Building an Integrative Undergraduate Education: from Exploration and Discovery to Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The end of WWII brought incredible advances in technology and knowledge but it also sowed the seeds of a disconnected academic education in which fields became increasingly specialized (even at the undergraduate level) and a chasm developed between basic and applied research. For years as a research officer in industry and the academy and through developing research clusters, I have sought to reintegrate basic and applied research as well as create an interdisciplinary perspective, believing that necessity and hands-on experience does often drive invention and that the intersection of disciplines creates amazing opportunities for discovery while enhancing the leaps of insight that come from a broader a understanding of and an interaction with the world around us. This approach was so successful in research environments (and so inspiring to students) that I became increasingly interested in and motivated by its application to reinventing the way we teach. This presentation traces education from the first “academy” to the present day university and highlights where we may have gotten off track, what we can do about it, and the impact such a change could have on our future. At my university as a physicist and president, we are reintegrating the liberal arts around a model of project based learning and open laboratories so that students can thrive in an economy based on connectedness, multitasking, integrative discovery, and an understanding of complex systems.