Jared L. Cohon President Carnegie Mellon University

Ladies and Gentlemen:
It¡¯s a great pleasure to be here. It¡¯s an honor for me to have this opportunity to address to presidents of China¡¯s leading universities. I want also to thank vice-minister for this opportunity, for the wonderful hospitality, we have been treated very well, my wife and myself, we appreciate that greatly. We hope that some day we might be able to return the hospitality, at least a little bit of it when you travel to US. 

Indeed the history of Carnegie Mellon, as President Shan has just referred to, is an important one and a unique in the history of higher education in my country. And that will be the basis for my discussion today. I have three topics I will try to cover, but I will focus my attention on number two, strategic planning, because I believe not only that is an very important issue for universities everywhere including Chinese universities, but the experience of Carnegie Mellon University is a very good case study of strategic planning in just a way that president Shan referred to President Wang mentioning Carnegie Mellon. So I will spend most of my time on that, but before I talk about strategic planning, I want to give you a brief history of Carnegie Mellon. Because to understand our history and the nature of Carnegie Mellon today is important for understanding how strategic planning has importance for us, therefore, how it might be important for you. The other topics that I hope to cover are IT and its impact on education, those in terms of the opportunities provided including a new learning model as well as distance education. The other topic I hope to cover is economic development in the role of universities, talking from the perspective of Carnegie Mellon¡¯s experiences in this. Now I will speak until 3: 30 and I will stop exactly 3:30 more or less by my watch. If I have not gotten to these topics, I will not cover them. Because I think strategic planning, especially coming from the president of Carnegie Mellon is most important for this session. 

So let me turn first to the history of Carnegie Mellon and also some information about Carnegie Mellon today. First, the history. Carnegie Mellon was founded in the year 1900, so they have a Cambridge in the morning and Carnegie Mellon in the afternoon. I think it is very fitting, it¡¯s sort of bounds of spectrum from one of the world¡¯s oldest universities to one of the America¡¯s youngest research universities. We do not have a tremendous history behind us that Cambridge and many American universities have as well. Our founder was Andrew Carnegie, who is famous in America, in fact, around the world for first getting very rich by making steel, a man giving away virtually all of his money. He is considered to be the greatest philanthropist in the history of America, even Bill Gates, I think would agree with that. Opposed with him is Arthur Harmer Sherlock, the first president of Carnegie Mellon. Now I should point out that we started life as a Carnegie technical school. We have a very modest beginning for Andrew Carnegie had in mind was basically what in America we call a trade school. He had no interest in a fancy college, like Harvard, but rather he wanted a school with his name on it that focused on real trades, learning how to work, learning how to make things, that¡¯s what we started as. In fact, in a lot of ways, we have not changed very much. I will explain what I mean by that. 
Groundbreaking for our campus occurred in 1905. What¡¯s interesting about the picture is you might notice is the only one who is actually digging is Mrs. Harmer Sherlock when all the men are standing and watching her do it. I don¡¯t know what that says about our history. 

In our early years, perhaps the most significant first event after our founding was in 1912 when we changed our name to Carnegie Institute of Technology and that¡¯s how we were known until 1967. In that year we were granted permission to offer bachelor¡¯s degrees and that started what became one of America¡¯s very strong engineering colleges. Not very well known to even people in Pittsburgh where Carnegie Mellon is located is we have one of the strongest colleges of fine arts in America almost since our creation. In fact, Carnegie Mellon was the first university in US to offer a bachelor¡¯s degree in theater, drama. And we still have a very strong drama program. 

Moving forward in time to the period between World War I and World War II, perhaps the most significant event other than the fact that we beat Notre Dame in football, that was a joke, you can laugh, was the creation of something called the Carnegie plan for professional education. This was led by president Robert Dory, the third president of Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Tech in those days. It was perhaps one of the first examples of strategic planning at Carnegie Mellon which had a very profound effect on the university and on engineering education in America and around the world. Until that time, engineering education focused almost exclusively on science and mathematics and technology but the Carnegie plan started was the training of engineers in humanities and social sciences and communication skills, in knowledge in world around them, not just in technology. It¡¯s quite remarkable. That¡¯s started in Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1930s, almost 70 years ago. 

After World War II, Carnegie Tech started to develop strength in research, though the real growth happened after 1970 which all come to in a moment. Two very significant events, however, which occurred in this period are first, the creation of Carnegie Mellon¡¯s business school, which we called graduate school of industrial administration, this was significant, because it was one of the first examples of truly inter-disciplinary research in education at graduate level. Before our business school was created, business education in US was basically former businessmen, they were all men, getting up and talking about how they did management in their companies. What Carnegie Mellon started instead was business education rooted in the social sciences and mathematics, of course that¡¯s the standard model today, it started at Carnegie Mellon in 1949. 

Another significant event for us was the creation of our computer science department in 1965 that was a very early event in the area of computer science. It became of course, one of Carnegie Mellon¡¯s greatest strength. Now until 1967, we were the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Until this time when we became Carnegie Mellon University, we have developed reputation in certain selected areas, like IT. But in 1967 that is still too new for people to recognize it. We were known as a good engineering school, which largely drew its students from the local region. It was known nationally for a few selected things, like the Carnegie Plan which I mentioned before. We become Carnegie Mellon University in 1967 when the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Research. The Mellon Institute was created by the Mellon family. This is another rich family in Pittsburgh, a family that made its money in banking, in which it created an industrial research institute to support the companies they had helped to create, companies like Alcol, the big producer of aluminum. This merger then created a new university and we made the transition for being an institute of technology to being a university. This set the stage for one of the most remarkable leaps forward by an institution of higher education in American higher education history. This period, 1972 to 1990 coincides with the ten year of Carnegie Mellon¡¯s sixth president Richard Cyert. Cyert, you will see spelling of his name later on. President Cyert was a master of strategic planning. And it was Cyert who led the way to focus on the IT, not exclusively, but very heavily. This led to building on our existing strength, our strength in our computer science department, in creation of many inter disciplinary research centers and institutes. That was the key, inter-disciplinary collaboration. This was the key principle on which our strategy was formed in the 1970s and 1980s and it continues today to be the bedrock, the foundation on which Carnegie Mellon strategies are based. Some of the examples of research centers are famous Robotics Institute, the Software Engineering Institute created in 1984 as the nation¡¯s support institute for our department of defense as relates to software. And in 1986 we created a school of computer science from our department of computer science. That is very unusual in America. When we use the name of school which conveys the idea of a large academic unit. In Carnegie Mellon, computer science is very big indeed. 

