December 8, 1997
Penn National Commission

The University and Public Behavior

Discussion following presentation by Judith Rodin
President, University of Pennsylvania

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DON RANDEL: I wager everyone in the room will have something to say about that or something to ask about it. Who wants to be first?

Derek.

DEREK BOK: Let me just mention a few things that are sort of concrete issues that arise from the kind of talk you gave. Two are things in which, I think, many people feel universities are doing less to promote and to contribute to open dialogue than they did in the past; the third is an opportunity, perhaps, that exists today that didn't seem so apparent in prior times.

I think, certainly, if you asked generally today about whether university leaders are making an important contribution to the public discourse, even about educational issues, I think the general impression is that they're not, that there's been a real decline--I'm not speaking over 10 years; I'm speaking over 50, 75 years in the importance of educational leaders in engaging the debate, even on educational issues.

JUDITH RODIN: Mm-hmm.

BOK: And I think that opens up a number of questions about why that should be. Is it that somehow people aren't interested in university leaders as much, or there are fewer opportunities? Or I'm sure part of it is that the job of an educational leader is very much more hectic and leaves less room for this. There's also very interesting questions about what kinds of public issues educational leaders ought to speak out on. I come from a university where university presidents in the past have spoken against unionization, immigration, co-education and a great many other things that give you pause about just how far afield from educational issues one really would like university leaders to venture in getting into the public debate.

But I do think there are a set of issues about that. I know in Boston the local newspaper, simply because of this silence, reached out recently and said, `We want each university president in the greater Boston area to write an op-ed piece, and we'll make it available.' Curious that the impetus had to come from the newspaper, because it felt that there was a vacuum there, rather than being pressed to make space for messages that university leaders wanted to get across. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is, seems to me most people would believe is a trend against what you've talked about--whether the old norms that we took for granted about indoctrination in the classroom are as clearly understood and as widely applied as they used to be, whether there are not classrooms in which--no, there is a kind of correctness that is imposed, using at least mild forms of authority from the teacher. And I guess I'm not aware, if that is so, of very much that university leaders of my acquaintance have done to deal with that, even though that seems to me one of the most serious breaches of the kind of open dialogue which you so correctly are pressing for. But I think the idea that indoctrination is actually a legitimate part of the academic mission is still held by a very small minority, but it's probably a larger group than would have held it, say, in the 1950s.

The final point, which is a sort of a new possibility, is I think one trend that is going on that we're all familiar with is the increasing sheer volume of information, often confusing, conflicting and so forth, that swirls around us on almost every issue. And as that takes place and as it's magnified by the Internet and new technology, which is clearly going to add new dimensions to that, I think a trend that's already visible is going to become even more so, and that is that the role of the interpreter, the gatekeeper, the person who kind of makes sense of masses of information, that tells you what's really worth reading or believing, is going to become more and more important, and that could be a real force for good or for evil, but it does suggest a possible role for universities.

There is at least one example I can give from my own university of a very innocuous role, but it exemplifies the point, and that is in the area of health, where you hear so many conflicting things about this study, that study and so forth--an enormous need out there in the community for some kind of authoritative voice that could come out and say, `Here is all the evidence and here are the conflicting studies, and this looks to be a good summation of what we know and don't know at the present time.'

And we found that to be enormously successful in terms of hundreds of thousands of subscriptions of this kind of thing. But what it was really doing was taking a name that people trusted, a university--at least they trusted it in terms of knowing medical knowledge--and trying to help in sifting out, in this swirling mass of information, what you could put some weight on and believe. The question, then, would be, is there, in terms of the kind of public dialogue we're talking about is there a role for universities to do something more of that--not in terms of telling people what to believe, but in helping to sort out, from an overload of information, what do we know and don't we know that's relevant to this important public issue, so that we can help people who are looking for assistance in making sense of all this data--help them order the information so that they can begin to think more intelligently and more confidently about the underlying issue?

RODIN: Let me start with the third and say that I absolutely agree, and I think universities have often been reluctant to take on that responsibility of informing the general public, even if it's organizing and interpreting massive amounts of data. The Harvard Medical Newsletter may be one notable early example of a different attitude, and what I was trying to describe were that kind of initiative a hundred different ways, but really believing that part of our mandate, at the present time, is to engage, via our knowledge, the more general public and to help them to understand and sort out, whether it's information of that sort or other kinds of ideas, and hopefully, we will do more of that.

