Well, what brought
me to Lehigh in 2011
was the fact that the
College of Arts and Sciences
here has exceptionally
strong departments.
Our college has 18 departments,
ranging from chemistry
and biological sciences to
mathematics, history, English,
the arts, music, theater, and
art, architecture, and design,
so we have a very strong base
in all of the liberal arts
and sciences.
However, what is unique
about this college is
we also have 20
interdisciplinary programs,
and those
interdisciplinary programs
foster conversation, dialogue,
research, and teaching
across those
traditional departments.
And that's what
brought me to Lehigh,
and it is what I think
really will serve us well
in the future, as
we move forward,
to foster interdisciplinary
dialogue with a very
strong base in the
traditional disciplines.
When you think
about the complexity
of the global challenges
that we face across the world
today, whether it is
environmental degradation,
the complexity of
religious conflict,
economic injustice,
global health
crises, environmental
crises, et cetera,
these are problems that are
not solvable through the lens
of an individual discipline.
They are related to
the social sciences.
They are related, of course,
to the natural sciences,
to culture, to
language, et cetera.
If we are going
to equip students
to deal with the complexity
of the global challenges
that we face today,
they need something
more than a training in the
traditional disciplines.
They need to be able to look at
the complexity of the world's
challenges through
the lens of all
of the above, social sciences,
natural sciences, arts,
humanities, because the
solutions to the challenges
are not rooted solely in
the lens or the solutions
provided by a single
disciplinary perspective.
What strikes me,
really in an odd way,
at the same time that some
politicians and pundits
in the United States
are calling for training
that is much more
narrowly vocational.
The rest of the world continues
to send their best students
to us for training.
So if you look at economies
that are challenged today,
such as that of Japan, across
some of Europe at least,
these are built on an
educational system where
the training is much
more narrow than it
is in many universities
in the United States.
So I've become an
ambassador, in a sense,
for liberal arts education.
If economies are going
to grow, if individuals
are going to learn to
innovate, to create,
they can't be trained
solely as technicians.
They can't be trained
solely to approach,
whether it's business situations
or the situations of, again,
the challenges of the
globe, through the lens
only of a narrow technical
or vocational education.
They need to learn
how to innovate.
They need to learn
how to create,
and that comes from being
able to view problems
from a variety of
different angles.
And that is what we do
at Lehigh University,
especially in the College
of Arts and Sciences,
and it's what I find
institutions abroad
are becoming hungry for.
So at the same
time, I talk to them
about the power of
interdisciplinary education,
research, and teaching.
In a sense, also, I'm
talking about Lehigh
being a model for what the
rest of the world could do.
