“Let People Be Free to Come Up with Ideas”

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gotten a lot of attention over the past decade. In these pages, we’ve often lamented that universities’ focus on superficial measures of diversity undermines merit and overlooks viewpoint diversity. A new book by Duke professor Adrian Bejan, Diversity Through Freedom , emphasizes a different kind of diversity: the organic, inevitable, and beneficial diversity found in nature. He calls it “a phenomenon that has a mind of its own” that can’t be “shoehorned into a few distinct (antagonistic) classes.” The Martin Center sat down with Professor Bejan to discuss his book and its implications for higher education. This transcription has been edited for clarity and length. Martin Center: Let me start by asking you about the core argument of your book. You say diversity comes from freedom, not from top-down efforts to engineer it. What does that mean in plain terms, especially for universities? Bejan: To let people be free to come up with ideas and gather voluntarily around ideas that are better. And then if you want to admire the association, you’ll be admiring natural diversity. The engineered diversity is not to be confused with the natural diversity. Engineered diversity is something that is a very old practice in human society. It goes by many names. The most common is the class struggle in which the different things are two: oppressed versus oppressor or proletarian versus factory worker, or underrepresented and overrepresented, minority versus majority. It’s always two antagonistic groups. And yes, if you want to make a mixture of, for example, milk and coffee, you would go for mixing two things. But nature has a mind of its own. It’s basically the constant evolving movie of anything goes. And amazingly, the diversity that happens naturally is impossible to measure. It is so enormous and constantly changing. And if you want to pay attention to that constantly or permanently, [it’s] surprising how relentless the change really is. And I like to say that, in fact, this whole thing began with the activity of design, which, even without education, is the act of striving toward perfection. Well, perfection, you can imagine it, but it never comes. What comes is the unexpected, which is the diversity of imperfect things that approach the performance of the perfect, but they’re good enough to be kept, adopted, and used as stepping stones or trampolines to new and even more promising ideas. People make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity. --> Diversity, on the other hand, you cannot imagine it, but it always comes. That’s why everything that surrounds us is so diverse that people make careers out of proclaiming that the world is evolving toward greater and greater complexity, which is a statement of admitting defeat because you cannot make a drawing of something complex. Complex means twisted together in its origin. Again, the discovery that led to this book is the physics of diversity, natural diversity, which is what happens when something good, meaning a good promise called perfection, is put in front of people. And that comes from one idea, from one individual, and then, those who are attracted, they come with. They are capable of approach[ing] that sort of design. But they necessarily miss the mark, just like in target shooting, nobody hits one point. Everybody hits an area which is small, but it’s an area, and everybody gets top marks for hitting a disc, not a point. And all of them together are the diversity of winners. It is why, at the end of every competition in the Olympics, you see new faces on the podium, even though their records are essentially unchanged from the previous edition. That is diversity, natural diversity. The diversity in athletics is in this particular book; the diversity of universities in the so-called rankings is also there, it’s predictable. Humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream. --> Everything that moves, obviously, is driven by the natural tendency toward the easier movement and more economical and farther, longer-lasting meaning, longer lifespan. All these things make nature itself act as a flow, trying to elbow its way in front of others. I grew up on the Danube. I’ve seen this growing up. I got a feel for the fact that the so-called inanimate has a mind of its own. If you do not respect that you’re swept away by the waters, especially in springtime. So humility in the face of nature comes from realizing that your ability to predict something exactly is a pipe dream, but just like nature, the individual is well advised to go with what works and move on. And that way, you get ahead, because you save time. You save time to cook up a better idea and to surprise even yourself with the fact that you did not think outside the box. You actually thought inside the box. And you found things that most people have been overlooking for decades. Martin Center: When you look at higher education right now, where do you think institutions are getting this wrong? They’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent. --> Bejan: Well, they’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent. It is attractive to the ignorant. And of course, the students are easy prey for people who preach that failed philosophy. How many hundreds of millions of victims of communism do you need in human history to alert people to the importance of saying, “Never again. Never again”? It is a pipe dream, and the results are well-documented in history. In fact, they don’t need history. [You just] have to look around and talk to people who came from somewhere else, and they’ll tell you what happened to their grandparents, to their parents, to themselves, actually, which is why they emigrated. What happened to the house they built? What happened to the little shop that they built on the corner of the street? Expropriation, dehumanizing effects, getting fired from jobs, being sent to the labor camp to die, not to come back. All these things are very well documented. And the numbers are enormous. Stalin is famous for joking that one death is a tragedy. 