U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander kicked off the university’s first annual Honors Symposium by encouraging UT to push to be a top research university in the country as well as to team up with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex.
Alexander is no stranger to UT. In addition to serving as Tennessee’s governor and the education secretary under President George H. W. Bush, he was UT president from 1988 to 1991.
“People used to ask me: ‘What’s harder, being governor, a member of the president’s cabinet or president of a university?’” Alexander said. “And I would say, ‘Obviously you’ve never been president of a university, or you wouldn’t ask that question.’”
Alexander said he supported Gov. Phil Bredesen’s goal of making UT a top 25 research university in the country.
He said this usually also means at top research university in the world, considering the United States’ wealth of research universities.
In addition, since the Manhattan Project and World War II, he called research universities the secret to high standards of living in America, saying five percent in the country are researchers, and they make 25 percent of the money.
He also encouraged UT to move closer to ORNL and Y-12.
“The state has financial problems and will have for awhile,” Alexander said. “The federal government is not in the best shape, but this year, and I was talking to (UT Chancellor) Jimmy (Cheek) about this, the federal government will spend $3 billion dollars at Oak Ridge and Y-12. So it’s been a good idea for a long time to take the science program here and the science programs at Oak Ridge laboratory and Y-12 and where appropriate, put them together.”
Alexander said that while many think of research as basic and narrow, sometimes it can have major practical effects.
“Sometimes the research that faculty members and students do can have a dramatic effect on public policy,” he said.
He used the example of Bill Sanders, a UT statistics professor in 1984, who worked on making Tennessee the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well.
“Nobody knew at that time how you measure student performance, at least how you relate student performance to effective teaching,” Alexander said.
The three methods offered at the time were looking at a teacher’s portfolio, having a principal observe a classroom or observing a teacher in the classroom firsthand. But all of a sudden, legislature added in student performance to the mix.
With Sanders’ help, such a method was established and aided in the use of the program of paying teachers more for effectiveness, though Alexander said this program is now defunct.
“And now we have a president and a United States education secretary saying there’s nothing more important than relating teacher effectiveness to student performance,” Alexander said. “And our governor, Gov. Bredesen, has just had Tennessee take an additional step in taking Mr. Sanders’ work and tying it to teacher effectiveness.”
More than just having practical effects, Alexander said research would help the citizens know that politicians are informed.
“It would be comforting to most Americans if they knew that we politicians are guided by something other than our opinions when we make big decisions about health care and energy and other issues,” he said. “And your research can help to do that.”
Alexander concluded by offering four suggestions to students pursuing research: pick something practical, find the best professor as a mentor that the student can find, aim for a definitive piece of work and learn to write.
He related the last suggestion to his everyday job.
“Part of my job is persuading at least half the people I’m right, and that means speaking in plain English,” Alexander said. “I’ve gotten old enough or long enough in my career to assume that if you can’t explain to me in words I can understand what you’re talking about, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cheek painted Alexander as someone who cares about the university and thanked him for his time during Cheek’s Washington D.C. trips.
“I was in his office about two weeks ago for 30 minutes,” Cheek said. “I had the full 30 minutes, and I think there must have been 100 people outside there, trying to get in at the same time.”