By 1990, Carnegie Mellon had greatly improved its research strength and its reputation as a result, that was the focus of president Cyert. His successor, my predecessor as president, our seventh president focused instead on undergraduate education which had largely been ignored during the 1970s and 1980s. I will talk more about that in a little while when I start talking about strategic planning. We also enhanced our inter-disciplinary research and added more inter-disciplinary research centers, which as I said, is very important to Carnegie Mellon. Today, Carnegie Mellon consists of seven colleges and schools, they are listed here. We retained the old name of Carnegie Institute of Technology, which is our engineering college, we have our college of fine arts, humanity and social sciences, etc. You notice that we are a very focused university. There is no school of law, there is no school of medicine. We focus on engineering, computer science, fine arts, business, and public policy. That¡¯s what we do best in Carnegie Mellon, that is what we stay focused on. There will not be a school of law or a school of medicine at least during my presidency and probably for many many years to come. 

Let me give you some numbers about Carnegie Mellon. Today we have about 5,000 undergraduate students, notice about 35 from China, that is a fairly small number, about 3,500 graduate students, but almost 400 from china, which is a very large number, more than 10 % of our graduate students are from China. We are very proud of the alumni from our university who turned to China and who now populate the faculty of universities like Qinghua. Sometimes Qinghua is called MIT of China, we would like to think about it as Carnegie Mellon of China. You see we have about 1,300 faculty, many faculty for such a small student body that reflects our research focus and about 1,700 staff. We are a small university by any country standard, including America¡¯s. 

Let me talk a little bit about our finances. It shows you our revenues and our expenditures for the academic year that just ended one month ago. Our annual revenues are about 500 million dollars, and so are our expenditures. So we have 500 million dollars, about 8,500 students. We are among the smallest research universities in America, but very focused, very good in what we do. This is further breakdown of our revenues. This is actually quite revealing about the nature of Carnegie Mellon. About 35% of our revenues come from tuition, that is a little bit high among research universities, but not too untypical. About 42% of our revenues come from research, that is very high. When I say come from research, these are sponsored research, grants and contracts, mostly from the national government in US, but about 30% from industry and other sources, which is also quite high. About 8% of our revenues come from the income from our endowment, now that is very significant, that is a very low number compared to the other leading universities in America. This gives you some insight into Carnegie Mellon, why we have to be so focused and so strategic. The reason is we don¡¯t have very much money. In particular, we don¡¯t have much discretional money that president can apply to new activities. Our competitor universities, by that I mean MIT, Stanford, Penn, Cornel, Princeton, this percentage would be 2 or 3 or 4 times that number, which gives them a great competitive advantage. So we have to be smarter. I am glad president of those universities are here. And I would ask you not to just repeat what I just said. 
Let me show you the rankings. You would ask me about it even if I didn¡¯t show you. Unlikely UK, our rankings are done by private magazines who do these to sell magazines. They do it very successfully. That is they sell magazines very successfully. Universities had to pay attention to these ranking because our students do. They paid very close attention to rankings and movements, even one or two positions can have very significant impact on students¡¯ demand. US News will report ranks of universities overall for undergraduate education, they use a complicated formula that is really quite controversial we don¡¯t talk about it. We are ranked overall 23rd in the nation. Remember we are very focused university. We don¡¯t try to do everything. Our business program is in top ten as is our engineering programs. The graduate rankings, these in business they get rank by US News, Business Week, Wall Street Journal or private publications again, we were ranked in the second ten, generally. Wall Street likes us, they ranked us number 2 in the world.
We don¡¯t put a lot of stock on rankings unless they are very good. Then we think they are excellent rankings, very well done. Our graduate engineering program ranks 8th in most recent ranking. Computer engineering was ranked 4th this year down from No. 1 last year. All of our engineering departments are in the top 15 in their specialty areas. Computer science, our Ph. D program was ranked number 1, and we are ranked in the top ten in all these specialty areas they rank in US News. We are number 2 in artificial intelligence which was invented in Carnegie Mellon, and systems; number 6 in theory. And our public policy program is ranked 7th in the country. Information Technology specialty area ranks No.1, IT public policy. Finally, our psychology program is ranked 9th, Cognitive Science specialty ranked number 2. Here I just want to pause and point out something. There is something to these rankings, full out they maybe. One of the things you may have noticed is if it related to computer and IT, we are ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in the country. In engineering, computer science, in business and in public policy and in psychology, in a way, cognitive science, IT and branch of psychology. Everyone of the those departments or schools at Carnegie Mellon related to IT was invented or created by one person, his name was Herbert Simon, this is a name known to some of you. He was a remarkable person. If ever there is an example of a single intellectual force shaping a university, it is Carnegie Mellon, and Herbert Simon had enormous impact. He died last year at the age of 83, I think he was, he was writing papers until 3 days before he died. He was a remarkable man. 

