Biological Sciences and the University

Surely, too, it is one of the most important-perhaps the most "vital," I should say-for the subject of your sciences is at the base and beginning of all life. It would not surprise me if biologists these days felt themselves at some disadvantage in our academic cosmos-consideiing by comparison the war-won priority of the physical sciences in so far as governmental and industrial support of research is concerned; and considering also the newly and rightly awakened interest in the social and behavioral sciences. If our experience at Minnesota is any criterion, these two groups are receiving more new aid and encouragement than any others I could name, with the exception of the Medical Sciences. Agriculture, in a land-grant institution such as ours, enjoyed the first research priority of all. Fortunately, the basic biologies have been in position to enjoy some overflow from both the medical and agricultural largesse, but the intimations of still a "stepchild status" one occasionally discerns. The long overdue attention to the social sciences is perhaps the most significant postwar academic phenomenon. It is enormously hopeful and promising. And yet I am remembering the admonition expressed by Herbert Hoover in his address at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the founding of Stanford University about ten years ago. I think it worth repeating: "I have wished," he said, "that the economists and sociologists and the governmentalists generally would get together with the biologists. In the long run, society will be built upon the sums of human behavior. And that behavior has deeper roots than wishful thinking and exhortation. Those chromosomes which transmit the behavior of geologic ages ought to haunt the thinking of the social and governmental doctors." This seems to me a wise reminder, as we study the new techniques of "group dynamics"-or watch by television the treaty-making tensions at San Francisco. But the heartening thing to the whole academic community everywhere these days, it seems to me, must be the growing public interest in science generally, the growing awareness of its indispensability to the solution of every human problem, and the trust which people seem to feel in the scientist for weal or woe, for war or peace. When Franklin Roosevelt read the letter from Albert Einstein, declaring that atomic bombs could be built, the President-knowing little of physics or nuclear energy-committed billions to the project. He trusted the ability, and the integrity, of scientists. This public trust in science brings two thoughts to my mind: It lays upon universities a larger obligation. It should lay likewise upon the public an obligation more fully to understand and appreciate, to protect and support the nature and function of universities. People must understand that the nature and function of universities is unique in the whole history of civilized societies, that the nurture of science and scholarship is a delicate and precarious undertaking. I need not spell this out for you. It is instinctive in your understanding. But the public acceptance of science has outrun its understanding of the climate and ecology indispensable to scientific advance, it seems to me-and this lag is the understandable product of the problems and tensions of the time. The short-run physical and ideological defense of the nation has become, curiously, a dangerous deterrent to its long-range defense. In saying this I am thinking of two things, as a university administrator who has no real function, of course, except service to the advancement of science and scholarship. The University has two responsibilities to the scientist-two responsibilities which those who support universities by benefaction or public action must likewise somehow come increasingly to learn and understand: