Global Summit on the 21st Century Campus--Keynote Address at Cisco Systems
 View the streaming video introduction to the address
Like any great University, the legacy of our campus is built
on a remarkable tradition in which human genius has both discovered and applied
science, technology, and the arts. The future of Case Western Reserve University
is linked not only to how much the University invests in its technology infrastructure,
but to how we leverage those investments to support world class research, enable
and advance scientific breakthroughs, and provide capacity for the pursuit
of the world's most powerful learning environment--for our students,
faculty, and staff. Our vision is inextricably bound to our immediate neighborhood,
to the rest of University Circle, as well as to our city, our region, and the
nation.
In our national colloquium on Great Universities and Their Cities, co-hosted
in January by Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell and myself, a series of best
practices were shared by nine amazing university presidents and some remarkable
civic leaders from each of their cities, including mayors, cabinet ministers,
school superintendents, and others. The topics they addressed included:
- Yale University--Downtown Revitalization
- Washington University, St. Louis--Life Sciences
- University of Illinois, Chicago--Human Resource Development
- Clark University--K-12 education
- University of Rochester--Healthy Cities
- Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond--Technology Transfer
and Regional Economic Development
- York University, Toronto--Arts and Culture
- Johns Hopkins University--Housing and Community Development
Following break-out session on each of
these topics, Neal Conan, host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation,"
moderated a discussion among all these experts to explore common themes
and approaches.
As we've worked to learn from those
lessons and pursue our own strategy in building a uniquely productive relationship
with Cleveland, we've selected a series of key themes that are informing
our work at Case Western Reserve University. In each case, we're
leveraging our investments in technology to bring distinction and value
to our efforts in that area. The four focus areas are:
- Health Care for Cleveland
- Cultural and Artistic Development
- Technology Transfer in the Life Sciences
- Neighborhood Revitalization, which incorporates housing and community
development, K-12 education, human resource development, and closing
the digital divide
I want to discuss our current thinking
and work in these areas and reflect on some of the key transformative qualities
of our technology investments in helping to shape our 21st century campus--and, I hasten to add, the transformation of our relationship to the
21st century city in which we live, work, and learn. I begin my comments
on these efforts with a reflection about the human mind, the 21st century
university, networks, and the global city.
The brain is an amazing organ. As a psychiatrist, I've spent my professional
life trying to get a glimpse into the inner workings of the human mind. One
of the most important instruments of human agency and intervention in the
pursuit of further understanding of the human mind--the complexities of
human relationships, neurobiology, and our attempt to understand the environment
around us--has been the construction of the research university. This is
the greatest of all achievements of the human mind in its effort to understand
itself--the ultimate positive feedback loop!
The form of the modern city as it emerged in Europe has a remarkable resemblance
to the human brain. In fact, the genius of human civilization in creating
an urban landscape--characterized by communities, neighborhoods, downtowns,
roadways, airports, seaports, bridges, and transportation--replicates
the neural networks of the human brain. Urban planning is the topic of another
conversation, but suffice it to say that, like the human brain, great city
planning evolves with incentives and extends to feed healthy opportunities.
It also requires sustenance and, from time to time, resuscitation to keep
the ecosystem of the city growing and flourishing.
Like many other universities, Case Western Reserve has not always had a
close connection to its city. A look at our physical landscape, as you
are welcomed to our university today from the city's neighborhoods
immediately adjacent to our campus, would illustrate the cliché
of the town/gown divide that characterizes universities' relationships
to their cities around the world. By orienting the fronts of our buildings
to the all-important "quad," what we do is point the backs
of all our buildings to our community--to our potential partners.
The Challenge
The challenge for our university is to take
the inherited realities of our physical landscape and try to grow a healthier
relationship with our city. Our goals are:
- To become the best university neighbor any city has ever had.
- To be a major contributor to the vitality of our inner city.
- To be a catalytic agent for overcoming the digital divide.
- To be a meaningful part of the economic vibrancy of our regional economy
through successful commercialization and technology transfer.
- To take the incredible scientific and medical breakthroughs for which
we are known all around the world and--right in Cleveland--show
how the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, MetroHealth Medical Center,
and the Veteran's Administration Hospital can all work together
with Case develop a model for a healthy Cleveland.
- To become an existence proof for the nation and the world.
The ingredients for this transformation
are informed by the neural paths of the human brain, in part because the
most critical factor is deliberate and purposeful human intervention. There
are no easy answers to the human condition in the modern American city.
