Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Scott Page Madison 2112: The Resilient Idea  October 29, 2012 UP793     cc >> I'm Scott Page, I'm a professor at the University of Michigan. I taught the first course on Coursera. The first time I taught it, I had a mere 60,000 students. This time, I have 100,000 students. So, in prepping for this, one of the things I did, you know, apropos of Peter's talk, is I just said to my 96,000 students, hey, I'm giving a talk on the future of nursing in 100 years, what do you all think. I got several hundred very thoughtful one-page messages. So, even though this presentation is coming from me, it's also coming from 97,000 other people. So what I'm going to talk about is this. Wisconsin is sort of an interesting university, I'm an alum of here, in that it really actually has an idea. There is this thing called the Wisconsin Idea. 

The motivation for the university is actually substantially different than others. What's funny about the Wisconsin Idea though is that it's never really written down. It takes until like the 1940's, this guy Jack Stark, who sort of in committee speak, sort of writes it down. It doesn't have this sort of, there's no single passionate statement of the Wisconsin Idea. What they did is that the University sort of serve the citizens of Wisconsin. That may seem like an obvious thing, but it's not. If you look at other universities, like if you look at Harvard's mission, it's to educate young people. There's very little about service. If you look at Princeton, a similar sort of thing. But these started out as small colleges and I think they had a very different mission from the get-go. 

If you think of the modern, major universities, like the University of California system, here's Clark Kerr, who's considered one of the great scholars on what the multi-versity is. This is what universities are, right? They provide sex for students, parking for faculty. There's some truth to that, but I'm going to disagree with him later in the talk. But here's what's interesting, this is why I wanted to come to this, there's this, what I call the foreboding. There's a sort of drum beat in the background that this is all going to end. This idea that we have these cushy jobs and we're tenured for life. That we just sit and pontificate to students. That's all about to be disrupted. This pushback against the modern university is only coming from four different sources. I just want to walk through those quickly. 

Then I'm going to push back on those a little bit. What is the first one? The first one are these MOOCS, these massive, online open courses. These massive courses like the one I teach where all sorts of people can take them, and they're free. The idea is that these are going to wipe out the modern university. Sebastian Thrun-- I guess all us people sort of look the same I've noticed. He says there's a red pill and a blue pill. You can take the blue pill and go back to teaching your twenty people, or you can take the red pill, which I'm assuming here means in Wisconsin and you can sort of do this amazing thing. By the way, he's wearing his Google glasses there. Because he's such a futurist. His company, Udacity, which is sort of the competitor to Coursera, has these little white boards and people write little math things on this. 

This is sort of what college would be. You look at this and, as Peter would say, this doesn't quite seem like the college experience that most of us had, right? But the idea here, that these MOOCS are going to wipe out the university, have a long history in economics. There's a guy named Schumpeter who had this notion of creative destruction. It sort of goes like this. You can draft the number of tractors and you can see that that goes up, the number of courses goes down. If you look at the music industry, your going to see as the 8-track gets taken over by the LP which is taken over by the tape, then the CD, and then digital. You see is that one things wipes out the thing before it. But Schumpeter's ideas have been refined by Clayton Christansen with something he calls The Innovator's Dilemma. How many have seen or heard of this book? It says the following, take something that's totally awesome and at the top of it's game. Like a Harley Davidson motorcycle, right? Hundreds of years in engineering. 

This is sort like the pinnacle of human existence if you're from Milwaukee. Take this things and say, what can compete against this thing? The answer is nothing. But what did compete against this was this, the Honda 50CC. It was only $215. And this thing sucks compared to the Harley, just like my MOOC sucks compared to me in person, but the fact is, it's a lot cheaper. What Christansen plays out is the idea that, look, here's time moving on this axis. Here's the disruptive technology. Initially it was disruptive technology, whether it's the Honda 50CC or this massive online course. It can't compare to the Harley Davidson, nor can it compare to me in person, or David in person, or Jessica in person, or anybody else. But it's got a steeper slope, and eventually, it just going to take over. 

That's one threat. A lot of people argue that the MOOCS are going to take over that way. Now, other people think that the MOOCS are going to take over in a different way. This is sort of the un-bundling theory. It goes like this, the university has these things that they make a ton of money on, like 800-person classes. They have things they don't make much money on, which are, like, five person advanced classes. Those are going to get pulled apart. If Peter were here he'd talk about, this is what's happened to the newspaper industry. If you look at the number of workers in the newspaper industry, it's fallen by a quarter of a million people over the last 15 years. The reason why is, where did newspaper money come from? It came from classified ads. 

