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President Jim Yong Kim

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Thursday, July 29, 2010

PROVOST CAROL FOLT: Greetings everybody. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to the second of Dartmouth’s Presidential Lecture Series this summer. My name is Carol Folt, and I’m the provost at Dartmouth, and it’s my pleasure to introduce today’s speaker, President Jim Yong Kim.

Now, he’s not a person that needs much of an introduction to this group. We’ve all had a chance to get to know President Kim this last year. At this time last year, he was starting off, getting to know what sophomore summer is like, and now he’s experiencing his second sophomore summer with all of us here.

We all know him very well through his work as a physician, an anthropologist, a humanitarian, the co-founder of Partners in Health, and former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization. But we also know him as a pretty good performer at Dartmouth Idol. We know him as a great fan on the sideline of virtually every student activity. He’s also been teaching in a lot of classes already this year.

So I thought, well what do you not know about him that I can tell you? So I started thinking, well maybe you don’t know what he did when he was a student. Unlike Dartmouth students, he didn’t have a sophomore summer where you’re studying languages and learning about antiquities and chemistry and government and economics. He had to go and make a living for his next year in school.

So, I asked him, “What did you do in your sophomore summer?” And so his sophomore summer, he had his first job, working at the Heinz Ketchup factory in Muscatine, Iowa, where he was a very strong worker on the gravy-making line. He stayed there for just a month, and then he took a different job, where he was working as a waiter in a local restaurant. And I think we’ve decided that this is one of the key factors that have led him to be a president at Dartmouth. He says that he learned to do at that job a Peach Melba flambé while carrying a large tray of food and entertaining his customers all the time.

So, please welcome our multitasking president for this lecture.

PRESIDENT JIM YONG KIM: Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you.

Thank you. It’s great to see all of you. First of all, I want to thank a group of people that we’ve been working with over the last year, the Higher Education Study Group. Many of them are here in the audience today. With the Higher Education Study Group, we’ve been asking some very, very basic questions. When I came here, the question I asked was, “What are we doing to 18- to 24-year-old minds?”

Part of it was that I had been reading some of the literature that suggested that 18- to 24-year-old minds are involved in much more intensive neuronal connection and formation than we’d ever thought before. In other words, the 18- to 24-year-old period is far more important and plastic in terms of creating new connections than we ever thought.

But, we felt that at the end of the year we had to bring it together somehow, and this is my own very personal effort to take you through what we know about the developing mind and how that might have a direct impact on you sophomores who are here this summer.

So I thought I’d start talking about what my own aspirations were at about this time. By the time I was a sophomore, I was forced to give up this aspiration, but for most of my childhood, I wanted to be a professional basketball player. Five-foot-ten Korean kid from Iowa, this very rational choice that I was making, to think that I was going to be able to join the NBA. 

But, you know, one of the great things about this job is that, despite the fact that I never made it as an athlete, I’m now sort of the owner/president of 34 sports teams, right?

And so I get to go to practices. I actually this year got to scrimmage with both the women’s volleyball and the women’s basketball teams. The men’s basketball team even lets me shoot the ball a few times. The football team lets me throw, and I throw out the first pitch. This is just great.

As I wanted to be an athlete when I was a kid, my own sense was that my own son, Thomas, who’s 10 years old, who does a lot of these things with me – my own sense was that Thomas was really developing a better image of his father, really looking up to me, because I get to go and do the pep talk before the football game.

Well, this is what Thomas thinks of my own efforts.

You can see here, this is Diego, one of our great linebackers. He noticed, and thought that was very funny that Thomas was doing that. I told Thomas after I saw this picture, I said, “Thomas, you know, I might show this to students and some audiences.” He said, “Dad! What about the reputation?” And I said, “Oh, don’t worry, Thomas, I think my reputation will be fine if I show this picture.” And he said, “No, not your reputation! My reputation!”

Well, one of the things that we know about aspirations is that you’ve got to have very high ones, and your aspirations should be high from the very beginning. So every day that I’m here as president talking with all of you as students, you should know that I’m constantly thinking about what I tell Thomas. And, interestingly, the things that I’ve learned this year about the developing mind have actually changed the way I talk to Thomas about things. Things we understand about the importance of persistence; things we understand about not making conclusions too early about the nature of a person’s talent.

These are the Rockefeller Leadership Fellows. If you look at this particular really outstanding group of young people – Ben Campbell down here on the left was a mentee of mine, and he is now off working on outcomes measurement for global health in a group that’s led by a classmate of mine out in Seattle. Over on the right, J.R. was a proud member of Alpha Delta fraternity – AD – and now he’s at law school. Next to him is Jessica Guthrie, who got one of the most coveted positions now for graduates, Teach for America. Next to her is Matt Applegate, who’s working on Wall Street. In the top left corner is Will Schpero. Will is now my Presidential Fellow, and I want to thank him in this setting for doing a huge part of the research that led to this particular talk.

