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