Full Transcript for Dr. Nicholas Dirks, CEO and President of New York Academy of Sciences & Studiosity Academic Advisory Board member

as a senior academic leader? It's a great question. And I've met many academic leaders who come from all kinds of different backgrounds, many from engineering and science, others from social science, some historians, not too many anthropologists, I will say. And perhaps we could trade notes about that. But I find that, in fact, history just kind of comes naturally when you're thinking about institutions. I've always been interested in how institutions get started and how they change over time, how they develop certain kinds of norms and protocols and basic ways of being in the world and how difficult it is to change them, but also how contingent they are with respect to the times that they're both created in and then that they have to serve. Anthropology, a little different, but I actually found anthropology interesting and helpful from a methodological standpoint, which is to say I did a lot of fieldwork and ethnographic study and I'm sure you did that too. But it really did teach me how to listen, taught me how to listen to people whose views of the world and sometimes whose, you know, whose worldviews, more generally, were really quite different than my own. But that was what doing field work in South India and villages and the like was all about. Often having to, if not suppress, certainly try to calm my own personal reaction to somebody talking about the caste system or about intergendered relations that seemed to me to be retrograde. I had to listen. I had to first try to understand where somebody was coming from. And I found that to be a very helpful aptitude and training for the life of both the dean and chancellor. So when you reflect on both the life of a dean and a chancellor in large, complex, politically active places, what are some of the events that have stuck in your mind in terms of how the nature of higher education has changed during your career? So the first thing I would say, and I'll go back to before being a dean, but actually something that probably was more important for my ultimately taking that path than anything else. And that is when I was a member of the faculty at the University of Michigan, I had this joint appointment in history and anthropology. And I myself had been not formally trained in anthropology, but my professor, my advisor had been a historian who was actually himself by background an anthropologist. So I imbibed these two different fields and then decided to pursue appointments in both fields, which is not all that common, but which I found quite stability. But because I felt that there was some advantage to actually having a relationship to more than one discipline, I created at the University of Michigan a joint interdisciplinary PhD program in anthropology and history. And it was because I did that, and it was really something I did just to make possible the same kind of experience I had for the students who I was working with. Because I did that, I was then recruited to be a chair of an anthropology department at Columbia, and then I moved from Michigan to Columbia. And because I was a chair of the anthropology department at Columbia I was then asked to be the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. So I wouldn't have had these jobs without having done something that sort of, you know, was recognizably both different but also administrative, and actually it was successful. So, so that was the background, but the thing I would stress here is that I had a kind of appreciation for interdisciplinary work at a time when there was a more general recognition that there needed to be more of it in universities and that not just in fields like mine, but in fields quite far afield, including in the sciences. Some of the most interesting work was being done by people who were either moving from one discipline to another, or certainly working closely with and collaborating with people in adjacent fields, you know, physicists with biologists, which in fact was a major source of, I think, innovation and understanding a whole variety of biological kinds of systems and problems. So, so I certainly brought that kind of interest and that kind of background to being a dean and a chancellor. How have things changed though? Because that was a time when people were saying, we need to be more interdisciplinary. Also, we need to be more global. And because of my work in India, I was always interested in global studies. And the other thing I did early on in my career at Michigan was to direct the Area Studies Center for the study of South Asia. And that was seen as a really important and good thing. I've been around long enough now that I've seen both the crises of some of the disciplines, certainly in the United States that I'd been most affiliated with in the humanities. I've seen a resistance to interdisciplinary work grow. I've see a kind of backlash to globalization. And retrenchment from global connection, certainly on the part of many universities in the US. And of course, I've also seen a growing level of distrust in institutions of higher education. When I started, the university was held in very high regard, higher regard than most other institutions. And today and for the last few years, the university comes in almost last sometimes. And so I've seen a lot of things change. And I've, myself, worried a great deal about the future viability of the university and about what and how things perhaps need to change in order to stay relevant, not just for the present, but for the future. So, you know, on the one hand there are a lot of things in the university that feel very much the same as when I first entered it. But I think we're at a kind of moment, if not of crisis, and we use crisis a lot as a word, of course, but certainly a kind of inflection moment for how universities are seen by the public and ultimately, I think, by how they will be able to serve the public going forward. So if we could interrogate that a bit more, both in Australia and

