Academic Duty
Kennedy, Donald
LOSING OUR BALANCE Robert E. Procter In 1992 Donald Kennedy resigned as president of Stanford University. The furor created by sensationalist media coverage of the government's...
...As a scientist he participates in the one area in which the modern university maintains high prestige with the public: he points to the wide appreciation of the successes of university scientific research, especially in the fields of biomedicine, physics, and engineering...
...The most important of these is the first, the duty to teach...
...Placing students first is a simple design principle, but it has great power...
...As he puts it, the university is society's agent for cultural transCommonweal 4 I April 9,1999 mission and cultural change...
...Members of the faculty, especially of a research university, have the duty to teach, to mentor, to serve the university, to discover, to publish, to tell the truth, to "research beyond the walls," and to change...
...It is written about, and for, members of the faculty, including what Kennedy calls the "future professoriate...
...The furor created by sensationalist media coverage of the government's investigation of Stanford's cost accounting of federal research grants "had made me more of a lightning rod than my university needed," he explains...
...Kennedy offers the wisdom drawn from two important experiences that have taught him a great deal about the modern research university, but which also limit his ability to understand the challenges facing it in contexts that transcend these challenges...
...Change is impos...
...His academic career has been that of a scientist at Stanford, a major research university...
...It works by the thoughtful, participatory transfer of knowledge and excitement from one generation to the next...
...He criticizes "the faddish and often incomprehensible preoccupations of the humanities, the absorption of the social sciences with the detailed quantifications of not very important problems, and the resistence of various diseases to the ambitious claims of molecular biologists...
...Once that is done, the rest falls into place: the complex challenges posed by intellectual property disputes, the tension between research and teaching, the ethical problems in faculty-student relationships, professional misconduct issues, the need for creative thinking about undergraduate education reform—indeed all the manifold difficulties so prominent in the growing public mistrust of our academic institutions...
...Accordingly, its improvement must entail putting students and their needs first...
...Kennedy describes eight duties in as many chapters, and illustrates the challenges and conflicts they entail with case studies, most of which are drawn from the sciences...
...Kennedy, now Bing Professor of Environmental Science, rejoined the Stanford faculty and decided to offer a seminar for doctoral students planning academic careers...
...Academic duty is the counterpart to academic freedom...
...It can do so successfully only by reclaiming its central mission of teaching...
...This book grew out of that seminar...
...As a former university president, Kennedy also understands well the limitations of administrative power in the modern research university, where, as he repeats throughout the book, the faculty's role is central...
...Public disaffection with higher education, and economic and technological changes taking place all around it, will force the university, Kennedy believes, to "redesign" itself...
Vol. 126 • April 1999 • No. 7
