Superheroes and such

Jack Ryan and Captain Ramius in the Hunt for Red October.

I love the scene in Hunt for Red October when Jack Ryan is ungraciously air dropped into a submarine during a torrential storm. The film's hero, who professes a fear of flying and turbulence, has no special powers, weapons, or Conan-like physical attributes.

Instead, Ryan, the man sent to save the world from possible nuclear annihilation, is an academic. "I'm not an agent, I just write books for the CIA," he says, half-embarrassed.

Riffing on the same topic, the first Indiana Jones' flick opens with Indy teaching archeology in stuffy college classroom at fictional Marshall College. That even some of his foes later refer to him as "Dr. Jones"---without any irony---cements his status as a professorial superhero (with a whip).

Indeed, knowledge is the answer.

The higher ed adventurer/hero with high mental powers motif shows up again in The Da Vinci Code, the television series Fringe,  and even in the fabulously titled The Librarian. Iron Man could also be included, but the protagonist is as much industrialist as engineer. (Let's not even get started with Harry Potter, but sheesh, most of the film takes place inside the high school/college we all really wanted to attend---and what are wizards and witches other than faculty with magical powers.)

On the print side, academics get less of a warm welcome, especially considering recent works like John Updike's Roger's Version (about chaos theory and proving the existence of God) and Ian McEwan's latest, Solar (about a revolution in the physics of energy production).

Despite their grand achievements in world-altering science, morally, Roger Lambert and Michael Beard are less than superheros. (In Solar, McEwan, I think quite cheaply, thinly fictionalizes the entire former Harvard president Larry Summer's women in science and engineering fiasco.)

So, are you expecting me to suggest that, despite their faults, we should elevate academics to modern superhero status? Out with Captain American and in with the Chair of American Studies! Turn the librarians and labs into fantastic fortresses. After all, Jack Ryan and Indiana Jones did best the Russians and Nazi's, respectively, and well, saved the world.

Imagine entirely new movie franchises (in 3D) with academics saving the day with their brilliant retorts! Oh the faculty meetings would offer up a bevy of brilliance. I suspect that would, alas, end up being more Monty Python than Michael Bay.

UCSD's  library kind of looks like a fortress suitable for a superhero.

I am going to go one better. Should universities attempt to put a stake in the ground and help make the world a better place? Dare I say it, or say they are going to "save the world"?

Reading all of the PR copy (some of which I wrote) seems to suggest that the aim of most research universities is to use knowledge and its applications to solve our most challenging problems. (Just read some of President Faust's speeches or the recent op-ed from the SEAS dean, Cherry A. Murray.)

Tackle global warming. Discover cleaner, greener sources of energy. Cure disease. End hunger. Promote tolerance. Protect our privacy and security. End poverty. And even, revitalize the entire economy.

Aspirational, yes, but not without evidence or success. Especially during WWII universities like Harvard became hotbeds for practical science, cultivating everything from computing to cryptography to medical imaging to eventually, the Internet.

While slightly less grandiose, our Harvard friends at Public Health promoted the designated driver program, reducing drunk driving in the U.S.; the Ed school created Sesame Street, educating and inspiring generations of kids; HMS invented one of the first "cures" for certain types of cancer with the drug Gleevac; and at SEAS, we have a lot to pat ourselves on the pack about (See our list of favorite milestones (baking powder being my personal favorite)).

MIT has long been a game-changer.

MIT recently celebrated its 150th. And well, wow. It is hard to argue that without MIT, the world would be a very very different place. Email. Biotech. Radar. Quarks. The Roomba.

Case closed. Universities have long been superheroes! Hooray.

And yet. And yet. Other than in times of great distress (such as war), universities do not, in fact, boast that they are going to change (let alone save) the world or direct all of their energies towards a single-minded goal. Doing so is not only presumptuous, it is dangerous.

Any good Kuhnian knows that revolutions do not work in an orderly fashion and that "enemies" do not come in brightly colored tights. And most professors, especially in the sciences, are very weary of suggesting that their latest discoveries will lead to a manufacturing revolution, cure, or the next Google or Facebook. When such things happen the normal reaction is utter surprise. "I wasn't trying to change the world, I was just solving an interesting problem" is a common refrain.

Is picking low-hanging intellectual fruit enough?

It does seem disappointing. Universities do make a huge impact, but they have to be careful about over-promising the fruits of knowledge (except after the fact---as that is what alumni are for). And yes, knowledge for its own sake is a lovely, wonderful thing. You cannot, however, base fundraising campaigns or calls for massive government or corporate investments on picking low-hanging fruit.

