Pursuing the endless frontier: essays on MIT and the role of research universities

Abstract

In his fourteen years as president of MIT, Charles Vest worked continuously to realize his vision of rebuilding America's trust in science and technology. In a time when federal government dramatically reduced its funding of academic research programs and industry shifted its R&D resources into short-term product-development process, Vest called for new partnerships with business and government. He called for universities to meet intellectual challenges posed by innovation-driven, globally connected needs of industry even as he reaffirmed basic academic values and continuing need for longer-term scientific inquiry.In Pursuing Endless Frontier, Vest addresses these and other issues in a series of essays written during his tenure as president of MIT. He discusses research university's need to shift to a broader, more international outlook, value of diversity in academic community, greater leadership role for faculty outside classroom, and boundless opportunity of new scientific and technological developments even when coupled with financial constraints. In provocative essay What We Don't Know, Vest reminds us of what he calls the most critical point of all, that science is driven by a deep human need to understand nature, to answer big questions -- that what we don't know is more important than what we do. In another essay, on future of MIT, he celebrates MIT's strengths as being extraordinarily well-suited to needs of an era of unprecedented change in science and technology. In Disturbing Educational Universe: Universities in Digital Age -- Dinosaurs or Prometheans, he describes MIT's innovative OpenCourseWare initiative, which builds on fundamental nature of Internet as an enabling and liberating technology.Vest, who is stepping down from MIT's presidency in fall of 2004, writes with clarity and insight about issues facing academic institutions in twenty-first century. His essays in Pursuing Endless Frontier offer inspiration to educators and researchers seeking way forward.