Rhodes promotes coalition to harness science to end global problems

By Lissa Harris

Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes, speaking on campus Sept. 9, outlined a vision for an international version of the land-grant university, in which government support and university science would unite to help solve some of the globe's most pressing problems, from poverty and hunger to health care and sanitation.

President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes speaks in Baker Laboratory, Sept. 9. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

"I wonder if half a dozen leading universities of the world could band together in a coalition that would devote itself to the whole question of sustainable development," said Rhodes, who was delivering the inaugural Moses Passer Lecture, "Science and the Academy." The lecture, hosted by the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, was in 200 Baker Laboratory.

Rhodes noted that the United States currently spends about $8.5 billion annually on international aid. Ten percent of the international aid budgets of participating nations, he said, would support a multinational venture of the proposed scale. Cooperation of this sort between universities in the developed and the developing nations, he said, would allow science to address global problems in the way that publicly funded university science now addresses national problems.

Rhodes, who was president of Cornell from 1977 to 1995, has long been involved in public service to science and education, chairing, among others, the American Association of Universities and the National Science Board. Currently he is chairman of the Atlantic Foundation and a principal of the Washington Advisory Group. He recently published The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University.

A proposal for such an international coalition could meet with opposition from both governments and universities, Rhodes admitted, adding that the potential benefits could outweigh the risks: "Can we afford to assume that there is no benefit in the kind of cooperation that has produced such magnificent results for science in our own country?" Science, he said, has brought enormous benefits to society, from staggering increases in food production and the harnessing of energy to technological marvels in health care and sanitation.

However, he pointed out, the very success of science has created its own problems for society, and it is now the responsibility of science to help address them. Current problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation, said Rhodes, have come about in part because of technological advances made possible by scientific discovery. He said he has come to believe that the way science is done in universities must change radically if science is to successfully meet the challenge of developing technologies for a sustainable society.

"Science has to accept a larger role in addressing the problems that confront us as a contemporary society -- not just within our own nation, but beyond it," said Rhodes. "The real question is: Do scientists in the universities have any responsibility for addressing the problems that the success of science has created?"