There is a lot of repetition in my notes from the Science w/o Borders visit. That is because people are saying many of the same things. It seems that the consensus is that the best way to build connections is through faculty exchanges and relationships. There seems to be consensus that one of the best ways to do this is to work on joint research projects where both sides contribute and both sides benefit. One of the ways to get this ball rolling is to hold workshops where potential participants can get to know each other and who has what expertise. Finally, there seems to be a consensus that this system of relationships takes time to construct. It is robust, but decentralized and grows organically. We (outsiders) can help fertilize this process, but we cannot really rush it.
Anyway, my plan is to write notes about what I hear, try to treat each one like the first time. I understand that that many of the reports will look like many others. Instead of being a problem, I see this as a confirmation that we are onto the right ideas. Consensus is not always the way to go. We all like to imagine that the few mavericks have it right and everybody else is wong. Experience indicates, however, that this is usually not true.
The work I have been doing in higher education this last year has been a real eye-opener. The good news is that the American system of higher education is simply the best. This includes our universities community colleges and training. My appreciation of the system was last updated in 1984, when I graduated with my MBA. I got to know a little more about it when the kids were applying for college, but the experience was limited; the application process doesn’t give you the kind of inside knowledge I have been getting lately.
The “bad” news that there are so many great opportunities and so many permutations and they are so widespread that it is hard to understand and hard to know what to do. It is the proverbial kid in the candy shop story. The other problem is that our higher education system is a protean as it is ubiquitous. (I love to use the phrase, but opportunities are few.) It is our great strength that our system adapts very quickly. My observation is that even the people ostensibly in charge at most institutions have only an awareness of most of what is going on. This is by no means a criticism. In fact, I am impressed by their wisdom. Good leadership trusts people to innovate and imagine better things and then make them realities. I see a lot of spontaneity, serendipity and self-organizing ad-hocracies. Excuse me if I wax whimsical, but the picture is so complex and beautiful that no one can comprehend it in its entirety. Fortunately, no one has to. The parts work together autonomously and organize themselves. We did Rice University in the morning. I didn’t know much about Rice (discussed in my last post), but I did know there was such a place. I didn’t even know that the University of Houston existed. This is the complexity part. But I was greatly impressed with the people I met there. They told me that they are awarding 300 PhDs a year and they want to expand that to 400. This is no easy task. It is possible to grow too fast and, as I have learned to my sorrow, scalability is a problem when you try to rapidly increase quantity while maintaining quality, even when you are rich in resources. It takes about five years to make a PhD and you lose about 30% of them. That means that you have to take in more than 500 a year and you can expect to have more than 3000 in the system at any time.
This is a challenge. The Houston folks were interested in talking to the Brazilians, since they saw some synergies and ways to share resources. They also pointed out that they were the country’s largest Hispanic serving institution in the U.S. They quickly pointed out that they understood that Brazilians were not Hispanics (a frequent cultural gaffe) but that they simply meant that they had lots of experience in cross culture communication and, after all, Portuguese speakers can usually understand lots of Spanish, even if it doesn’t seem to be a two way street. (I don’t know why this is true, but I have seen it enough to know that it is. I can understand most spoken Spanish and can read it fairly easily, even though I have never studied it. Spanish speakers tend to look at me blankly when I speak Portuguese at them. I would attribute this to my bad accent, except I notice the same thing when native Brazilians are doing the talking.)
University of Houston is strong in health care and energy, as you might expect given its location is the world’s energy center and top health care complex. They also said they were good at getting innovations to market. One guy said that lots of academics know how to invent but they don’t know how to innovate. He claimed that they were separate skills. Lots of inventions just are not useful or not useful in their original form. Sometimes the inventor can take his product successfully to market. Often they need someone else to help or do it.
I think the above is the big take away lesson. Few people possess the requisite combination of stills to be master the technical details, implement them, understand potential uses and how to bring them to market. Even the few people who have all these things often lack the flexibility to change their great ideas as necessary. There really are no great individuals; only great teams. When you look at great people closely enough, you always notice that the team around him plays a big role. Often when the great man fails, we see something has happened in the team around him before the problem was manifest.
We spent the morning at Rice University. It is a beautiful place, a university in an arboretum. They told me that when this place was built a hundred years ago, it was marshland w/o many trees. The trees are mostly live oaks. They line the streets and fill the space between the buildings. Live oaks have that spreading aspect with branches extending almost horizontally across streets and paths.
