethic, but I'm looking for honesty,
pursuit of the truth, and I'm looking for empathy.
That is an absolutely critical skill of anyone that I have
worked with or I've wanted on my team.
And appreciation for the human condition
and the ability to connect.
Now, this list actually comes from--
It's a modified list from a paper that Bill Cronon,
one of your famous historians here on campus.
It's a phenomenal paper that I encourage you to read
called "Only Connect."
It represents or describes what it is to be
liberally educated.
His number one point is the ability to connect disciplines.
That's what he says and I would argue is key to someone with
that liberal education background of their ability to see
different types of information and merge them together to
solve problems and to connect with people.
Now, I wanted to give one practical specific example of how
a liberal education can be applied to a very specific
commercial problem.
This is an image of James Keighley, and James Keighley
I met for the first time about a year ago.
He's a retired Kraft and Proctor CEO or CFO.
He was one of the top leaders, vice presidents,
in the organization.
He was actually involved in some of the discussions here
that led to the changes in Oscar Mayer's relationship within
the parent company.
And he retired up in the Sault, became a member of our
advisory board for engineering, technology advisory
board on campus.
And we asked him to speak about this experience of being an
engineer with business training in a top commercial
international company and how and what he thought were
important skills to becoming someone, a vice president in
that position or a very top executive, and how those skills
could be applied to a specific problem.
And I didn't know exactly what he was going to talk about.
He came and talked about his experience of a team he had who
worked with Gillette.
And Gillette originally, if you know anything about the
history of Gillette, Gillette was originally from Wisconsin,
invented the Gillette razor, became widespread in
World War I, the company had tremendous success.
Interestingly, Gillette wasn't able to enjoy that success
and was separated from the company at some point
in his life, but Gillette was interested in expanding its
reach in a global market.
And they were particularly interested in India,
of producing a razor in India that would be successful.
And for a significant period of time, their approach was
simply to either produce something that was cheap
or engineered as inexpensively as possible or was a product
that was not selling well in the US and they offered it to
India, and that was the strategy.
Very little success.
And then Jim and his team came in and decided what we need
to do is go to India and apply some sociology, anthropology,
business, and engineering to look at how Indians use razors
and what might be attractive in terms of a design and what
are the parameters we need to design a product that would be
viable and successful in this country.
And so he did this and found, A, most Indians that were
using their product shaved out of a cup,
didn't have running water.
So they needed to design a razor that could be cleaned with
a drinking cup, not with running water out of a tap.
Very different than how most of us shave in the United States.
Found that most of the consumers were shaving outdoors in
daylight because they didn't have electricity in their home
to produce enough daylight in the morning to
shave in that setting.
So what they found was that people were using portable
mirrors, shaving with a drinking water outside
of their home.
So they designed a razor around those parameters.
Very inexpensive.
Also found that Indians, depending upon where they were
in the country, tended to hold the razor
and use it differently based upon their traditions.
So they designed touch points on the razor that helped hold
the razor in a tactile way that would make it attractive.
And then they, interestingly, found out how did people buy
these things in India.
And for the average Indian in terms of that would purchase a
product like this, they were purchasing razors from their
local shopkeeper that was usually a portable or a shopfront
store on the street.
And up until this point, Gillette had produced its razors in
boxes to be on a shelf.
But all of these vendors displayed their products by hanging
them on rope or thread or lanyards.
They had to visually displayed in order to make the sale.
And also had to have something on it that told what the
product was and why it was useful that wasn't written,
language-based, because there were so many dialects
and languages in India.
So they did this, and after a year's time of employing all
of these disciplines, produced an incredibly successful
product that exploded.
Brought Gillette to the forefront in terms of disposable
razors in India.
You can argue whether there should be a sustainable
component to that in studying what happens when you bring
disposable razors to India.
But it's a fascinating story.
It's a story that when I asked him about this, he told me
his training as an engineer, he never thought at the time
that a connection between sociology, anthropology, politics,
history, and business would be critical in the development
of a product in his discipline.
All right?
Perfect example of using a liberal education to
approach a problem.
And, finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about the
history of liberal education and liberal arts
in the context of Wisconsin.
In front of you are three symbols and phrases that are known
throughout the country, throughout the world, in terms of
Wisconsin and public higher education.
