瞿宛文的部落格關於Stanford大學即將卸任的校長JOHN HENNESSY的報導
Where He Took Us
During a prolific and sometimes perilous 16 years, Stanford’s first 21st-century president remade the university from the inside out.
Stanford Magazine, May/June 2016
https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=86100
這位工學院出身的教授在當了16年校長後即將卸任。他很重要的成果是推動以跨學科方式來解決世界重要的現實問題。
AMONG THE MANY VEXING PROBLEMS plaguing the planet is this one: Hundreds of millions of people lack safe drinking water. …. It also is the sort of global-scale problem that Hennessy had in mind when he set out to mobilize the Stanford faculty as solution-finders.
Today, Stanford percolates with undertakings involving a network of interdisciplinary alliances, such as the collaboration between civil and environmental engineering professor Jenna Davis, who leads a research team for the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Stephen Luby, a medical school professor and infectious disease expert who is also a senior fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Davis’s group is perfecting plans for a mechanically simple, low-cost chlorination device that could bring clean drinking water to urban slums worldwide.
The ambitiousness of these kinds of efforts, often fueled by new academic partnerships, illustrates a fundamental cultural shift, inspired by Hennessy.
He said, “It was time to open the silos that historically have isolated the academic disciplines”. He wanted to launch an attack on societal problems through the collaborative force of Stanford’s sweeping expertise.