Rice is strong in engineering and sciences, especially in the ones that come naturally to an institution in Houston: oil & gas and medical services. Rice is already cooperating with Brazil and has Science w/o Borders students. They have working agreements with USP to share supercomputers and there are people to people exchanges. Our Brazilian friends expressed their interest in doing joint research with people at Rice.
Rice takes Brazil very seriously. They have even established an office called “Brazil at Rice” just to take care of the Brazilians, SwB and others.
Rice is working on a joint PhD program in American studies with Campinas. Students would spend two years at their home institutions and then a year at the partner. They would get degrees from both institutions. Campinas has signed onto the agreement and there are currently two Brazilian PhD students at Rice. Rice is still pushing the agreement through its bureaucracy.
They are have also recently made an agreement with PUC-SP to have Rice students go to Brazil for eight week Portuguese training. The idea is that they would do this in their second year. They told us that eight weeks in country is worth a year in the classroom in Texas. They like PUC-SP because they are a reliable partner and can provide housing for the students with Brazilian families. Eight students will go from Rice this next year. Our Rice interlocutors were very interested in FLTAs. I promised to send more information.
We talked about the challenges of exchanges. The biggest problem is course articulation, i.e. figuring out which courses at one university are equal to those of another. It I not just up to the universities in question. They have to answer to their accreditation boards. The challenge of cooperation is tough. It is hard enough even with close partners and two-way. It gets nearly impossible when we start talking about multilateral partnerships.
I heard again at Rice what I hear all the time. Universities are decentralized with lots of autonomous sections. The best programs are done professor to professor. These things grow organically and it takes time to build relationships. People have to learn each other’s strengths and weakness and they have to learn to trust each other. This produces a flexible and robust system, but not one that can be quickly scaled up.
Short term exchanges are much easier. Students just make their own deals; actually it is usually professors who make the deals for their students. What could be done to make things work better? The best thing to do is to facilitate relationships thought joint projects and workshops. Rice professor Richard Smalley won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with Rice colleague Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Sir Harold W. Kroto of Great Britain for the discovery of 60 carbon structures shaped like soccer balls, nicknamed Buckyballs. They said that these Buckyballs have application in chemistry and engineers. I don’t know about such things but it must be important. I got to hold the Nobel Prize. It is bigger and heavier than I thought.
After that, it was time for lunch at the truly beautiful chow hall you see in the picture. It as a useful and good visit that I believe will result in stronger ties between our Brazilian friends and American universities. The relationships are up and growing.
I spoke at an AmCham sponsored meeting in São Paulo that brought together American firms in order to talk about connecting internships at their firms with Science w/o Borders students. Also on the panel were Jorge Guimarães from CAPES, Glaucius Olivia from CNPq, Allen Goodman from IIE, Nelson Fujimoto from MDIC & Luiz Loureiro from Fulbright.
The representatives of the firms (around sixty were there) seemed interested in the internship possibilities. The idea is that they get to test drive the best and the brightest while they are in the U.S. and then they can use them when they come back to Brazil. In talking to them after the meeting, I learned that the major challenges will be logistics and communication. They have some communications/coordination disconnections between U.S. headquarters and their Brazilian operations. Even when everybody agrees, things don’t always work perfectly. But the goodwill was there.
Glaucius discussed the successes already manifest in the program. He mentioned the good results of going overseas to learn a generation ago in relation to aerospace, oil & gas and agriculture. He also shared a recently developed program that plots each of the SwB participants on Google Earth. When you click on the point, you are shown information about the student, including resume and interests. This should greatly facilitate the placement of interns, as firms can rapidly identify potential candidates and find contact information.
We invested a lot of time and money in this recent trip by Brazilian leaders of higher education and I think it was well worth it. An early indication of this was the Brazilian willingness to be partners. It is always better if both sides have some skin in the game. The Brazilians paid for all air travel and per diem for their participants, a big investment. Beyond the cash outlay is the commitment demonstrated by the willingness of so many busy leaders to take three weeks out of their life – sacrificing their Carnival holidays, BTW, to take part. This not only indicates that they value the enterprise up front but also that they will be more committed to worthwhile results to make sure they justify the investment.
