Thank you to the National Humanities Alliance for inviting a biology major to address this distinguished audience of English majors and advocates for the humanities and liberal arts.

As a physician and former president of a health science center and medical school, I support recent efforts to better prepare high school and university students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – the STEM fields.  Under-represented minorities, for example, are not currently pursuing STEM degrees in sufficient numbers.  But as we increase attention and support for STEM studies, we should not do so at the expense of the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts.  I firmly believe that an undergraduate curriculum should offer balanced exposure to the arts and sciences, even to students who are seeking professional degrees that require more specialized training, like business, architecture, and engineering. 

Statistics from the Labor Department for the past 40 years tell us that the average American worker changes jobs 10 times in a lifetime.  If that is the case, it might be a mistake to spend four or five years of college preparing for your first job – because it will not be your last.  Instead, isn’t it wiser to learn skills that will prepare you for every job? – independent thinking, self-direction, problem-solving, verbal communication, open-mindedness, multicultural sensitivity, and team-building.  These are the attributes that employers are seeking.  CEOs want employees who can communicate effectively and grapple with complex issues in an ethical way.  And so on every level of education – K through 16 – one of our core values should be to nurture more sensitive, thoughtful readers and writers – and to produce more reflective, caring, and well informed citizens of the world.  That is the province of the humanities.

I served as a member of American Academy Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, which began its work in 2011, and our final report observed that the strengthening of the humanities and social sciences should begin in high school.  It is crucial that high school students experience excellent courses in literature, history, social studies, civics, and composition classes that teach them to read and write intelligently – to articulate – and to develop the skills to think logically and construct a persuasive argument.  And as a practical matter, students will not advance to the next level unless they reinforce their GPAs with strong grades in the liberal arts and social studies.

As an Hispanic child educated in public schools in Laredo, Texas – a city on the Rio Grande River and the border with Mexico – the odds were overwhelmingly against my addressing you today.  When I was growing up, Laredo was ranked as the poorest city in the United States.  In my wildest dreams as a child, I never imagined I would attend an Ivy League university, become a transplant surgeon, serve on national commissions appointed by the president of the United States, and be selected as Chancellor of a highly acclaimed public university system.

But early in my life, my paternal Grandmother Josefina began instilling the importance of education in her 20 grandchildren.  Every Sunday when we were growing up, our families would get together for lunch after Mass.  We would alternate houses among families.  It was quite an event.  All our cousins would attend, and Grandmother Josefina would hold court.  There was an adult table and kids’ tables.  After lunch, Grandmother would call the children to her table and give each one of us a dollar.  She would say, “Here’s your dollar.  And by the way, let me put this in an envelope for you.  When you graduate from high school, I’m going to give you this money and it will help pay for college.”

She put the cash into a bank account for each of us, starting when we were five or six years old, and she did this until we graduated from high school.  Very early on, the idea of attending college was imprinted in our psyches.  Academics were important, and we received lots of positive reinforcement from our grandparents.  They would phone us when we did well:  “Francisco, I heard you got an A+ in science.”  This encouragement inspired us to work hard, excel, and make them proud.

At age 89, my father is still a practicing physician in Laredo.  He still makes house calls.  I can remember him reading Shakespeare to us as children and also sharing with us his love of music.  I play flamenco guitar, partly because it keeps my hands nimble for surgery, and partly because I find great personal satisfaction in playing music.  We have our father to thank for encouraging my siblings and me to read broadly, appreciate beauty, and enjoy life’s wonderful mysteries.

When I was a boy, my father provided me with a tremendous experience in understanding the challenges faced by a medically under-served region along the Texas-Mexico border.  He let me shadow him when he made house calls.  Seeing his love for his practice, I received a firsthand view not only of the beautiful art of medicine, but how this art profoundly touches all classes, from the poorest to the wealthiest without regard to economic status or homeland of origin.  The Border region was, and still is, a place with significant healthcare disparities, many of which are now looming public health issues not only for Texas but for the entire country. 

My father is an incredibly ethical man, and his bedside manner with patients is truly exemplary.  Not every student will have this kind of direct exposure to goodness and moral purpose, but every student can learn these lessons from the study of philosophy, theology, literature, history, and many other fields in the humanities. 

It was a combination of my father’s example and my own study of ethics and humanities that led me to create the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics when I served as president of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.  I wanted our medical students, student nurses, and all of our health-professionals-in-training to understand that the practice of medicine is both a science and an art.  I wanted our students to approach their work with compassion, empathy, and a strong desire to heal.  Abraham Verghese – a physician and best-selling author of Cutting for Stone and other remarkable books – served as the first director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics.  For the last 11 years, the Center has provided course work in global health, literature, and art – and real-world experience in hands-on community service.  Students are required to take these courses during all four years of their medical education, and the Center is regarded as adding great value to the School of Medicine and the community.  

After a task force recommendation in 2004 and four years of additional planning, our flagship University of Texas at Austin created a School of Undergraduate Studies to implement a revised undergraduate core curriculum for all UT students, regardless of major.  The core curriculum includes courses that are designed to give students a broader intellectual experience.  Students are also introduced to a set of important skills and areas of study:  writing, quantitative reasoning, global cultures, cultural diversity, ethics, and leadership.  This revised core curriculum represents UT Austin’s commitment to expand beyond traditional boundaries to encourage students to become widely informed, well-educated citizens of the world.