Before I turned to strategic planning, I want to spend just a moment talking about the character of Carnegie Mellon. What kind of institution are we? This is very important as a point of the culture for discussing strategic planning. We think of these characteristics when we think of Carnegie Mellon. One of the remarkable things I found about Carnegie Mellon is how universally shared these values or characteristics are, that is ask any professor at Carnegie Mellon, what is distinctive about Carnegie Mellon? This is what they will say, without my pounding upon them anyway, ¡°we focus on problem-solver.¡± This goes back to the very beginning of our universities as a trade school when Andrew Carnegie wanted a new school that would focus on making things, we still make things, now we make software and poems, and works of art, instead of what we used to make, machines, but we still make things, it¡¯s part of everything we do, our undergraduate education, our graduate education and our research. We do not just work on theory, we take it all a way to implementation of the product, or the system itself. Inter disciplinary collaboration which I mentioned before is part of everything we do in Carnegie Mellon, this was I believe more than anything born out of necessity, because we have limited resources compared to our competitors, we have to make use of everything we have. The word in American English is leverage, we need to leverage what we have, get synergy out of everything we have, that means inter-disciplinary collaboration, working across departments, even across colleges, on common problems. We are innovative, Carnegie Mellon, I think of as a restless place, i.e. never satisfied, never complacent with what it has. It very rarely celebrates its successes. The attitude rather is, well, that was nice, but what is next new thing that we are going to do? Very innovative, very hard on the president when you have a university like that. We are very small and compact. Small, I already talked about that, by compact, I mean we are all located on one small campus, so it is very easy to get from one place to another. Finally we have unusual mix of strengths, not only we are very strong in technology, but we are also very strong in the fine arts, that has always been something of unusual combination that can create tensions. But today, we are very thankful for having that mix of strengths, now we are working on making even more out of it. So this is what makes Carnegie Mellon distinctive, these five characteristics. 

Now you know everything there is to know about Carnegie Mellon. Let me turn to strategic planning, my second topic, the main focus for my talk. Of course, strategic planning is important for any organization, not just universities. But I believe it is esp. important for universities. Because we, universities presidents, face so many demands, on the universities, and on us individual, from so many different constituencies. The government in all it expects, of course, government is not a monolith, there is many different ministries of government, there is local government, there is national government, there is your professors, and your students, and your alumni, there is the world of academia in what it expects. How do you make choices when you have so many competing demands on you? Strategic planning is especially important when you face limited resources. Of course, we all face limited resources, there is never enough money, never enough time, etc. But it is especially important for universities like Carnegie Mellon which as I already pointed out, has much less in a way of discretional money to support our activities than do our competitors. So we have to be very strategic, we have to make very careful choices. Ever since president Cyert, in 1970s and 1980s, the basis for our strategic planning has been the idea of comparative advantage, by that, we mean, understand what you are good at, and then leverage that, get as much out of those strengths as possible, another way to put it is, build on your strength, or make your steeples of excellence, your towers of excellence even higher. That also means, those areas which are not so excellent will still not be very excellent. That is a very difficult choice. But that¡¯s been the basis for Carnegie Mellon¡¯s success. Do not try to be excellent in everything. Now I am speaking from the perspective of a small private, under-endowed research university. But I believe that idea, certainly the idea of comparative advantage is one which is universally applicable whether you talk about a large public universities or a small private university like Carnegie Mellon. 

Let us talk about the strategic planning process. Let me emphasize at the outset, I don¡¯t believe there is a single process that works everywhere. I think every institution at every moment in time, depending on the challenges it faces, depending on its leadership, has to adapt its own strategic planning process. But here are some observations and key elements of every strategic planning process. These are some questions, issues I want to pursue in more detail, who does the strategic planning at university? While one answer is everyone, everyone has a stake in it, all of those constituencies I mentioned before, but at least in American universities, I believe it is the same in Chinese universities. It is the faculty who are the most important of all. You heard sentiments expressed by previous Chancellor, Lonsdale for Cambridge. It is faculty, faculty governance, which has been key to 800 years of excellence at Cambridge, it is the key to every successful university in America as well. The faculty have a very central role to play. Having said that, it is very very difficult to manage a strategic planning process, with a lot of faculty participation, but you have to do it. What is the role of president? That is very important. But just how actually involved you should be, in what way, it is very important question, but answer to it is not obvious. I am going to expand on it in a minute. 

Every strategic plan has certain components, no matter one year you are doing it or what kinds of institution you are talking about, a vision and mission, objectives, alternatives, or actions you should take, measures of success, and a plan for implementation and communication, which are also very important, that¡¯s what it says, I know it is very faint, got left out when I type these, implementation and communication. I am going to talk about each of these elements in more detail. 

First of all, let us talk some more about the question of who does strategic planning and the role of president. One question is should we use existing organizations or bodies within the university? I will show some examples of that in a minute. Or should you create new special purpose organization like a special strategic planning committee? Both models are used in American universities. In the case of Carnegie Mellon, in the case of strategic planning I led, we did both. I will show you what I mean by that in a moment. Whatever the process is, whatever the organization you use for strategic planning, should president be the chairman of that body? Well, some of you might be thinking, of course, you should be chairman, you are the leader of a university. In fact, I chaired our efforts, but I want you to understand, in fact that is a risky thing to do. Some strategic planning efforts do not work out very well. The people on it, the faculty start fighting when they can¡¯t come to an agreement, then the whole thing just sort of falls part, if you chaired that effort, what you do then? If you did not chair it, you could sit back and say, well, you know, my vice-president messed it up, what can I do? And you by distancing yourself, by keeping some distance, from the process, it gives you some room to maneuver. So being chairman is risky, but it is valuable. It is valuable because, well, you are the president after all, you are the top leader of the university, so by participating, you convey to other participants, especially the faculty the seriousness of this effort. You are giving your time to the process. In addition, you own insights, of course, are very important, most important of all to a strategic plan. So your participation is very valuable. But it is risky. You have a decision to make then, about whether to chair this effort. When should you do strategic planning? Some people would say, all the time, in some respects, in Carnegie Mellon we are always planning, because our plan is a living document. That is a point I will come back to. But two very common times when strategic planning is taking place in American universities is whenever there is a change of leadership, when a new president comes, it is time to think again about the university and where it¡¯s headed. Always, when we undertake a major fundraising effort, then we engage in strategic planning to identify the important things for which we want to raise money. 

