Conference Details

The annual conference for Naspa -- Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education runs March 8-12 in Boston. View the schedule.

Recent Posts

Hot Topics

Be Everywhere Now
Today's generation of students is a singular one in its spectacular hunger for life and more life. But some stereotypes about the millennial generation may not hold up.

No Longer 'Nontraditional'
Colleges are reaching out to adult students, especially those who have some credits but no degree.

Help for Troubled Students
Public colleges often don't have enough resources for mental-health services, even as expectations rise for them to identify and help troubled students.

Past Naspa Coverage

Creating a 'Culture of Preparedness' (2008)
Colleges must empower their students to help prevent violent incidents on campuses and prepare them to respond during emergencies, experts say.

Do Guns Belong on Campus? (2008)
The solution to shooting incidents at colleges and universities is not more guns, public-safety experts argue.

New Demands on Student Affairs (2007)
The needs of an increasingly diverse student population are rapidly expanding the roles and responsibilities of student-affairs offices.

Millennials, Parents, and Liability (2006)
Modern students are skilled multitaskers who dream big, thrive on stress, and call their parents constantly.

Conference Archives

February 14, 2008

Keep It Small, Nobel Prize Winner Advises

Scientists like accuracy. The first slide that AAAS president David Baltimore put up during his address to the association this evening said, “The world is flat.” The notion has a questionable place in modern science. Mr. Baltimore had an out, though: he was referring to the title of Thomas L. Friedman’s book on globalization. And he wanted to talk about a global view of science.

“To prepare myself, I went to Rwanda and India,” he said. One country was coming out of a hellish civil war, he noted, and the other was a flourishing democracy. And both places are being—to varying degrees— transformed by science and education, which are viewed as engines of economic growth.

He was concerned by one thing he saw in his travels, and that was an eager emphasis on growth. Academe too easily measures success by growth, he said. He’d rather go slow and go small.

Mr. Baltimore presented five rules for doing that:

—demand excellence.

—concentrate resources.

—create small environments.

—maintain unity of teaching and research.

—make academic freedom crucial.

Violating those rules, he said, invites government control, and control morphs into interference, interference perverts science, and perverted science undermines economic growth. Those principles, Mr. Baltimore added, bear consideration for the United States as well as the developing world.

Comments

1. What else can we say? Dr. Baltimore is absolutely correct. Don’t these five points suggest that universities need to re-examine their fundamental objectives? The bottom line is that bigger isn’t always better. BETTER is always better.

   — Jon L Albee    Feb 15, 10:22 AM    #

2. Baltimore is nearly always right. He’s an academic hero. Let’s not forget the fact that he was subjected to a grossly unfair attack by a headline-seeking congressman who is still with us.

   — Observer    Feb 15, 05:26 PM    #

3. Grondana’s and others’ work on “the culture of development” within first world elites and within developing world populations, found the opposite of Baltimore’s first three and agreement with his last 2 principles. Baltimore is not a god, he is, like the rest of us, partial.

   — Richard Tabor Greene    Feb 16, 06:33 AM    #

4. Oh and Grondana is a god?

   — Spanky Context    Feb 18, 02:16 PM    #

Previous: The Science of Meeting Navigation
Next: U. of Delaware Tries to Extend Faculty Reach Via the Web