What did newspapers do? They wrote news. Well, they lost all this revenue from classified ads and so they lost a bunch of employees. If you look at classified ad sales and then Craigslist revenue, you see these things flip. When creative destruction happens, one thing gets wiped out, and something else comes in. The newspaper industry lost 250,000 jobs, but a lot of jobs got created at Craigslist, right? You know how many? 37. There's only 37 employees at Craigslist. So what you've got is, these new technologies, like I can teach a MOOC, over the last semester, to about 150,000 people. That's roughly 500 years of teaching. And now when I do it I just have to hit the return key and I do 300 years of teaching. It's sort of amazing. 

Okay, here's the second argument. The second argument's completely different. It's that we're dinosaurs. David was talking about moats and castles, but we've sort of got these dinosaur silos. This is a graph from Google. This is Google anagrams. You can type in a word and ask, how much has it grown. What you're seeing here is, this blue line is the word "complexity." The world is just becoming much more complex. This is from the Copenhagen Consensus and the Arlington Institute. What are the big things we're going to face in the future? Climate change, terrorism, political collapse, transportation, water, species extinction, education. 

All these things jump the silo. They require psychology, physics, biology, engineering, social science, economics, political science. So we can't have a university that look like this, with little silo houses. In fact, we're dinosaurs if we do that. We've got to create things like the Wisconsin Certificate of Discovery if we're going to fight it, and it's not happening. Most hiring, most promotion, most budgets, as David mentioned, all go through these departments. Okay, reason three, rising costs. One of the things you read all the time, the universities are becoming incredibly expensive. This is called the Baumol Effect in economics. If you look at things like the inflation line. 

That's the light green line. The red line is university tuition and fees. What you see over time, universities are becoming way more expensive, and if you do a linear analysis of this, I'm going to criticize this in a few minutes, but you do an analysis, you're basically going to get that college will cost, like, $14 million in 40 years. You've just got to not buy that. Okay, reason number four. It's bad enough that the MOOCS are going to wipe us out, that we're in these little silos that don't make sense, and it's way too expensive. It's even worse that there's less money for this. So if you look at 1925, 54% of Wisconsin's budget came from the state. By '61 it was still 50%. Now it's 17.6%. 

My home institution, pretty much the exact same graphic, except it would be in yellow and blue. Otherwise, it'd be exactly the same, okay? If you look at the NSF budget, other than the emergency spending, trying to boot-strap the economy. NSF funding certainly did that. It's going up, but not that much. If you look across everything, energy, defense, NSF, NIH, or just even the total budget, you see pretty much a flat lining on government spending for research. This looks bleak, right? I'm trained as an economist, so let's just do Econ 101 on this, then it doesn't look that bleak at all. First, the financial sky isn't falling. Here's college tuition and fees, and here's medical care, and here's median family income. The reason medical care and education are going up is because it's still done by people. It's not done by machines. 

There's just higher labor costs. This is the University of Wisconsin. Remember I showed you that pie chart showing that university funding has gone way down. That's the yellow line. Tuition has gone up, but the actually total cost hasn't gone up that much. You used to give, in 1991, $14,000 per student, now the state of Wisconsin gives $5,000 per student. Tuition's gone up $10,000. $9,000 is because of the fact that the state isn't giving you $9,000. If you look at tuition from 1980-2001 it looks like it's going way up, but it's also true that net tuition isn't going up very much at all. One of the things that's happening at most of these universities is that we're using this to equalize the income distribution in the United States. 

Almost no one is paying full fare. If you're really, really wealthy you pay full fare, but if you're less than that, you're getting some sort of scholarship. There's so many scholarships going on. This is actually the University of Wisconsin net tuition paid by students verse what is written on the bill. This suddenly doesn't look quite so bad. Here's every public in-state university in the country. The blue line is stated tuition. This is actual tuition. Here's private schools. Again, when people are publishing this thing saying, oh, my goodness, tuition is going way up. 

