August 25, 2009 | Editor’s note: Duke Divinity School Dean L. Gregory Jones spoke Aug. 19, 2009, during the opening convocation for Duke University’s graduate and professional schools. This is an edited version of his prepared remarks.

The foundations have been shaken over the past year. Most obviously we have experienced an economic crash that exposed foundations built on sand, but those economic dynamics are symptoms of deeper cultural shifts. Well before the crash that began in September 2008, the great Czech poet, playwright and president Vaclav Havel wrote, “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself -- while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”

There is much that feels like rubble, and little that seems to be rising yet. And, though we may have successfully hidden it from view, when we are honest with ourselves, modern universities are part of the rubble. Not universities per se, but modern versions of them. The economic crash exposed weaknesses and fault lines in the current structures of higher education, and while we have not been in the news as much as Wall Street and Washington, we ought to own our share of culpability for the messes we’re in.

Actually, I believe the university you have chosen to be a part of for this next period in your life is a vibrant and exciting place to be -- both because of our willingness to acknowledge that things need to change and because we are already organizing to effect that change. Indeed, the rubble at Duke has structural integrity, and we are able to build creatively, charting new directions for the disciplines and the professions you have come to study -- and for the broader public leadership we so desperately need. But we cannot do it without your partnership and active engagement.

Put more directly, universities will rise from the rubble only insofar as we help equip students like you to recognize that the best way to develop genuine excellence in your specialization is precisely also to connect its guiding insights, practices, and questions to those of other disciplines and professions.

We will fail you if we offer you shiny, impressive degrees with a great brand -- Duke -- in exchange for your becoming no more than experts in narrow disciplines or skilled technicians. Indeed, it is just this narrowness of discipline and skill that has weakened the structures of higher education and ensured that universities cannot escape responsibility for the mess we are in, just to the extent that in this narrowness, we have failed to form people who ask big, broad questions.

When universities are at our best, we will cultivate in you habits of forming questions that underlie your particular study and that compel you to reach beyond the assumptions that may artificially narrow your study. I am inviting you to discover again the intellectual wonder of being a 4-year-old or for those of you who were precocious questioners, a 2- or 3-year-old. Remember when you asked big questions: How do airplanes fly? Why are there so many different kinds of animals? What makes people do such bad things?

The most significant intellectual leaders in disciplines, and in our broader public life, ask such questions. They wonder, for example: What social purpose does a particular kind of business serve that makes its existence and flourishing important for society? How does a commitment to the rule of law create structures of social organization and public policy that make human freedom possible? What does the history of science help us understand about the relationship of risk and failure to new discovery? Is it possible to believe in a good and just God in the wake of the suffering of the innocent? What roles do the education of the mother and clean water play in a child’s health in Ecuador at age 5? Why is Africa rich in natural resources but home to 70 percent of the world’s bottom billion in terms of economic prosperity? What virtues of character do we discover in great literature -- fiction, history, biography -- that are indispensable to effective leadership in our world?

None of these questions are addressed adequately within a single discipline, or a single school, of a university. As soon as we ask them we discover that we need expertise in a specific area and collaboration with others. I remember interviewing a wonderful young woman about her commitment to educating people in Haiti, and she talked about water problems and her desire to study environmental science. I asked her how she would address the water problems in remote villages she had visited and she said, “Well, I’ll need to find an engineer on the one hand, and I’ll need to learn more about community empowerment on the other.” She won me over as a leader in whom I could invest.

At Duke, we have discovered that in order to work collaboratively with groups in Africa around pressing needs of health care, including training health care workers, no one school or program could tackle it alone. The Fuqua School of Business, the Global Health Institute and the Divinity School are working together in creative and exciting ways -- and learning how to ask new questions as we seek to address pressing problems and grand challenges.