Let me say more about how we did strategic planning when I became president of Carnegie Mellon in 1997. This goes back to the issue whether you should use the existing organizations or create new ones for the purpose of strategic planning. As I said, we did both. We have two existing organizations that we call the management group, in many American universities, it is called the president cabinet, the vice-presidents basically, that is a standing organization which meets weekly, even when we are not doing strategic planning. We also in Carnegie Mellon have an organization called the president¡¯s council this again, is a standing organization, which meets monthly. It is a bigger group which includes the deans. For our strategic planning efforts we did in 1997 and 1998, we also created a committee of one hundred as I called, because we had 100 people on it if you can imagine that. It consisted of the following: first of all, the management group, it is president, provost, vice-provost and vice-presidents, that¡¯s the group that meets every week. The president¡¯s council is this group plus the deans. And the committee of one hundred I put together for strategic planning is this group, i.e. president, vice-presidents, etc. the deans plus all of our departments heads, in Carnegie Mellon, that¡¯s about 30 people, our heads are very powerful at Carnegie Mellon. university professors, that is special designation we have for a small subset of the faculty, these are most distinguished and accomplished professors. Forget the special title, that¡¯s are another 25 or so. Then I added faculty, in order to get balance, representation, to make sure of various disciplines have representation, as well as having gender or sex balance, i. e. men and women as well as minority representation. In our case, that means, African Americans and Hispanic Americans. The problem is our university professors and our heads are almost all men, all white. Also there is a preponderance among these in engineering and sciences, so to get disciplinary representation as well as minority representation, representation of women, I added these faculty, then there were a few non-faculty staff, that was a committee of one hundred. I chaired this committee, I led the meetings, a hundred people, about this many people. We met four times. In between the meetings of that group, this group and this group took the outcomes of the discussions of big committee, refine them, move them forward. In each subsequent meetings of the big committee we reported back, that¡¯s how we made progress. It was not easy, it was risky, could fall apart at any moment. But it worked, or I would not be standing in front of you today. 

Now I want to turn back to the elements of strategic plan, i.e. I want to talk some more about vision and mission, objectives, alternatives, measures of success and implementation and communication. First, vision and mission, this is the thing that keeps university president awake at night, in America, in the UK, in Germany, and in China. Because we are thought as people who are supposed to have the vision for our universities. A vision basically captures the notion of where are we now? Where does you university stand now? What makes you distinctive? What are the characteristics that make you, the university that you are? The kinds of characteristics I mentioned before for Carnegie Mellon. Where do we want to go? Here is where we are, where do we want to go? That¡¯s the key for a vision, it sets the direction of the vector along which you are going to move. The very important question is, whose vision is it, sort of unstated question is, our presidents, you and me visionaries, this is the thing that keeps us up at night. I am very skeptical of visionary presidents or presidents who claim to be visionary. Some are. I think that there are some visionary presidents. I sure there are some in this room today. I don¡¯t think myself that way. Even president Cyert, the great leader Carnegie Mellon had in 1970s and 1980s. I think he would have said, ¡°I am no visionary, I just know how to do strategic planning and lead process that results to the plan, that will make Carnegie Mellon better. Indeed make Carnegie Mellon better.¡± That¡¯s how I think myself as well. What I have done is to make sure that we do benchmarking, to make sure we can answer the question where we are now, then to do a great deal of consultation both inside and outside, to try to get understanding of what¡¯s happening in the world, how can Carnegie Mellon use its strength, comparative advantage in order to set the directions for the future. That¡¯s what a vision is. You know, it is very common in America when a university is recruiting a new president, you are asked during the interviewing process, ¡°what is your vision for the university?¡± And of course, I was asked that question, too. And I gave an answer just like this, I basically said, ¡°how can I have a vision for Carnegie Mellon when I have never been in Carnegie Mellon, I have never been a professor here.¡± In fact, you should not want to me to have a vision for Carnegie Mellon or if I have one, you should not want me to implement it. Because it could not be particularly well-informed vision. Instead, I said, ¡°I see my role as this, helping the university to discover a shared vision.¡± You know, that is very important, this goes back to the process and involvement of the faculty. In my university, my power is only as strong as the faculty will let it be. I hope you understand what I mean by that. Yes, I am president, I have certain authority and power that was delegated to me by the board of trustees. But if the faculty do not have confidence in me, I will not last long as president. So in creating a vision for the university, it¡¯s absolutely essential that I bring the faculty along, the idea of a leader, I think, in American universities today, is not to say I can see the future follow me, instead it¡¯s to work with the faculty, to create this common understanding of what the future looks like, and then we go there together, that¡¯s the role of a university president. It is extremely important, that you know yourself, by that I mean, not just know yourself as an individual, but know your university. What is it that make us Carnegie Mellon? What is distinctive about our u? Know yourself, that¡¯s vision and mission. 

