Philip S. Khoury

INTERVIEWER: Today is May 12, 2010. I am Karen Arenson. We are talking this afternoon with Philip S. Khoury, associate provost at MIT, who has special responsibility for the arts, international activities, and initiatives between and among schools at MIT. A historian who specializes in the Middle East's political and social history, he was dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences for 15 years, although the Arts got added to the name during his tenure as dean. Phil, thank you for talking to us. Your current job seems like an interesting mix of assignments. Who dreamed it up? How was it put together?

KHOURY: It is an interesting mix of assignments, and I had something to do with it. But I was reaching the end of my tenure, at least in my opinion, end of my tenure as dean of School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Really I just planned to go back to the faculty, get a sabbatical, which I hadn't had in a long while. The president and provost approached me about joining the central administration in two main capacities. One would be, would you look at the arts, and look after the arts, and try to promote them. The second, in equal time, would be to help design an international or global strategy for MIT.

I said, I certainly would not take on the arts job as simply the arts job. One, as challenging as it is, I'm not an artist. I have some knowledge of at least the music and theater world, having been dean in that school. That department reported to me, as did Creative Writing within the writing program. But I thought it would be presumptuous of me to be the associate provost for the arts. International, I do have some experience with. So I said, well, if you can bear it, and my colleagues can bear it, I would take this on for a limited period of time. So I agreed to do it for five years, and I'm getting toward the end of that tenure. I have one more year, and we'll see where things go from there.

INTERVIEWER: Do you devote roughly equal time to the different responsibilities?

KHOURY: I would say, perhaps the accent is a little heavier on the arts. I have more staff to work with, there are more demands. We actually have programs that I have direct responsibility for. We have, of course, our museum and our List Visual Arts Center, and so I do spend perhaps a little more time on the arts, though I also do a lot of international work. Like everyone at MIT, we all do more than nine to five. It's how this place runs. But I would say, the accent is a bit more on the arts.

INTERVIEWER: What about the line about encouraging initiatives between and among schools at MIT?

KHOURY: Right. So this comes from, when you're in a smaller school, and my school is, depending how you count, either third or the fourth in size, in descending order, you learn that one way to make things happen, make the world go round for your school, just one way, is to try to build bridges to larger schools, where one, there are deeper resources, both human and capital, physical, fiscal, and so I learned to do that, for better or worse. I'd like to think for better. So when I took on this job, one thing that always interested me, and a lot of the activity was in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, was around what I would call the public understanding or awareness of science and technology. So I thought that might be a leveraging point for building across boundaries, across the major learning cultures of MIT. And while it's not the principal thing I do, I have some involvement in that, and some personal interest. So I added it, really. That was my-- I was told by the president provost, craft the job and then we'll decide whether to approve it or not, the job description. I threw that in because it's important to me. I'm really thinking of my old school as being a centerpiece for the public understanding of science and technology.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk about that international portion. Like many leading universities, MIT seems to be much more interested in global strategies and international activities than it used to be. One report said that MIT was involved in something like 700 international projects in 2008, and that number has probably grown since then. It seems like you need a spreadsheet to keep track of everything. Are there guiding principles to help determine what's worth doing and what isn't? Or does it grow like Topsy?

KHOURY: It's amusing you ask, because yesterday we had a meeting that included the vice president for research, myself our director of Office of Major Agreements, and two of our in-house counsels, lawyers, attorneys, to talk about creating, once and for all, a truly comprehensive international database for all that we do internationally. We have different kinds of databases that bring much, but not all, of what we do, but not necessarily with all the kinds of information we need to have at our fingertips, really. So we are going to go forward with that. We just made the decision yesterday. So yes, it is complicated. MIT has had a long international outlook on life. I mean, science is international almost by definition, and has been, at least modern science, for a good long while. Though they are not, the School of Science is not necessarily the most active in building the new kinds of large projects that we are doing.

The schools that are most active in thinking about building new international outreach are, of course, the School of Engineering, which is in such heavy demand, the world wants to come to the School of Engineering and get it engaged, and the Sloan School of Management. In fact, the Sloan School of Management is probably our stalking horse, or at least the organization within MIT that makes the first move, often on global issues, and has the most coherent strategy of any of the schools for how to deal with the rest of the world, and how to embrace the rest of the world and bring it closer to MIT in creative ways. In part, the School is not large, not huge, it's very centralized, and it's probably been the right organizational size in which to be a leader.