in the U.S. and in the UK, students are starting to question the value, the monetary value of and the cost of a degree. And in many respects, I think there's a sense of denial. That you know if we're here they'll come. Well in fact it's starting to be we're here and they're not coming. So where do you see that sort of conundrum about the debt that students are incurring and the impact that's having on their future life standards, I guess? Right, well, one of the kind of headlines that I associate with my move from being a Dean at Columbia to being Chancellor at Berkeley was when the amount of student debt in the United States crested over a trillion dollars. Now we think of a trillion dollars and we think about Elon Musk. But in fact, of course, what that means when you break it down into the individual burdens that thousands and thousands of students carry with them when they become indebted, and of course, a high proportion of those student debts are for students who never completed a degree even. You realize that this great privilege that we've within the institutions of higher education assumed has value that everyone will understand and appreciate and seek to therefore experience has become an increasing, not just burden, but source of resentment and, indeed, growing concern that this is really, A, not worth it and certainly not worth it if I have to carry this debt with me for the rest of my life. And so we've seen levels of indebtedness go up. It was also for me personally a kind of wake-up call when I moved from a private institution to a public institution. One of my first meetings in California when I came here was with the then governor, Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown had been a student at Berkeley. He was an alum and he'd gone to Berkeley in the 1960s. And he would tell me every time I saw him, he said, you know, when I went to Berkeley, I only had to pay $70 a year. That was what it cost. And why can't you, you know, deal with the cost problem? Because, you're now charging 12, $13,000 a year. That was in 2012, 2013. Of course, I told him, I said, one of the things that's really changed is that the state of California used to subsidize the education at the University of California at a much higher level. So, you, know, Mr. Governor, could you please, you know step up and give us a little bit more money? But he wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong to say that while you can ask for more money when you're in the university and you're being supported by a state or whatever the funding source is, that whether or not it hasn't gotten to the point where we in universities just don't take responsibility for the cost of higher education sufficiently. And I was slow to do that. I kept thinking, you know, the value of the university is so self-evident to me. You have to support X, Y, and Z. You have to have the very best faculty. You have to have small classes. You have to have robust financial aid so you can recruit an increasingly diverse class and give new people and new kinds of people opportunities that they didn't have before. You need to also, however, have money for all kinds of programs for students. You need to have research money for faculty. You have to try to aspire to, at least in the case of places that I've been, the highest rankings for your research in every department. And then you have to support a sports team, or you have to support an intercollegiate athletic program, or you to support of variety of other activities. And you keep hiring people. And I would get these questions repeatedly. You know, what is it about the administration, that you keep adding more administrators than you add faculty? And we say in response, but all of these things are things that students and faculty and alumni are demanding. So we have to do these things in return. But I think we were very slow to begin to say, look, we need to make some very hard decisions. The only way to cut cost and to cut the price perhaps is to make tough decisions about what we're going to, what we are going to build in the university and what kinds of programs we're going to support. Because otherwise you know you can try to please everybody and then you please no one because everyone is in debt or everyone is looking at a price tag which is indeed what the price tag currently is. In private universities in the U.S. now if you look at tuition plus living expenses if you get no financial aid, the yearly cost of higher education in the Ivy League, for example, is $80,000, $90,000. I didn't think of the university as being a Maserati or a Bentley. I thought of it as being something that would be potentially driven by everybody in the U.S. context, a Ford or a Chevy. But meanwhile, we built a luxury vehicle and now we're wondering why are people complaining about how much it costs? 13 00:25:11.570 --> 00:26:18.569 Mm-hmm. The other, apart from the cost of a degree, it's also the vocationalization of higher education. That, you know, one of the measures of success is student, successful student graduation, but then employment. And so that's led to particular sorts of degrees and the removal of others, like yours and my discipline of anthropology, the social sciences, and the humanities are really being cut back in universities in Australia and you know you read X, Y and Z are no longer being taught at university P and it's as a social scientist that to me is such a lack of foresight about the value of social scientists in asking the questions that actually make progress rather than being seen as the asking the questions that impede progress. So what are your views on the state of the humanities and social sciences and their sort of currency and value in American universities? Yeah, no. So this has been a trend that's been happening now for some years. Numbers of majors, especially in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, in which anthropology of course is one, have been going down pretty dramatically. And over the