The second component was objectives. This is actually I think, the most important part of strategic planning effort. It is right up there with vision, which is also very important. But it is in defining the objectives, where people start really engaging in the strategic planning process, but it is not easy to do. First of all, there are many many objectives, in fact too many objectives. i.e. there are so many things you could do, you could do better. Further more, objectives have unfortunate characteristics of conflicting often or at least competing, because at the very least, you have limited resources, and you have more that you would like to do than your resources allow you to do. So there is competition among objectives. Even though it is difficult and there are many objectives, the process of identifying and prioritizing the objectives is key to strategic planning. It is really the heart of what strategic planning is. I keep saying it is difficult and indeed it is. These are very hard conversations to have, because many faculty will interpret your setting of priorities as saying that their field or their department is not important. ¡°You must not think that English, study of English is important, because you identify bio-tech is the No 1 priority.¡± You have to find a way of being inclusive, while at the same time, being focused. Not an easy thing to do. I had very tough meetings with faculty. But that¡¯s all part of being a leader. Another part of making this work, i.e. getting a plan that you can implement is, as I said, being focused, but not in a way that says to a faculty member who does not see him or herself in the plan that you are not important. It is very important especially at universities like Carnegie Mellon where faculty initiative is really key to our ¡­
You should not create a plan that stifles or stops that initiative by faculty to want to do something new, again, it is a big challenge. One of the key things, I think, is making sure you develop a plan, and you always think of your plan as organic, living, i.e. it is not a plan that you set in year one and then you don¡¯t change it and will not change it for five years. You have to continuingly reexamine it, be open to new opportunities, because even the most visionary leader cannot anticipate all of the opportunities that might come up in the future. So talking about objectives, identifying them, prioritizing, all in an interactive way through the organizations or bodies you create for strategic planning is very very important. 

Vision and mission, objectives, the third thing was alternatives. By alternatives, I mean the possible actions that you might take in pursuit of the objectives you identified in previous step. What is that actually you are going to do to make progress in achieving your high priority objectives? It¡¯s obviously an important thing to do, a necessary thing to do, identifying actions, but be careful. When I say be careful, because conversations about actions are much easier to have than they are about objectives. This happens in every organization. I will tell you a rightful example is Unite States congress. The United States congress finds it much easier to fight about the most specific detail in a particular issue than it is to talk about major important objectives. That is human characteristic. It is true for faculty, as it is true for members of United States congress. You have to talk about objectives, but you have to do in a way that does not distract you from that very important conversation of what is what we are trying to achieve? What are our higher objectives that we are trying to achieve? This is the difference between being strategic, that¡¯s what the objectives are, and being tactical, that¡¯s what the actions are. Strategy, tactics. Strategy is higher level of discussion, tactics is lower level of discussion, tactics should be dictated by the strategy. No the other way around. That¡¯s the danger you have to avoid. Now in fact, talking about tactics, or actions, or alternatives, really is very valuable, not only because they are necessary, but they can also help people understand the objectives, it¡¯s often the case that we talk about objectives at a very high level, but we don¡¯t necessary understand what we mean by that, until we get down to the level of actions. So people say, for example, my objective is to improve undergraduate education, everybody agree with that. How would you do that? Some of you might say, we should have smaller classes, reduce class size, what does that mean? To do that, we will have more faculty, more classrooms, Oh, that¡¯s what improving undergraduate education might mean. That costs a lot of money, that¡¯s another discussion, there are a lot of examples of this both in university and outside, where the objectives may seem clear at the outset, but only when you start talking about the specific action you would take, do the objectives really become true. What that means also is that you should have iterative process, iterative process, or you would go back and forth. You talk about objectives and then you talk about actions and you go back and reconsider your objectives, now you understand them even better. 

OK. Vision and mission, objectives, alternatives, the fourth component was measures of success. This might be the most difficult challenge for universities administrators in my country. As you heard, in UK as well, there is incredibly large number, very large number of potential measures of success that one might use in universities, that is one of the problems. There are so many measures you could use. How do you choose, or do you do them all? You know there is such a thing of having so many measures, that the whole exercise becomes meaningless. Because you are just overwhelmed by data. Aside from the very large number, measurement is just plain difficult. It is hard to do. In some cases, you can even say impossible to do in a direct way. Here is an example, one of the key, I think you would all agree, that a key measure of our success in undergraduate education is the future success of our graduates, our students. Unfortunately, in this year, you cannot know what your current students are going to do in their lifetime. You would like to be able to look back after 20 or 30 years, then you could say, well, that did not work very well, we should have changed the program so that they had had better speaking skills or would have known more about Chinese culture or world affairs, or more about IT. We cannot know in advance how our students will do. So what we do is use Sara Gates, like indicators, but not a direct measure of what actually it is interested in, some Sara Gates for future achievement of today¡¯s students would be achievements of current alumni, but of course current alumni are reflective of the programs that they studied in 20 or 30 years, so here is a comparison problem. Or you can use indicators of future achievement by current students based on their achievements as students. So an example of that is not a very good one perhaps, but how successful are your students competing for major national or international scholarships. One of the ones that we care a great deal about in America is the Rose scholarship. How many Rose scholar do you produce. Rose scholar often turned out to be leaders. This presumes that leadership is your key measure for your success. It may not be. Another danger in measures of success is unintended consequences, by that I mean, it is just human nature that we tend to pay more attention to those things that we can measure. In things we can¡¯t, we just pay less attention to. So here is an example. One thing that is very easy to measure is number of patents that a university gets for its technology. In that that¡¯s a useful thing both to have and to know. But does the number of patents equal technology-transferred success? It may if you think it is so important. I am thinking of more important things like the number of companies or the amount of money we generate, or the economic vitality of the region around Carnegie Mellon University. But patents we see in universities in America which have a very large number of patents, but not other indicators of success of technology transfer. 