It was clear to me that the Brazilian side took this very seriously. Our own commitment of money and attention of our own high-ranking personnel made it clear to them that we were fully onboard. The visit would have been a success if all we accomplished was confidence building, but there was much more.
All three of our groups received warm welcomes everywhere they went, which with few exceptions ranged from enthusiastic to very enthusiastic. American institutions clearly think it is time to get involved in Brazil and this program is a fantastic opportunity for them. Our groups got enough firm commitments from American institutions to absorb all the students that Brazil could reasonably send their way.
On the Brazilian side, this visit and deepened their growing understanding that Brazilian students should be spread across in many institutions and that excellence exists in all fifty states. The original formulation was to send students only to the so-called top-ranked institutions. Meetings during this visit confirmed that depending on the subject a University of Nebraska can be better than a Harvard. I believe that most of the Science w/o Borders students will end up going to large public research universities, like the land-grant institutions, mostly because they demonstrated the capacity and interest to accept relatively large numbers integrate them into their academic communities and help them get practical expertise thorough existing intern or co-operative arrangements that they have with local firms.
Our Brazilian partners also came to a better understanding of the role that community colleges play in developing and maintaining a 21st Century workforce. Because of this visit, at least some Science w/o Borders will spend time at community colleges, principally to give them intensive instruction in English and acclimatization to the American system. Community colleges already play a role very similar to what the Brazilians need, bringing immigrants and first-time college students up to speed to benefit fully from the educational system. A potent collateral benefit was to convince there influential Brazilian education leaders of the usefulness of extending their nascent network of community college equivalents. I am certain that this will encourage links between community colleges in the U.S. with Brazilian partners in a ground floor opportunity that will enrich both sides.
We cannot overestimate the importance of the contacts made and the excitement generated. The program touched key decision makers. The Brazilians who participated are in strategic positions to make changes in Brazilian higher education. The Americans they met are in similar positions in the United States. Their collaboration will bear fruit in ways we can only imagine. I believe that scores or even hundreds of future linkages among Brazilian and American institutions of higher educations will trace their provenance to this two-week crucible.
The Brazilians are making a big investment in their future and tangentially in ours. We are lucky to be present at the creation of this wonderful program, which means that we have been able to help our friends shape the program’s initial form, which in turn will have follow-on effects for many years. This visit is helping us all benefit of this opportunity of a generation.
It is always an honor to meet kids that are so hard-working and a pleasure to share in their aspirations. This is what I got to do yesterday at the Casa Thomas Jefferson branch in Taguatinga, a satellite city near Brasília, when I met this year’s English ACCESS students and presented them with their scholarship certificates.
Fifty-four new students got ACCESS scholarships, which gives them two years of English study at our BNC (We cover the cost of fifty; CTJ adds in four more.) The kids are all low income and from disadvantaged backgrounds. English will give them a big boost and will help boost their communities. Being involved is also good public diplomacy for us. It helps build and maintain the web of relationships on which our good relations ultimately depend.
Relationships are why I think it is so important for us – for me – to be part of these things. I was talking to my colleague Marcia about that on the way to Taguatinga. Since I just got back to Brazil the morning before, I had a lot of work to catch up, lots of paper to push. I was really “too busy” to take the time out for this ceremony. But we work through Brazilian people. My job is relationships. Paper pushing is only a means to that goal. Our program CAN go by itself. We can pay the money and forget about it. But that is like planting a garden and not taking advantage of the fruits and flowers.
An American diplomat is sufficiently rare in the lives of these students that I believe that they will long remember that I shook their hands, called them by their names and gave them their certificates. It gives their program an American face – literally. Of course, I also had the chance to renew my acquaintance with school leaders from Brasília and our friend at the BNC. This is what public diplomacy is about.
Marcia wrote my comments, which I have included below for reference. I still don’t trust my Portuguese to completely. Besides, at official events it is important to hit the main points but not to talk too long. W/o prepared remarks, I tend to ramble on too long. I ad-libbed a few comments at the end. I thought it was important to tell them a little about their own importance for the future of their country. Talented people have the privilege and a duty to develop their skills for the good of their country and the world in general. We need to remind ourselves and others of that. I find that most young people are receptive to that message. They want to be part of something bigger than their daily lives. I also wanted to remind everybody about the Science w/o Borders initiative and the opportunities and responsibilities that it brings.