So my job is really to work with my colleagues in the leadership to try to figure out what it is and where it is MIT ought to be placing itself. Now, the world is a lot more complex than it was. When we say it, globalization is, you know, it's a metaphor for so much. But really what we're talking about, is the fact that for a good long while now, since the second world war, MIT has been, with a few other institutions in this country, the centers of science and engineering. Big science and big engineering. At least in the realms of basic and applied research in these areas. We're not into product development or such, but we create the innovation that leads to product.

But the fact of the matter is, the world is getting so complex, and there is enormous talent out there, some of which we have always brought to our campus. If you look at our faculty, nearly 40 percent of the faculty are foreign-born, and they bring something special to this campus by the mere fact that they grew up in another culture, for the most part. Not everyone comes from the UK or Canada, or English-speaking Canada, in any case. The largest number of international faculty we have actually come from India. So we tap into that all the time, and have for good long while. That number is increasing, by the way. It's not decreasing.

But there is talent out there that no longer can either afford to come to us, that we really want to partner with, and integrate with, and do collaborative work with, or they are developing their own institutions at home, that say, why come us. We're finding, what we're really looking for, where are the hubs of innovation today? What cities, what countries? It's not always the country, but it's really the city where the action is. We're trying to identify the six, seven, eight places that we really ought to be concentrating our resources. It's a bit of a gamble, as always. Because if you've, if the place is already very established, well, I mean, they may not need us as much as we think they do, or ought to. So what we're also trying to figure out, is where the future hubs of innovation are, and see if we can hit the ground running in these countries, always thinking about, how do we get some of that talent to come to our campus, to become part-time or permanent members of our community. But also, we know we're going to have to spend more time with them.

INTERVIEWER: How systematic is that search? I mean, do you take 100 or 200 countries, and go down them one by one, or does somebody simply say, boy, they're doing this, we ought to jump on it, or how does it proceed?

KHOURY: It's a mix. It really is a mixed profile. If you look around, most of the interesting projects we've concocted with other countries start at the faculty level. It is the faculty that are most creative. It is not the upper administration, in these cases.

That doesn't mean that the upper administration, in its movements around the world, don't come across opportunities. We try, in our way, from the president, to the provost, to myself, to others, to bring back these opportunities and present them to the faculty. Sometimes the faculty grabs onto them. It will never work, of course, if the faculty don't embrace them. I mean, just, there's no way the upper administration, most of us are members of the faculty but spending more time doing academic administration than the normal jobs of the faculty, teaching and carrying on primary research.

So what we try to do is figure out, are these projects worthy of MIT, and try to make the case to the faculty. Those are the top-down initiatives, and we've had a few of them. The Cambridge-MIT exchange was definitely a top-down activity. Some of what we do in Singapore, which today is the country we actually have our largest projects in, have been top-down. Not all of it, but some of it. Sometimes they reflect the nature of how those countries are organized. Some of them are very top-down, and so that's how you end up, the top comes to talk to the top, and then we go down further into rungs of the faculty to see what happens.

INTERVIEWER: I can remember some time back that MIT and other universities were criticized in Washington for giving away too much of our know-how to foreign students, who would go home, maybe, and compete with the US. Is that a theme that's coming up again as MIT gets more international? Is there criticism either from the inside MIT or from outside along these lines?

KHOURY: I think there is. The big scare that I recall, and it was my first years as dean, really was with Japan. It was at a time when the Japanese economy was just thriving, and the US economy was not doing as well. There was this great scare, and sometimes, I hate to say it, sometimes the scare was presented in racial terms, or racist terms. I found it very offensive, as did others. But it was this notion that Japan was here, it was investing in MIT, and it was investing largely because it knows, this is where the talent is, these are the crown jewels of technology, and they were here to basically take those home and adapt them and what have you, and we were giving those away for a pittance.

