Chet Haskell

Commencement Address to Cogswell Polytechnical College

April 23, 2005

Good afternoon. Most colleges and universities mark their Commencement rites with a distinguished speaker from the outside world who can provide sage advice to the new graduates, while giving their parents some kernels of thought upon which to reflect. I expect this will be the format for Cogswell in the years ahead.

But this is a special Commencement for me – it is my first as President -- and I am privileged to be able to address you myself on this occasion.

And this Commencement is certainly special for all of you who are graduating. Not only is it the first baccalaureate Commencement for most of you, but it is also marks your last time as a Cogswell student.

Your last year and my first year overlapped and this is why I am particularly glad to be here at this moment. You see, I came to Cogswell because of you. Cogswell’s students make this a very special place. One of the secrets of higher education is that good students attract good faculty, much more so than the reverse. And so it was with me.

Thus, I’d like to reflect for a moment on this unusual College and what it has given me and, more importantly, you.

For me, Cogswell is a professional opportunity to learn and grow. After 28 years in the business, I know that much of higher education is pretty predictable. We’re fairly certain about the make up of the curriculum and faculty in most colleges, even looking several years into the future. In these medieval institutions, change is slow.

However, here at Cogswell, the future is upon us daily and nothing is certain except continual change. This situation provides a set of challenges that are simultaneously daunting and exciting. One example is figuring out how to keep educational programs in pace with the technological changes that are happening at light speed around us. How do you always have professors and courses who are right at the edge of change? How do you attract and retain students who relish such change?

We concentrate on such things here. Our faculty have worked hard to create high standards and to assess themselves in order to achieve them. We employ a number of adjunct faculty who are part of the corporate world around us and thus provide a means for us to stay directly connected to best practice in several fields. We are widening our student recruiting, admissions, and scholarship operations to enhance the quality, diversity, and scale of our student body. We are building staff to provide greater student support, advice, and career services. And we work hard at strengthening our networks of industry connections. We understand the centrality of simultaneously being dynamic and constantly pursuing excellence.

Significantly, we do all these things in a small college where our scale is vital to the education we provide. Our faculty interact with students to a degree unheard of in most colleges and universities. Our students all know each other well. We can and should provide much more personalized student support and services than is possible in larger institutions. This scale helps the College create and nurture an educational environment where students can be creative, risk-taking, and exploratory, welcoming new ideas and new people. All these things are difficult to do elsewhere.

So, not only have I come into a new setting, with new curricula and challenges, but I have already learned a lot about things previously unfamiliar. I can now talk with moderate confidence about such things as rendering farms, MAYA, demo reels, and can even discuss a bit of Fire Science technology or digital audio engineering with a modicum of sophistication. But I also have learned the most in trying to align the College even more directly into the vortex of the stupendous changes around us.

You, as engaged students, have had a central role in my education. I have been fortunate to be able to teach some of you. I have enjoyed immensely the various interactions with students that a small school facilitates. I get the chance to talk and engage with students daily in ways formal and informal, something not possible for most college presidents. Much of what I have learned, I have learned from you and your colleagues. So, I thank you, the students, for your part in educating me. And I thank Chancellor Pickens and the faculty and staff of the College for giving me this chance to grow and contribute. When interviewing for jobs, most people will say something like “I want to be in a place where I can make a difference.” Well, Cogswell is precisely such a place for me.

But today is your day, so let me turn to the much more important topic of what the College has given you. In one sense, this is straightforward. You have gained a sound educational base for movement into one of several professional fields. Yet, there is more. The College has strained to provide you with more than just the tools for that entry level job. Since you are going to have something like fifteen jobs and at least three different careers (on average) in your adult life, an education truly has to make sure you have learned how to learn. In addition, I believe that this College has given you the opportunity to develop a set of inherent skills and attitudes that will be equally or even more important (in the longer run) than the specifics of your degree program. One of my students in the Humanities General Studies Project class did his paper on the value of higher education in the videogame and animation industries. After interviewing a number of people from those industries, he concluded that higher education was important and valuable, although not always in the ways one might predict. Central to this was the conclusion that education is at the core of one’s longer term growth opportunities. This is essential because, to quote Charles Vest, the former president of MIT: “the purpose of higher education is basically opportunity.”

In looking ahead, I would suggest to you that there are three key capabilities you must have for success, capabilities which I believe Cogswell has helped you develop.