Moreover, given the multi-billion dollar endowments of some of our most well-known institutions, underselling impact doesn't play all that well to alumni, budget-minded politicians eager to slash federal funding for research, or to the public. 

To hedge, Harvard, in particular, takes a different tactic, employing a kind of six-degrees-of-separation scheme. The tagline is: We educate leaders, who then go out and lead governments, companies, and institutions that end up making a difference.

This is reminiscent of like BASF's former tagline: "We don't make the products you buy. We make the products you buy better." (A typical advertisement is below.)

MIT, as it did for its 150th celebration, shows its contributions in a similar way: the number of spin-off companies and overall economic impact of various inventions and technologies.

These are all fine indicators of success. What they lack in the "wow" department they make up for in celebrating the long-term dynamism and overall value proposition of American higher education.

That said, I am a sucker for a good moonshot. And given our current government's distraction about debt, I doubt it is going to come from Washington---at least soon.

Couldn't universities step up, or better, band together, and declare: We will cure cancer. We will stop global warming. We will invent an ideal form of energy. We will revolutionize transportation.

IBM's Watson was a big risk and big reward endeavor.

Believe it or not, companies have been far less bashful about getting out in front of problems. IBM set out to create a machine that could pounce on the world's leading Jeopardy! players. Guess what? Watson did so with a flourish.

Google, honestly, wants to put everything its programmers can get their hands on online. Amazon is changing the way we read.

Apple changed music, forever. And private entrepreneurs are building planes that can fly in space and Virgin Galactic is signing up customers right now. On a bigger scale, consider that sequencing the human genome was a collaborate effort of a private company, the government, and higher education.

(And if you want to read about companies going a bit too far, check out Fordlandia, Henry Ford's quest to create an American Midwest-in-miniature in South America or books about Milton Hershey, the candy man who wanted to develop the perfect little utopia.)

So where does that leave universities in the world-bettering equation? Will we have to continue to look to fiction and film for our superheroes? Or wait for companies to tie profits to issues of great promise?

Instead, I think universities should think big and dream big.

• They can identify the kinds of problems that need to be solved---and show how, even in small ways, that they are making progress.
• They can collaborate and join together as in the case of the Internet 2.0 and partner with industry to tackle Moore's law, quantum computing, and other deeply challenging frontiers.
• With vast projects like the Large Hadron Collider, universities can continue to convince governments that it is worth the investment to get to the bottom of how our universe works and spark the public's imagination.
• They can work with countries to solve infrastructure and energy problems and become the 'hubs' (virtual and physical) where people are brought together to get their hands dirty and come up with not just policy solutions, but real engineering solutions.
• They can encourage their students to enter competitions with big goals, like Robocup, which seeks to create a robotic soccer player that can compete with humans by 2050. Better, they can create such competitions themselves---if it worked for Netflix to create a smarter algorithm, it can work for higher education.
• They can, as MIT did, celebrate their contributions, showing how they make world not just better, but far more interesting and exciting. (To be inspired, just check out all those TEDx talks.)

Ultimately, even with all of the excitement of flash and explosions at the movies, the kinds of down-to-earth superheroes are far more compelling. In fact, the recent trend has been to unmask the heroes and show their humanity (from the reboot of Batman to the latest Spiderman to shows like Heroes.)

Believability is potent stuff. Jack Ryan works as a latter-day hero precisely because it is his book smarts that win over the day, all with a bit of humility and humor. The world and its problems are way too complex for solutions that only offer bludgeoning as a response.

To wit, you cannot blow up global warming without destroying the earth. Thankfully, moviegoers are smart enough to realize these nuances, as superheroes now operate in a grayer, tougher landscape.

An assessment of the modern battlefield by SEAS's Kit Parker, my favorite bioengineer-soldier, offers precisely this dose of reality: "It is the most intellectually complex environment that probably our military has ever operated in."

Blue sky thinking in higher ed should be more than just about caps.

This is not to say that universities should not attempt to go for the gusto.

In fact, it may be better if they encourage some blue-sky thinking---just blue sky thinking at a slightly lower elevation and with a net.

"The choice we have is not between reasonable proposals and an unreasonable utopianism. Utopian thinking does not undermine or discount real reforms. Indeed, it is almost the opposite: practical reforms depend on utopian dreaming." - Russell Jacoby, Picture Imperfect Utopianism