Prestige or Purpose?

Students admitted to the University of Michigan are amazingly accomplished. The University itself is well known, selective, and indeed among the best in the world. Frankly, it’s a prestigious place. But “prestige” has little to do with the spirit of the place. Indeed, often we are criticized for being too Midwestern – friendly, cooperative, soft-spoken.

But the University of Michigan is dedicated to making an impact on the world. This is a large ambition, and it goes back to the first President of the University of Michigan, Henry Tappan. In 1852, looking at six buildings in the middle of a tiny Midwestern town, Henry Tappan imagined a huge, comprehensive university that would attract students from all over the United States, and possibly the world, to study and teach everything.  “It embraces,” he wrote “all possible means for studying every branch of knowledge, and thus perfecting education, and all possible means for making new investigations, and thus advancing knowledge.” He imagined a university that would make a difference through the cultivation of people, placing the university within the State’s aspirations as “Let us make men, as well as houses and railroads.”

We do this still by helping to propel young people towards excellence, and we insist that those young people will go forth with a drive to matter, a drive to make a difference.  Students who come to Michigan are devoted—they must be devoted—to having an impact on the world.  At the university we must dedicate ourselves to molding all the members of our creative community into agents of change.  This is at the heart of the University of Michigan: it’s not about prestige; it’s about purpose.

Note: This entry was inspired by discussions with many students and faculty at the University of Michigan during a number of meetings in November 2011.  The commonality of this theme arising out of so many independent conversations was striking.  The phrase "it's not about prestige; it's about purpose" was used at a meeting of the President's Bicentennial Planning Committee; I believe Scott Page first chained it together.

Thanksgiving differences

While driving across Indiana today, I heard a characterization of the “first” Thanksgiving that gave me pause: it was an event in which diverse people from two very different cultures, English and Wampanoag, came together for a harvest celebration.  I’d never thought of Thanksgiving as a cross-cultural event.   Without doubt, the English settlers had benefitted from the ideas of the other culture, and merged those ideas they brought over the sea, to solve the problem of feeding their colony. This coming together of different peoples, both to share ideas and to celebrate is a core activity of any creative community: constructive debate and interaction across differences, followed up by action, are the heart to solving complex problems.  While we have not always lived up to this principle of constructive interaction across difference, the power of the principle overshadows our failure to always achieve it.

In 1863, in a time of unparalleled strife, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving as a national event, saying,

“I … invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, … to set apart and observe … a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that ... they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

He meant this message for both the Union and the Confederacy.  This is a remarkable request to a nation torn apart by Civil War, and it is remarkable that both the North and the South observed the day.

Today Thanksgiving is a day to come together with family.  It is notable, and perhaps sad, that this celebration no longer expects the diversity that the first Thanksgiving provided.  We do not often sit down with those very different from ourselves to celebrate how working together had solved a problem.   This is also a year of rancorous political debate, when our leaders fail to truly debate, listen, and act.   If the colonists of Plymouth had used the same techniques, there would have been no more colony.

There are notable exceptions at the University of Michigan, where I know faculty, staff and students who have invited international students over to their homes for Thanksgiving day.  This generosity will be amply repaid, in unexpected and rich ways.

It is perhaps a good time to reflect on those past moments when people truly came together to solve a problem.  These are the moments that make the human community so worth celebrating.

The China Challenge

This entry is based on a speech given at the China Business Challenge, November 12, 2011.

The China Business Challenge was the result of hard work by UM students in the China Entrepreneurship Network.  The University of Michigan is proud of their work.  With nearly 50 teams of students participating, including 3 from Michigan State University and 7 from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the China Business Challenge has to be considered a success. The work that our students took on to organize this business competition illustrates education at it’s finest: active, engaging, and experiential.

It is important that the business challenge was designed to engage the creative minds of our students to propose business models that can address some major problems in China, and by adaptation, some major problems in the world. The Challenge was organized around the three themes of high technology, environmental issues, and social impact. There are few more important challenges in China, or in the world.

China is a partner to the US, but is also a significant competitor.  While the US economy is the largest in the world, China might be poised to overtake us sometime in this decade (although I suspect it will not).  But if the US and China are competitors, why should the University of Michigan, or the United States, be engaged in China?   Why should we be doing joint research with Chinese universities, or building educational collaborations like our University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute?  Why are we sharing our best organizational, technological and educational ideas with China?

Because competition is not conflict.   Competition, informed by strong purpose driven value systems, is in fact a stimulus to improvement for all of us.  The best way to avoid conflict between the two great economies of the world is to promote engagement, understanding, and mutual dependence.  It is in the United States’ interest to have China fully engaged in the normal international economic and legal structure of the world.

Further, the challenges of China are not unique to China.  China provides us with a laboratory, a laboratory in which we can all learn new approaches to development in a nation that seeks modernize its economy in a 21st century way.

Not surprisingly, this process of transformation is not smooth. Creating change requires high functioning teams that know the value of diversity and the power of inviting and working through disagreement.  It is from this disagreement that the best ideas are born, built from the shards of ideas in collision.  But China is still insufficiently tolerant to organized disagreement.   And any of us who have experienced the dirty air of a Chinese city know that plenty of mistakes are being made as China jump-starts its economy, recreating at a large scale some of the environmental blunders of the West.  But these mistakes represent the pains that an entrepreneur seeks to address with a strong business venture.   Solving these problems in China presents all of us with new tools to solve them elsewhere; failure to solve these problems in China presents all of us with a catastrophe.

While China’s economy is large, her per capita GDP is not.  The US is somewhere around 10th in the world by per capita GPD, but China’s per capita GDP places it somewhere around 90th.   Being the world’s second largest economy is not the same as being a prosperous country.  China houses 1.2 billion people, some 800 million of whom still live in relative poverty.

It does not seem necessary, it does not seem healthy, it does not seem right, to maintain my own privileged position by denying these 800 million people access to the ideas that might improve their lives.

Living Abroad

I’ve had the chance to live overseas three times: from late 1964 to mid 1969 my family lived in Bangkok, Thailand; then from 1984 – 1985 I lived in Cambridge, England, doing the study abroad bit; and finally I lived in Germany for a couple months in the summer of 1996 doing research.   Each experience had an impact, but today I want to dwell on Thailand.  Well, Thailand and Oklahoma.

Of course in the 1960’s I was young: I turned 4 just after we arrived and was nearly 9 when we left.  But I spoke Thai well, I spent lots of time with folks who were very different from the typical 1960’s American kid, and I grew up thinking about the world differently than I would have, had I been raised in the States.   In Thailand I cannot claim to have experienced society as the Thai people did, because we interacted with the international community in Bangkok as much as with the Siamese. But because I was a kid the mix of Thai and international “expat” culture did not seem “different” to me.  It was just the world as it was.  Our cultural environment socializes us, and while these influences are profound they are largely unnoticed.  The only way to truly appreciate a cultural difference is to experience it.

We returned from Thailand to live in rural Oklahoma.  It was this move that created the true culture shock for me.  I did not know what to make of that space, I did not know what to make of the other kids in elementary school, I did not know how to behave in their world.  In reality, even though I was born in the US, moving from Thailand to the States was my first international experience.  I was socialized in Thailand, and was now observing a new culture.  It was fascinating and strange and frustrating, but I was too young to think of it in any articulate way.  Fortunately these transitions are easier for us when we are young, because our minds are more open.  

But still, moving back to Washington DC in 1969 was a bit of a relief, because at least the traffic was more like that in Bangkok!