Yes, it is, but the amount people are paying actually isn't going up that much. The amount that the one percent is going way the heck up, and that may be okay, right? [inaudible] We'll go right here, yeah. If we look at student loans, from 1996-2000 we've gone up from $12,800 to about $23,000. Most of the increase though has come from these for-profit universities, right? Those are the places that have huge loans. If you look at a place like Wisconsin, it's actually not that bad. You've got a slight increase in loans, but just to put this in perspective, $23,000 may seem like a lot. If you look at credit card debt of people 65 and over, it averages $10,000. So, $20,000 for a college education in terms of loans just doesn't seem that bad in the overall scheme of things. Last thing, is the flip side of the domino effect. The domino effect says if you use a lot of people to do something, like teach or give medical care, it costs more money. 

The flip side is if you don't use a lot of people, it costs less. So in 1930, when college was cheap, 25% of our income went on food. Now it's 9.5%, because now you can go to Olive Garden and get two meals for $12, this will fall to 9.4% by tomorrow, right? The amount spent on clothing has gone from 11% to 3%. Why? Because these things have been largely automated. So even though education has gone up, other things have gone down, and it maybe doesn't matter as much. Okay, next. So the numbers aren't as bad. There's also the case, look, there's this persistent need. So what does Wisconsin do? What does the University of Wisconsin do? What does the University of Michigan do? We do research. We teach. 

And we serve, right, this is the Wisconsin Idea. Let's think about it, the research end of things. So Alfred North Whitehead has this beautiful quote. I won't bother reading it. You can sort of read through it. But it basically says look, if you don't, if you're not ahead technologically, you're going to lose. That's just the one firm rule. Who's ever ahead in knowledge is eventually, there'll be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated. So basically, Whitehead is saying this, and it sounds good because it's Whitehead. But the thing is, if you do the math on this, if you look at economic models of growth, what economic models of growth tell you is that if you have a fixed technology, you're going to get to an equilibrium and then growth stops. 

So the irony of growth models, I teach growth models and economics, the irony of growth models is that unless technology changes, growth ceases. So unless we want to say we're happy with where we are, then we need innovation. There's always going to be demand for that. Now, there's this thing when people talk about research, they say, well, research is a public good, and this is why it has to be done at universities. Well, what do we mean by public good? It means that it's nonexcludable, so you can't prevent other people from using it. It's also nonrival, so no one person's using it prevents somebody else from using it. Let me give you an example. This is Steve Durlauf, a friend of mine. He's in the Econ Department here. He couldn't say, sorry Scott, you can't use the Central Limit Theorem right now because I'm using it. 

As soon as I'm done, I can pass that back over to you, and you can feel free to go crazy, right, I'll be done about 6:30, right? The reason this is silly is because the Central Limit Theorem is nonrival and it's notexcludable. If he's using it, I can use it and he can't prevent me from using it. Here's why universities aren't going to go anywhere. So, Peter's talking about Google. I had the same experience at Google. Actually, mine was worse, because they were giving out copies of my book to a certain group of people and t-shirts to everybody else. And people were trading my book for the t-shirts. [laughter] Which was not a good sign. But when you go into Google, one thing he didn't mention, is you sign, I don't know, it seemed like a 150-page form. I just kept scrolling down the thing, and I finally said "agree." You can have my children, my dog, the naming rights to everything. 

I don't care, just let me get in the building. Google does exclude some, not everything. They post some of their papers. It is rival, because they don't want Yahoo! and Microsoft to know things. At Wisconsin, it's not excluded nor is it rival. So when universities produce research, we put everything up. If you go to almost any university's researcher's webpage, here's all my research, here's all my papers, here's all the stuff I do. Look at how smart I am. Use this, right? If you go into most companies, it's like, you know, you have to sign a waiver saying no, I will not tell anybody what I've learned, or they won't even tell you. So, my experiences with Google have been that like, no one will tell me what they're working on. 

The reason why is that I'll come up here and tell you what they're working on, and then maybe someone else will find out. So, what do we do. We talked about, I thought David's thing on the library was fantastic. There's this very unfortunate acronym that they use at the School of Information at Michigan called DIKW. You know, let it go. It is what it is. You can probably run with that all day. It stand for Data Information Knowledge and Wisdom. Here's how people who study information think about the sort of repository aspect of the university. So, what is Data? Data is just the captured phenomena. 