That was the way it was portrayed, and the New York Times actually wrote about us in that way on occasion. Probably a bit unfair. Of course, the Japanese economy began to plateau, and went into one of the longest recessions in modern history. Still may be in a form of recession today. That scare went away, pretty quickly, frankly. Today-- because the media helped to put some of this fear in the minds of people, the threat, so-called threat of China, will China, which controls so many US dollars, will they in a way eclipse the United States?

I mean, these are all reasonable things to ask. We have a kind of empire, an empire of knowledge, and will we be the only players in this empire of knowledge forever after? We've never been the only players. But whatever monopoly we've had in certain areas is likely to be broken apart and divvied up in certain parts of the world. That's why our international strategy is to figure out, look, how can we get the best out of China, how can China benefit from us, because they don't want to really play with us or partner with us unless they're going to benefit. But we need to benefit. The same with India.

These are huge, long-term investments we're beginning to make. Some find it very frustrating, working with their bureaucracies, or their democracies, in the case of India. It is frustrating. It's a lot easier, frankly, to work with a little country that's fabulously well-off called Singapore, which has the funding, and knows more or less what it's trying to do in order to survive into the future, and how MIT can play that role. But we know the long-term investments will not be just Singapore, they'll be these major countries.

It's not surprising that today the provost is taking off to go speak with Russia at the highest levels about how MIT could get back in with Russia. We actually had more activity with Russia, on this campus and in Russia, during the Cold War, than we've ever had with Russia after the Cold War. There are opportunities, maybe, to partner with Russia in building new universities, in setting up new kinds of research projects. Russia, we tend to forget, still has the strongest base of science outside of the United States probably in the world. Maybe with the exception of the United Kingdom and Germany. They're ahead of China, they're ahead of Japan, and ahead of India, in many, many areas. In the physical sciences, even in the biological sciences. Yet we're spending all our time talking about India and China, as is the world. So could MIT get ahead of the game, get out in front with Russia and do something really interesting.

And Brazil. The BRIC countries, that would complete the BRIC if we do build in Brazil, and we're about to launch a new program there. It's very, very exciting. So we are picking big targets, not just little targets. But the other criticism isn't simply, you know, are we giving the crown jewels of MIT away? I don't believe we are. But we need to be cautious about that. It's not that we shouldn't be conscious of how that could happen if we're not careful. Are we doing it cheaply? OK, that's also a big criticism.

But the biggest criticism on this campus about what we do internationally is, one, who are we partnering with, are these places really hubs of innovation or is it all about the money? Here the Middle East looms large, but not just the Middle East. The other is, can our faculty afford to be bouncing around the world, doing these projects, when their first obligation must be to our students, who are among the most brilliant students in the world, a number of whom are international, as we know? But can the faculty afford to be away and still do what the faculty is paid to do, which is to deliver the best learning culture possible to our terrific students? That is a real tension, and it's not going to get any better. We need to figure out ways of bringing the world more to our campus than our faculty going out to the rest of the world and spending quality time abroad. So that tension is there.

INTERVIEWER: You talked about the internationalization of the faculty and the large portion who were born in other countries. I think the graduate student population is quite similar in that respect. But the undergraduate population isn't. Is that a matter that's come up for discussion lately, and where is MIT headed on that?

KHOURY: Well, it's hard to know where we're headed. I have co-chaired with the vice president for research, Claude Canizares, for the last three years, the International Advisory Committee. Which is the committee that is designing the strategy, or trying to design, if we can really say that, strategy for how we should operate for the next 10 to 20 years globally. We've issued a report that sorts some of that out, but certainly not everything.

In our report we recommended that MIT seriously consider increasing the number of international undergraduates, non-US citizens who would come to our campus. Right now we actually maintain a quota. It's about 8 percent. We say 8 percent, we're actually quite explicit about it. Quotas worry me, for all kinds of reasons, but we do say it. Part of it has to do with the pool of American students coming out of high school that remain robust, very strong, but we turn back many more than we can possibly accept. MIT is very self-selective in the sense that if you're not really good at math and science, you're going to have trouble here getting through our system. Because students have a core curriculum they must all go through, as everyone knows, and it's a very special core curriculum. It's rigorous, that's for sure. So a lot of the young people who apply to us, from this country, are qualified to come here. So, it's a great opportunity. It's a, what do you call it, a buyer's market, as it were. So why do we need to go abroad? For graduate students, we have no quotas that I know of. The total number of international or non-US citizen undergraduates is approaching 40 percent. Very high, and that number is likely to grow as well.

