In 1948, the cubs ownership took out ads in the chicago papers to apologize for how bad the product was. He said, well, were not very good but we have a terrific ballpark and lets market that. The ivy so lush, the grass so green, the sun so warm and the beer so cold that people wont really care what the scoreboard says. Charlie drew faust and george will when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Charlie Drew Gilpin Faust is here, the 28th president of harvard university, the first female president. She has served in that role since 2007. In her installation address she said, a university is not about results in the next quarter. It is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transcends the heritage of millenia, learning that shapes the future. Im pleased to have the person who said that back at this table. Welcome. Thank you so much. Charlie i want to talk about universities today and the role, and some criticism theyre receiving and how they confront the challenges of the future. But today, tell me how is harvard today . You know, you went through some deficits in terms of fundraising difficulties as everybody did, a challenge to you, as you have taken note of. There are questions about the merits of a college education, people not being able to find jobs, raising questions about what kind of education people should be getting, all these questions. So tell me how harvard is doing and what are your answers to that. This is a really interesting time for Higher Education, and i think probably a time in which it is going to change more than it has changed since at least the end of the 19th century when the Research University was invented, and maybe changed as dramatically since it was invented in the 1100s. Its in part because of the kinds of transformations we see in the world we live in, the digital revolution and what that means for teaching and learning, the globalization of Higher Education, those are very important factors, but i think there are also very significant sets of expectations that have been articulated about universities, partly in the aftermath of the financial crisis. How does this contribute to a life, a future . How does it contribute to a nation, a society . So how do individuals and societies evaluate what universities charlie its best time, when those questions are being raised, to remember what universities were for and how you make sure that i think someone said you make sure you have the best of the past but make sure you look forward to the future. Exactly. And i worry somewhat that we will focus too narrowly on the immediate outcomes that have become so pressing in the aftermath of the financial crisis the question of what is a contribution a university makes to the employability, the life of an individual and to the economic structure of society those are absolutely important things for universities to do. But its also important that we keep the long term in view and ask ourselves about how universities contribute to building citizens for the future, people who will be the pillars of our democracy in the years to come, people who will be able to adapt beyond a first job to a future that we can hardly imagine the shape of, and, so, well have the kinds of habits of mind, the kinds of ways of thinking, the kind of breadth of understanding of the world from which they come to be ready ten years after graduation, twenty years after graduation for jobs that havent even been invented yet. Charlie i think i remember this coming from you, a speech you made or an interview in which you quoted Charles Elliott basically saying, yes, we want engineers and architects and chemists but we think they will be better at that the if they also learned here something of the humanities and what it means to be a citizen. Yes, and part of a world not necessarily like the world you came from in your own or origin origins and your own immediate experience. The globalization of our education and lives is critical. The students who go to harvard will be lawyers, doctors, Business People or Public Servants in a global context. They will have to deal with citizens in societies quite different from their own and that speak languages different from their own. How can they imagine themselves inside those peoples heads to do their work most effectively, it comes from humanistic study as much as any other field. Charlie another critical question is access. Former secretary of state clinton raised this question universities are so expensive today. I know you feel strongly about university support and Financial Aid for students, but that is an issue for so many and how much it costs to attend a Great University. Absolutely, and you talked a moment ago about crime sisms universities are being subjected to and the kinds of doubts people have about them, but those are coupled with an appetite of what a university can be and part of a desire to be part of one and have ones children be part of them. So how can we make the university affordable to the wide range of people who can benefit from the people being there. Charlie its also good for the university. It is and weve greatly expanded Financial Aid programs in the past decade so that we have increased Financial Aid spending by 90 since 2007. We have a program that permits students from families making less than 65,000 a year to come with no parental contribution at all so were working very hard to make harvard affordable. In fact, the cost of education has gone down at harvard. If youre on Financial Aid, and 60 of our undergraduate students are, you pay about 12,000 