Thomas Everhart: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would just add that in the Administrative Council of Cambridge University, I've often heard Roger Needham speak out just as succinctly as you heard him speak today. He manages to put everything in the right perspective and add a great deal to the governance of Cambridge University.

I'm delighted to be here today. I think of all the Marshall Scholars assembled here, I probably entered the program the earliest. I want to thank the Marshall Scholarship Commemoration Commission and the British government on behalf of all the Marshall scholars here assembled for the privilege of studying in England under this excellent scholarship program and say for most of us, certainly for me, it has made a very great difference in my life, what I've been able to do, and what I've been able to contribute. I'm delighted to publicly express my gratitude in this forum.

A very distinguished panel is assembled, and I think you are going to enjoy the comments that they have to make on this topic - the academy, scholarship and research. I had only two instructions for the panel members. First, speak for about five minutes, and secondly, it's OK to be provocative and stimulate discussion later on.

As all of us know, the academy itself started as a community of scholars. In the English-speaking world, this community of scholars first gathered at Oxford in the 11th century, and then after some problems between town and gown developed there, some of them migrated to Cambridge, and another community was established there. These became the two oldest universities, I think, in the English-speaking world.

The academy initially was a group of students who gathered around a few superscholars to learn. They had to take notes because there were no textbooks; the printing press hadn't been invented. And in fact, this system of lecturing and taking of notes has persisted to this day. We are perhaps seeing the change, which will take us away from the pure lecturing and note-taking that has gone on for so long, in this information revolution we're discussing here.

The scholarship that was done in the early days was really for the scholars' sake. They were learning knowledge for knowledge's sake and very interested in furthering human knowledge because of the pleasure it gave them. As time has gone on, and particularly since World War II, I think scholars have been pursuing knowledge not just for knowledge's sake but also for society's sake, because both in England and in the U.S.A., society is really the group that funds the academy. And that point is debated inside and outside the academy. Whether knowledge should be pursued for its sake alone or for its benefit to society is causing a certain amount of tension in the academy, as we all know.

Interactions between Oxford and Cambridge Universities and government, I learned by reading a concise history of Cambridge recently in conjunction with my present duties there, has gone on for much longer than I had remembered. There has been an interaction between these universities and the crown for several centuries.

In the United States, the financing of universities by government started primarily with the Morrill Act in the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. There are many private universities you might think that receive little governmental financing, and therefore have little interaction with government. I have served two of those - Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology. I can assure you that both of them look to the government for research funding. At Cal-Tech, if you take away the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is a $1.1 billion enterprise and gets all of its money from the federal government, and look at the Cal-Tech campus alone, over half of our support comes from the federal government. So, "private university" perhaps is a misnomer. "Federally funded university with some private support thrown in" might be a better description. So, these topics should be seen in that context.

I would like to raise one issue that our other panelists may want to discuss, and I think will be important as time goes on - namely, how this information revolution is directly affecting the academy. That is, the issue of publishing in scientific journals. Right now, consider that the scientist in the university writes a proposal, gets funding from the government or some other source, does research with his or her students and post-docs, writes this up, and sends it off to a journal, which reviews it. If they accept the article, they then ask to have the copyright and full ownership of that intellectual property. They generally will ask the author to pay page charges for the privilege of publishing it. They will publish it, and then they will sell the journal back to the author and to the university and charge them for that as well. All of the creation of the knowledge and the utilization of the knowledge is done by society, and yet the copyright is owned by the journal. This is now starting to be questioned in academic circles, and it is only one example of the changes that may come about when, as in physics today, most people publish on the Web before they publish in the journal, and get comments before they commit their article to press.

So, we are in a very dynamic time in the transmission of scientific information, and I think having done my job of trying to be provocative, I will now like to introduce the first panel member.