It's just the stuff that's out there. What is Information? Information is taking that captured phenomena and like, giving it words, putting it in buckets, right? Giving it labels, categorizing it in some meaningful way. What is Knowledge? Knowledge is relationships between that information. So, Dave and I were talking earlier about-- How do you unpack causality? Or how do you tell the difference between correlation and causality? Or how do you make an understanding of the world. That's what knowledge is. What is Wisdom? Wisdom is the capacity to apply relevant knowledge, figure out which knowledge applies in a particular setting. So the example I give in my online course concerns my roommate from college who works in the financial world. When Iceland fell, the country of Iceland fell, --, he handles money for one of the largest corporations in the world. Somebody comes running in his office and says, Eric, Iceland just fell. He had two pieces of knowledge in his head. 

One piece of knowledge was just sort of economics 101, right, supply and demand, and if one country falls, that should affect prices. The other was sort of a Santa Fe Institute complexity sort of there's a network of countries and banks, and if one falls, other things can fall. So he looked to his underling and said Iceland is smaller than Fresno, go back to work. Right, because he knew which knowledge was relevant. He knew Iceland was so small, that the sort of econ 101 knowledge was appropriate. When you think about what we do at universities, we gather tons of data. We put it in a form that it's actually useful information. We produce knowledge, and then we have people who have been around a long time, collections of people who sort of have the wisdom. So when somebody comes to the university and says help me with a problem, we can do it in this way. Here's what's so cool about every one of these things. 

They're all super additive. It's the case, so this is saying the value F of the union of these things is bigger than the sum of the values of the pieces. So the reason universities aren't going to go away is because it's much more valuable to have all this stuff in the same place, all the data, all the information, all the knowledge, all the wisdom. But here's the missed opportunity. I used to teach at CalTech, which is filled with all sort of pointy-headed future Nobel Prize winning kind of people. But it's very small, so you feel like you're in some kind of quaint village. When I come back here to Wisconsin, or now at the University of Michigan, it's like being in an intellectual Manhattan. There's just, anything you want to know about, there's someone on the faculty that knows it. Unfortunately, we're siloed a little bit. This is where point two I think matters a lot, in terms of like, are we just sort of dinosaur silos. 

We're often so siloed that we don't even know there's someone who knows the thing we need to know. But the potential. I mean, if you just sort of do the mathematics on this in sort of a Shannon information sort of way, all these things are super additive. Okay, what else do we do? We teach. If you look at the percent of people going to college, right, that's going up. And the number of people available to go to college is also up, so the demand is just going to be there. That's not going to go away. Let me explain this sort of in a different way. We've got boys who are 12 and 11. At some point, they're going to be 18. 

You can do fancy stuff like they do here at Institutes for Discovery, and look at different parts of the brain, and put-- This is a graph where at age 21, you've put it so they're all at like 100%. Then you ask how different are these sizes as the child grows. You'll see different parts of the brain sort of grow at different rates. What you can see if you look a little more deeply is at 18, there are certain parts of the brain, especially the male brain, that maybe aren't quite where you'd like them to be. So if you look at things like drug use in Texas, you'll notice that it's like maximized right at 18, so it's probably not like the best time to be shoving people out of the house, right? If you look at crimes over the entire population, you see, oh my gosh, it peaks right about the time they go to college. You think, well, maybe we could keep these kids at home. Well, here's a very scientific graph I found where those children, the IQ of their parents as a function of their age. [laughter] What you see is that sort of mins out at 18, okay. This is a joke. But the point is, at 18, a lot of us I think are ready to kick their kids out. 

There's a time in which they've got to transition to adulthood. It's not just the data, right, it's not just data looking at the brain and data looking at --, we know that an 18 year old isn't ready to just sort of be plopped in New York or Chicago or Madison, right? They need to be in this place where there's other people like them. You get these sort of quaint visions of what the university is supposed to be like. But there's a ring of truth to that, right. When I speak at Parent's Day at the University of Michigan, and I watch these parents like reluctantly getting rid of their children, right, they're handing them off to us and saying we want them when they come out of here four years from now to be much more mature thinkers. Okay, last one, Service. I talk about things that are more complex, but this is just, you know, this is a graph of the banking system, you know, prior to when they bailed out AIG. This is just a simple graphic of, the larger the number, it sort of shows how connected things are. So if you look at this graph, you can figure out we should probably bail out AIG, and we probably shouldn't bail out Lehman Brothers. What's interesting, when they made this decision, they didn't just have this model. 