a year for your harvard education. So that, i think, is an important commitment we have made, but making Higher Education affordable is a much broader challenge than that. We have been very lucky to benefit from the kinds of resources that our alums and friends have given us over the years to support that kind of a Financial Aid commitment, and that isnt the case everywhere. But let me Say Something about another aspect of affordability, which is if you look at what states have expended per student on Higher Education in the public Higher Education of the United States, thats gone down 26 . Charlie how much states have contributed. Per capita, 26 decline. Charlie you talk about the individual states of the 50 states. Yes, to support the university of california, university of north carolina. So the rising cost of public Higher Education is closely related to the declining support charlie if they cant support, they have to raise the tuition and everything else. Yes. So par part of what we need to k ourselves is how do we make college more affordable by being more cost conscious. All of us in Higher Education have to do that. We also need to ask ourselves as a society what are we willing to invest in Higher Education which i firmly believe is a public good, and duds our Society Still believe that and will it invest in it. Charlie you raise the question that, in fact, the level of support from the federal government to Higher Education is declining . Well charlie compared to where it was as a percentage. A significant portion of what we do at harvard is research. Charlie right. And about 16 of our operating budget comes from charlie 16 . 16. Comes from federal support for Scientific Research. So what happens when that declines across the United States . Charlie and it is declining . And it is declining. We see, in the last decade, the purchasing power of dollars from the National Institute of health which is our biggest federal funder has gone down about 25 . So where is the United States going to do its Scientific Research under those circumstances . I can tell you a little story about a wonderful discovery made at a harvard, announced just this past week, and its a discovery about a protein that may inhibit the development of alzheimers, this discovery made by a young faculty member in our medical school. And he applied for n. I. H. Funding, he got the highest possible score, but because of declining support for n. I. H. , the highest possible score did not guarantee you would be funded. When the qualifiers were listed, the top three were funded. Used to be six or eight of those would have been funded. Charlie right. He was number four. The cutoff was three. Charlie no funding. So how does he advance how could he advance this extraordinary work with the same vehemence if the funds arent there. Charlie so what happens to him . He has funding. Hes been doing it more slowly. Hes not been able to advance as quickly as he should have. I hope he has a great result, his next study will be funded. Heres this extraordinary destructive disease charlie and may be slowing down one of the important elements in trying to either reduce its impact. Yes. Charlie yet, at the same time, you just got one of the largest single grants youd ever received for 150 million. That is a philanthropic gift. Charlie thats what im saying. 150 million is a lot of money to give to a university. Youve also lost a 6 billion Capital Campaign for your endowment. But im saying youre not getting federal money but youre getting gifts of a significant size. We are and that gift was for Financial Aid for one of our very highest priorities for Access Affordability from ken griffin who is an alum who believes deeply in making places like harvard open to students of talent. But if you think of how much federal money we get every year, 670 million a year, and what substitutes for that . Thats annually. So it takes a lot of philanthropy, would take a lot of philanthropy to compensate for what the federal government has done and has been in terms of the scientific profile of our country. Charlie are you able to reduce your things on the expense side because through wise Financial Management . We are certainly attending to that and, in a variety of ways, administrative ways of consolidating functions and thinking about cost saving, also asking hard questions. Again, the downturn in 2008 was a real motivator in this regard. What dont we want to do anymore that we are doing . What can we afford to do less of . What can we afford to figure out ways to do more efficiently. Charlie do you believe that members of the academy make good managers . All of them . Charlie as a general rule, though, its a different talent. Its a very different talent. Charlie after all, youre a historian who writes books. I am. People ask me what does history have to do with being a University President and wasnt that a complete disjuncture . Charlie im asking does being a historian make you a better University President. Makes me a better president than if i didnt understand history. Leadership is about change, envisioning change, managing change, bringing people to embrace change and what is history about . Change. What is the civil war about . When i look at the civil war, its about a very concentrated period in which everything changed. So that equipped me understanding that equipped me very well, i think, for the kinds of challenges i face. Charlie and it is always true if you dont understand your history, you will be judged to repeat it. Yes. Charlie so when you look at online education, is that a positive