We were so important. We were needed. I remember as a graduate student saying, thank God, I am really in the right enterprise, we are so important and what we do provides the intellectual capital that we all need. This is probably true, but we overdid it. The community saw the benefit.
Research is service.
That is a land grant philosophy. Yes, it had something to do with agriculture, but it goes beyond that. I am prepared to make the argument that Johns Hopkins and Harvard are in public service, just as much as esteemed state universities are. I would like to push this just one second. One thing we do is we listen to other people, and not just when a legislative committee in Texas starts wanting to get into the tenure issue.