2001 Bluffton College
Presidential Leadership Lecture
October 2, 2001
“I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the
cause of liberty – the cause of humanity.”
- William Jennings Bryan, 9 July 1896
Winds
of change fanned flames of controversy the year in 1899. Across the country, upheaval caused by
geopolitical and economic power realignment left Americans searching for a
standard, a basis upon which they could denominate their existence. With the industrial machine drowning out the
sound of the plow and scythe, a revolution was brewing – one that would change
the landscape of the globe for a century.
Productivity, industrial might, and cash now measured wealth, once
denominated by property ownership. The
idle holders of idle capital vilified by William Jennings Bryan at the
Democratic National Convention in 1896 were the educated industrialist elites
who, according to him, turned a deaf ear to the working masses. While all acknowledged the need to establish
a currency standard, fierce battle lines were drawn on the 11th
meridian of the Periodic Table of Elements with impressive skirmishes in the
“A” section.
In
the face of this tumultuous time, another debate was growing equally
rancorous. As the 20th century dawned a
movement was afoot to establish the infrastructure to consolidate the movement
of wealth throughout the nascent continental country. Financial panic, alleged by many to have been
instigated by proponents of a central bank, provided a stimulus to create the
Federal Reserve Bank by 1913. The
centralization of the mode of wealth and knowledge transfer, be it tangible or
intangible, has long been known to be the path to dominance. After watching the Duke of Wellington defeat
Napoleon at Waterloo, Baron Nathan Rothschild was quoted as saying, “I care not
what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which
the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the
British Empire, and I control the British money supply.” While observing that, “whoever controls the
volume of money in any country is the absolute master of all industry and
commerce,” President Garfield provided the inspiration for today’s presentation
in his words spoken in 1880. “I am an
advocate for paper money, but that paper money must represent what it professes
on its face. I do not wish to hold in my
hands the printed lies of the government.”
Today,
we will explore the realities of a crisis of humanity more polarizing than the
debate of gold or banking. We will probe
the enigma of the knowledge economy that has no standard – a wealth without
denomination. We will address the
challenge presented by President Garfield 120 years ago and resolve to
valiantly seek to address the problems we encounter. What is knowledge, how is it’s quality
assessed, and who controls its distribution?
Informed by the debates of yesterday, we will seek solutions for the
challenges we face today.
Let
me begin by making the following observations.
At the turn of this century, the International Leadership Forum
estimated that the adult global literacy rate was 73%. That means that the written word was
meaningless to over 1.3 billion adults.
With many countries boasting rates of 95%, many had rates under
50%. An UNESCO report estimates that
approximately 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are working and
going to school. Fifty percent of this
group works full-time. When one
considers the numbers of people trained beyond nominal literacy, the numbers
are more poignant. Less than 40% of the
world’s population, over the course of their lifetime, can enter tertiary
educational institutions.[1] Sixty three percent of the world’s literate
population lives in economically “developed” countries with African, Central
and Southeast Asian countries disproportionately illiterate. These statistics should, in themselves, hold
considerable weight.[2] However, this is not a lecture on education
of the masses. No, today, I’m concerned
with a far more complex topic that, while impacted by the numbers above, is far
more unnerving.
We find ourselves at a point in history where considerable
acclaim is cast upon those who have achieved greatness in the pursuit of
corporate goals. Forbes
and Fortune herald one after the other multi-millionaire whose
fame is built on success in entrepreneurial imperialism of one sort or
another. During the last four years of
the past decade, more millionaires and billionaires (in economic adjusted terms)
were created than in the cumulative running of all of human history. Are we really that much smarter and that much
more productive than all civilizations that preceded us? Are our institutions of higher learning
producing genius with every diploma? Do
we live in Garrison Keillor’s mythical town where, “every student is above
average?” Or is it possible that we have
built a tower of Babel?
Let
us examine three elements of the knowledge economy.
First
let us ask the question posed by Mr. Bryan.
In the knowledge economy, we must ask ourselves the unsettling question
of basis. In antiquity, wealth was
denominated by raw materials. Those who
had the most land, the most gold – in short, the most tangible property – were
the wealthiest. In the evolution of
economies, these basic elements were replaced by the metrics of the industrial
age. In industrial economies,
productivity, distribution, and market share served as the more abstract
surrogates for the wealth of ages gone by.
Now, in the knowledge economy, we find ourselves confronted by an
economic reality without basis. Prior to
the dot bomb, we were told that value was measured in “eye-balls” and
“stickiness”. Billions of dollars flowed
into the creation of a virtual presence that conveyed virtual information
virtually anywhere. Pause; let us
consider what virtual means. Our
faithful Webster tells us that virtual refers to a hypothetical particle whose
existence is inferred; being in essence though not formally recognized. In other words – NOT. When value is ascribed to virtual reality,
how is it denominated? More importantly,
how is one to know whether it is real or imagined? As the educator and the educated, how can we
learn to discern reality from that which is not?
Revisiting President Garfield’s conundrum –
we need to know that face value is based on value or it’s a lie. Is “knowledge” the presence or absence of
literacy, the letters of degree conferred on an individual, the prestige of
institution or commercial affiliation, nationality, race, creed? Or, is knowledge something more than
these?