The CTJ in branch in Taguatinga teaches around 1,250 students. Among them are 250 who get their instruction at a local High School – Leonardo Da Vinci – after school. CTJ pays the school 10% of what they get in tuition. It is easier for students just to stay a little longer at school than it is to fight traffic to get to the CTJ facilities. This is a good partnership that benefits all around.
CTJ people tell me that there can be significant differences among the students they attract in different locations. The Lago Sul campus gets mostly upper and middle class students. They often spend a long time at CTJ and learn to speak English almost flawlessly. Taguatinga is not much like Lago Sul. Most of the students there are poor and many come from single parent households. It is harder for them to continue their English educations, but it is a tribute to them and their parents that they continue to show up.
The ACCESS program in Taguatinga has an excellent retention record, despite the challenges of its students. Of the 54 students who entered the two-year program in March of last year, 52 have returned for the second. CTJ staff is active in creating this happy result. The CTJ teachers and administrators take it personally. I heard one story about a young woman from last year’s class who was going to drop out. She was getting married and her prospective husband thought that she had better uses for her time than to study English. The CTJ director called the future husband and explained what a rare opportunity this was and that he should not take it away from her. The young man relented and the young woman returned to class to finish what she had begun. I wonder what changes this intervention will make in her life and the life of her community.
In all there are 1,147 students in the ACCESS program in Brazil, in Recife, Sao Paulo, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Manaus, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and here in Brasilia.
My picture up top is the class picture. You may notice that most people seem not to be looking at the camera. This is because there were multiple cameras. The picture taking can take a long time; everybody wants a photo. The middle picture is a student from last year’s class and me. She had the scary task of giving a speech in English to the new students. She did very well. The bottom picture is the street outside the BNC.
Remarks below, FYI:
– Muito obrigado, Ana Maria!
– Muito obrigado à Casa Thomas Jefferson, à Secretaria de Educação do Distrito Federal e à Diretoria Regional de Ensino do Recanto das Emas pela importante parceria na implementação do Programa ACCESS.
– Bom dia, alunos do programa ACCESS e PARABÉNS pela bolsa de estudos!
– Vocês agora são alunos ACCESS da Casa Thomas Jefferson e participantes nesse importante programa de ensino de inglês, cultura americana e responsabilidade social.
– Sintam-se orgulhosos! Vocês fazem parte de um grupo de aproximadamente 1,150 (mil, cento e cinquenta) bolsistas Access espalhados pelo Brasil em cidades como Brasília, Manaus, Recife, Salvador, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro e Porto Alegre.
– À medida em que o Brasil cresce no cenário internacional, surgem muitas oportunidades e é muito bom ver que vocês já estão começando a se preparar aprendendo inglês.
– Além de abrir portas no mundo profissional, o inglês também permitirá que vocês busquem interessantes oportunidades de estudo no exterior, com programas como o Jovens Embaixadores, o Ciência sem Fronteiras e muitos outros que existem.
– Sejam curiosos, perguntem, participem e aprendam bastante. Da próxima vez que eu me encontrar com vocês, conversaremos em inglês,
We had excellent meetings at several universities. A few stand out. One of the last we visited and a good example is North Carolina State University. I can be a case study of what we want. If you want to find out more about Science w/o Borders in English, the NC State webpage is a good place to start.
Whenever you find something working really well, you should look for a champion, somebody just pushing the program, fixing the problems and making all the good luck just seem natural. At NC State that person is Michael Bustle. Having a practical champion is rarely sufficient to make a successful program but it almost always necessary. It is an interesting leadership question. Organizations need champions but you cannot really designate one and it is sometimes difficult to recognize the person involved, but you recognize the energy in the operation. It is usually the presence of one or more of these champions that makes an operation “lucky”.
There is more. NC State is a land grant institution. Land grant institutions and their like have traditions and advantages to draw on. Schools like NC State have experience with bringing in non-traditional students, educating them and adding value to citizens and society, as well as the mandate to work on practical sciences. They are, IMO, the places that will take most of the America-bound Brazilians.
Another advantage is the integration with local firms and government.I wrote about this in an earlier post. One of the biggest plus in American education today is its flexibility and connections. NC State is closer than some others. Some private firms are actually located on campus, actually a new one called Centennial Campus.
