In the end, the university should be a hub, or in dot-com parlance, a portal, where we bring the best of knowledge to the university and take the university s knowledge out to the world. In my blood, I am a teacher. It sometimes drives my kids crazy because I m always instructing them. I ve thought about a lot of things I could do with my life, but this is what I was genetically wired to do. But you can t be a good teacher without doing research.
People come here for perspective.
And if a faculty member isn t thinking new things and challenging the orthodoxy of a field or discipline, then the teaching is vacuous. And we will be very aggressive in taking those steps. Our goal is to break out of time and space and create a community of learning any time and any place and really rethinking the very notion of education. My father died when we were young, and so my mother raised us on her own, and with real grace. He doesn t settle for the status quo.