I
would suggest the sine qua non of knowledge economy is the need for a
gold standard. Copyright law of the
United States established that facts have neither owner nor value. The organization and presentation of facts in
various expressions have value. Our
society is filled with data; our challenge is to transform that into usable
information leading to wise deployment creating value. Yes, here’s where I appeal to the student
populous movement – educational assessment should not be based on the
recitation of facts established by U.S. law as valueless – now here comes the
part where I shamelessly pander to the faculty – but in the useful synthesis
and application of the same. Knowledge
built on rout memorization is valueless, knowledge built on application and
problem solving has value.
Second,
we explore the problem of ownership.
There was a time when ownership was rather unambiguous. Possession was 9/10ths of the law. Land, buildings, shipping lines and trade
names were clearly defined by title. In
the knowledge economy, we are confronted with the timeless problem of
counterfeit. When he realized that
conventional warfare was not swinging in his favor, Hitler, in an effort to
decimate the United States and Great Britain economies began the process of
printing counterfeit dollars and pounds.
The French tried the same technique in Vietnam and the U.S. introduced
20 Peso notes in Cuba for the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion. Why is it that from Duke Sforz of Venice in
1470, to Napoleon, to Hitler, to Kennedy counterfeiting has been an integral
part of war? Because savvy tacticians
know that economic chaos is one of the world’s most effective weapons. Introducing counterfeit undermines all
economic systems as confidence is lost in the representation of legal tender.
So
too, in the knowledge economy, counterfeits are an untold tactical weapon. In a recent study made of United States
patents, our company found that over 35% of all current patents are
intellectual forgeries. This means that
the patent claims rights already secured by another party or already existent
in the public domain. One cannot help
being overwhelmed in Malaysia with copies of Microsoft Office being sold for $2
in the shopping malls of Jabor Bahru.
Passing off as proprietary that which is not is an unmitigated disaster
looming over our current economic system.
For the knowledge economy to have any viability, forgery detection must
be implemented.
Last
Spring, the University of Virginia gained national attention when one of its
faculty implemented a computer system to determine whether term papers
submitted by students were plagiarized or authentic. In certain sections, as many as 25% of the
papers were copied, in part or in whole from other sources – often the papers
of classmates. Is it any wonder that we
go on in life to copy the works of others in business, education, and other
walks of life when, in high school and college, we get away with intellectual
theft? I think not. However, I believe that educators and
students alike must realize that these patterned behaviors establish
foundations that lead to ruin.
Many
have proposed that with the ubiquitous nature of the internet, we are becoming
a boundary-less world. Traditional
geopolitical barriers are eroding.
People are interacting with one another irrespective of time zone,
language, tradition, or status. In real
time, I collaborate with business partners overlooking Tiananmen Square, Big
Ben and Tierra del Fuego. However, in
these times of heady multinationalism, we must consider the often-overlooked
dependency that is being created in this unrestricted world wide web. Knowledge must be transferred and shared for
it to achieve its greatest impact.
However, as we see the expansion of telecommunications-facilitated
trade, we see an equally expanding malignancy of inadvertent isolationism. Geiger & Diller closes its doors while we
shop on-line. Balmer’s purchases are now
made at Talbots.com. All the while, we
lose the priceless, informal interactions with our neighbors telling us of
places, people and events that once were intrinsic to the broadening of our
minds and perspectives. We miss the
touch of the hand, the warmth of a smile and the sharing of a friend’s tear –
in our wealth, we gain poverty of soul and mind. In the midst of this efficiency, what has
the knowledge economy lost? Is the local
ISP the Rothschild of the knowledge economy?
We
have sacrificed human interaction. In
our global economic conquests, we have lost the innovative impact of
observation. Rather than go to places,
we visit them virtually (remember, that means we DON’T). I would like to suggest that one of the greatest
threats of the knowledge economy is that we will actually see a reduction in
global understanding. We will see, hear
and trade with only those who are wired into the web. Rather than learning from the wisdom of the
cultures that have passed before us, we will see only that which the content
providers deem appropriate and, in so doing, we will see a contraction, not an
expansion of knowledge. In short, we
will choke the inventory of innovation and inquiry in the morass of
irrelevancy. We must resist the
centralization of information and knowledge.
Efforts must be made to learn from the richness of indigenous knowledge
that may never find its way to a web browser.
We must develop multiple venues and vehicles for the exchange of
knowledge so that the trade routes are not the monopolistic empire of the few.
So today, we must heed the warnings
of history and listen to the voices of the past so that we build a legacy of
renaissance, not repression. We need to
encourage one another to add value, not volume, to the knowledge of the
ages. We must commit ourselves to
respect and value the uniqueness of the intellectual property of each member of
the human race and decry piracy of the same.
And finally, we must vigorously resist the temptation of sloth and in
its place actively participate with the global community. We must resolve to move forward the
democratization of knowledge and be relentless in our efforts to bear the standard
of substance in the face of maelstrom of virtual value.
Let
now ring true the statement made by Mr. Bryan on that hot July day in 1896,
“The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous
cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.”
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