If you read like the World Bank reports on this, they have all sorts of different models. Just over in England, they had a macro conference on how many models should we have. So their equivalent of Bernanke there, and he's basically saying, look, we're trying to figure out how many models should we have of the economy, and who's producing these? Google's not going to produce them. Goldman Sachs might produce them, but they're going to produce them with an eye toward what helps Goldman Sachs, right? So you need universities producing these models so you can figure out when something happens, how do we deal with it. Here's the modern economy, right? This is some work by Hausmann and Hidalgo. Each color is a different industry. Each dot is a different country in the industry. You can see, sort of, that you get this sort of elaborate mass. Here's my favorite. This is Afghanistan. 

Right? Nobody's going to figure this out. No one from a silo is going to figure this out. Yet, you might think this is totally stupid. And in fact, when I first saw this, I thought, I can't, you know, this does seem totally stupid. In fact, this turned out to be very useful for the military, because what they could do, is these little arrows have pluses and minuses in them. And what they can do, is they can allocate money to these different things. They wanted to make sure they weren't allocate money to things that like, would just cancel each other out. So even with first approximation, even if you don't know what the hell is going on, at least you can figure out, let's not do something totally stupid. Just even constructing this graph, takes all sorts of knowledge and all sorts of people. When I look at this, will the university be around in a hundred years, look, there's a need for the research. 

Absolutely, right? Just because of the super additivity. There's going to be this need to sort of transition people to adulthood, and the service is going to be that the problems are only getting more complex when you get into service. There's also this sort of convenient truth, and that is that universities are like the most, with all due respect to the travel industry, even though the travel industry is still there, the horse is long gone, right? The train, unfortunately, here is gone. Universities are unbelievably resilient. Here's a list of every company founded in the United States prior to 1820 that has a market capital of over $500 million. All of them. There they are. Let's see universities. So, the first university, let's take every university and college founded prior to 1820, every one. First one fails, because Jamestown failed. 

Second one, Harvard. I think they're hanging in there. Next one, William and Mary, hanging in there. Here's the next 20. They're all there. Here's the next 35. They're all there. None of them failed. They're sort of ridiculously resilient. Why? Why are universities so resilient? First is, we adapt, right? So, Darwin was in a university, and now if you go to Oxford, there it is. 

Darwin College. In Cambridge, I'm sorry. There's Darwin College. So, we constantly change what we do. If you look at the University of Wisconsin, that was founded in 1848, it's like, here's the stuff we're going to do. Science, literature, arts, law, medicine and elementary instruction. Even though they weren't going to do medicine for, it takes them 60 years to sort of figure this one out, right? Well, then what happens? You get the Morrill Act that says we're going to give these land grant universities, 30,000 acres for every college. Wisconsin says boy that sounds great. Here's what we're going to do, but unfortunately, but this Act said you had to do agriculture. So they said, oh, yeah, we're doing that as well. 

So instead of thinking about splitting things off, these being pulled off universities, universities are great at absorbing this stuff. So if you look at the medical school at Wisconsin, this is true of Michigan's medical school as well, when they founded the medical school, how did they do it? They just basically grabbed parts from the university. They grabbed existing faculty and created a medical school. So, it's sort of like if you go to Greenfield Village, they've got Edison's Lab, this is a very blurry picture for some reason. This is Edison's Lab. He's got all these little jars of weird things on his walls. Any time he wanted to make anything, he just pulled down different jars. This is sort of the universities of the past, they've basically taken things from these different silos to create new things. Wisconsin is particularly interesting, because when I was here as an undergrad, one of the things that I learned that sort of surprised me was Wisconsin was originally the wheat state. It wasn't the dairy state. 

It was the wheat state. But what happened, we were growing all this wheat and it was sort of leaching all the, you know, nutrients out of the soil, the nitrogen out of the soil. So research at the University of Wisconsin said, you know, maybe you should start rotating your fields, put some clover in, have some dairy, right? So the whole reason Wisconsin became the dairy state is because of the University of Wisconsin, the Dairy Research Center, they replace them. So, where do we go? Here's Forward Wisconsin. I'll get to David's question now, 30 minutes in. What do the next 100 years look like? So will the university survive? I don't think that's a meaningful question. I think the question is more one of niche reconstruction. This niche that the university does, right? It does this research for society. It does service for people in the state, and it teaches people. How's that going to change? For one thing, they'll be technology --. 

