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CMU launches its 2nd century
Sunday, November 12, 2000 By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Carnegie Mellon University has churned out its share of Hollywood stars over the years. It has programmed robots for space exploration. It has even talked about growing human organs one day.
Quite a set of accomplishments for a campus that 100 years ago was nothing more than a cabbage farm.
Yet how many of its graduates have gone on to occupy the Oval Office? How many of its alumni have ended up a prime minister?
If you guessed zero, you are correct.
And that ought to change, Carnegie Mellon President Jared Cohon says. As the school prepares to mark its 100th birthday Wednesday, its leaders are taking a hard -- and some might say unusual -- look at what the school's place should be as it enters its second century.
For Cohon, one thing seems clear. A school that has left its mark on movie back lots and in the Silicon Valley ought to produce a wider array of leaders from its student ranks. Not just the CEOs, the technical wizards and the stage performers who have become a school trademark, but graduates who might one day shape the world socially and politically.
"I want to see at least one president of the United States in the 21st century be a Carnegie Mellon graduate. And I think given our international character and our international aspirations, I'd like to see the head of state in other countries also be Carnegie Mellon graduates," Cohon said.
That intent is a major reason that the school is pushing to broaden the kinds of instruction that its 7,500 students receive. Since last year, a campus that already prides itself on working across disciplines has developed 25 new courses intended to bring together more students from vastly different parts of campus.
By getting drama students involved in computer projects and by encouraging design students to team up with engineers, the school hopes to expose them to fresh perspectives that could make them better leaders.
On the surface, the idea of churning out more global bigwigs sounds like just wishful thinking.
But Cohon said it's more than just pursuit of prestige. It's part of a broader self-examination at Carnegie Mellon, which over a relatively short time has evolved from a trade school into an elite research university.
"If you believe in universities as the institutions that do much of the shaping in society -- not by themselves single-handedly but through their teaching and research -- then what your graduates do is a very important indicator of the effectiveness of the institution," he said.
In that vein, knowing your university has graduated Hollywood stars such as Holly Hunter and Jack Klugman and writer/producer Steven Bochco provides a good benchmark. So does knowing that your computer science program has produced the likes of Jim Gosling, who invented the Java computer language.
But having a prime minister of India back for homecoming wouldn't be bad either, Cohon said. "Indian students represent the largest single foreign student group that we have," he said.
Paths to leadership
There's no reason that a Carnegie Mellon graduate shouldn't go on to become secretary general of the United Nations, Cohon added. And the school ought to spot alumni faces in Congress and among the ranks of the nation's top university presidents.
Cohon may have cause for optimism, if the 18 U.S. presidents of the last century are an indicator. While many were products of the Ivy League, others studied at places such as West Point (Dwight Eisenhower), Georgetown (Bill Clinton) and Allegheny College (William McKinley).
There are many theories about the most likely paths to leadership. But can a college actually become a breeding ground for leaders by altering what it teaches?
To some degree it can, said Robert Bies, a Georgetown University associate professor who studies leadership. He said it can depend on how motivated the students are when they arrive on campus and how challenging and diverse an education they receive.
"Leadership in part is a set of skills -- your ability to prioritize, your ability to inspire, your ability to build common ground. You can teach those kinds of skills," he said.
Not only will the student benefit, so will the school. Georgetown found that out when one of its graduates, William Jefferson Clinton, made it to the White House in 1992. Applications to the university "went through the roof," Bies said.
"People said, 'Ah, Georgetown.' It brings visibility, it brings applications and probably, but indirectly, it also brings money," he said.
From its beginnings, Carnegie Mellon has been a place where practitioners honed their skills in technical fields. In 1900, a time when steel drove the region's economy, industrialist Andrew Carnegie used a $1 million endowment to found what became known as the Carnegie Technical Schools.
Its earliest classes included first-generation Americans, many of whom worked in the area's mills. The courses they took ranged from management and drafting to blacksmithing.
In the decades that followed, the campus evolved into a regional engineering school and was renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Its offerings broadened into the humanities and social sciences, cementing an unusual campus marriage between the arts and hard- core science.
Indeed, the place where Andy Warhol studied and where bagpiping is taught also was the place where a pair of researchers in the 1950s received worldwide attention for proving that a computer could think.
'Network of catalysts'
In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with Mellon Institute, an applied center for corporate research near campus, to form the present-day Carnegie Mellon. In the two decades that followed, it evolved into a nationally known computing center. In 1985, it became one of the first universities in the nation to network its campus computers when the "Andrew" system went on line.
In recent years, the opening of new institutes for software engineering and robotics helped enhance the school's position as an information technology leader.
As Carnegie Mellon enters its second century, some who have watched the school closely believe similar new institutes may play a major part in its future. Already, Carnegie Mellon has identified biotechnology in its strategic plans as a discipline in which it wants to develop a major focus.
It is talking with the University of Pittsburgh about joint initiatives that may range from creating images of the brain's cognitive functions to growing human organs.
Raj Reddy, who served nine years as dean of Carnegie Mellon's school of computer science, said he saw Carnegie Mellon's future in how it trains the professionals who will use computers to transform all kinds of industries -- from music and retail to health care.
"Every field is going to be revolutionized," he said.
In that regard, Reddy sees star potential in areas such as the school's e-commerce program, its entertainment technology center and its language technology institute for translation between human languages.
But Bill Seibel, an Internet consultant and Carnegie Mellon graduate, said that no matter the field, he sees the real role as being how the school teaches. He said he hopes the school will make it a priority to expose students to as many varied experts as possible, both from campus and beyond.
"Use them as a network of catalysts," he said.
Drama school graduate Kent Gash, associate artistic director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, expressed a similar wish.
He said he hopes that Carnegie Mellon will maintain the investment in its actor training program, the oldest such program on a college campus in the nation. But he also said students there and elsewhere in the fine and performing arts need to be taught how to incorporate the Internet and various new technologies in their work.
"We have to tell stories for this generation," he said.
Cohon said that mix of ideas was what the new set of multidisciplinary courses is all about. In one such class, "Building virtual worlds," students from such diverse disciplines as art, architecture, drama, engineering and business are asked to work in teams to build on their computers a hypothetical world.
"It's a very powerful learning experience," Cohon said. "How does a drama major think about this problem? How does a computer science major think about this problem?"
He said the school would always be steeped in technology, but that he wanted future students who learn those skills to be better rounded, like a student with a computer science major, a minor in business and who takes plenty of fine arts courses. Or, he said, "a student who majored in fine arts but can make a computer sing."
That broadening may leave a mark on Carnegie Mellon as big as any new center or building that may be contemplated in the years ahead.
"Twenty years from now or 30 years from now, if we ask the question, 'What's most different about Carnegie Mellon today than it was in the year 2000 or in the year 1970?' I think that will be it," he said.
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