The other issue with undergraduate financing, is that it is a very different kind of financing system from what we do with graduate students. Here we provide a lot of financial aid to our undergraduates, many of whom really do need this to be able to come to MIT. I mean, we're a high tuition, high financial aid organization, much as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, and a few other institutions, are. Those who can afford to be.

We know that taking on an international student here, we must treat them by our rules. So far our rules say, they need to be treated just the way American students are. So we need to know what their financial background is. It's very hard to get good information. What we do know is that it costs more to bring an international student here. More of them need financial aid, that is, if you look at it on a per capita basis. The amount of money we need to dole out to them is higher than we would dole out to your average American student. So it's an expensive proposition. Right now, in the financial crisis, our timing probably wasn't the best. We've decided to stay with 8 percent, with the hope that when things stabilize, we could come back to this.

Between us, I think it's no secret. It's no secret that we could have even a stronger undergraduate class if we increase the number of international students. I'm told Yale has gone to 12 percent, but Yale's financial aid program may be different from ours, how we do business. Harvard is still hovering around 9 percent or 10 percent. We proposed, at least early on, going from 8 percent to 12 percent. Which is a 50 percent increase. But that has been tabled for a while. But it's been seriously discussed, I'm happy to say.

INTERVIEWER: One thing that keeps coming up when the United States looks to partner with other countries are questions about their values, and things like human rights. There's a lot of debate back and forth about, should we be working with this country or that country? Do those issues surface here? In other words, as MIT looks to get involved with a whole range of countries, do people sit back and say, hm, do they had the same values we do? Or do they do things in human rights that we're not happy with, that would prevent us from going in? Do they even come up?

KHOURY: They definitely come up. They are debated seriously, more seriously than ever. In large part because two of our larger sponsors these days happen to be countries in the Middle East, which have very different systems, cultural values than we have, and Singapore. Really, we've been in Singapore for over a decade now, and that debate has always been there every time we begin something new.

In the end, we ask ourselves, do we, should we prevent faculty, on an individual or small-group basis, from having arrangements in countries whose values we may not share? But if the faculty feel there is something to learn and to gain, should we allow them to do it anyway? So one debate point is, should we call things that are controversial, countries that are controversial, should we ever institutionalize it, such that the name of MIT is there an institutional way? So the program is the MIT Program, we'll say, Saudi Arabia. Let me take perhaps the most controversial. We've decided that if the faculty really want to do it, and they need to check things out, and that means we're interested in what, not just what white males have to say, we're interested in what females have to say, what gays have to say, what others have to say, who might be particularly vulnerable to discrimination in any one of these countries for a whole host of reasons.

We've found that more often than not, you will find faculty, including women faculty, in the case of Saudi Arabia it was proved, that women faculty went there and felt, including the leaders of the mechanical engineering department's case, that they should do collaborations with Saudi Arabia, with a particular university there that was all-male. But this caused a small firestorm at MIT, as you can imagine. A lot of controversy around it. We decided in the end that it wasn't an institutional relationship, it was between a department and a center within a department, and that was OK.

But frankly, and here's the problem, is that any time MIT faculty do anything in any country, the name of MIT is there. Because it's not the individuals, but our name, our brand name with Harvard's, probably the two strongest brand names in the world in higher education research today. I can probably document that. There's an inverse rule of some kind, the further you go from MIT, the better our reputation is, the stronger our reputation is. So when people or countries say, we're collaborating with the mechanical engineering department, it is always with MIT, and mechanical engineering second or third in line.

So we have to figure this out, but we do not have a policy on this, frankly. Other than we will not put the stamp of MIT officially on agreements or contracts if we feel that it's inappropriate. In the case of Saudi Arabia, we did not do that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think there will be efforts to hammer out and shape a policy, or is it one of the things that people see as better left ambiguous for the moment?