thing for universities . Because i love my university experience. I love being on campus. I love everything about it. Everything. At the same time, there are people who cant do that, for whatever reason, and now they can access a Great University and great teacher teachers onli. Online education will never replace the extraordinary things that happen when you bring people together from around the country and around the world to learn together, and im sure when you think about your university education, when i think about what goes on at harvard every day, the certain serendipitous interactions are incredible. But online can supplement our education. Its extraordinary. We fed edx just about two years ago and began producing online content to share with people all around the world, and we do our content called harvard x, the content of the edx delivery system, we use the edx platform and, so far, weve had more than a million individuals who benefited from courses from edx. One of my favorite stories related to this is a Public Health course that was offered in the very first fall that we were involved in this program, and i had just been to India Several months before and was made so aware of the Public Health needs in india and had so many come up to me while i was there saying could we do more programs with your school, get more students and faculty from there to consult and help . And i came back very passionate wanting to do more with india because the challenges are so enormous. This basic Public Health course offered that foul fall and it was biostatistics and epidemiology, a kind of Building Block of Public Health it was taken by over 50,000 people worldwide but by 8,000 people in india. So there, in an eye blink, is a kind of an impact for Public Health knowledge and the dissemination of the knowledge that all the partnerships i was going to dream up would not approach. Now, those partnerships are still important, well still do all those kind of facetoface things, that here weve had a level of outreach that would have been unimaginable. One of the things i love about it is how the users figure out how they want to take these courses. We had one instance where someone who was taking the course in mumbai said, hey, i want to see who else is taking the course and created a flash mob of biostatisticians in mumbai that came together. In another instance the whole hospital staff in india took this course together so that they could share the experience and have a facetoface dimension of what the online course was. So thinking about that impact and thinking about what can be available in that mode that simply isnt available and cant be made available readily in a facetoface mode is very striking. Charlie you went to gettysburg to make the 150t 150th anniversary of lincolns speech. I did. Charlie and because of your sense of history and Civil War History and that magical gettysburg address and honoring that, and lincoln talking about making sure that those who died did not die in vain, what did you tell them when you had a chance to be there and remember that speech but also remember the problems were having with government today . Well, as i was thinking about that anniversary and thinking about going to gettysburg, i wrote a piece for the Washington Post that kind of summarized my thoughts, and what i focused on was this notion of how much sacrifice had been made for this extraordinary nation that lincoln described as the last best hope, as democracy was disappearing around the world, and in the mid 19th century lincoln roused the north to take on this remarkable set of commitment to keep the nation whole and sustain that last best hope, and if we dont want people to die to have died in vain for that, 700,000 of them, what have we abandoned . And as we were approaching that anniversary, the government was closed, we were in complete deadlock in washington, we had a congress that was unable to exercise the responsibilities of democracy. Charlie and examining the role of government. Mmhmm. Charlie and youre basically saying to them, remember, how do we ensure we have a government of the people, by the people, for the people and that it shall never perish. And remember what we have inherited in the way of responsibilities to those who have built this for us and what we owe to that past and to the future, and our obligation to sustain it. Charlie when people talk about great universities, they talk about the United States. I mean, i think of the top twenty great universities on most peoples list, 17 or 18 of them in the United States, harvard and cambridge being an exception, what is required for china and india and other places that they have a lot of resources there to build a Great University and how quickly can they build a series of great universities . Its a very interesting question, and one that both china and india are thinking hard about. One of the aspects that china has identified as increasing importance is how American Students and universities are filled with curious, imaginative, creative people, and part of that, i find from my chinese interlocketters, they come from the liberal address from the breadth of training, from not having someone focused on a particularlyiar particular, but from a perspective that may give you a different angle and make a New Discovery that you wouldnt have thought of if you were stuck in a prescribed path. Charlie the interesting thing about china, for example i mean there is this myth that theyre so into rote learning, and some of that may be true, and rather than a full understanding o