First, is the simple capacity to cope with constant and accelerating change. I believe most people tend to underestimate the stresses that come with any sort of change. When our entire context is changing rapidly, we sometimes forget that change is always difficult. You must become part of change. You must be one who changes things. You must revel in change. For change is the definer of your future world.

Second (and related to coping with change) is openness, openness to new ideas, new people, new attitudes, new ways of doing things. Regardless of what you end up doing or where you live, you are going to be part of a world of increasing heterogeneity and interconnectedness. The demographics of Santa Clara County are a great example of this. I used to tell my students in Boston that if they didn’t believe me about the greater diversity of the world of the future, they should visit LA or Silicon Valley, because the future arrives early in such places.

But along with accelerating change comes accelerating interconnection. Thomas Friedman, a noted columnist for the New York Times has recently written a book called The World is Flat. By this he means that advances in technology and communication have diluted most of the advantages of specific countries or regions. Competition in every field has exploded in what is now a truly global economy and world-wide educational environment. You will work with (and compete with) equally talented and motivated people your age from Bangalore and Beijing, as well as more obvious places like Boston or Austin. Doing so will require the capacity to communicate, the capacity to learn, and the ability to tolerate ambiguity, all of which depend on your being open to the new.

Third, you must be able to integrate different modes of thought. Two MIT professors, Richard Lester and Michael Piore, have just published a book entitled simply Innovation. They argue that there are two dominant approaches for those seeking to create new things. One approach is that of the engineers and is dominantly analytical and focused on problem solving. You define the problem, break it into constituent parts, find solutions for the pieces of the problem, and then assemble them into something whole that solves the defined problem. Precision and the elimination of ambiguity are central to this approach and we usually call it rational decision making. As Lester and Piore point out, in this view, customers are seen as having needs that pre-exist and the challenge is to figure out those needs and then to create products that meet them. This rational, project-oriented approach dominates in much of our society.

The second approach they call “interpretive.” Here the emphasis is on constant process, whereby communication may be less precise, but more open-ended and fluid, leading to more creative ideas. In this view, it is recognized that creativity is a social process. The image the authors use is that of a cocktail party. The host will invite a diverse group of people to engage in open-ended communication, not knowing where the conversations will end up. People with different backgrounds commingle and move about, talking to others openly, without a preset agenda. This is the approach of the artists and the explorers. The thrust is the discovery of new directions, new languages, new perspectives.

Lester and Piore argue that both approaches are essential in organizations, that the analytical and interpretive perspectives must interact with each other and, in ideal situations, become integrated. Their metaphor is taken from a visit they made to the Matsushita Corporation in Japan, the company that makes Panasonic electronics. They describe a display case with all of the cell phones developed by the company over time. These phones are arranged in chronological order and are similar to a reel of film, with each cell phone being a single frame. For Matsushita, product development is integrative: it is both analytical (the frames) and interpretive (the film). One could easily extend this metaphor of combining specific with motion to almost any professional field, including, in our case, Fire Science. As Jean-Luc Godard, the famed French film director once put it: “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second.”

Why is all this important? It is important because, as Friedman notes, the future is one in which the capacity to innovate, at both the corporate and national levels, will be key. The United States will not compete with China or other nations in the production of mass production goods. Rather, the U.S. advantage is still in its capacity for innovation. Our history of creativity and the enormous intellectual resources of our colleges and universities are central to this. And, perhaps most importantly, we have a society that is very heterogeneous, thanks to almost 400 years of constant immigration. Because of this, we have developed ways to cope with and take advantage of this rich diversity. We don’t always do this as well as we might, but we do it far better than most other nations. Success in this new world will pose difficult challenges, but will also provide immense opportunities for those attuned to these perspectives.

It strikes me that Cogswell College is well placed to address these things for our students. Our curriculum and context strive to realize this integration – we call it the fusion of engineering and art. And while we may not always achieve our objectives, this gives the College – and more importantly you our graduates – some experience with integration that I believe will serve you increasing well in your futures. You have not been coddled in a static environment. You have experienced change. You have seen the value of openness. You understand networks and connections. And you have studied within an environment that seeks to integrate the analytical and the interpretive. You have to some degree brought all these things together within yourselves. And you now have the chance to define your dreams through these prisms.

The bottom line for me is that I and the faculty and staff of Cogswell have great confidence in you, in your capacity to cope, to be open, to be creative, and to lead. You represent our most significant contribution to the future. For us, you are the future. We are immensely proud of you, we look forward to your successes, and we wish for you that you will achieve those dreams.

Congratulations and thank you for permitting me to be part of this College and this very special day.