Vision and mission, objectives alternatives, measures of success, and then my last component was implication and communication. Now I want to emphasize I am talking from perspective of a rather small, decentralized universities. That¡¯s the world that I lived in, that¡¯s how implementation has to happen in my world. In my world, my ability to make change in a direct way, is rather limited, in part because I have so little money. What is implementation mean to Carnegie Mellon for a strategic plan? It does mean allocation of discretional resources, but as I said, in my case, that¡¯s small amount of money. It means allocation of fundraising effort, that¡¯s actually very important. I spent a lot of my time fundraising. Don¡¯t worry, I will not ask you for money, today, and how I spent my time is actually a very significant issue, and I spent my time on our strategic priorities when it comes to fundraising, so that actually is quite significant. But frankly in terms of really effecting the change, the most important thing is my ability to influence my colleges and my departments, my deans and my department heads, and their decisions about their plans and their decisions about things like hiring which faculty, which area to hire, how to shape their curriculum, these are the things they decide, I do not decide. Let me give an example, bio-technology is one of our strategic priorities in our current strategic plan, indeed I spent a lot of time to fundraising for building up our strength of bio-technology, but without my making it happen directly, in some cases, without even my knowing about it, until after it happen. There has been a very significant change in my university in just last 3 years. In engineering we created new department of bio-medical engineering. It was not my idea, it was idea of a dean of engineering. In our physics department, after a very rough time with them, my physics department, more than any other department, looked at our strategic plan and, said well, obviously you don¡¯t care about physics, because physics is not well represented in the plan, I said some nice things, but of course, I did not yield on the plan, those are strategic forecastle. While to my delight, 2 years later, I learned, that our physics department said, there is a favored American saying, if you cannot beat them, join them. The physics department decided, ¡°well, we can¡¯t beat them, we will join them.¡± So they, on their own, created a new biological physics group within the department. Our robotics institute, when you think about robotics, you think about robots in nuclear power plans, robots on the moon, robots flying to Mars, indeed that¡¯s what we do. When I met with the faculty in our robotics institute just a few months ago, I was very surprised, but very pleased to learn more than half of them have research plans in bio-technology, bio-medical areas, again, it responds to university¡¯s strategic plan. 
A key to all of these is communication. I see it as my job to communicate to my faculty in all the other constituency, alumni, our board of trustees, our students, the local region and the nation, what our strategic plan is, this is very important again because there are so little that I do directly. Its¡¯ really the faculty, and departments and college leaders who do it. So I have to communicate what the plan is. And you have to do it many times, and the message has to be consistent, the same message over and over again, before it actually sits in. In my case, I focused on department meetings, I make appointed meeting with the faculty of every department once a year which may not sound a lot to non-president but you know how much effort that is to do that. In those meetings, I focus on our strategic plan, then we use our university publications, to get the message out. So those are some additional thoughts about the components of strategic planning and strategic plans. 
Strategic planning in America, esp. in Carnegie Mellon, is very much influenced by external organizations. We all go through accreditation, and accrediting bodies could be quite valuable actually. In America the accreditation process, in terms of its actual outcome, is really not very important anymore. It becomes a sort of what we would call pro-forma, you know what the outcome is going to be, you are going to be accredited. But the process of going to get an accreditation can be very valuable, it requires you to do self study and self examination, so that¡¯s a part of strategic planning. One of the things, that is esp. important to Carnegie Mellon, and someone unusual is our advisory board, we have an advisory board for every department, not just for the college or the university, but for each department. So department of English has an advisory board, even our robotics institute has an advisory board, etc. physics, chemistry, each have an advisory board, they are made up of members of our board of trustees and external experts mostly from other US universities, sometimes foreign universities, sometimes from industries as well. These advisory boards meet about once every three or four years, and each meeting last for about one and one half days. It results in the written report, a very detailed report, we respond to it in writing. So it gives us criticisms, it provides recommendations, and then we respond in writing on what we are going to do with these recommendations. It¡¯s a very serious process. And overarching this whole process is university¡¯s strategic plan. So one of the key questions I ask each advisory board is does the department strategic plan coincide with and support the university¡¯s strategic plan?

Let me give you some specific examples now from Carnegie Mellon about strategic plan. In the way I talked about this already, I can be more specific now. As I have already said before, the 1970s and 1980s was Cyert years, I promised you his name. What president Cyert did so effectively was to understand Carnegie Mellon had some comparative advantages already, with some early leaders in the area of computer science, esp. Herbert Simon, who I mentioned already, and Ellen Noël, and Ellen Parlous, these are some of great early names of computer science in America and in the world. He built on that, turned Carnegie Mellon into an IT power house. This idea of computer U or computer university. There is a widely distributed magazine in America called Time Magazine, and on the cover of one of its issues in the 1980s, had ¡°Carnegie Mellon had created first fully networked campus¡±, they called us computer university. Ever since, that¡¯s been what we are thought of. It was again the result though of a very careful strategic planning, and very focused implementation by president Cyert. In 1990s, our attention turned to undergraduate education. Now the two situations are really very different. In the 1970s and 1980s the situation president Cyert faced was the following, OK, we are a new university, remember Carnegie Mellon University was just created in 1967, we were sort of in the middle of second rank of universities, how do we get to the top rank? That¡¯s what motivated the strategic planning process in early 1970s by president Cyert. In early 1990s, 1990 in particular, when Robert Maribean became president, he was responding to problems, that is, Carnegie Mellon now had leaped forward, and had sort of raised up to the of bottom of the top rank of universities, if I can put in that way, but one thing was clear our undergraduate programs had not come along for this great right upwards, as our graduate programs and our research do. We had many problems. We were not very selective, we were accepting too many of the applicants. We had a low retention rate. Many of our students would dropout. Our students really were not very happy. They were stressed out as you heard as challenge of Cambridge, which is still a problem at Carnegie Mellon. But they were not very well supported. Well, President Maribean led us strategic planning effort, identified its No. 1 priority is improving its undergraduate education, both the quality of education, and the quality of student life and the retention rate. That was a very key element for him. We did many things, we created teaching centers, support both our faculty and our graduate students, to help them become better teachers. That has been very successful. We had a much better, we invested much more in student activities, facilities, we have a very very good student activities and student support network now, thanks to the investment made in that time, by the way, I want to add we created a very active undergraduate research program which is also significant. The results of that effort by the way have been significant. 

