When Jane and Leland Stanford lost their only child to typhoid fever, they decided to use their wealth to do something for "other people's" children. In her last major address to the Board of Trustees, in 1902, Jane Stanford said:
It was the paramount purpose of the Founders… to promote the public welfare by founding, endowing and having maintained a university with the colleges, schools, seminaries of learning, mechanical institutes, museums, galleries of art and all other things necessary and appropriate to a university of high degree.
The end was the promotion of the public welfare. The means was a university of high degree, and the education it would offer so that students "will become thereby of greater service to the public."
Participation in a university of high degree is one of the most elevated, noble, honorable forms of public service that I know. As I told our new students at Convocation last fall, they will promote the public welfare through the increase of knowledge: their own knowledge, the knowledge of their fellow students, the faculty's knowledge and society's knowledge.
It may sound a little strange to suggest that the public welfare will be promoted by increasing the knowledge of an individual. To Jane and Leland Stanford, however, that was obvious. They knew, to quote the University's charter, that "cultivation and enlargement of the mind" were necessary conditions "to qualify students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life." They thought of education as a prerequisite of good citizenship. To contribute to society, one must be well prepared. I urged our students, as I urge all of us, to be brave and rigorous in the pursuit of knowledge. The University's seriousness of purpose, its commitment to intellectual values, must also be ours.
Students further promote the public welfare by increasing one another's knowledge. This occurs in classrooms, in dorms, even in the Main Quad during chance encounters. As the poet Goethe once wrote: "We derive great benefit from lively and frank association with educated people. A nod, a warning, encouragement, timely opposition are often capable of changing our lives." Very few communities match a university's opportunity for association with people of diverse interests, talents and backgrounds.
It is no surprise that students learn from the faculty, but it may sound odd that I believe the public service of a university includes the faculty's learning from the students. At a research-intensive university, research and teaching have a dialectical relationship. A 19th-century scholar whose impact on universities the world over has been profound -- Wilhelm von Humboldt -- expressed this relationship bluntly. The university professor does not exist for the sake of the students, he said.
Both teacher and student have their justification in the common pursuit of knowledge. The teacher's performance depends on the students' presence and interest -- without this, science and scholarship could not grow. If the students who are to form [the] audience did not [gather round] of their own free will, [the teacher] would have to seek them out in [the] quest for knowledge. The goals of science and scholarship are worked toward more effectively through the synthesis of the teacher's and the students' dispositions. The teacher's mind is more mature but it is also somewhat one-sided in its development and more dispassionate; the student's mind is less able and less committed but it is nonetheless open and responsive to every possibility.
Students profit when taught by scholars at the frontier of their fields -- one reason to choose a university for undergraduate education. In addition, scholarship itself is enriched when the younger generation consciously, if naively, questions it. This requires discussion in lectures, seminars and laboratories, and that is why our University, through Stanford Introductory Studies, offers, from the very start, small-group interaction with regular faculty, in freshman seminars, sophomore seminars and sophomore tutorials.
Finally, the university renders public service by increasing society's knowledge. In an address to Stanford's 1895 "Pioneer Class," the University's first president, David Starr Jordan, said: "The best political economy is the care and culture of men. The best-spent money of the present is that which is used for the future…. The university stands for the future." To put it differently, Jordan believed the university is "the best political economy."
There is much talk in government and industry of "technology transfer" from universities. However, the most successful method of knowledge transfer lies in educating first-rate students who have been engaged in the search to know, and who then will be able to take on leadership roles in industry, in business, in government and in the universities themselves. From the education of such leaders, a great stream of blessings flows, serving the public welfare.