1 million is a statistic. People don’t even shrug their shoulders when they hear about the 100,000 dead or a million dead. But the family and the descendants, they know. They feel the pain forever. But the important thing is, for those who have had contact with the tragedies of this kind, they are well advised to stop being quiet and to talk about it. In my own environment, academia, I know professors who know what I’m talking about, but most of them are keeping quiet. I decided that the time has come to express not an opinion, but the physics of it, and the physics is this: that what is not useful is destined to fade away or to die, and yes, if you are stupid enough to try communism again, be sure that you’ll fail, because soon enough, that dictatorship will be overthrown. It will be. In fact, the writing is on the wall. Today, every dictatorship is a police state. Without the police state, it would not exist. Martin Center: In your book, you make a strong case for both merit and hierarchy as natural features of thriving systems. How should universities think about merit today, given all the debates? Merit gets a bad name. How should universities approach this? Bejan: Well, it’s ironic, actually, it’s funny. The word “merit” is not spoken, yet the university wants to achieve a higher ranking. But the people who engage in this kind of narrative don’t think it’s funny. They think that they’re preaching to the choir. The fact is that we’re all different. And that is why society is a very impressive living body. It has powers and abilities and ideas that one individual does not have, and that is why the society outlives the individual, and yes, the society can take one idea and move it to greater heights. And this is all pretty well documented. And one university, with its merit and fame, is perceived by others as being better than other universities. And that is the mother and father of the rankings that are obvious to most people who pay attention. The word “merit” is not spoken, yet the university wants to achieve a higher ranking. --> It’s about ideas, and the ideas do not come uniformly from the members of the university. Some members are individuals to whom ideas occur more frequently, even better, meaning, even more different. There are some individuals whose ideas arrive in not only greater diversity, but greater audacity. Audacity or ability to shake the boat. And it is those ideas that put the university on the map. People ask, “Where was Richard Feynman professor? Where was Einstein a researcher [when] in the States?” They talk about time and place, not only one name or one group. This is what people remember, and this is why, to this day, regardless of the news of the day, Harvard University is famous. MIT is famous. It is for this reason that it attracted and protected, meaning it housed and cared for gifted individuals who came up with ideas, many ideas, not just science and other things. Impressive characters such as Aldrin, who was the second man on the moon, is an MIT PhD. Things, meaning behavior and achievement, belong to valuable players, like on a football team. The value of the player and the play is not distributed uniformly, because those are individuals with a built-in notion that they’re on earth to make a contribution and not to be sheep. That’s the reality. And if a student today does not resonate with what I just said, well, that’s his fault. He will end up not being a producer of things that change the world. What I’m telling you is particularly valuable in engineering, because engineering is the science and the profession of making things that did not exist before. So, the engineer is the creator. And if you are not able to dribble the ball, then you’re not part of the game. They’re on earth to make a contribution and not to be sheep. --> Martin Center : You’ve been very critical of what you call artificial diversity. How do you see that showing up at universities? Do you think it’s showing up at all in the growth of administrative offices and all of these programs we have on campus? Bejan: Yeah, that’s right. So, the evolution to which you refer is of an older vintage. It began right after Sputnik in the late 50s. That is when the government in this race for outer space became very busy in getting involved in shaping the research activity in the university, and decade after decade, the monies that came from the government ballooned the administration, the administering of that flow also became a university of its own at all levels, from government all the way down to the university. So we have here people who handle the money, we have in Washington, people who distribute the money, but the people who are making the decisions at all levels are failed academics. They’re not the ones doing the research. I’ve seen them, and it is mind-boggling that, say, Adrian is required to convince people who basically are not players. But they do the deciding, and they decide the initiatives or categories of projects that should be sponsored, as opposed to other categories, such as free thinking, that I think are more valuable, meaning the least expected idea should be encouraged. All of that is just foreign to research based on planning. Well, that is the USSR: research based on planning. And remember, I grew up in communist Romania, so I know what I’m talking about. I grew up in communist Romania, so I know what I’m talking about. --> Before I left the university where I got my start for the