If Princeton were content to rest on its laurels and remain unchanged, its endowment might suffice to support it without further fundraising. But the world does not stand still, and, as President Emeritus Harold Shapiro often remarked, “if Princeton stood still, it would actually be moving backward.”

Princeton certainly wishes to remain true to its traditional values and mission, and to do so, it must pursue great new ventures. That is the third critical element of the University’s budgetary environment: knowledge grows, and the University must grow with it.

For example, when I attended Princeton in the early 1980s, the field of computer science barely existed, and the University had no department devoted to the subject. Twenty-five years later, information technology has revolutionized the way we live, the way we learn, and the way we explore the world. Princeton has a thriving computer science department with more than twenty tenured faculty who are making crucial discoveries and twenty-five or more undergraduate concentrators per year. It would have been unthinkable for the University and its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to ignore this extraordinary new field of knowledge.

Virtually everybody agrees that universities must respond to new fields. People sometimes ask me, though, why universities do not shut down departments, just as industries retire old product lines when they introduce new ones. In fact, universities do sometimes terminate or transform departments. At one time, Princeton was a leader in the field of botany; now that has given way to leadership in molecular biology, genomics, and neuroscience. Princeton once had a Department of Aeronautical Engineering with an airfield on the Forrestal campus where flight research was conducted; it has evolved into a subpart of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, where advanced research focuses on subjects such as the search for new planets and how underwater robots can cooperate with one another to improve our understanding of marine environments.

That said, the growth of knowledge in one area does not usually eliminate knowledge in another. On the contrary, new knowledge begets new questions, including new questions that can invigorate and revivify old areas of inquiry. Princeton’s Department of Classics, for example, has made aggressive use of information technology to produce new insights into old texts and cultures. When the University’s neuroscientists make new discoveries about how the brain responds to moral dilemmas, their research does not resolve or eliminate questions addressed by Princeton’s philosophers. nstead, it generates new ones about the physiological foundations of moral intuitions. Likewise, in my own field of constitutional law, American scholars have paid increasing attention to the development of constitutional systems elsewhere in the world. These studies have not diminished the need for research about America’s own constitution; on the contrary, they have generated fascinating new questions about how to understand the relationship between our system of government and foreign ones.

A sufficiently narrow-minded administrator might impose an artificial zero-sum calculus on some university departments, demanding that new departments arise only if old ones disappeared. Such notions remind me of an amusing passage from one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about Sherlock Holmes. In the story, Dr. Watson is amazed to learn that his friend Holmes does not know that the earth revolves around the sun. The human brain, Holmes retorts, has room only for so much knowledge, and if he made space for the heliocentric theory of the solar system, he would have to squeeze out other facts more useful to detection.

Great universities cannot share the legendary detective’s singularity of focus. They must care about human knowledge very broadly. That is not because universities collect facts and theories the way some people do stamps, or because universities resist change. It is because the mission of a first-rate research university is to prepare students for all of life’s many challenges and to supply the world with learning that speaks to all the fundamental aspects of human experience.

Princeton’s endowment and our tradition of giving allow us to take the long view. We believe both that learning may be valuable for its own sake and that it is impossible to say today what knowledge will turn out to be useful many years in the future. Basic research is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inefficient, but it is absolutely essential to the growth of knowledge. My favorite story in this vein is about Professor Ted Taylor of Princeton’s Chemistry Department, who served on the faculty here for more than fifty years. In 1946, he asked what chemicals produce the colors in butterfly wings. After more than a half century of work, his research yielded the most effective drug now available for the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer.

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