Now, the interesting thing is, as you talk to the people who are selecting these young people, you might think that they had a completely different set of things they were looking for. The striking thing was actually how similar they are. If you look at Teach for America – Teach for America probably does this as well as anybody – they have seven traits that they’re looking for. And not only do they have seven traits that they’re looking for, they actually measure those traits in their applicants. Moreover, they follow the development of those traits as you’re teaching in the schools; and if they find that one or another of those traits is actually more correlated to success than the other, then they re-weight those traits in looking at the next group of people who might be coming in.

So there is a lot of work being done these days looking for what I would call “habits of the mind.”

So, what is a habit of the mind? 

The reason I was so attracted to this particular way of thinking about skills, this particular way of thinking about the attributes of students, is that in psychology they’ve now been working very hard to continually put a finer point on these traits. It’s not just discipline or the ability to finish a task. The notion of persistence is extremely important, and persistence now is the focus of a lot of different work. If you have some time this summer, the popularization of the importance of persistence was discussed by Malcolm Gladwell in a book called Outliers. Creativity, independence, empathy, managing impulsivity, taking responsible risks, metacognition – thinking about thinking – there are more of them; but with each of them, they’re trying to put a finer point on it. What is it? Can it be studied? Are there underlying neurophysiological correlates of these qualities?

This is a list of sixteen of them. I like this particular list because it points out things that you wouldn’t think about. Look at the one here on the top right, and I’ll read it for you. “Responding with wonderment and awe.” Now, you think is that just kind of a corny way of talking about life and skills? I actually think what they mean here is taking the anti-cynicism pill.

You know, cynicism has grown; we know that. Young people are more cynical these days, but a lot of people agree that using different kinds of measures, young people are a little bit more cynical. 

But here’s my experience with cynicism. You know Tracy Kidder, who wrote that great book about Paul Farmer that included some of the work we did at Partners in Health. Tracy is one of the great writers living today. Tracy followed us all over the world and listened to us tell him, “But, you know, Tracy we can do this. We can change the way people treat MDR, drug-resistant TB. We can change the way people think about HIV.”

And he kept coming up with more or less cynical ways of saying, “No, come on, that’s not possible. You can’t…how can you even think that that’s possible?”

After about a year of doing this, he looked at me and he said, “Well, Jim, I guess what I realized is that cynicism is the last refuge of the coward.”

Responding with wonderment and awe to new information I think is really important, but how do we think about it? It’s not just about making you naïve. It’s not making you react joyfully or artificially to different kinds of information. I think that this is worth study.

Cynicism is also probably correlated with a part of the brain. We couldn’t find much literature on that; but what does that mean, and what kinds of experiences would it shut you off to if you were overly cynical?

With these habits of the mind, we have to ask ourselves the questions: are the habits teachable? Are they critical for your lives? Why are these habits important to me?

You know, I’m taking a step and taking a risk. I’m getting into areas in which I’m not a specialist. I’m not a brain scientist. I’m not a social psychologist. But this kind of information made a lot of sense to me as I thought about what I would want to tell a group of sophomores in the sophomore summer.

Finally, this is the most important question. This is a very important period in your lives. A lot of things come together in the sophomore summer. Somebody explained to me the other day what the “X Factor” is and how it comes together in the sophomore summer. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What I’m talking about is you’re halfway through, and you have a chance now to consciously think about the habits of your own mind and what you can do to prepare yourself for great success in whatever you choose to do, whether it’s graduate school, whether you want to write a dissertation on Shakespeare, or whether you want to work in an investment bank. It’s just striking to me how many of these habits are things that everybody looking to employ or admit graduates is looking for. 

A very interesting study. I’m actually not quite sure where it was done, but the professors who did this study were all Dartmouth professors. I suspect this was Dartmouth students, although it’s not clear. 

They did MRIs before freshmen started school and then about six months and a year later. These are complicated diagrams. The authors were Abigail Baird, who has left Dartmouth and is now at Vassar, and her colleagues, but they were a very important group here. And it’s just a small study of 19 college freshmen beginning fall term and then six months later and then a year later. 

What it showed was that there was a very significant increase in what they called “voxel intensity,” and they go into depth about thinking about what that means. Their conclusion is that these are white matter changes, so you’re actually changing the structure of your brain in a very short period of time. Their conclusion was that young people with very much actively developing brains are exposed to a completely different social context, and that social pressure – understanding the new situation, understanding how to deal with it – actually creates new neuronal connections.

So the point is, even at this stage, you are actively making new neuronal connections, and it’s partly up to you to choose what kind of connections you want to make.

Now, hearing that there was this study going on and that others had been studying brains through functional MRI, I volunteered; and I said, “You know, if freshmen brains are changing that much, if first-year student brains are changing that much in their exposure to Dartmouth College, maybe my brain will change too.”

So I talked to a person at Massachusetts Mental Health Center who was a Dartmouth ’82 graduate, and so we decided to do an MRI of my brain before coming to Dartmouth and after I got here.