last 10 years, more and more colleges and universities have been making cuts because fewer and fewer students are majoring in those fields, and so resources are being reallocated. And humanists, myself among them, will say, why are you cutting us? We're absolutely critical to a liberal arts education, which is a phrase we use in the United States a great deal in universities, but which increasingly, I think people outside the university don't really appreciate. And they'll say, well, a liberal art's degree is all very well, but that too is a luxury good. And why should even taxpayer dollars go for it to support it in a public university? I worry many times when I talk to my colleagues on the faculty of both Berkeley, where I spend a lot of time, but also other universities I've been and friends I have in my own field across multiple universities that they haven't really begun to engage in the kind of self-scrutiny that is needed to see why it is, perhaps, that our fields no longer speak to students in the same way that they used to and certainly don't, don't speak to their parents. And I know parents who will simply say I don't want my child to major in English because they'll never get a job. And-and-and yet many humanists think that's just a kind of benighted way of thinking. But of course it's connected to your questions around cost. If you're going to spend all this money, you need to not only pay back the loans, you want to think of it as an investment that's going to repay multiple times what you put into it. And of course, whether you're looking at the printed tables of average salaries that you get from having graduated with different majors or other kinds of data that is pretty readily available. Again, it doesn't take a weatherman to know you should be majoring, perhaps, in computer science and before that in economics or in some area of business or to give you the kinds of concrete skills in health care or other fields that actually do employ vast numbers of new entrants into the job market. But we're in an odd moment, because you would think, I would think, and I have written about this too, that the faculty would begin to really ask questions about what and how they should change to respond to the current moment? Are there different ways to think about what we're offering to students? And in particular, are there ways in which we can make these arguments, make the case for ourselves in language and registers that actually make sense, not because we just did this and we think its value is self-evident, but because, for example, in a world in which AI is doing more and more perhaps skills of being able to speak, skills of being able to think critically, skills of being able to get up in front of a group and tell compelling stories and understand also the kind of data you have to be able to convey, but in ways that, again, are best told through narratives and stories and through compelling public speaking, all skills that you would think could be basically the result of a good liberal arts education. But that's not happening very much. And until that does, I worry that this process is going to continue. It's not irrational for students to, I think, think about what value their majors are going to have for them. But to me, it is something that we have to take very seriously. I actually do believe that at a time when you have people in AI labs who are telling us that AGI is coming in three years, that the future is going to be controlled by, you know, self-taught artificial intelligence, robotic systems, and so on and so forth, that, you know, fields like philosophy, fields like literature, fields like history, should become even more important because they're going to ultimately position us to build the kinds of guardrails we need to use AI productively and to maintain the human relationship to AI. But this is not how faculty are often talking about these kinds of issues. They're just seeing it as the failure of others to recognize the value that they themselves continue to believe they have. And I'm not sure how to do that without really seeing things even get more difficult, more closures of departments, and more pressure on faculty to find ways to actually get students to take their classes. And it seems to me that often policymakers, but also senior administrators, are forced into a particular mindset to satisfy external pressures rather than manage effectively the internal challenges of their own institution. And perhaps there are a couple of questions that could in fact reframe it, but if all administrators ask that sociological question, whose interests are being served? There would be a completely different sort of internal political dynamic and discussion that might emerge that might reframe the way decisions are made, but also reframe the role of students in the whole ecosystem of the university. So what other sorts of questions do you think we should be asking? And do you think that the sociological question whose interests are being served is, is one way to start? Well, yes, I do. I believe that those kinds of questions around the sociology both of knowledge around any of the things that we do in universities and certainly its relationship to interests that exist outside are questions that we need to ask over and over again. But the problem, I think, that bedevils many faculty is that when you get trained in graduate school and then you get a job and you live in and work in a department, you think about your own interests and the interests of your discipline and the interest of your field as being preeminent. And you also think, often in the fields that I've been in, and you as well, I also think a lot of faculty think, well, we don't really want to serve corporate interests. We don't really want to serve the interests of billionaires in the tech world. We want not only to have students find what we do self-evidently valuable, but we want them to become critics