With regard to your first two points, I think that it is very clear to everyone that university presidents have, over time--university leaders have, over time, really either relinquished by intent or at least by its absence, given how busy they are, the kind of role of authority, whether it's institutional authority or authority in the broader community, not only on educational issues but really beyond. When that's commented upon, it's often attributed to the fact that there are so many competing constituencies that have conflicting motivations and conflicting views of what is right and wrong that the university president, ever eager to raise more funds for his or her institution, dare not offend any particular notable constituency.

I think that if we allow that to happen, we really are relinquishing, in a way that would be tragic, the role and responsibility of university presidents. One of the--just on a personal note, one of the reasons for wanting to convene this commission was really to have an opportunity to be able to engage a broader set of issues and a broader set of publics about social issues and ideas that really are compelling to us in our society, and where university presidents ought to take on some leadership role, given the opportunity to convene colleagues such as you to do something transformative. And I think that we will be able to do that, but we can't be gutless and we've got to be out there, and being out there is really hard, and you need to get more thick-skinned but you need, really, to be out there.

I think the classrooms have gotten politically correct, and I think that, when we talk about a kind of roiling and robust debate, we're going to have to push back on our own faculty and on our own students, and we've got to be able to exercise a leadership role to do that.

Lani and I have been engaged in a very interesting dialogue over the past several months. Many of you know that she identified that the legal method of education, typically known as the Socratic method, interpreted in a variety of different ways, seems to differentially disadvantage women in the classroom relative to men, and the question of how her colleagues took the data, both emotionally and personally, and what they did with it in terms of changing the way they teach, has been a cause of great concern to both of us.

So I don't say that these are easy issues and I don't say that we move our faculties or our students or our alumni or trustees all at once, but if we don't try, what have we given up? Cass.

CASS SUNSTEIN: Yeah. I have a puzzle and two harmful tendencies to talk about. The puzzle is--you spoke very eloquently on behalf of open discussion, but it is the case that no discussion is possible unless some things are closed, so that every discussion, including this one, is feasible only because we've ruled some things off the agenda. For example--this won't surprise you--at the University of Chicago economics classes, graduate and undergraduate, if you try to talk about whether preferences ought not to be taken as given, that discussion--that's not acceptable, not because of any, I think, really horrible notion of political correctness; just you can't do the form of microeconomics that people are being introduced to if you ask, `Should preferences be taken as given?' That's for something else.

In biology classes at the University of Chicago, many other places, a sustained discussion of creationism isn't going to be accepted. In constitutional law classes, lengthy talk about why the Constitution ought to be taken as binding--that's not acceptable. Now this is not to say that these three forms of closing off the debate are bad; far from it. No discussion can work unless some things are ruled off the table. You can't discuss everything at once.

So the puzzle is--I don't think it's the case that any discussion is fully open. There are taken-for-granted assumptions that get going. Political correctness in the most expansive sense is omnipresent and unavoidable and not to be deplored; that is, there has to be some kind of orthodoxy. So the puzzle is, when we talk about an open discussion, what exactly is it that we're talking about? I don't really know the answer to that.

OK. The two bad tendencies are--I think it would be good if we had a more concrete sense of things that were operating in current universities that weren't working well, and let me just throw out two possibilities. One is on the left--identity politics, where we understand identity politics to be encapsulated in the phenomenon--I know at Yale a couple of years ago some classes--law school classes were common in which people would say, `As a white male I think,' and then it would be some retrograde position on rape, and it was thought that the ascription of the characteristic would authorize the retrograde view. And in any case, the view would be that the identity would be determinative of the argument, so that these positions were fixed and argument wouldn't be possible across identity. So that's very destructive to education.

On the right, there is something associated with Leo Strauss, and that is the great books tradition, taking the great books to the authorities that have teachings. "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom is a famous--and let me just say polemically--exemplification of that view, where the great books are not taken as invitations to think hard about a problem, but instead as teachings that you get something concrete from. That's kind of the right-wing version, I think, of identity politics, and in a way it's its flip side.

I think both positions have a conception of truth, which is transcendental, and that's why they're each other's flip sides. In any case, the puzzle is open discussion; no one would be against that, but what exactly the ideal amounts to, I think, is a puzzle, which is not to say that it's not an admirable ideal; it is. But I think it's more complicated to get concrete on what it entails, exactly, and the other is to think, maybe, what are the antonyms to the things you're speaking for.

