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Beyond the Bench: Preparing MIT Students for the Challenges of Global Leadership

Moderator: James A. Champy '63, SM '65
Richard Samuels PhD '80 Subra Suresh ScD '81 Marc A. Kastner Deborah Fitzgerald David Schmittlein Adele Naude Santos: October 3, 2008; Running Time: 1:24:26

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

MIT produces students who are “deep, entrepreneurial, passionate, diverse and active,” says Phillip Clay, the kind of talented individuals who should play major parts on the world stage. MIT has begun a drive to ensure that its students fulfill their promise. Central to this mission, Richard Samuels says, is the kind of education that steeps students in the realities of globalization. In a world that’s not so much flat as converging and increasingly complex and diverse, students must “step boldly and intelligently into the global market of ideas and commerce,” says Samuels, lest they “become cogs in a global machine.” MIT hopes “to create the people who design and operate those machines.”

This means making international studies a core part of the MIT experience, and establishing MIT in an international context. At a time when MIT faces increased global competition, Subra Suresh worries that flat and reduced federal research funding will cut into MIT’s research preeminence. So the School of Engineering is seeking out partnerships around the world for faculty, and looking to provide its undergraduates with exchange and practicum opportunities abroad.

All over the world, “countries want to reproduce MIT,” says Marc Kastner. But MIT’s unique culture is difficult to replicate: the Institute pours resources into the youngest students and faculty; promotes an egalitarian atmosphere; draws instructors from an international talent pool; and is “great in everything” -- science, engineering, liberal arts and business. As MIT seeks out international alliances, “We must think about how to communicate to our partners what’s important about our culture,” he says.

The “crown jewel” of MIT’s international programs is the MIT International Science and Technology Initiative (MISTI), says Deborah Fitzgerald. More than 300 MIT students each year get to spend time working in a company in another country, at no expense to them. A program that often requires two years of language, history and culture study, MISTI boosts confidence, says Fitzgerald, allowing students to see themselves “as people who can solve any kind of problem, anywhere, in a foreign language” -- a “great vindication of all they’ve worked so hard for.” Fitzgerald’s wish is to make MISTI possible for every student.

MIT Sloan is committed to developing principled and innovative leaders who can improve the world, says Dave Schmittlein. The school has developed a Center for Leadership that emphasizes “values, transparency, consistency in decision making,” and provides its budding leaders with international experience through a global entrepreneurship lab that operates in 17 different countries.

Adele Naudé Santos declares herself “passionately opposed to outposts” in foreign lands, because it would be impossible to clone MIT’s collaborative, multidisciplinary, nonhierarchical ethos. Instead, “we partner,” she says. Students and faculty work and study with colleagues abroad in projects like the Urbanization Laboratory, which develops sustainable designs for new cities in such nations as India, China and Japan. Graduates in architecture and planning migrate to all corners of the globe, carrying their unique experience and MIT’s culture with them.

Lecture Details

Location: Little Kresge

About the Speakers

Moderator: James A. Champy '63, SM '65

Chairman of Consulting
Perot Systems Corporation Life Member, MIT Corporation

James A. Champy is an authority on the management issues surrounding business reengineering and organizational change. Prior to joining Perot Systems, Champy was chairman and CEO of CSC Index, the management consulting arm of Computer Science Corporation. He was one of the original founders of Index, a $200-million consulting practice that was acquired by CSC in 1988.

Champy has also authored such well-received books as Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, which sold more than 2,500,000 copies and spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list. His articles appear in major newspapers and magazines throughout the world.

Champy earned his B.S. and his M.S. in civil engineering from MIT, and his J.D. from Boston College Law School. Champy serves on the board of Analog Devices, Inc., on MIT’s Board of Trustees, and on the Board of Overseers of the Boston College Law School.

Richard Samuels PhD '80

Director, Center for International Studies
Ford International Professor of Political Science, MIT

Richard J. Samuels is also the Founding Director of the MIT Japan Program. In 2001 he became Chairman of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, an independent Federal grant-making agency that supports Japanese studies and policy-oriented research in the United States. In 2005 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Samuels served as Head of the MIT Department of Political Science between 1992-1997 and as Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council until 1996. Grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Abe Fellowship Fund, the National Science Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation have supported nine years of field research in Japan.

