I pretend to no personal originality when I say there are three main reasons for the university commitment to financial aid. The first is a matter of justice. As the great source of inward enrichment and the great enabler of worldly success, education is arguably the premier privilege our world has to offer. Those of us of a certain age can remember a time when this privilege was available in America on profoundly unequal terms; when quality education was open to some with relative ease but closed to others—closed to women at certain schools, closed to African-Americans in many places—on grounds extraneous to ability or intelligence. During my adult lifetime, those injustices have been remedied in substantial measure. But it would be a poor sequel for less visible economic discriminations to be allowed to stay in place when gender and racial ones have been abolished.

But our society has a profound self-interest in seeing that the talented young have access to quality education even apart from the question of justice. We tend to take for granted the dynamism that makes our economy and culture throw off so many benefits of wealth and quality of life, but there’s no reason to believe these things are self-sustaining. They are driven by human intelligence and creativity; and for their renewal, these resources need cultivation and investment. Making sure that those gifted with these traits get the education that will allow them to give the greatest return on their talents is the best way to provide for this social good; and it’s a safe bet that the talent we will someday want to draw on is not confined to a single social origin or income band. Financial aid is the investment we make to produce the trained talent our future world will require—and when we think of graduate and professional schools, this means the talent that will keep our own fields strong and strongly advancing.

I’m aware that financial aid may seem to be a student issue and so a strange subject for a faculty address. If I dwell on the subject here, it’s in the conviction that this is all of our issue and must be a priority for us all. If one of you were so churlish as to ask, “what is the faculty interest in financial aid funding?,” my answer would be, first, that the interests I have been urging—in justice, in education, in investment in talent—pertain to all members of our society, faculty certainly included; but faculty have further interests in this cause as well.

If teaching and mentoring were alien to our deeper careers and functions—if, as at some schools, students were thought of principally as a distraction, an irritating intrusion on one’s real work—then it would scarcely matter who one’s school admitted: the less interested, the less demanding, and so the better for me! But if students are thought of as partners in inquiry, people whose independent vitality and intelligence can help advance the work of discovery, then it matters whether one’s school attracts students capable of the highest form of engagement and creativity. That, at bottom, is what aid is about. Students on financial aid are not the only interesting students in a university; but I’m wagering that the best faculty would find little to stimulate or hold them in a school where all the students could afford to pay their own way.

Then further, while Duke already has enlightened aid policies and already funds undergraduate, graduate, and professional student aid in hefty sums, at Duke, far, far less of our aid budget comes from restricted endowments than is the case at our strongest rivals. What this means is that Duke meets its aid commitments out of the same pool of funds that support most everything else here, including academic programs. And what this means is that, in lean years or hard times, Duke’s need to fund student aid will be in competition with its need to fund the programs that would make top students and faculty want to come here in the first place. I want to keep Duke accessible to talented students in all foreseeable futures and I want to prevent any future collision between two fundamental imperatives, our obligation to social openness and our obligation to academic excellence. If we can raise permanent support for financial aid, we’ll have done something crucial for this university’s future health.

Let me turn to my other theme, which I’ll introduce this way. Since arriving here, I’ve needed both to learn Duke and to learn how to describe or project the idea of Duke; and if you’ve heard me speak, you have listened to me struggling to articulate my emerging understanding of the strengths and aspirations of this place. There are two things that I‘ve continued to find striking since the day of my arrival: first, the high level of interdisciplinary and interschool collaboration at Duke; and second, Duke’s real-world orientation, the way academic inquiry is naturally brought to bear on real-world problems.

I run into these paired Duke strengths virtually every time I turn around. One of the numerous high points of this fall term was the launch of the Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions. That’s so Duke, I had to say: an attempt to bring the most advanced scientific research into closer touch with the world of policy choices, and to translate the implications of academic inquiry in such a way that politicians, corporate leaders, and the media can win a better sense of the meanings and consequences of different environmental choices. (It was at the NIEPS launch that I learned that when FEMA faced the need to chart the location of environmental hazards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they called on one of us: Nicholas School Professor Marie Lynn Miranda, who was able to redeploy her expertise in spatial analysis and digital display of environmental health risks from her usual subject, children’s health in Durham, to the crisis on the Gulf Coast.)