RODIN: I guess I don't inevitably see the opposite of closed discussion being open discussion. When I talked about closed discussion, I meant the discussion of closed minds, rather than the discussion that takes place away from the light of day and away from the analysis of people other than yourself. I think that that's a very dangerous thing as well, but it certainly is true in any kind of deliberation that there may be circumstances where everyone in the room does not serve the outcome well, and no one, indeed, would have had the expectation that they ought to be there. So in a way, for me, that's a straw man, if that's the opposite side of the continuum.

SUNSTEIN: I didn't really mean that. I meant that, in any discussion, there are some things that are closed off, both in terms of subject matter and position. Like in this discussion we're not talking about, you know, the Vietnam War, and we're having certain shared assumptions which to question would be not productive, partly because we really share those assumptions and we think it would be you know, if I said something Nietzschean, you would think, `Well, that'--and so it may not be even that raising this point is productive but the suggestion is that many people who I think you would think would be disagreeing with you would actually agree with everything you said and say, `We're in favor of open discussion, too.'

RODIN: I understand. Larry.

LAWRENCE LESSIG: I want to follow up on something Cass said, and then bring it back to something Robert said earlier. I think there's a fundamental ambiguity in the idea of things being off the table. You at some point, Cass, said `ruled off the table'; at another point you said `things are off the table.' And I think they're very different ideas. I mean, it is true a conversation proceeds with things that are off the table, but the perception that goes along with ruling things off the table is often extremely destructive, and the confusion about political correctness is often that things are ruled off the table, and it's the very ruling that people rebel against.

Now the point I wanted to relate back to something Robert was saying--Robert's question was: Are we able to talk to these questions to the people? And there is an issue about whether we should be worrying about the people, but I think there's a question that is quite significant in relation to what you were saying about the role of education or universities in this discourse.

At a time when universities, in Cass' sense, the authority of universities is off the table--everybody takes it for granted--then what presidents of universities say is credited, just by virtue of that authority. But when the authority of universities or the presidents of universities or institutions like this, in a sense, aren't taken for grant--that authority isn't taken for granted or it's up for grabs, then you have to compete for authority through our words.

Now it's a great--at least for academics--us academics, it's our great handicap that we speak in sentences or in paragraphs or in pagelike thoughts, right? We have extended an--sometimes quibbling but sort of extended ideas that we want to express carefully. That's the way we talk. And we live in a world where that talk communicates nothing to most people. That talk is ineffective. And so we, oddly, even though we think of ourselves as, in some sense, above this--we are handicapped by our very way of engaging, handicapped in speaking to people.

So to regain the authority that existed when these institutions were, in a sense, taken for granted as authorities, is for us is gonna be very difficult. And that doesn't mean we don't have things to do. I'm reminded of Lani's contribution, the very first of our meetings, where she described structures we could create that would help bring about transformation in the way in which our students or people think about things. And that was using our particular expertise, but not depending upon our ability to communicate things directly. It was using our expertise about pedagogy here in seeing how we could structure situations that help people change--obviously related to Jim Fishkin's work as well.

So here's a place for us to imagine us having an effect which doesn't reveal our handicap, mainly that we don't know how to speak in one-word bites, but does actually suggest how we could do something out there.

RODIN: I think that's very compelling. I think that there are--the assumption that university presidents carry with them now the authority of their institutions is one that we are challenging, because I think the institutions are really losing the confidence and trust of the general public. And so if we are to take on this task, whatever this task is that we ultimately decide that we are well-suited to, not only within our own university community but as we reach out to the broader communities, I think we shouldn't delude ourselves; we ought to recognize that part of what we will need to do is to regain the public confidence--not only because we speak differently, but because there's a real sense of mistrust in the nature of the academic mission, in what we are teaching our students there. The politics of the left and the politics of the right, as Cass characterized earlier, are just one of the ways in which we have turned against one another and made accessible to the broader community a sense in which we are made to be suspect--views about the cost of tuition, views about indirect cost recovery; all of these issues are now thought about by the general public as ways that universities should be viewed as suspect.

So there's a larger challenge there, Larry, than I think the one that you characterized of university-speak.