All three themes of connecting, enabling, and transforming our community
add up to a message that rings true for all of Cleveland and is made possible
only by a new orientation to power--the power to partner, in contrast
to the power to dominate. This too is the subject of a much longer conversation,
but we have already seen a remarkable set of turn-around stories when the
opportunity to work together is driven less by the competitive thrill of
negotiating a "deal" and more by collaboration, or by a joint
strategic plan.
Working
with my colleague, Dr. Fred Rothstein, CEO of University Hospitals of Cleveland,
our primary affiliate for over a century, we set out not to "negotiate
a deal" but to create a strategic framework for creating the most
exciting, ambitious, research-intensive academic medical center in the
country. The success of our medical school and their hospital is completely
interconnected so--after years of acrimony--a group of new
leaders broke away from the zero sum game in a "declaration of interdependence."
The result of our thinking about the development
of a joint strategic plan to achieve shared goals for national leadership
led to the creation of the Case Research Institute earlier this year, followed
almost immediately by two wonderful outcomes: first, a magnificent $25
million gift from Iris and Bert Wolstein to name one of our joint ventures
the Wolstein Research Building, due to open this fall; and second, the
recruitment of Dr. Ralph Horwitz from Yale to serve as Vice President for
Medical Affairs, Dean of Medicine, and the first Director of the Case Research
Institute.
An Opportunity for the Community
The same win-win philosophy holds true in our technology initiative known
as OneCleveland, which is the reason I was invited to speak here today.
Left to themselves to work in what they perceive to be the best interests
of their respective organizations, technology workers will reproduce parallel
network infrastructures, execute separate procurement arrangements, develop
application solutions in silos, and squander redundant investments of human
technical talent, which is still too scarce, all in the name of "providing
good customer service." Our approach to OneCleveland has been informed
by a mission to be a big, bold 21st-century community-oriented project
that delivers advanced information technology capabilities to achieve community
priorities for economic development, learning, job training, research support,
preeminence and distinction:
OneCleveland is committed to creating a
seamless, robust digital infrastructure for the residents, businesses,
and institutions of Northeast Ohio. Its objective include:
- Empowering individuals for personal and economic opportunities;
- Enhancing education and training opportunities for students and adults;
- Helping cities and counties to provide services in new ways;
- Supporting the delivery of world-class health services;
- Expanding opportunities for educational and cultural institutions;
and
- Creating and linking area networks to take advantage of efficiencies
of scale to boost our regional capacity for these activities.
This last item, network infrastructure, has
been the cornerstone of the technical effort to inspire our community toward
a synergistic, forward-looking orientation, building on the strength of
its ingenuity and serving as a springboard to a relevant positioning strategy
in the digital age. While the physical architecture of our inherited environment
is inward looking (and we are doing much to address that in an exciting
new campus master plan), the network architecture we are designing is outward
focused, with connections to University Circle institutions as well as
to backbone services connecting much of Northeast Ohio.
From the outset, as we set out to reinvest in our own network infrastructure,
responding both to the life cycle costs of network technology and to the
need to provide our researchers and students with the best network services
in the world, we engaged our unique constellation of neighbors and asked
them to work with us in the renaissance under way at the University. The
response has been amazing--from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Institute of Music,
the Cleveland Institute of Art, NASA Glenn Research Center, and many others.
Not surprisingly, many of the most important
scientific and medical research advances at Case Western Reserve University
are happening at the boundaries of traditional departments, schools, and
institutions. Not only do the network and the many devices that hang on the
network enable collaborative, multi-disciplinary research, they also enhance
collaboration with partners in the region, across the state, and around the
world.
Collaborations across our Case School of Engineering,
School of Medicine, and Weatherhead School of Management, along with NASA's
Glenn Research Center, have already inspired faculty activity in areas from
wireless technology prototyping on Mars to wireless implants designed by
our biomedical engineering faculty, along with faculty colleagues in surgery.
For
example, a group of nearly 45 faculty and researchers from NASA Glenn, the
Cleveland Clinic, the VA Medical Center, and University Hospitals are working
together and with several technology partners in a multi-disciplinary science
curriculum entitled "Discovery Through Visualization," an integrated
approach to science education across the disciplines and informed by advanced
visualization tools. In addition to shaping curricular elements for Case,
one of our award-winning faculty members is developing a compendium of materials
for high school science curricula, beginning with a "Discovery Through
Visualization for Nanotechnology" for 9th and 10th grade science classes.
Our Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty are leading several
research projects, with support from NSF and other agencies, on the extraordinary
opportunities afforded by our massive network infrastructure in terms of
measurement, end-to-end performance, and software protocols for network management.