Another recent day, I had lunch with Anthony So, a faculty member in the Sanford Institute who is expert in both the medical and the social and economic aspects of health care delivery in third world settings and who, like others of you, served on the planning committee for Duke’s global health initiative. It took minutes to learn that he was co-authoring papers on intellectual property issues (a major source of obstruction in this field) with Arti Rai and Jerome Reichman of the Duke Law School, Tracy Lewis of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and Bob Cook-Deegan of the Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy. That’s so Duke, I could have repeated: so Duke because it exemplifies a kind of cross-field collaboration that’s rare elsewhere but relatively common here, and so Duke because it was a shared devotion to training academic intelligence on real-world problems that gave these partnerships common ground. Interdisciplinarity does not thrive here because people are friendlier, but because faculty tend to be less oriented to a map of the disciplines than to living human issues—environmental degradation and health and health disparities are prime examples—their knowledge might help to understand. When we’re oriented toward the academy’s map of the disciplines, the disciplines are naturally divided. When we’re oriented toward challenges of this order, they are naturally united, since no discipline holds all the pieces of the puzzle to be solved.

Allow me one more example since my enthusiasm is unbounded. In rapid succession within the last two weeks I attended the 50th anniversary celebration of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and the dedication of the new Divinity School building that houses the Institute on Care at the End of Life. You already know my refrain: That’s so Duke! What’s a better example of a real-world problem than aging, a physical and existential crisis under any circumstances and a growing social challenge as the ever-more-aged aging fill an ever growing share of the population? Once a problem was the focus, it was natural for communities to form across the bounds of disciplines and schools. At the Study of Aging celebration, I met people studying the genetics and molecular processes of aging, the sociology of aging, the psychology of aging, and the nursing problems aging poses. Care at the End of Life bridges the Schools of Medicine, Divinity and Nursing to address a crisis at once of body, soul, and family support.

Faculty configured in such ways find their complement in a kind of student I’ve come to find fairly typical of Duke: an academically well-trained person who is keenly alert to challenges and opportunities in the larger world and instinctively puts his or her intelligence to the service of solving real-world challenges, in independent and ingenious ways. Last week a senior in the Pratt School, Tyler Brown, was killed by a drunk driver in California. I mention him partly to mourn his loss, a tragic waste of youth and talent, but partly to exemplify the human type I want to celebrate. As a volunteer in Engineers Without Borders, Tyler Brown went to Sumatra in the wake of the 2004 tsunami and, freely and imaginatively adapting things he was taught in classes, helped design new aerators to help restore the shrimp fishery in a storm-damaged area. You’ve got to love it: a kid who takes in what’s taught him, combines it with innate energies of creativity, joy in action, and passion for service, and re-delivers it to the world in a form no teacher could ever have envisioned. Closer to home, I learned that the city avoided the expense of a high-priced consultant to analyze how an area of Durham could be redeveloped to broader social benefit because a Fuqua student, Jill Homan, used what she had learned of economic analysis and entrepreneurial imagination to do the study, at a level the consultant would have been at pains to match. George McLendon taught me this cute trick: Discovering the Use of Knowledge is Education. DUKE.

As I said in my Founders' Day address, Duke has taught me to think of the university as a problem-solving place, a place where intellectual inquiry can be mounted with subtlety and power without shutting itself into an isolated space of abstract expertise. I’ve further come to think that it matters for a university to have such a character, and that, going forward, Duke could enjoy a growing advantage from its special nature. In the current political climate, mistrust of universities is compounded with growing restrictions on all forms of discretionary funding. In this circumstance, it’s hard to see how research universities will continue to succeed in either defending the autonomy of our enterprise or maintaining the funding of research projects unless the university itself makes a more persuasive show of what it’s good for, what value it returns on society’s continuing investment. In such a climate, a school of Duke’s character will be able to give a far better account of itself than many. I’m betting that over the next generation, schools designed for problem solving will command growing allegiance from scholars, students, and the public alike.