first two years, there was a directive that arrived from the Ministry of Education that a professor, an honest person, shared with people in the classroom. Can you believe here’s this document from the Ministry of Education, telling us the 20 inventions that need to be made. Yes, I read them to you. They are listed, 20 inventions to be made. That is planned, not planned economies, but planned scientific research, which is, of course, nonsense. If you know the question, the ball game is over, you know, because getting the answers is child’s play, and so that is what’s going on. And then the ones who come up with ideas while not being sponsored by the government are very few, but they are the free people who still exist. At a recent conference in my domain, which is called constructal law of design in nature, a participant a little bit older than me, said, “Now in retirement, I’m doing the kind of thinking that I knew that I was capable of doing. I can actually write what is important without looking over my shoulder.” And I said, “Well, I think you know that the challenge that I face is to behave like you, even though I’m not retired.” Science at this rate is doomed. Science, my field, for example, thermodynamics, is in trouble because of nothing new, and then an invasion of bowing and scraping. These are the copycats. They keep repeating things that, as I said, failed academics have the power to support. Thermodynamics is in trouble because of nothing new, and then an invasion of bowing and scraping. --> Martin Center: You answered my next question before I even asked it, which was going to be about freedom and creativity. It sounds like you think faculty today are not very free to pursue ideas. Bejan: They may be free in their own bedrooms, but in public, they’re joiners. They form big groups because the government favors collective proposals, with 10 or more co-authors, in the belief that size makes better ideas, which is the complete opposite of what collectivization has demonstrated in history. It began with the collectivization of agriculture in the USSR in the late 1920s, and it spread all the way to 1989 — the fall of communism. It created everything: poverty, of course, but also hunger, and the exodus of the few capable farmers. Farmers from the village, they left. They ran. They ran for a better life in the city as laborers, meaning unqualified laborers. I’ve seen them. They left the countryside vacant and rotting. That’s the effect of collectivization. There’s a cacophony of publishing where everybody writes, and nobody reads. --> In research, for example, there is research going on with extremely low ROI, return on investment. You have large groups that are getting paid. They publish papers, research articles with 20 or 30 or more co-authors. You don’t know who did what in that particular report, but everybody got paid. And by the way, nobody reads the article that’s published. Today in science, there’s a cacophony of publishing where everybody writes, and nobody reads. Not long ago, it took effort to write something by hand, then to have it typed, then to put it in a yellow envelope and lick a stamp and mail it to a publisher, and then in return, you got the three envelopes with the reviews mailed the same way with stamps, and that was an activity that made everybody honest, and it kept the numbers of participants small. It was reduced to a small number of real players in this kind of flow of ideas. Machine writing, machine publishing, all of this has created this Tower of Babel of Science, where, as I said, everybody writes and publishes, but nobody reads. By the way, this is where you come in. They watch a few podcasts or episodes on YouTube. And so, yes, that’s very important, the work that you do, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to contribute and to be heard. But writing a book is one way to stick to the old game, which is harder work because it takes a lot of effort to publish a book these days. All of this has created this Tower of Babel of Science. --> Martin Center: I will ask you one last question, and that is, if you were speaking directly to students or to young faculty watching this video, what would you tell them to focus on if they want to do meaningful, creative work? Bejan: I just finished my lecture, and I told them exactly what you’re fishing for. I tell them to value and protect their individuality and to think, first of all, to recognize that every moment of the day, things surprise them, that it is their duty to question them, to connect the dots, and to come up with a good question, which is their question. The ball game, meaning the opportunity to score, is not in finding an answer; it is in discovering a new question, and that is your baby. And then you also immediately know the answer, if not right away, you’ll know it tomorrow morning when you wake up, because that is when the better ideas that took shape during the night occurred to you. [You should] value those images and do justice to them, and never lose sight of the fact that there’s only one like you. You’re an individual. And I also told them, “Do not join. Just stay true to your own thinking and your own imagination.” And I know that they like me, but this kind of message is best transmitted with the personal example, with an unrestrained book like this one, “Diversity through Freedom,” and with other books of that kind that I published in the recent past. They all come from this attitude that I’m on earth to make a contribution, not to be a copycat, and certainly not to be a plagiarist or a thief or a sheep. Jenna Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. The post “Let People Be Free to Come Up with Ideas” appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal .

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