of those who are actually going to be the employers, but also those, perhaps, who are living out in the world in government and in other kinds of organizations, where you, if you're going to actually make a difference, you're going to have to go and work with them, and you're are going to have to figure out, you know, what their interests are, in the first instance, and then how perhaps to engage in a process in which you try to shape policies that open things up a bit, that begin to serve the public interest in a broader sense rather than a narrower sense, and that certainly think about what and how the world outside the university needs to be engaged with in order to try to do what the slogan that we always used to say we want to make the world a better place. Seems to me though that some of the discussions that are happening in government, but also in the corporate world, is diminishing the value of curiosity. Curiosity to me is actually what sustains me as a person. But for many students, that sense of curiosity is no longer there. It's all sort of programmatic, it's instrumental, it's the long-term purpose of getting a job. So how could we reinstate the value, the practice of curiosity back in our universities? A sense of wonder and a sense of wanting to figure out how things really work. Yeah, I think we all worry about new generations that have grown up now with social media that are going to be growing up with artificial intelligence who feel that they don't need to know a lot of arcane things because they can always look it up. They can Google it, they can get Claude to give them a summary of something. Instead of wanting to figure things out on their own and taking great pleasure from trying to figure something out, a problem in the natural world, an experiment in your basement, or what drove Shakespeare to write any number of his plays. And yet your question is such a difficult one, how to really reinstill that sense of curiosity, that kind of drive really to pursue knowledge, in some respects even for its own sake, not because of how it's simply going to translate into a job. You know, the truth is, I think that much of that process has to begin well before university level. And that I think we've often failed to figure out ways to, you know, early on in a child's education to really provide incentives for, you know, perhaps a strain a little bit for maybe getting off the treadmill for a second and following up a question that one has and not think only as well about the grades and also about how this will translate not just into a career later on, but getting into the right school, getting into the right college. So many students are so pressured that they feel that they have to, you know, they have to fill out their own CVs in high school in ways that really don't give them any time to just be curious. And you know, I think we're too often complicit in that. And of course, we're university people so of course we don't always have access to changing things at an earlier stage of education. But we're the ones who set the criteria for admission to universities. And I think, at the very least, we play a pretty big role in creating not just incentives, but also structuring how those incentives tend to favor certain kinds of success and certain kinds of activities on the part of students, and we should rethink that. The title of this series of podcasts is Reimagining the Future of Higher Education. You're in this sort of interesting position of being the CEO of an academy and you've moved away from being the the CEO of a university. But you must be both an insider and an outsider in this higher education sphere or this education sphere. What do you think some of the characteristics will be of higher education in the next five years at least? Yeah, no, that's a really great question. I just had lunch today with a friend who used to run the robotics program for Google. And he had himself, he stopped doing that a number of years ago, but he's doing some writing about the future of technology and its impact on society and he was recently at a conference at Harvard. And he said to me something quite interesting. He said, here in San Francisco, where he interacts with the people in the tech world he used to work with at Google and other companies, everybody's talking about AI. On the East Coast, and in particular at Harvard, very few people were talking very much about AI, it just didn't come up that much. And he said, I just found the contrast between the East Coast and the West Coast, just stark. And I'm reminded of that in your question, because I think when we think about the future and you ask, what is higher education going to look like? The truth is that at some institutions, it's going to looks pretty similar to the way it looks today, because Harvard can keep going. They have the resources, they have the brand, they have, you know, so many people who want to get a Harvard degree that they really don't feel enormous pressure to change. Obviously, the Trump administration has put pressures on all kinds of institutions, not least on Harvard, but not really to change in terms of fundamental structures. This is more a form of political pressure than it is thinking about the future. Whereas, in the Silicon Valley, where people think about the future all the time, they often don't even think that the university will exist in 5 to 10 years. So you have this enormous, you know, sort of difference between coasts, but also between the attitudes many people have. And yet if you put them together, you still don't get institutions of higher education that are changing much. You either get, you know, a sort of growing number of people who opt out and a set of institutions that will survive whatever financial pressures, whatever demographic cliffs, and ultimately whatever pressure is put by a political administration, and continue doing what they've been doing for decades. But I'm looking