Samuels' next book, Securing Japan, will be published in 2007 by Cornell University Press. His previous books include Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan, a comparative political and economic history of political leadership in Italy and Japan,and "Rich Nation, Strong Army": National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan,and The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective.

His articles have appeared in International Organization, Foreign Affairs, International Security, The Journal of Modern Italian Studies,and The Journal of Japanese Studies.

Samuels received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1980.

Subra Suresh ScD '81

Dean, MIT School of Engineering
Ford Professor of Engineering;
Professor of Biological Engineering

Subra Suresh received his Sc.D. from MIT in 1983. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1993 as the R. P. Simmons Professor, he was Professor of Engineering at Brown University. His current research focuses on experimental and computational studies of the mechanical responses of single biological cells and molecules and their implications for human health and diseases.

Professor Suresh is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, serving presently as the Vice Chair of its Materials Section Peer Committee, and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. His recent honors include the Gordon Moore Distinguished Scholar award from CalTech, the Brahm Prakash Visiting Professorship from the Indian Institute of Science, selection by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in Materials Science, the Clark B. Millikan Visiting Professorship at CalTech, the TFR Swedish National Chair in Engineering from the Royal Instiute of Technology, Stockholm and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Suresh has been elected a fellow of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Ceramic Society, and the American Society for Materials International, and an Honorary Member of the Materials Research Society of India.

Marc A. Kastner

Dean, MIT School of Science
Donner Professor of Science, MIT

Marc Kastner joined the Department of Physics in 1973, was named Donner Professor of Science in 1989, appointed Department Head in February 1998, and in July 2007, became Dean of the School of Science. A graduate of the University of Chicago (S.B. 1967, M.S. 1969, Ph.D. 1972), he was a research fellow at Harvard University prior to joining MIT.

He served as Head of the MIT Department of Physics Division of Atomic, Condensed Matter, and Plasma Physics from 1983 to 1987, and as Associate Director of MIT's Consortium for Superconducting Electronics—a collaborative program designed to advance the technology of thin-film superconducting electronics—from 1989 to 1992. He served as Director of MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering from 1993 to 1998.

Deborah Fitzgerald

Kenan Sahin Dean, MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Deborah Fitzgerald is also Professor of the History of Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society . She received her B.A. from Iowa State University (History and English, 1978) and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (History and Sociology of Science, 1985). Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1988, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.

Fitzgerald's research focuses on agriculture in 20th century America. She is the author of The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890-1920 (Cornell, 1990), and Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, (Yale University Press, 2003), which won the 2003 Theodore Saloutos Prize for best book of the year from the Agricultural History Society, of which Fitzgerald is a past president.

David Schmittlein

John C Head III, Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management

David Schmittlein became dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management in October, 2007. Prior to his appointment at MIT Sloan, Schmittlein served on the faculty at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1980 until 2007. He also served as Interim Dean during July 2007 and as Deputy Dean from 2000-2007. In addition, he was chair of the editorial board for Wharton School Publishing.

Adele Naude Santos

Dean, MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Adèle Naudé Santos was previously professor at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design where her academic focus was the design of housing environments. Her interdisciplinary courses in urban design encouraged architecture, landscape, and urban design students to collaborate and address unsolved problems in the urban environment.

Before Berkeley, she was the founding dean at the University of California at San Diego School of Architecture and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania where she was also chair of the architecture department for six years. She also taught at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and at Rice University. She has had numerous visiting appointments through out the United States and the world, including Italy and in her native South Africa.

Santos holds an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association in London. She also received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University as well as a Master of Architecture and a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to her academic work, she is principal architect in the San Francisco-based firm, Santos Prescott and Associates. Santos has received numerous awards and honors including being named Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1996. She has won numerous competitions for projects including the Perris Civic Center (CA), three facilities at Arts Park (CA), the Affordable Prototypical Multi-Family Housing for Franklin/LaBrea in Los Angeles, and Penn Children's Center (PA).