'Use the past to understand the present' Thoughts on innovation from Dean Ernest J. Wilson III Read the full transcript (PDF) Listen to the interview (MP3, approx. 25 minutes)

Beginning in 2007, journalism professor Norman Corwin (pictured) takes on a new role as writer-in-residence at USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism. His first assignment: Explore the history, current experiences and future plans of Dean Ernest J. Wilson III. The following is excerpted from an interview with Dean Wilson.

Norman Corwin: I’d like to believe there is both poetic and political justice in the fact that two educators closely identified with national policy and American identity in a fractious world bear the same name: Wilson. The first was president of an Ivy League university before he became president of the United States; the second is a man so deeply integrated in the sociopolitical education and fabric of the country that he must be regarded as a walking encyclopedia of modern academia. On his way to the deanship of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, he has served with rousing distinction in myriad capacities. Allow me to identify some of the seats of learning he has occupied after his graduation from Harvard and post-graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley: The University of Maryland. The University of Pennsylvania. The University of Michigan and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is married to the historian Francille Rusan Wilson, and they have two sons.

Dean Wilson, when I first heard you speak last spring, at the exercises seating former dean Geoffrey Cowan in the new Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership, you were brisk, and sunny, and I wanted to hear more. You have succeeded a highly innovative dean whose programs and the energies lavished upon them must be challenging to follow. Do you intend to carry forward the brown-bag luncheons?

Dean Ernest J. Wilson III:  Well, I do, but first I have to say that Geoff Cowan is a good friend. He truly has been one of the great deans in communications in the country, and he has really brought the school to a remarkable level. What I hope to do is build on his tremendous level of accomplishment and the accomplishment of our great faculty, and to try some slightly new directions. What I will do with the dean’s luncheons, the round-table, is continue that tradition, but instead of having a variety of different topics, I will use that forum to concentrate on only one topic – innovation. The challenge to America, the challenge to universities, and especially the challenge to the media is how to achieve sustainable innovation in an environment that seems to be changing every day. I think it’s going to be very exciting.

NC:  How serious do you rate the comment made by H.G. Wells, years ago, that “civilization is a race between education and catastrophe”?

EJW:  I think it’s even more relevant today, at least for the United States, for a scary reason: One is that the means of catastrophe have been multiplied, and secondly it seems to me that the commitment to education has been reduced. So we’re moving in wrong directions in some respects there.

Dean Wilson with communication graduate students at a reception in September.

NC: I am told that you have a legendary sense of humor. And I am afraid you may need that in answering a question that’s bothered me from time to time. It relates to those who denigrate education as useless and something to unlearn. I don’t mean the occasional ignoramus that may rise to power, but instead highly stationed respectables, like Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. Some of their remarks are very disturbing.
Here’s Jefferson:
“State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”
And then there’s Alexandre Dumas fils:
“How is it that little children are so intelligent, and grown men are so stupid? It must be education that does that.”
And Mark Twain, of all people:
“Education consists, mainly, in what we have unlearned.”
And this from a source I cannot remember:
“College is a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.”
Now, I ask you, Dean: At what targets were these shafts at education aimed? It cannot be the study of medicine, law, architecture, business. I believe it’s at the humanities. Do you agree with my identification of the main target of those critical attacks?

EJW:  Well, I think those attacks are aimed not so much at any given field but the problem of atrophy and calcification that occurs in the disciplines in the face of tremendous change taking place in the environment around them. Now it is certainly the case that there are verities and there are commitments and ethics that are timeless. One could go back to Plato’s Republic to see these verities, or the Bible, or other works of great literature and great belief.
I think the challenge in all disciplines, whether it’s sociology or political science or law or medicine, is that they sometimes enshrine what they claim to be learning but merely are outmoded rules governing the way we should know the world. And when the world changes from time to time, sometimes scholars are faced with a choice: Shall I try to shed more light on the way the world is changing, or shall I stick with my discipline? I think too often the choice is to stick with the familiar discipline rather than to be innovative and open, and use the tools of the past to understand the present.
So, Mr. Corwin, all of our disciplines run this risk, and this is why we should try to find ways to mix the sciences and the humanities and history in ways that will allow us to retain the best of the past but also be aware and sensitive to these dramatic changes that are taking place around us.

NC:  Thanks to the clarity of your answer, I’m going to sleep better tonight.

EJW:  I appreciate that.

Dean Wilson with his wife, historian Francille Rusan Wilson

NC:  One of the areas in which you have worked with great distinction is that of modern China. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have heard it predicted that the new century, in which we are barely embarked, will be a Chinese century. How does it look to you, and if this forecast should turn out to be accurate, what would, or should, our stance be?

EJW:  That’s a very good question. It’s a very important issue.
I go to China quite frequently. One of my recent books concentrated on China and its information revolution, and I was fortunate enough to go to China and interview those individual Chinese who sort of invented the information revolution in China, the people that I call the “information revolutionaries.”
China, as you know, is now the second largest economy in the world. Its economy is growing faster than any other economy, and has been for 10 years. They have lifted millions of people out of poverty, and they have now built up one of the fastest-growing armies in the world. And finally, of course, as everyone knows, their export machine has been able to undercut production in countries from Mexico to South Africa. So they are a formidable country.
I think that there are two things that are going on in China. One is that it is the case that poverty reduction in China is steady and consistent and at a high level. So there are far fewer people who are poor in China today, and the poor as a percentage of the whole population is much, much lower than it was, so that’s a wonderful thing.
It is also the case that the gap between the richest and the poorest in China is growing. This is also true in Russia, it’s true in India and, alas, even in our own country. The ratio of earnings between the poorest and the richest in the United States has gone from 25:1 in the ’60s to about 249:1 at the current period. I think some of these same wonderful technologies that help our lives also can contribute to a gap between the haves and the have nots, both in China and in the United States.
And this is perhaps where education comes in, that you spoke about. We have got to find ways so that those who are without, those who are at the bottom of society, can have access to the same kind and quality of education that those who are at the top of the society can have.

NC:  I would very much be in favor of your succeeding Woodrow Wilson in that office.

EJW:  I’m flattered that you would say so. If I can do a good job in this office, right now, I’d be satisfied.

NC:  Dean, I can’t thank you enough for your hospitality and making yourself available for this interview, on what I’m sure is an extraordinarily busy day for you. I hope that you and your family will prosper in an ambiance as friendly as it is productive.

EJW:  Thank you so much, and I look forward to continuing our conversations in the future.