So this is my brain before coming to Dartmouth. Red is kind of indicative of stress, so you can tell there’s kind of a deep, kind of a crimson hue to this brain prior to me coming to Dartmouth, and this is the change over time. So bleeding green is actually a physiological phenomenon that you can see. 

But, you know, one of the things that you might ask of these kinds of studies is, surely, I mean, we’ve advanced a lot. But things like human empathy, those transcend human physiology. Those are parts of the human soul that you can’t study. 

Well, you know, in fact they are studying them, and in fact, this particular set of MRIs is very closely correlated to the notion that you can diagram, you can watch empathy, and you can see it happening on a functional MRI in front of you.

So this is a study from Jean Decety and colleagues at the University of Washington that was done in 2004. The subjects were given a series of photographs where different things were happening to body parts, some of them very, very painful. The results showed that perceiving and assessing painful situations in others was associated with significant bilateral changes in activity in several regions. And there is – this is a hotly debated topic – but there is this notion that when you see others experiencing something like a painful situation, you have a mirror impact, and that that’s actually the foundation of empathy.

So they’ve also studied this in monkeys, and it turns out that neurons in monkeys fire not only when they themselves perform an action, but also when they watch another monkey do the same thing. It’s just the beginnings, but what it suggests to me is that we’re getting more and more and more precise about finding the neurophysiological basis of things as seemingly non-corporeal – seemingly related to the soul – as empathy. 

Now, this is another study that looked at male subjects aged 8 to 27 – this was done by Ellen Greimel and her associates at University Hospital in Aachen, Germany – and it looked at changes over time in empathy centers. It’s a complicated study; suffice it to say that what it showed was that over time, your ability to feel empathic can grow. 

Now why is it important to have your ability to be empathic grow over time? Well, there’s a great group of – as you guys all know – Psychology and Brain Science people here; and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been assisted quite a bit by people like David Bucci and Todd Heatherton, and this is from a paper that Professor Heatherton is working on right now.

Empathy is critical because we are fundamentally social beings. Let me put it in terms of anthropology. What we seem to see – 20, 30,000 years back in the anthropological record – is that the advantage that human beings had is very likely to have been cooperation and, I think, moreover, empathy. We have found the bones of very old people, tens of thousands of years old, that were clearly inflicted with an enormous handicap; but even in those days, when conditions were very difficult, they kept this person alive for a very long time, didn’t just abandon this person. I would argue that human beings’ ability to feel empathy is critical for many things.

Professor Heatherton talks about four components of the social brain, and you all have them; and in order to be competent socially, you need to have a sense of yourself. You need to have a theory of mind – meaning, you have to understand that other people have their own mind and are developing independent observations and evaluations of you. You need to use that information to detect threats, and you need to be able to regulate and change your behavior in response.

I’ve had lots of people tell me that empathy among young people is going down, and there are controversial studies that suggest that the ability of our young people to feel empathy is going down with a curve that looks very convincing, like that. In speaking with professors in the Psychology and Brain Science Department, we know that this information is very, is very controversial; and I would argue that this information is also very much counter to my own experience.

Here are two of our people – Kimberly Gagnon from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Kurt Rhynhart, also, Dr. Kurt Rhynhart from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center – in Hinche, a small town outside of Haiti, where I’ve been many times working on a Partners in Health project. You know, there’s no question that there has been a tremendous growth in your – you students – compassion for others, in my view. You’re interested in thinking about the lives of Africans. Somehow the closeness that this community feels with disasters that are happening in far-off places seems to belie to me the notion that empathy is going down. But, I don’t think it’s enough just to pat ourselves on the back by saying there’s a growth of interest in service, and there’s extraordinary interest in Teach for America, medical schools reporting that people are interested in global health – I don’t think that’s enough.

And I think that it’s important to use your empathy muscle every day. Now, is it possible to use your empathy muscle? Is it something that you develop? Well, Professor Heatherton argues that there is a reserve of the ability to feel empathy for others that you can actually develop over time.

Now, I’ve had a unique and wonderful experience of actually being trained how to do that, because as an anthropology grad student, you do something called ethnography, participant-observation ethnography. The whole point of ethnography is that you put yourself into a completely foreign situation, and you sit there and you suspend all of your own assumptions about how the world works and what’s normal and what’s reasonable, and you work and work and work to try to understand how that particular group sees the world. As you write about it, that’s your thesis; that’s the work of anthropology.

My belief is that every one of you has to be, in some form, anthropologists. That’s the world you’re going out into. You’re going out into a world where people have very different assumptions, and it happens here on campus as well. 

We have done a lot of work to increase the diversity of Dartmouth College, and we are one of the most diverse campuses around. But it’s not going to help you if you only stay around the people who you’re comfortable with. There is no question that having groups here on campus where you feel comfortable is really important, but also – think of it this way – it’s not about just not hanging with your people. It’s not…there’s nothing simple about it. It’s about finding ways to start here, developing your empathy muscles which you’ll use for the rest of your life. And I would argue that your empathy muscles can get flabby over time. 