Here let me show you some measures. I have told you before that in 1990 our acceptance rate was too high. That is we were not very selective. This shows you the number of students, number of prospective students applying for mission to Carnegie Mellon for undergraduate programs. In 1990, it¡¯s about 6000, that was for about 1200 positions, in 2001 it was almost 17000, almost tripling in about a ten year period, very significant. And not surprisingly, related to this is a very significant drop in acceptance rate, i.e. the percentage of students applying who we accept. That¡¯s the major measure of how selective the university is, the lower the acceptance rate, the more selective you are. In 1990 we were accepting almost three quarters of the students who applied, in 2001, it was less than a third. During that same period, we saw an increase in students¡¯ quality, as measured here by SAT scores, about 1300 or 1365, someone slower. This is really quite significant, a very large increase as these things go is retention rate. This requires some explanation for you to see what this means. What this top curve shows you is in this year, 1991, the percentage of the students who were first year students in 1991 who stayed in Carnegie Mellon to become 2nd year students in 1992, in other words, 85% of students stayed after their 1st year, 15% left. That¡¯s actually a low retention rate, 85%, or a high loss rate of 15%, compared to our competitive universities. The other universities, the highly selective universities, would have around 95% or even higher, like 98%. Notice how this has increased over the years, these other retention rates are for freshman, 1st year to 3rd year, 3rd year to 4th year, and graduation, percentage of graduated after 6th year. So of the freshman, the 1st year students who started in 1991, 72 % actually graduated from Carnegie Mellon, that is very low. By 1995, the students who entered in 1995, about 78% graduated, you can see, of course this retention rate is strongly correlated with that retention rate so we can expect this could continue to increase as we move up. These are all of results of strategic planning effort, and then implementation effort by my predecessor. 

I want to tell you about these both because it is valuable for you to know about the survey, and because it identified Carnegie Mellon for its great success in improving its undergraduate education exactly over this time period I was talking about. The higher education research institute is a very well regarded research center in UCLA in America. They do an annual survey of undergraduates at 117 colleges and universities in America. They have been doing this since the late 1980s. Just in February of this year, they published a report, in which they identified 4 colleges and universities for the most significant improvement in their undergraduate education from 1988 to 1998, and Carnegie Mellon was one of those. Everything I am showing you now comes from this report this is not the things that I made up. They talked to our students, this is our students said ¡°significantly greater satisfaction, growth in their interpersonal skills, in foreign language ability, a dramatic increase in number of students enrolling in our foreign language courses, more interactions with faculty, a greater sense of well-being you can identify with that.¡± These are all results of these things we implemented, it¡¯s result of previous planning, 

Sth. about Carnegie Mellon and its culture, it¡¯s really interesting how they got this right. ¡°Change itself is an inherent part of the u.¡± Remember I said before, they were never satisfied, always looking to improve. We are young and scrappy, I don¡¯t know if the translator can translate scrappy into Chinese, it means we fight, we are always striving, always moving, combating not polite, by that, the researcher we do not respect convention, or tradition, we try to invent things all the time. Very good lines of communication between faculty, administrators, students affairs professionals something I am proud of, this is quite interesting, this gets to the heart of challenge of managing a university like Carnegie Mellon. Striking to them was the simultaneous commitment to both autonomy, individual faculty, and departments being able to control their own destiny, and collaboration, working together we do that very well. But that¡¯s not easy. 
They take on Carnegie Mellon, they are understanding Carnegie Mellon, committed to delivering distinctive first rate education, faster in research creativity and the discovery, using new knowledge to serve the larger society. I could not have said this better myself. A commitment to self-critique this goes along with never being satisfied with. We are very critical of what we do in a ongoing review of all we do, always trying to get better. Finally, a continuing challenge for the university is a delicate task of maintaining this balance between integration of the colleges like fine arts with engineering, while still maintaining the individual college¡¯s uniqueness. And we could use more money to do it. They are certainly right about that. 

Finally our strategic planning, these are the strategic priorities that came out of our planning process in 1997 and 1998. And I don¡¯t think any of these is a surprise to you. In fact, this would look probably quite similar to every other American research university. But there are different twist for Carnegie Mellon. In our case running undergraduate education is a new experience. We are very good at training professionals in their fields, excellent engineers, ready to work the day they walk out of Carnegie Mellon, actually, excellent actors who get jobs in Hollywood, on Broadway in the minute they walk out of Carnegie Mellon, they do, they do very successful. But, what we do not do so well is to educate engineers who also know about the fine arts, for actors who also know about technology. That¡¯s what this is about. More inter-disciplinary research in education, that¡¯s what we do so well. IT of course here we are saying were reaffirming our commitment to be a leading information T university. Bio-technology, that is a big leap for us. We are not strong in bio-technology the way we are in IT. And this is one of the more controversial parts of our plan. It is building on strength but it is moving away from existing strength more than most of our others like environment, humanity and fine arts. Diversity, both general diversity especially women in engineering and sciences, and also US minorities, African Americans and Hispanic Americans, internationalization both in our curriculum, you should already have a very international student body, but the curriculum need to be more international, we seek more relationships with international institutions. Finally our commitment to our region and its economical development, that¡¯s strategic planning.
Now, let me take a breath and ask you to do the same thing. I do have ten minutes before questions and answers. I know it is hard to listen this long. But I have a lot more I want to say, but only for ten minutes, I promise. Let me very quickly cover a couple of high lights on a new topic of IT in education, in particular the opportunity we have because of IT to shift the way we do education to do actually a fundamentally new model in a way we go about education.

I really think the IT creates the opportunity for real change and improvement in learning, not necessarily improvement in teaching, but improvement in learning. They are not the same thing. Teaching, we know what that is; learning is what student do, they do not always equal. What I focus on is learning, not necessarily teaching. Of course it is also potentially very valuable for distance education, delivering education material over distances. Here is the real question though, how can we make universities more effective learning organizations? I will try to show you what I mean by that, let me ask you some other questions, how much do you really know about the extent of learning that goes on at your university? How does that learning relate to the learning environment you provide? I am not say you probably do not know that much, because I don¡¯t think any of us do. I think this area of assessment of student learning is still very underdeveloped. Do you really know whether students learn more effectively as you adopt new technology for example, does the learning persist over time? i.e. ok. they know what they not just learned today, or they know a year from that. Are their acquiring skills that can be applied in real world settings?

