Editor’s note: This is an article from the Winter 1996 issue of UCLA Magazine.

Mark Hopkins is no longer a household name — except at Williams College. Hopkins was president of Williams from 1836 until 1872. In his day, he was a figure of great stature in higher education, so great that a president of the United States, James Garfield, once described the ideal college education as a student at one end of a bench with Hopkins at the other. A learner, a teacher and a place to sit: In bare essentials, these are the elements of a school or university. Learning and teaching are the basics in any education worthy of the name, and they don’t exhaust the possibilities for education.

Another potent combination, and one that better describes the UCLA that we know today, is learning, teaching and discovery. Once committed to discovery through research and scholarship, a great university transforms the knowledge that it transmits through teaching.

Sharing in the transformation of knowledge makes learning active, for students and teachers both. Active learning is the most powerful kind. Teachers who do research get personally involved in what they teach because they help create what they teach. Transforming knowledge breeds enthusiasm in transmitting it, and enthusiastic teachers make for excited learners. Excitement about learning grows when discovery itself enters the classroom. The researcher who teaches thinks of knowledge as something to be made new, not just to be made available.

A premier research university like UCLA puts discovery at the center of its mission, along with teaching and learning. Perhaps the advantages of this combination should be obvious, but not everyone finds them so. And the benefits don’t come without cost. Taxpayers, citizens, families and students pay the bills. They’re the people to whom the benefits of discovery in a public university need to be clear and persuasive.

Because it’s incomplete, the term “research university” — a familiar way of describing an institution like UCLA — may not be helpful for this task of persuading. Why don’t we say “research and teaching university”? Not just because four words are too many for snappy copy. The fact is that our great research universities, through much of their dramatic growth since mid-century, have not always worked hard enough at teaching. A more salient fact is that universities are working hard at it now, and UCLA is leading the way.

UCLA faculty leading our Science Challenge are applying new media and — more important — new thinking to the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum. Their colleagues in marine science are extending these innovations to the schools and to the city through the Ocean Discovery Center at the Santa Monica Pier. Other faculty and students are serving on a work group planning an even broader improvement of general education. Deans and chairs are finding ways to bring new excellence and efficiencies to the curriculum. Assisting these efforts, the Academic Senate has reorganized the faculty governance of undergraduate education in a new Undergraduate Council, which has just launched a series of faculty conferences devoted to the improvement of teaching. These initiatives for better learning and teaching take strength from the context of discovery that only a research university can provide.

We’re doing a better job of learning and teaching at UCLA because we do it as a research university.

To make their work in the classroom and laboratory more compelling, UCLA faculty draw on the creativity that research requires. The passion that fuels research fires passionate teaching, the eagerness to help others learn in a climate of discovery. Discovery keeps UCLA faculty at the edge of inquiry, the best vantage point from which to see knowledge advancing. UCLA students — working in a laboratory through the Student Research Program, participating in a class taught by someone whose research defines the field — can learn in the context of discovery because our faculty create that context.

The context keeps changing. As the millennium races to its end, rapid transformation of knowledge is a given in the human condition. Knowing how fast knowledge changes, no one would want to rely on the curriculum of Mark Hopkins’ day for the latest word in chemistry, economics or psychology. If Mark Hopkins’ day was 10 years ago, or five, the epistemic gap would still occur, though less obviously. But Hopkins was a moral philosopher, not an engineer or a scientist. Does inquiry keep the curriculum changing everywhere, in every field?

Consider a famous remark by another famous university president. In 1945, Harvard’s James B. Conant claimed that “there is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science — that of picking men of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves.” Whatever the merits of the rest of Conant’s advice, no reader in the mid-’90s can miss the moral distance from the mid-’40s implied by the single word, “men.” Yes, history’s acceleration since Conant’s time drives not only the “advancement of pure science” of which he spoke but the whole spectrum of learning, all the fields in which the women and men of UCLA’s faculty are pioneering.

Research changes the world; the world changes research; and learning stays lively only by moving quickly with these changes. In 1971, when I took my first university job, a hell curve was useful for grading large classes, three strikes made an out in baseball, and a rational choice seemed reasonable in anybody’s ballpark. But insert these terms in a timelier list:

  • AIDS
  • Bell Curve
  • California Civil Rights Initiative
  • Cognitive Science
  • Deconstruction
  • Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
  • 40,000 Layoffs
  • History Standards
  • Human Genome
  • Hypertext
  • O.J.
  • Perestroika
  • Political Correctness
  • Rational Choice
  • Recovered Memory
  • Three Strikes
  • WWW

These are major items of culture, knowledge and controversy in the mid-’90s, but some would have been meaningless or puzzling or trivial even when my son started graduate school in 1991. Every term on the list, each an artifact of its moment, bears heavily somewhere on the curriculum. The curriculum, any curriculum in its time, takes life in the context of discovery created by a research faculty — like UCLA’s faculty — deeply engaged in the currents of academic and cultural change that give such a list its meaning.

There are many more benches and many more students at UCLA than at the Williams of Mark Hopkins. And UCLA’s teachers, who are also its scholars and scientists, care no less about learning than Hopkins cared. Their expertise, their enthusiasm, their engagement in discovery are the best basis for better education on our campus.