So not only does empathy have a neurophysiological correlate, I believe, with every fiber of my body, that you can develop it, and moreover, that it’s critically important for you to develop it. Why?

Well, this is a picture of me in Peru in 1994. This was my second ethnographic experience; my first was to go back to Korea, learn a language I had forgotten completely after I came here at the age of five. I went back to Peru and learned another language – Spanish.

More than anything else, though, I wanted to show you this picture to show that at one point in my life I actually did have hair. And, ever since that time – this was 1994 – I worked very, very hard to try to understand how Peruvian children in this case, but how Peruvians understood drug-resistant tuberculosis, how Peruvians understood the nature of social organizations and bureaucracies like the Peruvian Ministry of Health.

Any of the higher-order things that we have in this life – art; music, especially in the form of orchestras; universities and colleges like Dartmouth College – have their foundation, I would argue, at least at some point in empathy. All right?

So, empathy is an important habit of the mind; empathy is something that I think is teachable; empathy is something you have to work on developing again and again forever; and empathy is critical to your success later in life. Taking another person’s idea, judging it to be insufficient, and stating your own opinion is something we teach you here, and it’s very important. You have to marry that skill with the ability to, at any time, just stop and really try to experience the world from the shoes of others; and, if you do it well, the little thing on your functional MRI is going to light up brighter and brighter.

Risk-taking. Risk-taking and managing impulsivity are two very important habits of the mind, and it turns out that we now know a lot more about the reward system for risk taking than ever before. In the middle of the brain there is something called the nucleus accumbens. The nucleus accumbens is really important in giving you a sense that you’re going to get great reward from doing something. 

Now, that nucleus accumbens is regulated by your prefrontal cortex, right? Sexual excitement lights up the nucleus accumbens. Food often lights up the nucleus accumbens. Thinking that you’re going to reap huge financial reward – this has been studied, this is where this study comes from – lights up the nucleus accumbens. What keeps it in check so that you’re not always taking risks is the prefrontal cortex.

Now, the orbital frontal context is involved somewhat in impulsivity and the perception of reward. But what you can see is, in the middle graphs in the gray, in adolescence, nucleus accumbens activity is relatively much higher than prefrontal cortex. 

All of this is to say that it seems that what happens over time is that without the development of your prefrontal cortex, the ability to think, to cognitively work through processes so that not only do you see the rush of the possibility of great reward around any of these stimuli, but then you can also think: well, wait a minute…maybe that’s not such a great idea after all. 

This is what you develop over time, and I would argue that this is one of the most important struggles that happens right here on the Dartmouth College campus. 

Incidentally, alcohol tends to shut down your prefrontal cortex, and alcohol tends to excite your nucleus accumbens. So some things you think seem really cool and will bring you great reward when you’re under the influence of alcohol, are partly due to the fact that the relative control of these two centers is shifted with alcohol.

Now why am I saying this to you? Look. You know, there’s a lot of risk taking that happens in the evenings under the influence of alcohol. When we say that taking responsible risks is important, that’s not what I’m talking about. Right? This past spring, under the influence of alcohol, one particular person jumped from the top stair in the basement of a fraternity and landed on top of the pong table. The pong table broke and hit him in the head, knocked him out, and in my view almost killed him. 

Now, sitting at the top of the stairs with his prefrontal cortex well…suppressed, he must have thought that it would be a great idea to jump on top of that pong table. Right? Now, again, I don’t want to preach to you; I’m not. I want you to know that this is what happens. I want you also to know that excessive alcohol drinking actually makes you lose your cells in that area of the brain that is developing so rapidly here at Dartmouth College and is able to keep the nucleus accumbens in check.

Now, this is all well and good in terms of the science; and in fact, I think you guys take a lot of great risks. You know, in a month or so, we’re going to be welcoming the trippies. Those I think are really, really important risks. It’s really important to take risks. And here’s what Jay Conger of Claremont McKenna College says about the importance of taking responsible risks. I quote:

“A leader builds trust in the goals and demonstrates how these goals can be achieved. This is achieved through personal example, risk-taking, and unconventional expertise. These qualities are made to appear extraordinary by the leaders, demonstrating a total dedication and commitment to the cause and vision, and by engaging in exemplary acts that are perceived by followers as involving great personal risk, cost, and energy.” 

So I have experienced this – and I don’t want to make this too much about me – but again, all I have, really, are my own experiences to share with you, to try to convince you, that while, on the one hand you manage impulsivity – let your prefrontal cortex work – you also know what it means to take important risks that will benefit lots of different people. 

This is the 3 by 5 Initiative; some of you have heard of it. It was my own involvement in the World Health Organization. This was in the summer of 2003. At that time, we knew that about five million people needed treatment for HIV disease in developing countries. About a hundred thousand people were on treatment. What we feared was that if we didn’t move very, very quickly to treat people, we were going to have massive die-offs that would profoundly affect the very core of many societies in southern Africa; and moreover, the argument I kept making was, if we let all of these people die without even trying to treat them, that act will morally define our generation. We will be known as the generation who did have access to drugs, life-saving drugs, yet, because we thought it was too hard or too complicated, we let millions of people die.