MICHAEL USEEM: I have a question about help for a person like yourself, and it's going to go as follows: The list of leadership qualities that you identified--passion, vision, integrity, wisdom--seems to me right on the mark, and in hearing company leaders talk about what they want, they often have almost the same list. And then the second thing they'll say is that `I want these qualities to be exhibited by all 50,000 people that work at this company, because I can't do it alone. So I really want 50,000 leaders besides myself here, but then, following that, there's also the quick observation that it's really hard to make that happen, like `I can say we all should be owners and leaders here, but we've got 50,000 or 49,999 who are resistant for whatever set of reasons.'

So as you think about our university or any university, any thoughts about how you can carry some of these qualities through the organization, how you can draw faculty, administrators and students into exhibiting these four or five qualities you've identified?

RODIN: You can't start it without modeling. It's not the only step, but it is the important first step. And so when I think about myself as a university leader or my colleagues or leaders in other venues, really demonstrating those characteristics is number one, and demonstrating that those characteristics can move an institution, but also can and often do make an individual, including the individual leader, feel quite uncomfortable. Then I think you really need to very systematically take each level of your institution--and you're an expert in how institutions really confronted with this have come to the conclusion that they need to delayer. You can't do it with very bureaucratic hierarchical organizations and get too far down in the institution.

So both corporations and universities, and government, as I'm sure we'll hear in a few moments, are highly bureaucratic, and bureaucratic environments really run counter to the kind of additional leaders that are necessary in order to move a set of shared agendas forward. I have never really liked the concept `follower,' because I'm not really sure what that means. What you need is a kind of mutuality of leadership where sometimes the most effective thing a leader can do is really sit back and let others define agendas and participate once you've constructed a certain frame around that.

And it's not an easy task, but it is an essential task, and I guess, as I said, the only wisdom at the moment is that it cannot be done well in a highly bureaucratic environment, and it can't be done well in a highly regulated environment. And it's why, as I said in my comments, I really am so opposed to regulation being seen as a way to make things work well. I think that they're the antithesis to things really working well in an institution where ideas and exploration and openness, in the best sense, really need to move the agendas forward. Drew--lots of comments--we will get--go ahead.

DREW FAUST: There's a certain tone--I don't think this works. Yes, it does. There's a certain tone of nostalgia here about what has been lost and that universities are confronting that they didn't have to confront before, and I'd like to challenge that a little bit, and I think in a way that relates to Cass' point, which is that partly what we have--universities are suspect because they represent changes in society, particularly in the realm of diverse communities, in a way that many other institutions do not. And people living in universities probably are living in the most diverse environments that they ever have lived in or ever will live in. And so when we talk about things being off the table or not up for discussion, or we talk about classes being more politically correct now than they were in the past, I think we have to recognize that we are confronting daily all kinds of challenges and questions that were completely off the table in the 1950s.

If we're talking about American history classes--and I have many distinguished colleagues in American history here--when American history was being taught in the 1950s, you didn't have to worry about political correctness because you were dealing with a consensus school that didn't talk about conflict, that didn't talk about African-Americans, that didn't talk about women. There was no fight to be had, because the fights were all defined off the table. Now, happily, we're all fighting, and I think that political correctness is probably less in--at least in the context of teaching American history, than it was when we didn't even recognize that we were all being politically correct without knowing it.

So I think that we should not just be nostalgic for a lost past; we should also be celebrating, in some sense, the fact that universities are the institutions in this society that are confronting this in a very direct way, and in the only way for many Americans, I think, who otherwise are in very separate living situations and operating situations. And I think we should also celebrate that the kind of subject matter we're dealing with is inviting these debates that we welcome, but we have to be the institution to deal with the challenges of, and that that's a very important part of this that should keep us from longing for a world we have lost. We should instead, I think, celebrate the one we've gained.

RODIN: That's important. Jim.

JAMES FISHKIN: I have a brief comment on Cass' question, but then I have a question stimulated by your presentation. My comment for Cass is, when he raised the question about economics department ruling preferences, whether they ought to be satisfied or taken as given, off the table; it seems to me that he said that is for something else. Now the crucial ambiguity there is, what is the something else? I think, in a really well-functioning university, the presumptions of one course or class or discipline or department that are open to serious intellectual challenge--the presumptions of one such part of the university should be raised by some other part of the university. For example, a lot of places--or some places--have a program in philosophy, politics and economics, as Cass well knows, where exactly those questions would be discussed and raised quite fruitfully. And that's, indeed, the special power of interdisciplinary programs. So it's not ruled off the table for the entire university just for the purposes of being able to have a discussion on one particular course.