KHOURY: I think, better left ambiguous. I would say that the majority, and it may be a small majority, of those who have some knowledge, and really I'm talking to those with international experience more than any others, they would feel, I think, that-- not let sleeping dogs lie. Always watch what you're doing. Always make sure. For instance, with the Saudi project, which is a clean water, clean energy project, and the center is located here, not in Saudi Arabia, with very little time actually spent on the ground by our faculty center, we have a women's project, as well. To bring Saudi women here for a special kind of education. We're talking about doing something even larger on this front. That was introduced by our administration as a prerequisite for going forward with an agreement. That there had to be something more that MIT was doing.

There is a problem with that, and let me just very quickly state it, and that is, should MIT be in the game of changing the cultures or social policy, it reminds me of the Bush administration saying, we're bringing democracy to Iraq. Should MIT be bringing the values of whatever, of our country and of our institution, to countries and try to superimpose those values on those societies or on those institutions? That's a tough issue, but it's one we're always arguing about. That's healthy. At least we're arguing at home. But I don't think we have a hard and fast policy.

INTERVIEWER: Has the faculty really engaged with those issues, or does it tend to be a handful of interested people?

KHOURY: Like so much at MIT, it's a handful. More than a handful. There's professor Jay Keyser's notion that it's the same 20 percent that do everything. I mean, every committee-- it's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's remarkable. There are these loyalists to MIT. I don't know where they find the time. But you can find them serving on this, that, and the other committee at all time. So it's that community. It's a minority that is debating these issues. However, when they come before the faculty, and they're known to be controversial, the faculty comes out of the woodwork, which it rarely does, to debate these matters. That's a healthy thing.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us where the Singapore project stands at this point, and whether it's expanding, or what's happening?

KHOURY: It is definitely expanding, and it's really in three parts, like Gaul, in a way. It started with what we call SMA-1, or Singapore MIT project one, which was an educational project with some research. Then there was a second iteration of it which will wind down in 2013. That has been going now for a good 10 years, or will have gone 10 years when complete.

The third dimension grew up two years ago, and it is called the Smart Center, which is MIT's largest activity abroad. This is a Singapore-MIT research center, fabulously well-funded, if I may say so, by the Singaporean government, that does require MIT researchers to be on the ground for certain periods of time over the first five years of what will doubtless be a 10, and perhaps 15 or 20 year project, we'll see. This project is fundamentally about research. There are small educational components, but it really started off and will always be a research project in the area of remote sensing, water research, of various kinds of nanotech, and so on-- and transportation now. There will be a fifth major thrust area coming up, which still has not been settled on. It's in its second year, and again, it's mainly the School of Engineering that is involved. The center hierarchy, or the administration, reports up to the vice president for research. It does not report to the dean of the School of Engineering, interestingly. So it's not just engineering, and the hope is more scientists will get involved in this, and some have.

Just recently, last January, our president went off to Singapore to sign the latest agreement with Singapore, which is perhaps the most unusual thing we've ever done. That is, we are going to help Singapore design their fourth research university called the Singapore University for Technology and Design. So it is a chance for our engineering School and our School of Architecture to become deeply involved in developing new curriculum, curriculum but we will transfer to Singapore for this new university, but also develop for our own. I'll come back to that in a second, because it's so important for us. There's a reason for why we're doing this.

We will help them to pick their new faculty. We're already beginning to do that, and then we will bring the new faculty, once hired by the Singaporean University of Design, Technology and Design, we will bring them to campus and they will shadow our faculty for a year, and learn about this curriculum development, learn our methods for research-- by the way, some of them will be MIT PhD's and they won't have to learn a heck of a lot, they'll just extend their learning. Then they'll go back and become the new faculty.

The doors will open for this new university in April of 2012, to the best of our knowledge, and the first and founding president is the former dean of Engineering, Thomas Magnanti. He will do that for a period of time, and I'm sure, relinquish the position to whomever else they would like. This is a huge project. The reason we're doing it is not all for the money, as many people think, though again, it's very generously funded. We feel MIT has the best factors of production for design of any research university in the United States and perhaps in the world. Our peer rival, Stanford, gets a lot of credit for its work in design. We probably have the stronger faculty, but we've never figured out how to get our act together.