So, when I got to the World Health Organization, we thought about what we could do. I brought over a gentleman named Don Berwick. Some of you who follow health care will know that he’s recently been named as the new head of Medicare and Medicaid. I brought Don over to the World Health Organization and I said, “Don, what do we need to do?” And he said, “You gotta set a target; you gotta set an end date; and you gotta push, push, push to get people to react.”

So, that became the 3 by 5 Initiative. This was summer of 2003, and there had been a speech that the previous Director General of WHO gave, in which she said, “You know, about three million people should be on treatment by 2005.” She said it in 2001, and she said it without really having a plan for getting there. So we said, “Hey, the previous Director General already set the target. Let’s go after it.”

And so we started this huge movement; talked to everybody and said, “We gotta get to three million by 2005.” This was one of the most controversial programs in the history of the World Health Organization. And what happened was immediately everyone began talking about risk. I heard again and again and again, “Oh, what are you doing? This is crazy; it’s so risky.” And I didn’t understand what was risky about it. Nobody was on treatment; we wanted to set a goal; and we wanted to push the world in a direction of saving lives. 

What they told me was, “The risk is, if it fails, who will be blamed?” 

I said, “What do you mean?” 

“If it fails, somebody will be blamed, and I don’t want to be blamed.”

So I brashly said, “OK. If we fail, I’ll take the blame. I’ll stand up and say it was my fault. You know, if we fail and I take the blame, I suspect I’m going to be able to feed my children and do OK in life. It’s very important to take this risk because it’s not about us; it’s about the people waiting for treatment.”

So, the way it turned out was I actually did end up taking the blame when we failed. We went from about 150,000 total, mostly in Brazil – maybe a little bit more – about 50,000 on treatment in Africa – to 1.5 million people on treatment by 2005. And I did what I said I’d do. I went on the air and I said, “I take the blame.” BBC did an interview and said, “Well, what do you say to those people who didn’t get treatment?”

I said, “Well, we apologize. We could have worked harder. We could have done more. We apologize.”

And so I personally took the blame for everyone, and when I came back to the office at the World Health Organization, everybody in the office was furious at me, because by that time they had become convinced that no one was at fault, that no one should take the blame, that this risk was a risk worth taking. Look at the positive things that have happened.

It turned out, though, that me actually taking the blame was really good because everyone was ready to pounce on us and just attack us for setting a target and missing the target. But because I went out and blamed myself before anyone could do that, I started getting these notes from people all over the world saying, “Hey, Jim, brilliant strategy. Take the blame before they can blame you.”

Five and a half million people are on treatment today, and we reached the target of three million by 2007; and so something that seemed risky for me in the end was not risky at all, in my view. So doing things for others that might then reflect negatively on you, because it was a risk for you, is a good thing. That is something that is not just sort of looking at the possibility of great reward and letting your nucleus accumbens take over, but it’s thinking hard about how to make the world a better place.

So, how does this translate to you? I would argue that every single one of you is working with a theory of mind. In other words, you have a sense of how smart you are, how smart other people are, whether you can get smarter, what your capacity is; and I would argue that you have to think again about what your theory of mind is. You have to really critically assess your own theory of mind, and here’s an example.

I just today was on the blog of Cal Newport, Dartmouth Class of 2004, Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT; and he has written a lot about success in college. He pointed me to – I didn’t know about this study before – the work of Carol Dweck at Columbia University. She looked at the mindset of students taking a general chemistry class, and there were two kinds of students. One was the fixed-mindset students who believed that their intelligence is just a fixed trait. They worry about how clever they are. They don’t want to take on challenges and make mistakes. They don’t want their own relative lack of intelligence to be exposed.

The second one was a growth mindset, where students think, “No, it’s something that you can develop.”

And here’s the amazing thing: in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they found that the students who had the fixed-trait mindset of how brains work did poorly compared to students who had the developing framework, the notion that you can improve all the time.

Moreover, they showed that when one of the students got a bad grade, the ones who had the more fluid understanding of how people can improve were able to respond with a better grade the next time.

So on a very practical level – and this is just the beginning – I want to stress that I’m just talking to you today about three habits of the mind. Our working group on higher education – that’s going to become much larger – we’re going to be working with everybody on campus. Bruce Sacerdote is here today; he has been one of our leaders. Tom Luxon is here in the audience today, another one of our leaders. 

We’re going to continue to take this further, and we want you guys to know about all of this. Who knew that for general chemistry the most important thing is to have the appropriate theory of mind as you go into it?

So, this is the beginning. We’re going to continue to go forward, and I want you to know that I have a very clear motive behind doing this. Because I still believe in this, all right? I talk about this all the time – people are sick of hearing me talk about it – but in the Convocation exercises in October of 1946, John Sloan Dickey said to the students, “The world’s troubles are your troubles…but since the troubles of the world come from the hearts of men, there’s nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.”