Because ours is among the very first massive switched-gig-to-the-desktop
environments deployed across the enterprise, colleagues from all over the
world are now engaged in these projects, and many graduate students are seeking
opportunities for scientific investigation.
The
single most important question facing the technology community, and one that
I hold our CIO, Lev Gonick, and his team particularly accountable for, is
the demonstrated value of the network to the teaching and research missions
of the University. Unless our significant investment contributes to our becoming
not a good research university but a great research university, we will always
be sub-optimizing. What excites me about the environment at Case is that
we are positioned to make this a "core" part of every undergraduate's
experience. Our goal is that the undergraduate liberal education experience
should be nested inside one of the most vibrant advanced research programs
in the world. This goal of combining the rigorous scholarship associated
with a great research university and the liberal learning more classically
found at great liberal arts colleges compels us to bring research-based learning
into our classrooms and other learning spaces. We have a faculty group working
on a project called "Learning Objects and Advanced Network Technology."
They use the network daily to make enable learning moments in science and
engineering that otherwise wouldn't be practical, such as digital microscopy,
fly-throughs of the human body, etc.
Simulators have dramatically improved health sciences education at Case.
Dental, nursing, and medical students are exposed to the simulator environment
from the first week of their academic careers. In Dentistry, students are
scoring 25% higher with 50% less faculty intervention, and they're
getting to the real patients faster with better results because of our leading
work in this area. Innovations like our community dental sealant program
are possible in part because we have managed to reduce in-class time through
the use of simulators. We've given students more hands-on opportunities
to make a difference--and to find professional inspiration through service
learning--with the result that every child in the Cleveland Municipal
School District now receives dental sealants because every dental student
at Case is in the schools, serving the community's oral health needs.
Collaborations between the Cleveland Clinic's surgical education program
and our engineering faculty are actually creating robotic medical intervention
devices that will suture surgical patients with more precise stitching in
some very specific procedures than can be accomplished by even the most skilled
surgeon. And of course all of this becomes accessible by providing a gigabit
of connectivity to every pillow-top in our student residences.
An Art Form Emerges
Another example of the transformation underway is inspired by artistic genius
and enabled by our technology visionaries. Separated by nearly
2,400 miles, dancers from Case Western Reserve University and
musicians from the Cleveland Institute of Music conquered time
and distance to perform new music and choreography simultaneously
at our Mather Dance Center in Cleveland and at the University
of Southern California's Bing Theater in Los Angeles. A new
art form came into existence with the premier of "Kinetic
Shadows," an original piece of dance led by our faculty
member and former Martha Graham dancer and choreographer Gary
Galbraith and performed with students from our dance program
in Cleveland and on the campus of the University of Southern
California. An original piece of brass music played by Cleveland
Institute of Music students--some in Cleveland and others in
Los Angeles--was all stitched together over an unprecedented
sustained bandwidth of 300 megabits/second for the entire performance,
which was viewed live in both Cleveland and LA. Unlike any
other playbill you might have seen, the "Kinetic Shadows credit
list included a diverse combination of creative artists and
creative techies, all contributing to an incredible experience,
with dancers and musicians at Case Western Reserve dancing
simultaneously with colleagues in California who were projected
on screens on the Cleveland stage.
The main thing I want to convey about this
expression of a new art form is its message that the technology community
at our University is an integral part of our inspiration to greatness and
to transformation. This takes form every day in the blend of services and
customer support. It's also grounded in a fairly special commitment,
in my experience, on the part of our technology community to map their own
measurable outcomes and accountability to the core mission of our institution
and its vision. It's only because of that mission-driven focus that
our university has built out one of the fastest networks in the world.
Our two partners in this effort have been Cisco Systems and
Sprint Corporation. We've now nearly completed the build-out of our
wired and wireless infrastructure, creating what our techies tell me will
be more robust, more stable, more secure, and less expensive--and if you
believe all that I have a bridge to sell you. But truthfully, the network
has been a celebrated part of some our most exciting developments in the
past year, including especially the opening of the Peter B. Lewis Building
for our Weatherhead School of Management, designed by Frank Gehry.
This is a marvel of architecture and technology,
and is now a major tourist attraction for Cleveland. The school's dean.
Mohsen Anvari, has explained to national media that we've had to train
docents for all the Frank Gehry aficionados who fly in from their visits
to Bilbao, Spain, when we're really just trying to run the most innovative
M.B.A. program on the planet.
Our
Dean Mohsen Anvari is on the record, in print in the NY Times, television
on Good Morning America and on NPR radio...