Centennial Campus sits on 1300 acres about a half-hour drive from the main campus. Private firms pay $35/square foot for places on campus, significantly higher than they could get farther away. They come for the proximity to students, researchers and professor. Many of the buildings were constructed by private firms for their own use. After 30 years, they will become the property of the university. I won’t try to describe all the specifics. You can read more details about Centennial Campus at this link. You will be impressed.
My top picture is the North Carolina State University main campus. Below that is a fermentation lab on the Centennial Campus, where students can work in real-world facilities. Bio-manufacturing is a technology which will grow in the future, but initial investments are high and risky. A competitive advantage in the future will be the capacity to transfer innovations from university environments to real-world applications. The bottom picture shows some of the firms that are participating on the Centennial Campus.
My perception of Science w/o Borders evolved during this visit. At first I saw the simple practical task of moving thousands of Brazilian kids to American universities in order to improve their educational opportunities. Of course, this is still the key task along the critical path, but it is not the big picture or the ultimate destination. The final destination is the internationalization or the re-internationalization (as I wrote in an earlier post) of Brazilian higher education.
Their American experience will indeed change and enrich the lives of the individual students. But the experience such a large cohort brings back to Brazil will also change Brazilian education. In addition to its size, this is a well-targeted program. The Brazilian students will be chosen from all over the country. They are already in place to become future leaders of the country. Their already sunny prospects will be further brightened by their international experience, the things they learn and the connections they make, not least of which the connections they make among each other, the Pygmalion effect at work.
They will bring greater internationalization to Brazilian education. For each one that travels in the first waves, dozens will follow along the paths created and widened. Beyond that, they will come back with new habits and different expectations.
Our Brazilian friends liked the flexibility of the American system. Brazil still uses something much more like the old inherited European system. There is not a lot of flexibility and tends to be less cooperation among departments than there is today in the U.S. This is true even within universities, not to mention among institutions or with outside private firms. American universities were like this but they had to change to adapt to the new realities, as I wrote in an earlier post.
We couldn’t keep the doughboys in their old habits when they came home after seeing Europe. The popular song “How ya gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree” reflected this. Science w/o Borders affects nowhere near as many people and is nothing like the intensity, but it does have the advantage of concentration. Smaller numbers will have high leverage in the relatively rarefied, if rapidly growing, Brazilian higher-education environment. This is also a time of maximum leverage. Brazilian higher-education is in a transition, as is the country.
I understand that I am repeating many of the same themes. Maybe I should sometime combine related posts and make them more coherent, but I am writing day-to-day.
My picture up top show the SwB group at the Brazilian Embassy, where we were invited to give a readout of our various visits. We had a reception at the residence that evening. The second picture shows the entrance at Meridian House. Meridian House organized the program and we did a discussion there.
Our groups of Brazilian education leaders went East, West and Center to learn about Americans higher education and to explore opportunities for linkages, especially Science w/o Borders. Then we came back to together, gathering in Washington to discuss our experiences. We went all over the country, but we seem to have had remarkably similar experiences. I suppose that is because the ingredients were the same: Brazilian & American higher education folks talking about their interest in internationalizing their programs. There were some variations.
One significant difference evidently was the fame of Science w/o Borders. In the Eastern campaign, we had to explain details of Science w/o Borders, but most of our interlocutors already knew a lot about the program. Our Western group reported less general knowledge of the program. I can think of several reasons why this might be true. I also have considered the possibility that it might simply be a perception difference on our part or self-fulfilling, i.e. we got what we expected. But I don’t think it much matters. One of the central goals of our trip was to inform and persuade. In this we succeeded. Whether it was explaining details to the already reasonably well-informed or bringing new information to the erstwhile benighted, they’ve got it right now.
We found almost an embarrassment of riches. The American higher-education system provides more opportunities than can be exploited. A welcome challenge is the choosing among the many opportunities, but we should not believe that the beguiling number and variety of choices is not a serious challenge. Two extremes must be avoided. Our Brazilians friends are aware that they need to take care not to concentrate too much on a few places or dissipate their resources and people across to broad a spectrum.
IMO the best options are in the land-grant colleges and similar institutions. They have long had the mission and the infrastructure needed to take in large numbers of students from diverse backgrounds and they have first-class research capabilities in practical sciences – the kinds of things you need to build a country.