The University of Wisconsin seal, Numen Lumen.
Seek the light, the divine light, the truth, depending upon
how you interpret it, that the rays represent the outside
world and information coming into the individual,
making sense of it.
The sifting and winnowing statement which is about the
pursuit of truth and using all means to pursue truth,
investigate truth,
that require multidisciplinary approaches.
And the Wisconsin Idea.
The idea that this education, the resources of this state,
of this university, should benefit and inform and enrich all
of the citizens of the state and beyond.
And that doesn't just mean enrich in terms of getting a job.
That means lifelong enrichment of connecting all of the
fields of the universities to people's lives.
Of transforming the economy, transforming people's lives,
and opportunity.
That's what the Wisconsin Idea is about, and that's what the
legacy of this institution is about.
Michigan, by comparison, does not have a university system.
It has 15 constitutionally autonomous universities.
15 boards.
And the land-grant mission of Extension and Outreach is the
domain of Michigan State, exclusively, because they are the
land-grant institution.
The rest of us are very much interested in community
enrichment and enlightenment and sharing the resources of
the university with our citizens in surrounding areas,
but Wisconsin is the gold standard in the country.
It has been the model for what higher education should be
and the value of liberal education and the liberal arts of
benefiting all aspects of the economy and the life of this
state and beyond.
It's something that all of you need to take very seriously
in terms of the direction that this institution is going
and the direction of higher education in the country.
And, finally, I would argue that a liberal education
and the liberal arts are absolutely critical to the goal of
a public institution, public higher ed providing
public good.
There's a dialog happening, occurring in the country right
now of basically a dualism.
Of the idea that public universities really benefit the
individual and the good is a private good.
Meaning that I get a degree, I go out and earn more,
the benefit is predominately mine and my family's, therefore
I should pay for it or my family should pay for it.
The public good argument is that the individual not only
benefits himself but the benefit in return to society is
well worth the investment, perhaps greater than the
investment of the individual.
And in order to achieve that outcome, we need graduates who
have this broad liberal education base to be creative,
innovative, and to be able to be flexible and adaptable
and to be successful in whatever the future economy is.
The image on the left, I'm not sure if she's here tonight,
Heather Breunig, but it's a graduate at UW-Baraboo
handing a diploma.
That's the best part of being a college president is handing out diplomas.
That's just such an exciting time to see families
and folks there.
And the image enter to learn, go forth to serve,
is a plaque on one of our gates at our institution,
the oldest gate on campus.
Lake State's origins are actually a military fort that was
transformed into a GI access institution after World War II,
and we take this seriously.
We want all of our graduates to go out wherever they go from
Lake State and do something that not only benefits them,
their families, but contributes to a greater public good,
whether it be in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Canada,
the U.S. or the world.
That is critical to what we are there to do.
And it's something that cannot be accomplished without
producing a well rounded, well educated individual.
And, finally, my last slide, the Academy turns 150,
Jane, soon? [speaking off microphone]
In 2020.
The Academy's origins are in liberal education
and the liberal arts.
It is, perhaps, the only institution in this state where the
sciences, the humanities, and the arts and letters are
integrated into a interdisciplinary approach to solving
problems and bringing people together.
It's extremely valuable.
And its origins date back to a time before the internet when
a group of scholars saw great value in united these fields
to address public policy issues and problems and connect the
people of Wisconsin to scholars in a variety of fields.
The individual shown here with a hand lens is Increase Lapham.
He is a founder of the Wisconsin Academy,
and he's also the grandfather of Wisconsin archaeology.
He is Wisconsin's first archaeologist, first geologist,
read the first weather report in the region.
He was a renaissance individual and investigated
all things Wisconsin.
And he saw, in his mind with his contemporaries,
a need to unite different disciplines, to explore topics,
and bring the perspectives of different fields together to
bear on the topic of the day.
Way ahead of his time.
He's a mentor for anyone involved in archaeology
of the Great Lakes.
And the Academy is as much relevant today as it was nearly
150 years ago when it was formed.
So that ends my talk.
I hope you found this of some value and saw the relevance of
the liberal arts and liberal education to our past, to our
present, and very much to our future as we look to building
a creative, innovative, and educated economy, knowledge
economy, for this state, for the Midwestern states,
and for the U.S. and the world as a whole.
Thank you very much.
[applause]