The Singaporeans are helping us, through their funding, OK, through their vision, which we've helped to craft for them, or with them, a chance to build up and organize ourselves in the world of design, between engineering and architecture, principally, and we should emerge out of this, and that's the prediction, and we'll see if we're right, as the leading place, not just in reality, but in terms of reputation, around education and research on design. We will have a fabulous new laboratory, a center, really, around international design on our campus, which the Singaporeans are paying for. There'll be even a larger version of it on the new campus in Singapore, so there will be mirror sites, as it were.

So it's a long-term investment, and we're not paying for it. We're paying in our labor, in our intelligence, in what we transfer to them, but we'll be transferring to them what we really plan to use here.

INTERVIEWER: Is there a public price tag on any of this? Does anybody know what it's going to amount to?

KHOURY: Well, I can't tell you what the cost of the university will be, because then you have all these scholarships for students which we have nothing to do with, we're not picking the students, incidentally. We're just picking the faculty, with their help. Picking, that is, helping them to choose. They will have to decide who the faculty are. We'll just recommend, and we've done this elsewhere, by the way, it's not the first time we've helped on that front. I would say on the order of about $170 million, most of which is expendable money over X number of years, plus a $20 million endowment, is coming to MIT. In fact, the first tranche of the endowment, half of it, has already arrived. So Singaporeans are very good about paying on time. They also expect deliverables on time. They're highly organized and demanding. As they should be. They're paying a pretty penny for this. The Smart Center is even more funding. Yeah. So it's enormous. It's the largest, it is what Japan was to MIT, Singapore is now.

INTERVIEWER: After that was announced, after president Hockfield went to Singapore, did other countries come knock on the door and say, me too, me to, come help us?

KHOURY: Other countries have come since, but countries came before. I mean, this is not the first time. I should explain that I don't think we would have dared to take on this new Singapore University of Technology and Design, the SUTD, had we not had a decade of experience in working with Singapore. De novo, just jumping in with them and doing this, would have been, I think, a disaster for us. I hope it will not be a disaster for us. I mean, proof's in the pudding. But we at least have some knowledge of the place, the culture, the leadership, and the vision.

INTERVIEWER: One of the other very large and expanding international efforts is MISTI, which I think stands for the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, that grew out of, I think, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Can you talk a little about how it started, and where that stands now, and how much more extension there'll be on that front?

KHOURY: Sure, and I'll be brief. So this program actually grew up on my watch as dean. The first iteration of it, before it was called MISTI, actually began in the early 1980s, and it was exclusively with Japan. A very gifted professor, Dick Samuels in our Political Science department, who heads, now directs the Center for International Studies and has for a good long while, former department head, was a Japan specialist.

He felt that Japan was coming to these shores, and sucking up lots of knowledge and information, and taking it home. Part of it was that they were bothering to learn our language, they were learning our ways, and they were figuring out how they could take this back. Legally, perfectly legal. Yet the United States had very few ways of reversing the knowledge drain, as it were. Or gathering what the Japanese do so well. We thought if we trained students who are highly scientific and technical, as our kids are, in Japanese language and culture and politics and economics, and send them there, they will, not only will they learn about a foreign society and culture and imbibe of that, but they will bring back some of the crown jewels, or some jewels at least, from Japan.

That started back in the 80s and did very well. It was a single individual who kind of thought it up, and it grew and it grew. Then another colleague, more senior to Dick Samuels, Suzanne Berger, said, you know, we could replicate this in many other places. Including Europe, China, and India. She decided to develop this vision for a larger MIT-Japan program that became MISTI. We are now, I believe, in 10 countries. Israel and Brazil are our latest MISTI programs. Brazil is just about to start up. Israel is thriving after a year and a half, it's amazing how well that program is doing. Lots of excitement.

We're all over the world, basically training and educating students in the ways of these countries, helping them to learn the language, getting them up to, at least, some level of confidence. I don't want to exaggerate, they're not always fluent in all these languages. Some of them are very tough to learn. Chinese, Japanese are. Then they go off and spend three months, six months, up to a year. We figure out how to fund them. Sometimes we rely on companies, we've raised a considerable amount of endowment. They have, this is for them, what an internship ought to be. It's not a junior year abroad, or junior semester. Really, they're down in the trenches, in laboratories, at companies, on university campuses and the like. They come back different. I'll tell you. They come back different. Now this is where I'll stop on MISTI.