There is part of learning organizations i.e. how much has a professor learned from their own courses, and from what¡¯s happening around them? I want to show you two premises, a sort of assumptions I make.

We need to know the extent to which learning is occurring at the student level by students before we can develop a learning organization. We have to know what our students know. We have to know what they are getting out of the learning environment we now provide. Let me give you an absolutely amazing example. We all teach physics at our universities to undergraduates, and like you we have very high quality students with very quantitative skills, they are come in very well prepared in their regard. And most of our science/engineering students take our physics courses, some of them pass out it through advance placement, but most take the courses. 

So basically the population taking the courses are well-motivated, teaching is typical what we will find at a major research universities where it comes to teach physics. One of our better physics professors, a teacher, decided to do something. He decided to find out from the students just how much they had learned. So as you see, several months after his class, he went in a basic test his students again. He also tested the students who had not taken his course or any physics course in Carnegie Mellon. You can see an incredible result, there were no differences between those who taken his course and those who have not. It is pretty tough on this professor¡¯s ego, but it¡¯s just astonishing to us. I don¡¯t know if this would happen to your universities, but this point here is our students are not learning as much as we might think or hope they are. In the case of this physics professor, actually he did something about it. He went back and he redesigned his course. What he realized that what he was doing was put tremendous emphasis on the quantitative aspects of physics, which is important, students could solve problems, but they weren¡¯t getting concepts, they were not getting the major issue or concepts that he was trying to convey using mathematics. He completely redesigned his course to emphasize much more on the qualitative reasoning as opposed to just mechanical use of formulas. He found doing the same kind of assessment much better retention of the information by his students from the redesigned course. So that¡¯s a good thing, we need to understand this kind of learning issues by our students and do something about it. 

But this leads to my second premise. Certainly this redesigned physics course was a benefit to students and to the university. But one of the problems is the faculty member knew about it, but the other physics professors did not know about it. Its college even knew less about it, and certainly the university overall did not. The same kind of ideas he used in redesigning his physics course could be applicable to other course, to physics, to other sciences, to engineering, to mathematics, or in the social sciences, or even humanities. There is no mechanism though for the organization to learn, not just the students, no learning at the level of the department, the college, or university. That is the other premise. We need to move these kinds of individual successes into the memory if you will, or the knowledge base of the institution so that other professors know about it, other administrators know about it. There is no reason why they should. We need a mechanism for doing that. Certainly key message is IT can be such a mechanism if well designed and used proper, that¡¯s what we are working on now. We see that is a new thing for Carnegie Mellon in IT for education. Building a system to capture these kinds of important innovations helps the whole organization to learn. 

Ok. I would like to say about university in academic development, but I am just going to tell you one thing. In Pittsburgh where Carnegie Mellon is located we have been involved in a, so far as we know, unique approach to economic development, we do all the things that everybody else does, one of the things that we created just in last two years is what we called our greenhouse model. 

First of these is the Pittsburgh digital greenhouse. Now it¡¯s not a physical structure, it¡¯s an organization. Even though we call it a greenhouse. It is not for profit, but it is not inside universities or any other organization, it is free standing. It focuses on economic development, in particular, job creation. And the digital greenhouse focuses especially on so called system on a chip technology, i.e. generation of computer chips, that would be so capable, like having computer a full system on chip. In particular it focuses on multimedia and network. The digital greenhouse is a collaborative effort in our case, of three universities, Carnegie Mellon, and a state university, when professor Shan went, and University of Pittsburgh, that itself is unusual, we have three university in America collaborating, our state government, a local economic development organization, a private foundation, like the Ford foundation but in our case our local foundations, many many companies, you can see all the companies are here, some big companies, like Sony and Cisco, some small start-up companies in Pittsburgh that probably you have never heard of. We are all working together, we are working together as I said, to create jobs. We focus on education and training, research, recruiting new specialized talent to help the companies in Pittsburgh, startup etc. The state has invested significantly in supporting research, that itself is very unusual, state government usually do not support universities¡¯ research. In this case they do, they supported research almost at 8 million dollar level. The universities involved in some industry, proposed totally 139 proposals, that would have total 33 million dollars if funded but there was only money enough for 42 projects in 7.7 million. You know the largest number went to Carnegie Mellon. In this respect, its our great strength. 

I just want mention one more thing in this regard, I believe this is unprecedented in US but maybe I am wrong about this. The three universities, each a strong independent research university agreed on a common curriculum that leads to a certificate of achievement in system on a chip design for a master student. We each have our own students, so we have master students in Carnegie Mellon, master students in Penn State, master students in University of Pittsburgh. But if they complete certain series of courses, and they move around at each of the three universities to do that and they get a common seal or certificate honored degree, it says that they completed a Pittsburgh digital greenhouse system on a chip curriculum. This is really quite significant. The companies found that very very attractive. This has been very successful despite the fact that the sector it was system on a chip is important had been in depression for 2 years, not coming out of it even added some jobs in Pittsburgh, in that area through the digital greenhouse. We expect what we were positioning ourselves really takes off when that sector recovers, 

In summary, I talked about three topics, but in particular, the most importantly, I talked about strategic planning. As I said, every organization has to do strategic planning, but especially universities, it¡¯s very important to be focused, doing away that is inclusive so that faculty are brought along, enable to implementation of plan and a role of external review is really quite important. Information T has provided a wonderful opportunity for some real innovation in the way we do education, in particular in the way we achieve students¡¯ learning, as well as we measure students¡¯ learning, finally there is a lot to be said about our university in the role of economic development thank you very much.