We were also mightily impressed by the community colleges we visited. They have the capacity to train large numbers in English and study habits. I believe that my Brazilians friends experienced a minor epiphany when the toured community colleges (our group visited Northern Virginia Community College and Montgomery College) and I did too, BTW. Before this visit They were not much interested in sending their students to community colleges, which they saw in the old paradigm as second-class or junior colleges. We were surprised by their connections with local firms and flexibility in responding to their training & research needs. Something along the lines of the American community college paradigm will be a key ingredient in Brazil’s development, especially in the integration of the new middle class into prosperity. Brazil has excellent universities to train the best-and-brightest. What they need is that bridge.
I was less enamored by the receptions we got at our elite universities. Maybe they are less hungry because they already have much more demand for places in their universities than they can possibly satisfy and maybe they think they have enough international connections, but the difference was palpable. We got enthusiastic receptions at the excellent middle ranked universities and community colleges; the elite universities were polite but we tended to get one or two officials explaining that it was hard to get in. This is no real problem. As I wrote above, there are more opportunities than our Brazilian friends can exploit.
I believe, and told my Brazilian friends, that rankings are overrated. As a practical proposition, you can get as great an education at a big state school as you can at the elite institution. They understand this and are sophisticated enough to look to programs and department, not to the big name. If you want to study water resources, you are a lot better off at the University of Nebraska than at Harvard, for example.
So I think this trip succeeded in fulfilling all the expectations. The Science w/o Borders initiative will succeed and we helped.
My pictures are from the recently completed trip. Most people will recognize the picture up top as the Chrysler building in New York with its art deco crown. The middle picture is the quad at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The bottom is the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. It was our first public university.
One of the things about American universities that most impresses our Brazilians friends is the density and depth of outside connections. Most American universities work in a web of other universities, private firms and NGOs to a much greater extent than their Brazilian counterparts. Students at American universities often work as interns and in co-ops with businesses. Researchers at American universities mix freely with outsider. American professors consult. Universities are not outside; they are fully part of society’s fabric. (This may seem obvious to us, but recall that many universities traditionally have seen themselves as separate with separate norms and sometimes special rules and laws. In Europe, they were based on religious institutions with traditions of separation.)
In trying to explain this difference, one of our Brazilian friends credited relative insecurity among American academics. He said that Brazilian academics are relatively well paid and secure in their positions. They are not hungry for other things. They don’t need to look for outside opportunities. Only hungry wolves hunt. American academics are hungry, at least in the figurative case.
This makes a lot of sense. I am not sure the hunger metaphor is perfect, but I do think that American universities have a feeling of incompleteness. They need to partner with outsiders. This makes the universities better and more robust as well as more useful to society.
This is not an uncontroversial idea. When I was in school lo those many years ago, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth that academics were getting involved with private business. There was a kind of chastity idea that universities should start apart from the hustle, bustle and especially the profit motives of the larger society. This has weakened in recent decades. Describing academics in an “ivory tower” – separate from society – is usually a pejorative description. But we still see some of this idea. There really is not much merit to the idea of separateness it, although it is resembles the valid idea that scholars should have some space for contemplation.
The value of a scholarly pursuit is that it should allow the thinking person the space to think. You can be so involved in doing things that you don’t have time to think about what you are doing or why. This we should defend. But a step back or a pause to think should not mean separation.
The irony for a scholar being separate is that separating yourself allows you to do exactly what scholarship should never do, i.e. isolating yourself from people and ideas that might challenge your own ideas. We all look for confirming information and people who support us. We need to be pushed out of this comfort zone usually by needing to interact with people who might prefer to avoid.
That is why it is good to be hungry, at least sometimes. It forces us to get out there, try new things, innovate and overcome. Challenges lead to growth; comfort to stagnation.
My pictures are Ben Franklin at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a man who questioned, tried lots of new things and produced practical wisdom. He founded the University of Pennsylvania, an academic pursuit, but he also invented the Franklin stove, very practical, discovered the nature of electricity, very technical, originated lighting rods, very helpful and described the Gulf Stream, very much natural science. And he did almost everything he did in cooperation with others. He in his person formed a good template for what universities might be. I also have a picture of a walking street at the University of Pennsylvania.