In that MIT is a tough place. I didn't go to MIT. I can't imagine what it's like, having taught students here for 30 years, what it's really like to go through this system. Which is a grueling, tough, demanding, excellent education. These students come here at the top of the heap. They're the best students in their high schools. Whenever they arrive, valedictorians, this and that, star students, prize-winning Olympians, and they come in and they find that MIT is a great equalizer, and it isn't as easy to be number one any longer. If it ever was, it's no longer that way. And we're tough on our students.

When they go away, they work alongside other young people, and what they discover-- this is not just globally or internationally, down in Washington when they do this, or when they go to New York as interns, or to California-- they come away realizing that they really are talented. That they have strengths that are extraordinary. They come back with their egos not stroked, but feeling a lot more self-confident about what they can do, and how the future could unwind for them in the right ways. So I think these programs are as good as you get, and they're perfect for MIT.

INTERVIEWER: Is there any kind of goal perhaps to raise participation among the undergraduates to half or three-quarters of the student body, like the UROP program-- KHOURY: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: --which reaches so many. Is there a timetable, or do people articulate this, and is it a question of funding, or what?

KHOURY: So the dean for Undergraduate Education had a commission that looked into the future of international education for undergraduates a couple of years ago, two or three years ago now, and they came out with the model of UROP. You're absolutely right that 85 percent of all undergraduates imbibe of UROP. Could we set out as a goal 85 percent for the rest of this institution for undergraduates? In fact, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which, I said earlier Sloan has probably the most advanced in terms of having a strategic vision globally, that department also has a strategic vision. It is our largest department. It is larger than the Sloan School, in fact. So in their document, which they came out with a couple of years ago, they put an 85 percent figure out there as a goal.

OK, this is an aspirational goal, right? I mean, right now we're probably somewhere on the order of 25 percent to 30 percent of young people, undergraduates here, having some meaningful international experience when they're here. That number has grown fairly significantly. MISTI is the largest player in that cohort, no question, and it's likely to be even larger as time goes by. But it hasn't been easy, frankly, to get numbers up. Students are also on financial aid, and they have work obligations in the summer. They have to produce a certain amount of money to come through the four years here, so how can they take a summer off to go to Japan, or China, or France, or what have you? We're trying to sort through that. So our aim, I think, if we could get to half, 50 percent of our undergraduate student body in the next five to seven years, we will have really broken through, and it'll be quite amazing.

What we don't want is academic tourism. We're really against the idea that when our students go abroad, they're really just going on the Grand Tour of the 19th century. This is not what it's about.

INTERVIEWER: Have there been any studies comparing those students who participate in MISTI with those who don't, both what, you know, who chooses to go, and among those who make it, how are they different when they come back, from those who would have liked to have gone, but didn't make it, or something?

KHOURY: So honestly, I don't know if we have any systematic studies of that. I think people have, some of it is anecdotal. I think we all, as I observed earlier, as I mentioned earlier, internships no matter where they are tend to change our students in fundamental ways. That probably is the greatest dividend of these programs.

INTERVIEWER: But this is the internship plus being exposed to a foreign culture, a different culture.

KHOURY: Yeah. So many of these young people will work, and they may not work in the foreign culture they have spent time in as a MISTI intern, or as another kind of intern. But the fact that they've had some experience will strengthen them. But in a globalized world, they're likely to spend some of them at least, a good portion of their lives working in companies abroad. Maybe they'll be American companies or multinationals with homes in New York or California. That has to work to their advantage.

INTERVIEWER: Do they get credit, or I thought some of them earned money while they were working in these post--

KHOURY: No, they don't, really. They're not supposed, we make it possible for them, you know, to get by, by helping with their housing and airline trips, and stipends for the three months or whatever. Most of them are on three-month internships. That's the minimum. But the companies are not paying them. Should not be paying them salaries, yeah. So we're paying them. We get companies to donate money, so in a way the money is being circled back into the system, but there's no salary. That's the problem. If they were earning salaries doing this then they would have to give those funds back to MIT for the work part of what they need to do.

What we don't want to do, and I really need to be careful here, what we cannot do is penalize students at MIT who wish to participate in this program, undergraduates, because of the financial aid situation they're in. Everyone has to have the same chance, if they wish for it. That's what we're struggling to accomplish.