In the light of this prospect, I want to make three points. First, I want to make clear that I am not praising a narrow utilitarianism or looking to enforce a Tyranny of the Applied. To deliver the social good I have been describing, academic inquiry can’t be held to the criterion of quick returns in practical results. We need to support inquiry with no clear payoff, for one reason, because there’s no saying what things we may, one day, desperately need to understand. Our colleague Ebrahim Moosa is expert in the past and present history of the madrassas in the Islamic world. This was an arcane subject until we learned that jihadist terrorists were being educated in some madrassas; on which day, we became glad that somebody knew a little bit about them. As fear of an avian flu pandemic begins to spread, we may find a new relevance in the work of our colleague Elizabeth (Lil) Fenn on the role of the smallpox epidemic in the American Revolution—a use she could scarcely have anticipated when she was writing the book. In any case, deep intellectual contributions to real-world problems often come not from shots efficiently targeted but from a larger, less focused action of curiosity. Our new colleague Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering the mechanism by which the cell regulates the intake of water. Since this process goes awry in many well-known diseases, this discovery may have an impact of almost incalculable proportions. But I’ve been told that before he reached the discovery, Agre was thought to be wandering down fruitless byways. To be useful eventually can require patience, stamina, and the courage not to seem useful day by day.

In projecting the university’s future, therefore, we can’t insist too narrowly on the logic of the useful. But appropriately applied, Duke’s way of linking the work of inquiry to the social good is a differential advantage for this university; and if that’s so, we should not fail to recognize this asset and develop it in thoughtful ways. As you know, a new strategic planning exercise is underway at Duke. If translation is something we’re naturally good at that it will be increasingly important for universities to do, then this needs to be a guiding concept in the new strategic plan, the light in which we read the values of different potential priorities. Ideas are being explored in the Schools of Medicine and Engineering on how to assist basic and clinical researchers in advancing their discoveries along the way to practical application without subjecting them to the logic exclusively of near-term commercial prospects. Even at this early stage, this local project has the advantage of advancing the larger institutional value of the translation of knowledge into social good. Later this term, the Academic Council will be discussing the future course of the Sanford Institute. If what I’ve said is right, the real question to ask is not whether Sanford should be called an Institute or a School, but in what form it can best serve its function as a promoter of translation: a point of exchange between intellectual inquiry and policy application in fields like international order, third-world development, family and child policy, and media studies.

Finally, I’d suggest that if we’re right to be enamored of the strengths I’ve been lauding, then we ought to allow them to put pressure on other parts of our institutional practice. In most great universities and to a considerable extent in this one, what counts as faculty accomplishment is conceived in purely intellectual ways and measured by intra-disciplinary metrics (acclaim from the subfield, publication in the leading journal of the subfield—you know the drill). But if there’s value in bringing intellectual work to bear on extra-academic problems, that value will not always be registered by the traditional gauges; and a university committed to supporting and pioneering this somewhat different model of excellence will need to be more imaginative (I do not mean loose) in finding ways for the requisite virtues to be established.

Something similar might be said about the shape of academic programs. I’ve said that Duke has a special ability to turn out students strong in entrepreneurial innovation, will to service, and the use of intelligence for problem-solving in the world; but a person looking at the undergraduate program of study might wonder how exactly we produce this result, given the insistence on a fairly traditional concept of majors. In a truly strategic exercise we might dare to ask: is it possible that the received map of the majors—the projection into the undergraduate curriculum of the map of the disciplines formalized at the time of the birth of the research university circa 1890—is it possible that that map could be disrupted and redrawn, to bring the organizing forms of education closer to the virtues we want it to promote?

A half hour of inspiring mission statements and bold proposals, and not one standing ovation orchestrated by Messers. Lange and Haagen! I confess, it’s pretty deflating. For I have been talking about the state of the university, and the things that will keep it strong. For me these come down to two questions: first, as the lawyers say, cui bono: for whom the good, who derives the benefit of the university? And second, what is the university good for? If we make this a place where the freest and bravest exercise of curiosity can regularly lead to discoveries large with consequence for the betterment of human life, and where any deeply thoughtful, deeply creative person can join in the fun irrespective of their parents’ income, we’ll be able to look at our work with satisfaction. I offer these thoughts for your questions, critiques, and eventually, I trust, for your support. They should not seem too alien: I learned most of them from faculty like you.

I thank you for your work in the service of our great aims.