Provost David Madigan sat down for a wide-ranging discussion with Joanna Weiss, a special contributor to Northeastern Global News. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
It begins with the academic plan — the strategic plan that lays out the vision and the direction of the university. And that’s all about impact. Begin with problems in the world and how we might organize ourselves and work together across the disciplines to move needles with respect to those problems. The kinds of faculty we’ve been very lucky to attract are the kinds of faculty who want to do just that.
It’s a huge competitive advantage for us. To be able to say to an outstanding, talented faculty prospect: You can work from London, you can work from Oakland, you can, in the future, work from New York. Even for faculty that join us in Boston, many of them come here because of the possibility that they will be able to collaborate with our faculty in one of our global campuses, and perhaps do teaching and research there in the future.
We make bets in research areas that are potentially high impact. We have a Network Science Institute with faculty in multiple locations: London, Boston, Portland. There’ll be more in the future. It’s very connected with AI, connected with health, connected with sustainability. This didn’t happen by accident. We identified that as an area of potential impact and leadership and made some critical hires that led to further hires. And now, 10 years later, we are truly a leader in that space.
We have tremendous strength in network engineering. Our Wireless Internet of Things Institute is another area where we’re having significant impact, particularly in areas to do with mobile phone systems. Our Institute for Experiential Robotics is also going gangbusters. Our Institute for Experiential AI is enormously successful, both in terms of the research activity at the institute and the many affiliated faculty members across all of Northeastern’s Colleges. Its Solutions Hub works with clients all over the world. So it’s not just theoretical — let’s publish a paper together — but working with a partner to identify a situation where AI can really solve a problem for them.
To solve a problem in the world using AI, you need people who are AI experts — who really understand at a deep level how the algorithms work, what kind of data are you going to need, what kind of compute do you need. Similarly, in drug discovery where we’ve also got significant efforts, you need people who understand sub-molecular structures. Or in the social sciences, you need people who understand social movements and social media and how ideas permeate society. So when we talk about “interdisciplinary,” it’s not that you don’t need the disciplines. It’s rather you want the molecular scientist who wants to work with the social scientist. We tend to focus on people with deep expertise whose inclination is to work with others to deploy that expertise.
It also means we’re heavily partnered to solve problems. A bunch of academics, generally speaking, don’t solve problems. It’s academics — research scientists, faculty, students — working with community organizations, working with companies, working with government agencies and so on, that actually move needles. And it’s deep in the DNA of this university that we’re partnered. The roots of this university have led to this.
A research university is a place where the idea is the coin of the realm, right? Ideas matter here. Indeed, as we focus on impact in the world, that requires diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, diversity of expertise, diversity of all kinds. So that’s the kind of environment that we have to provide for our learners — where we vigorously debate openly, freely, and everyone’s viewpoint is valued. We have an academic freedom policy in our faculty handbook that describes exactly this: That different opinions are valued at all times. To have exchange of ideas and conflicting, potentially controversial opinions is centrally important to what we do here.
It is clearly stated in our faculty handbook that we subscribe to the principles of academic freedom and free expression. The university imposes no limitations upon the freedom of faculty members in the exposition of the subjects they teach, either in the classroom or elsewhere. It’s there in black and white. It is one of our core tenets. And we don’t deviate from that. We stand behind it and we live by it.
It they’re members of our academic community, they have the same protection as everyone else does. Now, there are guardrails. It is not OK to harass someone with your views. It is not OK to interrupt university business. It’s not OK to put people in situations that could be dangerous or unsafe. But ideas, no matter how controversial, no matter how offensive they might be to some people, you are allowed to express those ideas in our academic environments. And that principle is deep and is something we absolutely stand by.
Demonstration falls under this rubric of freedom of expression. So we have a demonstration policy that explicitly allows for members of our community to stage a demonstration on any topic of their choosing. I think it’s also important to mention that the Northeastern community — students, faculty and staff — have to get a permission to hold a protest on university space. The criteria that we use are all to do with safety and whether the event is going to disrupt university business. It has nothing to do with the substance of the demonstration. That policy exists in many ways actually to protect freedom of expression.
There’s no fear of change at this university. If you want to propose to do something quite different from something we’re currently doing, you will never hear, “That’s not how we do things here.” It’s, let’s examine it. Let’s poke at it from different dimensions and if it’s the right thing to do in terms of advancing the impact and leadership of the university, you know, we’ll find a way to do it. I know if I have a crazy idea, it might not survive. It’ll be relentlessly critiqued. But if it’s a good idea, we’ll find a way.