UT to the high-tech community: Shall we dance?

*Richard A. Cherwitz
Stefanie Sanford

Austin American-Statesman
Published: April 4, 1999

From whiffle balls to jibes about the staid and old-fashioned university, UT has taken a beating on these pages in recent months. Austin's vibrant high tech community has taken the 115 year old, proud 40 Acres to task: "Change or become irrelevant." Tough talk from these brash and successful young entrepreneurs who were aided and abetted by an eloquent fourth estate. In this millennial dance of the new economy and the old university, the ultimate question is as simple as the timeless tension of the senior prom--Who leads? ]

While the high tech community is hip and exciting, with their cell phones, denim shirts, fast cars and dizzying IPO's, the bottom-line pressures and frenzied pace of bringing innovation to market make them fundamentally ill-suited to create knowledge. Creating knowledge is what research universities have always done and will continue to do--in spite of the whiffle balls.

The primary mission of universities is to discover knowledge and teach students. They are places of intellectual experimentation--often for its own sake. Innovation to innovate rather than to make money may be a difficult concept for aggressive entrepreneurs to understand. But that is what makes scholars different from those in the private sector, and what makes academia forever relevant and occasionally annoying.

"But times are changing and so must you," is the refrain heard from political and business corridors. Agreed. UT is working to change every day, understanding that today's workplace makes the education of students a different enterprise than it was 20 years ago. While technology may not move as fast for academics as for Alpha 360, or move at the speed of business, it still is revolutionizing the way universities operate.

The rigid boundaries of insular academic fields are giving way to inter-disciplinary collaboration. Just two weeks ago, the top ranking woman from Microsoft, Deborah Willingham--who was featured in the Seattle Times for playing hard to get in a uniquely 90's way, declining a summons by Bill Gates in favor of attending her son's school play [Gates responded by sending a helicopter to the school to transport her to the Redmond compound in time to catch the last half of the discussion.]--came to UT as her first campus visit. She was treated to a host of events spotlighting the pronounced impact of technology on 15 different disciplines. Far from the traditional Computer Sciences, Engineering, MBA dog and pony show, UT showed her technology in each of those PLUS English, Art History, RTF, Biomedical Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Music and Nursing. A peek into the power of this sort of cross-disciplinary conversation occurred during the Women in Technology Roundtable sponsored by the Office of Graduate Studies. A graduate student presented a sample of her doctoral research in electro-acoustic music--just the sort of thing that business types might roll their eyes at as a mindless and erudite waste of time and funding. The student used software to compose "music." The sample was from a class--where all of the input sounds were produced by undergraduates who wadded and tore paper. Why? These varied noises were processed through a computer in order to "compose" new and unique sounds reminiscent of a swamp full of snakes, or bugs or dripping water. For what purpose other than creating something novel, you might wonder? When the student finished playing her piece for those assembled at the Roundtable, a longtime and accomplished Nursing professor asked, "Can you do this with any input sound? What if we used this to teach nursing students to hear the difference between sick and healthy heartbeats in infants, or to discern whether a baby's cry is a cry of frustration or one of pain?"

Microsoft VP Willingham's astonishment was obvious, "I had no idea that the use of technology on campuses was this broad." What an interesting revelation from a confidant of one of the world's richest men and most innovative technology pioneers. Indeed, this is precisely what the ivory tower provides that businesses cannot: the time, the venue and the intellectual testing ground to create knowledge for the betterment of the world--not just the good of stockholders. These epiphanies may not make you rich or even result in front-page headlines. But they're nothing to throw whiffle balls at. Perhaps you are right, Alpha 360. We have been too shy. At this millennial prom, it may be up to chivalrous, "square" academics, to make the first move. In the weeks and months to come, therefore, we promise to do publicly what academics have traditionally done in classrooms, teach--to help educate readers about the exciting opportunities for collaboration and learning between the modern university and larger community. We begin with business--Care to dance?

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*Specializing in contemporary rhetoric and theories of argument, Dr. Cheriwtz is aProfessor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of two books and over seventy articles and papers, and the recipient of numerous campus as well as national teaching and research awards, Dr. Cherwitz has been a political communication consultant .

Stefanie Sanford is a consultant and a doctoral student in political communication and technology at the University of Texas (1999). She holds a master's degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and has served as a policy adviser and speech writer for several state and local officials in Texas and for the White House.