"Schools are distinguished by the differentiated academic program and
the amenities they offer. IT at the Weatherhead School of Management is both
a differentiated programmatic offering and one of our key amentities. The
Peter B. Lewis Building is the most advanced technologically in the world.
IT is a central feature—and we would have it no other way."
I could give you many other examples, but these "testimonials,"
while they say a lot about any university, are not the end of the story at
Case Western Reserve University. I view everything I've shown you as
just a first step in our bold effort to transform our relationship to one
another and to our community.
Since I come out of a medical background,
I have to add that the entire first two years of our medical school curriculum
are available online, used extensively by our students connected to our network
in a seemingly casual and natural way. (We were the first school to provide
a laptop to every student a decade ago.)
Technology that Links and Excites
I could give you many other examples, but
while they would be big news at just about any other university, they are
not the main technology headline at Case Western Reserve. I view everything
I've described thus far as just a first step in our bold effort to
transform our relationship to one another and to our community. So let me
focus now on the "OneCleveland" initiative.
This is a unique arrangement, one that has stirred attention is places like
University Business and the Chronicle of Higher Education. OneCleveland carries
with it an opportunity for other educational, cultural, research, and governmental
entities to join us, along with Cisco and Sprint, in developing not only
the fastest and largest network infrastructure in the world at University
Circle, but in acquiring appropriate, comparable infrastructure that will
enable us to support a common vision of a community working together to gain
more control over its destiny.
OneCleveland represents an integrated, regional
technology strategy to create greater value, distinction, and prominence
for all those involved than could ever be accomplished in our separate environments.
I have to acknowledge that integral to our effort in OneCleveland has been
the vision and technology inspiration provided by Cisco Systems and by John
Chambers, who has taken time to visit Cleveland, to help shape the vision,
and to support our collaborative effort.
OneCleveland is all about enabling a smart, strong, safe, and healthy community.
Its members include Case Western Reserve University, the City of Cleveland,
the Cleveland Municipal School District, Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga
County, NASA Glenn Research Center, the Regional Transit Authority, Cuyahoga
Community College--and others who are enlisting each month.
The
logic of the initiative is straightforward, with three elements:
- Create a robust regional technology infrastructure throughout Northeast
Ohio,
- Leverage group-purchasing opportunities, and
- Establish strategic relationships with technology vendors.
OneCleveland has already acquired or been given
more than 200 miles of dark fiber, and is working with Cisco to light up
that infrastructure with cutting-edge optical networking electronics.
But
the goal of OneCleveland is not about technology or infrastructure. First
and foremost, it is about creating unique value propositions for education,
research, e-government, cultural institutions, and health care. It's
an explicit undertaking on the part of technology communities to work together
and to align their contributions with the mission and goals of our larger
community.
Building
Community Characteristics
I've said that OneCleveland is all about
enabling a smart, safe, healthy and strong community. Let's start with
"smart."
Online communities are important to faculty
at every research university in the world. Listservs, peer-reviewed online
journals, refereed grant proposal submissions, and of course the ubiquitous
e-mail, have transformed our communication patterns in ten short years. Our
faculty are now using the network to support net-meetings, including voice
and desktop video conferencing. Perhaps most exciting, OneCleveland makes
possible a huge urban intranet that supports distributing education assets
between the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Institute of Music,
for example, or between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural
History--at nearly zero cost because we own the infrastructure.
In our local context, perhaps the most ambitious
effort of OneCleveland is to work with Cleveland's economic development
centers, with the Cleveland Municipal School District and the public library
systems, and with dozens of community-based technology centers ultimately
to eradicate the digital divide. If we are indeed entering the Renaissance
of the Information Age, where creativity and ideas are the new currency and
invention a primary virtue, where technology truly has the power to transform
lives and help us solve fundamental problems, then our engagement with the
inner city of America will become the measure by which history will judge
our success or failure as a society.
Working together, we can also build a strong community. In the next decade,
OneCleveland seeks to support the doubling of the number of IT workers in
Northeast Ohio from 75,000 to 150,000. Critical to the long term health of
our region is the enhancement of our traditional manufacturing economy through
value-added innovations and new, knowledge-driven economic growth and development.
Case Western Reserve University is an engine of innovation in fuel cells
and advanced power, in MEMS technology, in wireless and other instrumentation
technologies, as well as in biotechnology, biomedical engineering, and bioinformatics.