What we’re doing here is trying to build better human beings, but a huge part of it is your responsibility. You have to be thinking, in your own mind, that these neural connections are being made all the time. Depending on the inputs, depending on the stimuli, depending on the choices that I make, my mind is going to develop in this way, or this way, or any other kind of way. 

What we’re finding is that neuroplasticity extends to very late in life. Exercise in people in their seventies seems to create new neural connections even at that age. There was an amazing study that was done at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston where they took 80-year-olds through weight-training regimens that changed fundamentally their ability to carry out the activities of daily living.

Now, I believe that that’s what we do here at Dartmouth College. We are in the business of building the better human beings that can take on the world’s troubles and make them better. But the really exciting thing for me in studying with people like Tom and Bruce and Dave Bucci and Todd Heatherton is that, not only is there a scientific basis to these ideas and feelings, but we can systematically help you to develop those traits.

You need to take your education into your hands right now; this is the time to do it. How are you doing with those sixteen habits of the mind? Put them on your wall. Think about it. Your theory of mind affects your performance in chemistry class! It’s very, very important to get in the right frame of mind, or an effective frame of mind for you, as you do it.

You’ve got two years before you’re right here. It’s plenty of time to develop habits of the mind. You’re at the height of possibility in terms of developing great habits of the mind. This is the time when neuronal connections are being remade and remade, made and remade with great speed.

You come here with great attributes. One of the professors pointed out to me that often you have people with different kinds of characteristics; you have one group with great analytic skills, and you have another group with great empathic skills. Well, we’re lucky here at Dartmouth because we get to choose the ones who have both. You guys come in here, for the most part, with both of those skills, both of those traits. This is a really strong foundation. You all have a very strong foundation from which to build. 

You can build empathy muscles, persistence muscles, responding-with-wonderment-and-awe muscles; but you have to work at it every day, and it’s worthwhile, and it never is going to end. You’ll have to do this for the rest of your life. 

You know, I came here, stopped doing my work in developing countries because I truly believed that by coming here and helping you develop your habits of the mind, that we together would have a much greater impact on the world that I ever could alone, or even with the small group that I worked with. 

Never forget the great words of Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist who passed away some years ago. She said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed souls can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

The faculty and I are with you every step of the way to help you develop those habits of the mind that will allow you to take on the world in whatever way you want. And as you know, I’m willing to do just about anything to help you accomplish your goals.

Thank you.

Question and answer period

Carol Folt: You talked about habits of the mind and I loved your example of as an anthropologist learning empathy; that was really wonderfully vivid … As president, what habits of the mind do you feel are particularly important or that you have been intentionally focusing on?

President Kim: I think the list of habits of the mind for a president is about 25,000 and not just 16. I think one of the things that happen in institutions of higher education is that we tend to become very conservative, especially because we have the greatest product on the face of the earth. There is no question in my mind that the American college and university system is by far the best in the world.

So it is hard to tackle something like the great 240-year-old institution of Dartmouth and talk about we need to take some risks, we need to think about how we can make ourselves even better. But the ability to withstand criticism to persist, in the face of criticism over a kind of risk taking that I think is really important, is maybe what I found is one of the most important, but they [habits of the mind including risk taking] are all important. The anti-cynicism pill; all of those [habits]. Managing impulsivity. All those things are extremely important every day. That is the point, the point is it is not as if we have mastered them all and we are telling the sophomores that they have to start on the process. Every single one of us looks at these 16 traits and says, oh my goodness, I need some work in some of those areas, and I feel the same way.

I think the worse mistake I can make is just to tell you about developing your habits of the mind and not working on it myself. I think we all have work to do. And for me, I am an incessant optimist in the sense that I just believe in the improvability of human beings and the human condition.

That is why I keep showing you that John Sloan Dickey comment* all the time. That is what you are here for and that is what we are here to help you do.

[ * John Sloan Dickey, Dartmouth's 12th president (1945-1970) imagined a Dartmouth keenly aware of the world outside Hanover and an ideal Dartmouth student who viewed himself as a citizen of the world. "The world's troubles are your troubles...and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix," he told students in his 1946 convocation address.]

Carol Folt: Optimism has to be a really important habit.

President Kim: Let me go further, Carol. I would say this. One of the discussions I had with Tracy Kidder [Kidder is author of Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, which profiled Farmer, co-founder along with Kim of Partners in Health], Tracy kept saying you guys are so optimistic and every piece of evidence suggests that you should be pessimistic. People are poor, people are dying of hunger and yet you guys are optimistic about what you can do. One of the things I said to him [was], when you are dealing with really terrible situations with the poorest people on the planet, optimism is not the result of rational decision making, optimism is a moral choice. Because if you are in a place like Haiti and everything is falling down around you and you chose to be pessimistic, outcomes will be very bad for the people you work with. It is not to say you should be wildly optimistic without being critical.

The Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, used to talk about a pessimism of the intellect but an optimism of the spirit, so that is precisely the combination you need at a place like Dartmouth College. It is not hard though, I tell you, to be optimistic when you get to hang out with Dartmouth students every day, you guys are a constant source of optimism for me.