INTERVIEWER: Most of the postings sound like they're in laboratories, science, engineering. Can humanities students participate, or is it really not for students who are studying, I don't know, economics or political science or theater?

KHOURY: Yeah, that's a great question. It is, it replicates kind of the distribution of majors, the MISTI program at MIT. It's almost one to, I mean, the correlation is very strong. The numbers of students who major in engineering and science tend to be the, more or less the same numbers, who participate in MISTI. With the Sloan School, incidentally. You could ask, I mean the Sloan School, what is it there? But of course, companies are interested in having our very highly analytic, mathematically strong undergraduates working for them. As, by the way, Washington government likes to get our undergraduates as well. For their technical skills, for their science policy understanding and so on.

INTERVIEWER: OpenCourseWare is another newish thing that falls under your bailiwick, I think. How's that progressing, and what are the questions on the table now, if any?

KHOURY: Yes. No, there are big questions on the table. So OpenCourseWare's actually in its eighth year now. It's only been reporting to me a little over a year, so I've learned quite a bit in the last year. The fabulous new director of the program, Cecilia d'Oliveira, she's an MIT alumna and brings all those talents to the job. She had been the technology director, and was selected in a very vigorous search, rigorous search, really, to become our new director. So I work closely with her, though to say that I'm actually doing anything would be preposterous. She and her staff are making the world go round. So the biggest issue for us, is we declared, eight, ten years ago when we went for this model, that this is MIT's gift to the world. Putting its entire curriculum, albeit in different forms of development, on the web for anyone who can access the internet, and for those who can't, we'll make disks and send them into sub-Saharan Africa so students and young people can, and older people can have access to it.

I've discovered that not only is now 60 percent of those who access OCW, OpenCourseWare, on the internet are international, live abroad, and that number is increasing, not decreasing. It's often, I mean, the largest number of people who do so, are not affiliated directly to universities or to industries, but they're doing this, really, at home as extra learning, whatever you want to call it, adult learning, if you will. This is an opportunity to extend their knowledge. Lifetime learning, call it. It's very interesting who's picking up on OCW. We get 1,000,000 unique hits on our website each month, which is tremendous, right?

When I tour the world, as I do, the two names apart from MIT, which as I said, the further you go away from MIT the more people know and love us, and admire us, the two institutions within MIT that get most of the attention, name recognition, are OCW and the Media Lab. OK? It's interesting, those two organizations within MIT.

So our biggest issue now, is how can we financially sustain this model, which is a very expensive gift to give the world? We have 1975 courses online, and we have a program that allows us, every several years, to renew, refurbish, those courses that are already online that we still offer, and we're always adding new courses as new professors come online, as it were, join our faculty. That's an expensive proposition.

So we have brought in Bain consultants, on a pro bono basis, I'm happy to say, with some MIT alums among them, to work with us to design different models for how we might package some of what we put online for free, for executive education, for distance learning, and the like, things that MIT frankly are, you know, both ahead and behind on in the game of using new technologies, and we've done it, I think we could be ahead of everyone if we wished to, but we've not chosen that route, because we are very pleased on, about how we deliver education to our students, whether they're full-time or executive ed students, or what have you.

But so we're looking very seriously at these models, certificate programs, which will be controversial. We're not talking about degree programs online, which some institutions have begun to do, including Harvard, through Harvard Extension, is putting, you know, increasingly an online dimension to that. We have not gone that route. Certificates will be controversial. In these financial times, this may be the best time to raise the issue of would we put certificates out there for courses taken, and how would we evaluate the students who took these courses so that they could earn a certificate, saying, they completed 511 or 3091 or whatever. Integral Equations, or something.

So we're looking at that. We're also looking at advertisements on these courses, and on department sites. Whether our faculty colleagues would accept that. We think they will. I mean, so far the polling suggests our faculty are willing to go ahead. The knowledge, the information and knowledge in these courses, belongs to the faculty. They own it. So they would have to agree to allow us to advertise these, and to earn money to help support the program so we can continue to deliver the free good, freely, to the world.

INTERVIEWER: Is there any kind of release time when a faculty member puts a course online, in other words, the assumption being that it probably takes some time and effort, or does it really take very little at this point?