to people who are innovating in this space, because at the same time that I say that, I also know, and my wife continues to teach in the classroom, that classroom life has changed enormously. And it's changed enormously just even in the last five years. Not only is my wife giving examinations using blue books of the kind that I wrote my comprehensive PhD exam on, which is to say not allowing a computer to be used in the classroom. But you know, the principal question is how do you inspire students to learn things in history, she teaches history, that you know is not the same as just asking technology to do it. But also recognizing you can't just assign the question for the term paper and expect it to come back and not have been fundamentally shaped by access to AI. So the question for me is going to be, you know, who's going to begin to think about how we need to teach students, how we have to come to accept different ways of student learning to get to the point where we respond to some of these changes without just trying to put our heads in the sand, but actually think differently about how we construct our subjects, how we teach our courses, and ultimately what kinds of expectations we have for our students. To do that, I think the successful universities are going to, and this, of course, is an old interest I have, are going to have to think differently about undergraduates, undergraduate education from the point of view of their majors and disciplines. I think those are going have to become much broader. I think they're going to have to finally get freed from the tether of being tied to a departmental faculty that thinks about an undergraduate major as being just a kind of preparation for a graduate degree, but instead really think collaboratively across different pedagogical units about how do we accept that big lectures may not need to be performed live anymore? How do we create more opportunities for faculty to interact with students if not in single tutorials in very, very small classes where there's real interaction? And where the teacher can really get a sense of where a student feels they understand something and where they really need help. And ultimately, how do we make another pitch at a compelling value proposition that really does begin to equip students to live and indeed to lead in the world that they're going to enter in five, 10 years. These are all, to me, still very unclear answers to the question you raise. But I do think that successful institutions are going to find ways to teach very differently. And ultimately, even ways to hire faculty, to train faculty, to reward faculty. And if we respond to the moment, this could be, you know, I use the example from the University of California of Clark Kerr in the master plan of 1960 where he created what he called the multiversity that you know well. Well, if we respond to the present challenges, well, I think this will be another moment where we create a very different structure than the multiversity that is differently networked, differently structured, and ultimately requires a different kind of faculty member and a different kind of student to figure out what we need. Nick, this has been the most engaging, interesting, and even challenging conversation I've had for a while and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think that one of the last questions I'd like to ask you, which is a little whimsical, it's summer, what are you reading? What am I reading? Well, I hesitate to say this, because I'm going to answer your question instead of thinking to the book before this one. But I'm reading a book by a historian I've read various things by in the past. His name is Colin Kidd. And the book is called Twilight of the Dawns. And it's about the British intelligence, the academic intelligentsia at Oxford and Cambridge in the years after World War II. And it's full of incredible stories. It is quite remarkable the ease of access that Oxbridge faculty had to the highest levels of government and civil society in Britain at the time. And of course, things change and come a cropper, as it were, under Thatcher. But it's just a very entertaining book. And and I recommend it to, I think, some of the listeners out there, Twilight of the Dawns. But I will say one other thing, which is I also, before that, read a novel by Ian McEwan, What We Can Know. And it's a marvelous, marvelous novel that, among other things, really looks at the craft of history and asks that question what we can know in ways that keep changing over time. And that too, at a time that we go into a kind of climate catastrophe. So one of those books looks backward, one looks forward but both of them tell us that we live as faculty members and educators in worlds that change dramatically even in the course of some of our lifetimes. And as a multidisciplinary scholar, looking backwards for history, looking in the present for anthropology, and in the future as a scholar. What a great way to end our conversation. I've enjoyed myself. I hope that you've enjoyed yourself and let's hope that through Studiosity, we're able to continue our conversations. I look forward to it very much. Thank you so much, Judyth. I appreciate all of your questions.