While
Case will contribute to the vitality of our region by becoming one of the
nation's premier research universities, we embrace the broader vision
of OneCleveland to work across our own institution and with the more than
20 other colleges universities within a 50-mile radius to create an environment
that supports and cultivates innovation, attracts and nurtures diversity,
and advances many of the other ingredients of a vibrant, economically sustainable,
21st century community.
Now here is where it gets really interesting, because by thinking synergistically,
we can not only be smart and strong, but Cleveland can also be safe. Both
on campus and around the region, we're leveraging the technical infrastructure
of OneCleveland to provide better tools for public safety, and we're
helping to make our inner-city community more attractive to new young professionals,
families, and new immigrants, as well as the 500,000 residents who already
call the city their home, of course. Wireless technology, interactive access
to public safety databases, and inter-connected resources in support of homeland
security (connected to the Centers for Disease Control and to other Federal
agencies) are all critical tools for our 21st century cities. OneCleveland
provides a model for community cooperation that is already being emulated
elsewhere in Ohio and reviewed with interest by the national group CEOs for
Cities as a model for adoption around the country.
And finally, working together we can also become more healthy. Today the
Cleveland Clinic, consistently one of the top-ranked medical facilities in
the world, offers a comprehensive, online service known as e-Cleveland Clinic,
offering second opinion services to individuals and major companies all around
the nation. A prototype version of this project is under way with the employees
of Cisco Systems.
People come from all over the world to Cleveland
for health care. Christopher Reeves recently had surgery at University Hospitals
for an implant of a bio-engineered breathing device that was developed by
Case faculty and funded through a collaboration with the Veterans Administration
hospital at University Circle. Everyone likes to talk about the way in which
sheiks, movie stars, and sports champions all come to be treated by Cleveland's
medical community.
But as wonderful as that is, we are challenging
ourselves and the rest of the community to adopt a much bolder vision: to
engage in a new social contract with the City of Cleveland that focuses on
public health, to mobilize the significant resources and talents needed to
launch a "Healthy Cleveland" initiative, and to hold that up
to the nation as an example of what we can do together.
We have a unique opportunity in health care: if you can make Cleveland
healthier, you can make America healthier. We are the only city in the
country large enough to mirror the demographics of America where there
is only one medical school, and it's a medical school that doesn't
own or operate any clinical facilities--so we're not a competitor.
We are now aligned and have long-term affiliations with all four major
health care systems in Cleveland. That's why, just as we helped recruit
a new CIO for the city of Cleveland (who gets resources directly from the
University by being a member of our faculty), we are now working with the
city to recruit a new Health Commissioner, who will not only have a faculty
appointment but whose entire operation will be moved onto our campus in
the most unique public-private healthy city collaboration ever conceived.
And OneCleveland will play a critical
role in this healthy city initiative. Telemedicine and wireless technologies
not only enable passive monitoring of implanted devices and other high
tech interventions, they also facilitate monitoring vital signs and simple,
home-based testing with transmission of findings. The infrastructure of
OneCleveland will enable Clevelanders to have access to their medical records,
along with critical public healthcare education resources like NetWellness,
a joint collaboration between Case, Ohio State, and the University of Cincinnati.
OneCleveland allows us to revisit some fundamental assumptions about the
delivery of health care by working with new advanced technologies like
wireless defibrillators and other implanted devices that can actually self-correct
or be directed by authorized personnel to adjust interventions based on
real time data transactions.
It's all incredibly exciting, and
we've only scratched the surface!
Former Harvard President Neil Rudenstine
said recently that the network, and the convergence of services on the
network--computers, television, radio, satellites, telephone, and wireless--are causing a "tectonic shift in academia."
Great universities and their cities understand that the shift underway
is indeed profound, and that the opportunities are at least as significant
as the uncertainties and risks associated with charting our common future.
We are at an inflection point on our way toward a common, interconnected
future. Great universities like ours are co-dependent on the strength,
vitality, and vibrancy of the communities and ecosystem that made our institutions'
world-class programs possible in the first place.
This country has made a major investment in its
public and private institutions, which now stand in every region and virtually
every sizeable community in the nation. They constitute a treasured part
of our life, of our culture and our heritage. Case Western Reserve University
and the City of Cleveland understand the enormous opportunity afforded
by the growing power of grid computing and the complex networks that will
shape our new landscape, connecting us to the City and the world, and shaping
the contours of the new ecosystem that will nourish us into the future.
But let us not forget that technology and networks alone will not cause
the tectonic shift to improve the human condition. Leadership, innovation
and transformation all require deliberate and intentional intervention.
"Willing is not enough," wrote Goethe. "We must do."
The challenge is ours!
|