RODIN: That's a good point.

FISHKIN: Now I'd like to move on. I think that--we had an interesting--our discussion this morning in our working group on community intersects a good bit with your presentation in the sense that we raised or discussed some related questions. And we actually had some disagreement--very friendly disagreement--about, I guess, the issue could be put what is the main product of the university? For example, it's both people and research. Now if it's people when we're thinking about the people, after all the university produces graduates, are they graduates who are being prepared for the job market? Yes, of course.

But are they also graduates who are being prepared for the role of citizen? I tried to say they were--but some of my colleagues thought that that was old-fashioned or there was no longer the consensus to support that. I think that's a very important presumption because we're preparing people possibly, also, for the public dialogue. Some of them will be leaders but some of them will just be citizens. And it seems to me, then, if we think of that as part of our purpose then that impacts on how the university does its business and on the opportunities offered for students.

Now Texas has a very quaint requirement that students have to take two semesters of political science and two semesters of history. I actually don't think it helps them that much preparing for citizenship, but I haven't fought it because it serves our purposes. It gives us more students than we can handle. But it raises a question. Obviously, the Legislature--this is by state law--the Legislature thought it was serving some purpose. It raises the question: What would you do in order to help prepare people for citizenship? For example, some universities make special efforts to provide opportunities for internships, for tutoring programs, for public service.

These things, I think, are enormously rich--probably a lot better than political science--in getting people to have some sense of public responsibility. I also think that from the research side and that's just the beginning of an agenda. You can see I haven't thought seriously about this, but I think it's one of the things we might think about at some point. On the research side, as well as the impact on the students who are in a sense a product of the university--on the research side we--you and I would both remember that the debate at Yale when they were going to get rid of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which was a place that had its weaknesses as well as its strengths, regardless.

But it was an institution that was designed to contribute to public policy debates. And the problem with institutions in the university environment designed to contribute to public policy debate is sometimes their work is thought of as applied or not theoretical enough or not serious enough. I think in the Yale case it was resolved after I left but I think there was some kind of compromise where they kept the institution and took away most of the money.

But it seems to me that that there's an issue. Does that kind of research have a role in the university? I think it does. But some universities might not. So there's an issue, both on the research side and the student side. Does the university have a role to contribute to the public dialogue and the dialogue among citizens?

RODIN: Let me comment briefly because in my prepared comments I hope I made quite clearly the point that I believe it does. But I think when you educate students for citizenship and I think we absolutely do and must educate them for citizenship, that the last way that we want to do that is by thinking that they're going to get it in their history or political science courses. Educating for citizenship really means an engaged student doing--whether it's public service or independent research so that you really can learn about the creation of new knowledge, how to challenge information. All of the process of what we do in universities is what trains them for citizenship. Very much less is the substance of what we give them, that trains them for citizenship.

Of course, we want them to be educated and informed and have knowledge, but that's the kind of baseline activity of really creating a student who will be the kind of citizen for the future that we hope holds the promise that is making us do what we do. In terms of universities and I have never found the theoretical applied schism to be very appealing, because I first of all, because I now lead the university founded by Benjamin Franklin who believed that those two do go hand in hand and that it is the role of the intellectual, both in the university and in the broader society, to integrate the theoretical and the applied.

So I'm much more comfortable with it at Penn, I guess, than I was at Yale. But, in fact, I think that it is critical. I really do and I think as I said earlier, that we must take on that obligation more frontally as universities. And if we keep saying, you know, `We're the institution that just does it theoretically' and leave it to others to think about the application, and now I'm not talking about applied research or going out and necessarily solving social problems, but at least asking that our engagement be broader and deeper with our communities, with our society and with the social issues that our fundamental enterprise really can influence and make a contribution to.

Bob.

ROBERT WIEBE: What you said now is precisely the lead in to what does concern me when I listen to your, you know, your beautifully presented talk. You started by giving a picture of--and I think it was received sympathetically--of the university as a neutral, as a depoliticized sort of cover over which much variety in the case of the arts, in the case of the conservative journal--you stood back. You said you didn't stop them from doing what they did. And you presented, to me at least, if not from you, it came across as a sense of the dispassionate, the even-handed, the neutral overarching university. But you end with the impassioned plea to engage and I think engagement is very messy. I think engagement risks all kind of damage to a university. I'm for it. But I think it's very risky and somehow or other I lost in your talk that sense that we really are bringing our institution to the edge oftentimes.