Carol Folt: What important risks should students be taking?

President Kim: The most important risk is to really put yourself outside of your comfort zone. One of the things I was talking about just today with Professor [Todd] Heatherton [psychological and brain sciences] is that sometimes, of the four qualities, the third one is the ability to understand threat. Sometimes [in] students that trait is heightened. You think that if you have a bad hair day, that everyone will notice. If you do something a little bit different from other people, other people will notice. I think it is really important to do things like take courses outside of your comfort zone.

One of the areas that I have been looking at with Jeff James here in the Hopkins Center [of the Arts; James is director] and Brian Kennedy of the Hood Museum [Kennedy is director] is the importance of the Arts in developing intellectual capacity. When I looked at that information, I was blown away. For example, learning to play the piano when you are four is correlated with being better at conflict resolution when you are six. There are pArts of your brain that light up simultaneously when you listening to music that don’t light up simultaneously in other situations. There is something about the Arts that is really important.

For me, one of the things that I have been intending to do and I am still intending to do it, is to begin exploring music and art more myself. Personally, I never did. I thought the ability to draw was a fixed trait. I tell you I thought that up until last year, when I saw people who were in a drawing class for the very first time do beautiful work. So for the sake of your mind, take the kinds of risks that put you into uncomfortable areas; that put you into areas that really make you almost feel [yourself] being remade. Those are great risks. Taking risks that just seem to be exhilarating, especially under the influence of alcohol, I’d say, avoid those risks.

Carol Folt: How do you think the Humanities will be important in developing habits of the mind?

President Kim: One of the things I thought about is, what if we were to study the evolution of empathy during the process of say taking a course in literature? So much of literature is about human empathy. So much of literature is about getting deeply into the mindsets of these characters. I think it happens everyday in the Humanities. Developing those habits of the mind are critical. We just had a discussion today; Win Thompson is here today from the American University of Kuwait [Thompson is president]. I was telling him that there are universities in Korea that have eliminated their Humanities [departments] because they think they need to focus on training the technocrat for the future. In my discussions with Korean leaders, I have said that is exactly the opposite of what they want to do. Where Korea is today economically, is they have got to start being creative, they are not going to make their future by copying other technologies and selling them more inexpensively. They now have to come up with the new ideas, the cultural production, and to me studying the Humanities and the Arts is absolutely critical. You can map many of these traits, habits of the mind, on the course work that we are already doing, especially in the Humanities and Arts, others as well, but especially I think, in courses in the Humanities.

Carol Folt: What do you believe the net effect the Greek system is on our campus empathy muscles?

President Kim: I am not in the basements on Friday and Saturday nights, I don’t know what happens there. I meet with members of the Greek system all the time though and I hear them talk to me about how deep the connections they make among the brothers and sisters in the Greek system. So I think it is mixed, I think we have to be honest and say it is mixed. I think the closeness that people feel to people you get to know so well from the beginning of your sophomore year as fraternity brothers and sorority sisters is tremendous. I think having those relationships for the rest of your life is really important. But I have then also heard, especially from women who have been in fraternity basements, who say that a lack of empathy and a lack of respect sometimes is part of what we see in those basements in the evening.

I would invite all of the students to think about that as we go forward. We make and remake our campus all the time and what I can tell you is that instances when everyone knows that you are letting your empathy muscles go flabby are not good. What are we going to do to step in and change that formula? I don’t know, I can’t legislate it, I can’t dictate to you what we are going to do. I can just tell you that if you let things happen that are obviously a choice not to exercise your empathy muscle, they are getting flabby and that is going to hurt you in the future.

Carol Folt: Is humor an important habit of the mind?

President Kim: Absolutely, finding humor is one of the 16 habits of the mind and I think it is really, really important. I get such a kick out of the humor that breaks out on campus. The greatest comedians of all time are always said to be the most brilliant people. It takes a really great mind to find humor in ways that are compelling. I think it is really important. I think also laughter is incredibly therapeutic. So finding humor is terribly important.

Carol Folt: How do you imagine we can put this [habits of the mind] into action in our courses? How can students who are so busy doing so many other things learn to add in a thoughtful way of adding habits of the mind? How can we actually support students in strengthening these habits? What are your general thoughts about bringing this to campus?

President Kim: You know, Carol, I don’t know, I think you know much better than I. I am not sure, but every time I talk to faculty members about habits of the mind, I hear things [such as], we really work on this and this, and you know I have never really thought of it in those terms.

But isn’t it interesting that we are finding the neurophysiologic correlates of things that we are already doing? I don’t think that it is a question of saying we don’t do any of this and we have to start. That is not the point at all, the point is we do it, and we do it everyday.

This is why we are the number-one undergraduate education in the United States. No applause for that? U.S. News and World Report [which ranked Dartmouth #1 for commitment to undergraduate education in 2009] gets it wrong all the time with Dartmouth, this time they got it right, so we have to give [them] their due.