If you've talked to like John Hennessy at Stanford, this is sort of like a Stanford thing to say. So look at things like these huge online courses, or if you're going to look at "singularity" when computers get smarter than we are, or if you look at the sort of like game playing, network, you know, groups problem solving sort of stuff, right, crowd source learning, all that sort of thing, these things are all going to exist, but they're all just going to, instead of having a link and banner, right, you're just going to hang these banners from Bascom Hall. They're just going to be part of what we do at the University of Wisconsin. But Kerr's is going to then be wrong. We're still going to provide sex for the students. That's never going away, as far as I know. But sports for the alumni and parking for the faculty, I think are actually going to change. So yes, it's true, Bucky will probably still be there, we can hope. But I think that there's going to be much more continued learning with alumni. I think that when you sign a contract with the University of Wisconsin, I think you're going to be sort of in for life, in a way. 

You're constantly going to be sitting in, because I can offer my new class to alumni, right, so there's just going to be so much more stuff that people can see. It's also going to be the case that faculty aren't necessarily going to be sitting in an office in Wisconsin all the time, right? You can be all over the place. So I think what we're going to do, is we're going to be providing this data, information, knowledge and wisdom for alumni in ways that we didn't in the past. And I think we're going to be doing a lot of logistics for faculty. I think that faculty are going to be much more entrepreneurial, and the university will be a place that sort of like, that's where I can metaphorically hang my hat, but then I'm out doing interesting stuff in all sorts of interesting places. Next, this is stuff the provost at Michigan thinks a lot about this is a guy named Phil Hanlon. He thinks there's going to be a big focus on tacit knowledge. So the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is like the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone. Tacit knowledge is actually how you reconnect the knee bone to the thigh bone, right? So if you think of things like these giant lecture halls, what we call at Michigan, we jokingly refer to as the sage on the stage, where somebody gets up and pontificates, people's eyes glaze over. 

That's sort of transferring explicit knowledge. A lot of that is probably going to go away. But you're going to see a lot more sort of what we like to call active learning. Active learning is going to take all sorts of weird forms, where you've got professors in class, you've got people playing games simultaneously, you've got other people remotely chiming in, who knows where that's going to go? But it's going to be much more active and much less passive. Last couple things. I think that we'll be Badgers forever. What do I mean by that? I don't mean the sort of Badgers Wisconsin Forward Badgers. I mean right now, when you go to Wisconsin, right, if you finish and get this diploma saying the University of Wisconsin, when people talk about this sort of new online world, they're talking about badges more like this. So you may come to the University of Wisconsin and get your little, like, Genomics badge, right? Or you may get your Central Limit Theorem badge. You may get your U.S. Constitution badge. 

So what will happen is, the university will still offer these four-year degrees, but like we do with executive education around the Business School, I think we'll be doing more sort of micro packaging of knowledge. I also think we have to see the end of the silo, and also what I call the combine. So, Cardinal Newman, if you want to read something great about universities, Cardinal Newman has this great book about the life of a university and his idea of the university. Even though his university is one of the very ones that failed, he says it's not this, it's not some place where you've got some independent stalls. It's got to be a place, right, where ideas get shared across people. So it can't look like this. I think that these things are going to go away. I just think that it can't work, because these sort of problems aren't going to be solved by sort of these conjuries of independent little units. We see that already. This is every paper written in computer science. 

This is the number of authors per paper, from 1980 through 2005. You see it's gone from 1.6 to 3.0. Why is that the case? The same is true in medicine. This is number of authors per paper in medicine. You can see that that's gone up, right, from 1.5 to 4.5. Why is that? If you look at team-written papers, or originally written papers and you ask, this is a graph done by Ben Jones and Brian Uzzi, team-written papers are 4-1/2 times more likely to get 100 citations than individually-written papers. It's also true the median number of citations for an individually-written paper, in any discipline, zero. That's not true for team-written papers, because one person can have a really stupid idea. It's hard for like four people. Usually, one person will say this is a stupid idea, right? So what you get is teams are just better. 

Because teams are better, we're going to see this move away. We also, this is what I call the combine, right, biochemical informatic Engineering. One of the things we've done now, if you look at either, Michigan and Wisconsin are very similar institutions. So we had like 30 years and we had 20 departments. Now we've basically turned them into Lego blocks to create new departments. BioInformatics, Chemical Engineering, right, those sort of things. The -- that it just won't work. If you think of all the combinations of 40 departments in groups of three, the number just gets too large, so it's going to collapse under it's own weight administratively. But instead what you're going to need, is you're going to need hybrid things, like I think like this place, that allow groups like this to sort of temporarily form to deal with particular problems and then sort of fall back out. I don't think you can actually continue to create. 