And we must take positions, sometimes very complicated issues, as universities in order to be properly engaged. I had a sensed that there was a kind of...

RODIN: I must...

WIEBE: ...antiseptic sense of how the university could engage itself.

RODIN: If I conveyed that I misconveyed it and my view, both in those three instances and my colleagues were there, and also in the comment that I just made I think belies that. I don't think it's antiseptic and dispassionate. I think that you need to create the context in which all of these ideas truly do bump up each other and people do dirty their hands and make one another angry and all of...

WIEBE: But dealing with the wider world is distinct from within the university. Yes, to be neutral to allow that kind of debate inside the university is one thing, but engaging issues of how to use public resources in the area of University of Pennsylvania...

RODIN: It wasn't even neutral within the university and it surely isn't neutral as it extends beyond. Any behavior demonstrates a stand and so the only neutrality is inaction and I'm arguing for the opposite of that, for really being able to engage and deliberate and be active and take the risk that you will offend somebody else. But when you do, the response isn't to neutralize or make antiseptic what you originally thought. It's to take it in from the other side and let it all really confront one another. So I really do believe just the opposite of, at least, how you characterized it at this moment.

Neil.

You tell me when to stop. Five more minutes, right?

NEIL SMELSER: I'd like to come at that dilemma from a slightly different angle. In opening our study--task force, study group, working group this morning I presented a dilemma to--to the group contained in the phrase, `This is a free country,' which is invoked all the time to put the burden of unacceptability on somebody else, right? That anything goes. Now in a way you were invoking a liberal or a free vision of the university when you said, `These things can go.' I mean you try to civilize them, you try to get other things to go on. But you rule against them and that they were--you didn't say they were unacceptable and take actions to prohibit them. But I think in microcosm that reflects the same dilemma of how do you--by what ground rules and on what defense do you find anything unacceptable?

RODIN: I think that's an important question and it's, in some ways, the question that Stanley Fish raised in the op-ed piece that we had in our materials on the New Palz situation. I don't--and he condemned the university president, in that instance of--many of you who read the article will recall for really falling back on kind of free speech and universities as being places where there has to be the expression of ideas without defending substantively why that particular conference was important as a way of countering both Governor Pataki and the Boards of Governors.

I think those are legitimate questions. I tried to say that I don't think it's about free speech. I think it's about--although I believe in free speech. I also think that although you said there's a fairly liberal view in what I articulated, there's also a fairly conservative view because I don't believe in regulation of this kind of institution as being--in the traditional sense of rules and prescriptions and mandates and speech codes as being ways for universities to govern themselves either.

So the answer, though, is not for the president to take a stand on every issue. The answer is for the president to create an institution in which people do take stands, where they feel safe enough to take stands, where they can come back together at the end of that and still work together as a community. And it is really hard.

SMELSER: I know that the traditional university has downplayed authority as an institution. It's not very much based on authority, it's based on persuasion and a lot of other means and a corollary of not having authority in an institution is that people will govern themselves by individual commitment or through force of collegiality or other forms of community and one wonders whether that particular institutional equation still exists.

RODIN: Oh, it's closer to Michael's question. Don? Do we...

RANDEL: One of the threads that runs through this, I think, all the way back to Gary Clark's comment has to do with this notion of the university as expert, which often confounds our thinking about the university because there clearly is a domain--multiple domains in which we are experts. The difficulty is now that there's a great deal at issue which is contestatory, in which it's not agreed that the university or the president of the university can be seen to be the expert.

So the difficulty for us is not how to model the discussion about the things we know about; should you eat more fiber to--should you--etc.-- in The Harvard Newsletter or even how to build a rocket. But it's things as simple as what books ought your kids to read? In that sense, the great books' notion itself is often sustained by kind of view of the university as expert. Aristotle was an expert on politics and that's why you want to know what he said about it rather than how to discuss something fruitfully about which there is, in fact, no agreement. I fear we have diverted you long enough, Judith? Thank you very much.

RODIN: Not me. Thank you.

RANDEL: My last duty is to say we get a small break now but it must be a short one, given that we have overspent our time. So let's say five minutes if at all possible.

Thank you very much.

Next presentation text: Bill Bradley, Government and Public Behavior

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