The point is we do it all the time and I would argue we are already developing habits of the mind and we are doing it better than anybody else, that is what gives us our number-one ranking.

Can we do it better? I think so, I think if we are intentional about it. I think maybe as you go into general Chemistry class, maybe the first lecture is about the study and about the theory of the mind impacts the way you do in Chemistry class. I am not sure what it is, but I have great faith that we will figure it out.

The strategic planning process we are going through right now [for the College] is going to be partly focused on figuring out how to do it.

I would like to tell the rest of the world that when you come to Dartmouth, that not only do you get the number-one undergraduate education, not only do you learn everything from Shakespeare to Physics, but we are also everyday thinking about how to instill in our young people habits of the mind that we know to be important for anything that they want to do going forward.

Carol Folt: What do you think John Ledyard would do if you told him he couldn’t swim in the river? [In the summer of 2010, the College announced that it would not provide a swimming dock and lifeguards, and discouraged students from swimming in the Connecticut River, due to the dangers of unpredictable currents, debris, and murkiness. Ledyard, a 1776 graduate of Dartmouth, hewed a wooden canoe and set out down the river, beginning a journey that would take him around the globe. In 1920, he was the inspiration for the forming of the Ledyard Canoe Club.]

President Kim: So let me tell you exactly what I think. I didn’t know John Ledyard, I heard he was a great guy. This is all about using both your pre-frontal cortex and trying to keep it in check as you think about things like the Connecticut River. Look, you know I have said to you many times, I can’t legislate behavior. But what we did about this is we did a very rigorous study. I called Jim Wright [former president of Dartmouth from 1998-2009], who did a very rigorous study of what happens in the Connecticut River. Here is what we found out. 1) The current in the Connecticut River changes all the time and from second to second as they open and close the docks. 2) There is debris in the Connecticut River that floats past at very unpredictable times, especially at times when the open and close the docks. The water off the edge of the Connecticut River is murky and very deep. Here is what we were told.

Having lifeguards on the deck is really an illusion because if you go down we can’t find you, especially if the river is flowing. So, the choice that we had to make was do we put life guards out there and pretend as if we can see people if something bad happens. Or do we make a statement, and again, as a public health person, I have got to listen to experts and listen to the research or just be honest with you and say, look, it is not safe to swim there. You don’t know when the docks are going to be opened and closed; you don’t know when debris is going to fall down and if you are swimming under water and something hits you, we can’t save you.

What I also said though was, I understand very much the desire to swim in the Connecticut, I understand that,so we are starting a process now, and what I told our team is that we should look everywhere. What about land locked countries in Europe? They must have figured out some way of making rivers safe to swim in. So what I can promise you for next year is we are going to scour the globe to try to find some way to make it safe so that you can swim in the Connecticut River.

Maybe this is the downside of having a doctor and a public health person as your president. I look at the data and then I have to make a judgment based on whether I think it is safe for you and the judgment in our view was absolutely overwhelming. We couldn’t put a system out there pretending it was safe when we knew it wasn’t. That is the answer to that question, sorry about that, and it is hard to find humor in that, I’ll tell you.

Carol Folt: Do you think Hanover is a bubble? I sometimes have trouble thinking about the world’s troubles as my own because I feel I am not connected in the world.

President Kim: So that is your task [addressing students], Hanover is not a bubble. It doesn’t have to be a bubble. You all know this is about us trying to reinvigorate the Great Issues class, most people say to me “well you taught us about bias in the media.” Now, back in those days very few newspapers came to Hanover and so one of the projects for people in the Great Issues class was to follow an issue over the course of the year. They read The Daily Worker, they read The New York Times, and they read The Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Tribune was conservative, The Daily Worker was very liberal and The New York Times was somewhere in the middle. I am told again and again by alums that bias in the media was a great lesson for Great Issues. [“Great Issues” was a mandatory course for Dartmouth seniors, offered during the presidency of John Sloan Dickey.]

I don’t think that is something unknown to students today, students today have access to so much information all over the world, up to the minute YouTube videos. I think there is the sense that there are just a lot of different perspectives and you don’t quite know which one is true or not true. I think students have that already, but then that is the separate question.

You are not living in a bubble in a sense that you have access to the outside world all the time. But what do we do with it? How do we make us of that it? Getting out of here, having different kinds of experiences is really important, but everyday right here we can demonstrate that we are not living in a bubble.

You know in Haiti, they know about Dartmouth, Dartmouth students raised more money for Haiti relief than any other group of students in the country. Our doctors and nurses were on the within 72 hours after the earthquake, it took other organizations weeks to get set up. So we reached out from the bubble with an act of compassion that is remembered to this day by those in Haiti and others people who watched. So, it is not a bubble because of physical location anymore, it is a choice that we make of whether sitting here in Hanover, New Hampshire with all the great things we that have whether we allow it to be a bubble or not, so I think it is up to us.

Carol Folt: Thank you, everybody and thank you, Jim.

President Kim: Thank you.