Michigan is continuing to do this, creating little BioMedical Informatic Engineering departments. At some point, when we have 700 departments, we're just going to fall apart, right, collapse under our own weight. I think in order for this to happen, we're going to have to continue to have what I call the life of pi. We're going to continue to have deep researchers. We're also going to need the Life of Pi, but hopefully in some cases, the Life of Gamma. So what do I mean? When we decide if someone's going to get tenure at Michigan, there's some sense in which you've got to drill to a certain depth, right? We have a tenure meeting, we look and say, how's this person's teaching, how's this person's research. You know, what's their service been. But there's some sense in which they have to go to a certain level of depth. You've got to know something really, really well, otherwise you don't make it. I think that we're going to get, some people call this sort of pi shaped careers, where maybe you have two things that you don't know quite as deeply, or maybe you have a broad base of knowledge when you come down, maybe not quite as deep. 

Or maybe you're sort of slowly --, but right now the way you get tenure is by looking like this. I think for universities to really function, they're probably going to have allow ways to get tenure that look like different shapes, because it literally is the case. Like, if I, like David, all these stupid things from a university perspective, like published papers in journals that have nothing to do with anything I'm supposed to know about, and my colleagues will say, why are you doing that, because it just doesn't seem to make any sense. Why are you coming down this second way? You should just be pushing this one deeper. I think the reason why is there's the possibility of the gamma, right, there's the possibility of coming down two legs and realizing that they sort of coalesce, and what David would call some sort of trans-scientific understanding that explains both things. So I think that by encouraging people to look sort of differently, and to have different types of careers that don't just look like this, universities will be just much better places. I think there's still going to be this focus on ROI, right, so when you think of the University of Wisconsin, you're still going to be thinking about how does this cash out. Unless they get rid of the legislature somehow in the next hundred years, this is going to be there. WARF is going to be there, and the university is going to have to, in some sense, prove its worth. However, I don't think this is going to be that hard to do. 

I think like Stanford and MIT, I couldn't find data on Wisconsin on this, but Stanford, there's been 2500 companies, including things like HP, Cisco, Sun, Google and Yahoo, which are moderately sized companies. Look at MIT, there's 26,000 companies, and they would be the 11th largest country in the world, if you just took spin-offs from MIT. It's one of those things where in terms of I think that the ROI is going to be demanded, but I think it's just going to be there. I think the return on investment will always be there. In particular, I think it's also going to be true that the examined life is going there. So I recommend Stefan Collini, who's either at Oxford or Cambridge. He's a U.S. professor. He's written some wonderful books on sort of the modern university. He talks about how it's just so important to have this place where people can sort of just think, just have time and space to just sit and think. The reason we need, you know, 900 different books on Lincoln is because we keep reinterpreting Lincoln through a different lens, a different life. 

We keep drawing new lessons. This goes back. Cardinal Newman says the same thing, right? He basically says universities aren't going to create geniuses. Geniuses come into universities, and it sort of nourishes them. We don't create genius. That's brought in. But I think what it allows people to do, is it allows people to sort of develop themselves to make that transition from 18 to 22, and become in some sense, useful citizens of the world. So I think the idea is going to continue, right? I think Goethe, you know, says it well that, you know, "Knowing is not enough; We must apply. Willing is not enough; We must do." Maybe this should be the Wisconsin Idea, right? Or, maybe we go back to Van Hise, which is, maybe I think, maybe the best one that I found in looking for what the Idea was. He said, "I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state." I think if this continues to be the Idea, the University of Wisconsin is going to be fine in a hundred years, but it's going to look different. 

There'll be fewer silos, right? There'll be much more sort of interesting types of people hanging out, in more interesting types of places. I think we'll, you know, spin off some things and spin in a bunch of new things. But I think it's going to continue to be really exciting. And I think by creating places like this, I mean, this is sort of a remarkable place. When a university throws so much money into a place like this, I think it's really, really great. I think it's the kind of action that doesn't say, we're thinking about our ranking. It's the kind of thing that says, we're thinking about how to really think about cool stuff. If you can do that, then you can continue to be relevant and continue to have a place in the world. Thank you.