I will also add here that University of Texas institutions are fully involved in using blended and online learning to enhance the educational experience.  And while I believe that face-to-face instruction in the classroom and lab is indispensable and invaluable, I think it is wise for us to explore the use of online technology in the fine arts and humanities, where a website’s visual and interactive qualities can enrich the learning experience – and where digital delivery of information speaks directly to a generation of students deeply immersed in technology and social media. 

In fact, two years ago The University of Texas System established the Institute for Transformational Learning, which aspires to make UT institutions world leaders in developing and implementing online learning.  Our founding director is Steven Mintz, a prize-winning scholar and former director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center at Columbia University.  Dr. Mintz and I have had wonderful discussions about how students can now access – in nanoseconds! – the best museums and libraries in the world, and how the masterworks of music and literature are literally at their fingertips.  This will benefit under-served populations from Mongolia to the impoverished colonias of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.  During this academic year, Dr. Mintz has also facilitated the development of nine MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – in collaboration with faculty at UT Austin.  The UT MOOCs are reaching 175,000 students worldwide.

In this new readily accessible world of online learning, what is now the role of our universities?  For centuries we have been the keepers and protectors of invaluable information – in libraries, art and natural history museums, and archival collections where masterpieces in painting, photography, and medieval manuscripts are displayed and studied.  On the UT Austin campus – at the Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Center – we are digitizing these images and reams of related information, and making them accessible to a global audience.  This will not replace the experience of seeing great literary and art treasures in person, but it will stimulate the imagination and introduce students around the world to the excitement of discovery.

I attended public schools in Laredo, and I can recall every teacher from first grade through high school.  They inspired in me a tremendous love of learning.  Even though my mother herded her ten children into our home study-hall every school night and insisted that we spend two hours studying, I wasn’t prepared for undergraduate studies at Yale University.  It was the hardest challenge of my life.  Despite my success at science and math in school, I wasn’t ready for Yale’s liberal arts curriculum, especially courses focusing on written communication. 

In the long run, Yale prepared me for medical school and the academic rigors of the biosciences and medicine.  In my experience, the sciences and humanities were complementary and gave balance to my education.  As filmmaker George Lucas once observed, “the sciences teach us how.  The humanities teach us why.”  Yale’s emphasis on a well-rounded undergraduate education prepared me for the different paths I would take – in medicine, in the administration of higher education, and eventually as Chancellor.  In my view, what medicine and higher education have in common is that they both save lives.  

So you can imagine my exhilaration when I was able to establish a new University of Texas institution in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.  The Valley is the south-most region of Texas and forms a sort of “V” between the Rio Grande River and the Gulf of Mexico.  It is an area where the population is 90 percent Hispanic, and 47 percent of the children in that region live in poverty.  It is also where there are two universities in the UT System – the University of Texas at Brownsville and the University of Texas Pan American – which we are combining into one institution to become the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.  UT RGV – a name chosen by the people of the Valley – will also have a medical school.  The new institution will have a presence in each of the major metropolitan areas of the Valley, immediately making the new university one of the two largest Hispanic-serving institutions in the nation. 

What is exciting about UT RGV – from an arts and humanities standpoint – is that it will be bilingual, bi-literate, and bicultural.  We have a unique opportunity to establish this new institution at the intersection of the Americas, reaching out to our neighbors to the south, not only through student exchange programs and shared research, but also on the larger stage of commerce, culture, and language.  UT RGV has the potential to become a major nexus of cultures.  Any student in the world interested in international and bi-cultural programs will benefit from attending this global institution, with opportunities to engage in programs connecting the Americas—north, central, and south. 

This new university and medical school will also be poised to become a center for enterprise development that transforms the Border economy into a global economy.  How is commerce related to the humanities?  In a recent article entitled “The Economic Logic of the Humanities,” which appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Jacob Soll at USC wrote that “there has been a recognition, running from Aristotle and Adam Smith to the seminal economists of the mid-20^th century, that a society cannot long flourish unless economic activity and thought are grounded in the liberal arts.  The humanities were seen as a necessary component of a wealthy and stable society.”  What a compelling argument Professor Soll makes.  Philosophers, utilitarian thinkers, and economists have long valued the humanities and classical studies as being central to economic success.  Professor Soll points out that the 16^th century Dutch humanist and poet Caspar Barlaeus saw economics and the humanities in “perpetual reinforcement,” and envisioned a nation of “merchant philosophers.”

Harry Ransom, one of my predecessors as chancellor and a remarkable scholar and book collector, established a world-renowned archive at UT Austin that contains literary manuscripts, authors’ correspondence, photographs – including the world’s first photograph – theater materials like the original dresses from Gone with the Wind and the original script of Citizen Kane, and artwork by Frieda Kahlo, D.H. Lawrence, and many notable figures.  Chancellor Ransom called the humanities “The Arts of Uncertainty,” and he once wrote that “the humanities confront all that is vague, changeful, unpredictable, immeasurable, unknown, and unknowable.”  That makes studying the humanities perfect preparation for shifting job markets and unusual career paths.  Those who courageously confront the “unknown and unknowable” – who are inventive, adaptable, and resourceful – will be tomorrow’s leaders in business, education, technology, and public service.

Our greatest hope is that if we strengthen support for the humanities and give them greater attention, we will better educate a new generation of thinkers and innovators, advance civilization, move us closer to world peace, and provide a more fulfilling life for our children and grandchildren.  Who today can afford to ignore this vision of a better tomorrow?  

These are some of the many reasons why a surgeon and man of science, like myself, deeply values the arts and humanities – and why I am proud to have served on the American Academy Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Thank you very much for your invitation to my share thoughts with you today.  I am deeply honored to join you in support of the humanities.  You have my greatest admiration and respect.