The difference today is that universities cannot afford to let this mixing occur by happenstance. In our world, information circulates instantaneously without restrictions of time or space, and virtually every point on the planet has been incorporated into global networks enabled by new technologies. As economic activity, technology advances, health menaces and security threats have become increasingly global in their causes and consequences, education needs more than ever to have an international horizon as well. Every year, more of our graduates accept jobs that did not exist when they were beginning their educations. Many current students will end up living some portion of their career in a country they do not yet envision visiting. They will be unprepared for the rapidly transforming world unless they are exposed to cultures around the world.

We have a lot more Charlie Soongs at Duke today. We have over 400 Indian students in our graduate and undergraduate schools, and faculty of Indian origin occupy key leadership positions The chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Duke Medical School, and now also the dean of the graduate medical school we have founded in partnership with the NUS in Singapore, is Dr. Ranga R. Krishnan, who earned his medical degree in Madras. Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute is directed by Professor of English Srinivas Aravamudan. The chair of our Computer Science Department is Pankaj Agarwal. G. P. Shukla is head of Duke’s Center for International Development. Two Indian faculty colleagues are with me here today: Prasad Kasibhatla, professor of Environmental Chemistry and Dean of International Programs at the Nicholas School of the Environment, a native of Mumbai; and Dr. Debu Purohit, Professor of Marketing at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, a native of Delhi.

But as this audience knows, the map of educational mobility is less of a one way street than it was a short while back. In the last decade you have seen many students educated abroad return to India, a trend that is bound to continue; and I predict that you will be seeing increasing numbers of students wanting to come to India from around the world to learn from your remarkable conditions and your great brains. As India has risen to global prominence in software development, pharmaceuticals, and other fields, so India has serious growth potential in higher education.

So I’m guessing that Indian leaders are kept awake by the same questions that drive American university presidents: how to draw the very highest level of talent and how to develop it to meet the challenges the future holds.

It’s clear that India has its own secrets for producing well trained, highly innovative, and entrepreneurial people. But without claiming that it is universally applicable, I will share my and my university’s thinking on these crucial questions. It’s our hunch that the structure of knowledge that was perfected over the last 150 years and encoded in the traditional structures of higher education is on the verge of profound transformations, in response to new facts of this time.

Specialization—the narrow, intense focus on a single discipline or even subdiscipline—was the enabler for most of the breakthrough discoveries of the 20th century. But such specialization alone is not going to be adequate to confront the complexity of today’s problems. The solutions to our environmental challenges require great chemistry and great engineering, but as we know, science by itself does not change the world’s habits. To change the ways human populations use natural resources and act on the environment, science needs major inputs from law, business, economics, and social policy.

India and the United States both know how unprecedented levels of biomedical discovery and sophisticated care can coexist with an unmet burden of human health need. The solutions to this great challenge require the cross-breeding of sciences that used to be quite separate: biology and chemistry, engineering, computer science, and the rest. But our health problems are also and inextricably legal problems, since they involve questions of intellectual property; business problems, problems of economics and management; policy problems; and they also have a cultural or anthropological dimension, since different cultures embrace diagnoses and cures on profoundly different terms.

In a world where challenges take this form, an educated person will need to be able to integrate disparate bodies of knowledge, and to do so not by some fixed formula teachable in advance but improvisationally, opportunistically, in response to changing arrays of facts and resources. Many issues will require the sharing or pooling of understanding, the bringing together of bodies of knowledge that no one person could possess alone. So we are guessing that working in teams will be as characteristic of the integrative regime of knowledge as working alone was the regime of specialization; and learning how to collaborate with others with different backgrounds will be an increasingly essential skill.

Let me outline some of the ways we seek to train the sort of versatile, collaborative talent I’ve been describing. It begins with our recruiting. American universities of Duke’s type look for evidence of outstanding academic achievement, but we also look for a broader array of powers. We look for signs of leadership, engagement, creativity, and concern for others, not just the ability to do well on tests. Since we believe that interactions among people with different base assumptions make everyone more imaginative, we actively recruit top talent from every aspect of American society and now from around the world. Our undergraduate student body is now 9% international, and the fractions in our Business, Engineering, Graduate and Public Policy schools are far higher still.

Second, we aim to train an adaptive, interactive form of intelligence through our distinctive style of undergraduate education. In India as in many other countries, students typically choose their specialization when they enroll as undergraduates. Schools like Duke require some degree of specialization, but we not only encourage but mandate that our undergraduate students explore broadly in the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences. Liberal arts education used to be valued for producing well-rounded people, and that is still of considerable value. But we are finding that students who have mastered more than one discipline are also naturally adept at connecting them, and at finding innovative ways to make one form of study shed light on the problems of another.

Third, starting with undergraduates and extending all through our graduate and professional schools, we are encouraging students and faculty to reach across disciplinary boundaries and bring academic inquiry to bear on real-world problems. Many students from India enroll in Duke’s Masters in Engineering Management program, a program that combines rigorous engineering with business school courses in product development and law school courses in intellectual property. Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment has leading atmospheric chemists and water and soil scientists on its faculty, but its specialty is in training students in both the science and the policy dimensions of environmental management. Our energy program is a join venture of our Environment School, our Engineering School and our School of Public Policy. And Duke’s Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions is building communities among academics, legislators, NGOs and private corporations to develop scientifically rigorous and economically and socially viable solutions to problems like the protection of oceans and endangered ecosystems and the establishment of carbon markets. In other words, we’re building collaborations among parties who each own a piece of the problem but can’t solve the puzzle on their own.

Duke’s Global Health Institute is another exercise in collaboration to address a fundamental human need. At most American universities, global health is pursued in a separate public health school or as a field within medicine. Duke has major strength for the study of global health within our School of Medicine: the Human Vaccines Institute has long been at Duke (our Doctor Sam Katz pioneered in the creation of the measles vaccine), and the $350 million international consortium founded three years back to pursue the creation of a vaccine against HIV/AIDS is also based at Duke, under the direction of Dr. Barton Haynes.

But Duke’s distinction is that we have built our Global Health Institute as a university-wide initiative, a space for biomedical researchers, nursing professors specializing in innovative care delivery and caregiver training, business faculty with expertise in health management, as well as health sociologists and health economists, all joined together by their devotion to a common problem and inspired by what they can learn from those who don’t share their expertise.

In the Global Health Institute, this collaboration is not reserved for the faculty. Students in all fields participate in its programs, down to and including first-year undergraduates. The collaborative spirit also reaches outside our university, since we know we can’t meet any significant challenge all by ourselves. Though still a young venture, the GHI is working with academic and non-academic partners across the United States and in many foreign countries, India among them. Michael Merson, the Director of our Institute, has worked in India for over twenty-five years, since his days as Director of the World Health Organization’s Global Program on AIDS. He and his colleagues are now involved with Indian researchers and service organizations in Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu, New Delhi, and elsewhere and are in active conversation with your colleagues in the Public Health Foundation India.

In fields like public policy, global health, environment, and engineering management, we are eager to help train people from India and to learn from Indian colleagues. To my mind, no great university can deliver the full benefit of the knowledge it helps create unless it reaches out across national boundaries. But increasingly, we have come to realize how much we ourselves stand to learn from participating in an international community of inquiry. Our business school has always drawn students from around the world, but like many American business schools, it tended to educate them in an American-based business model. But in future, and indeed already in the present, given what Fareed Zakaria has called “the rise of the rest,” all business students, emphatically including Americans, will need to understand the multiple worlds of international business practice and learn how to shift back and forth among them.

This is why Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has announced a pioneering, multi-sited model of education that will have bases in New Delhi, Shanghai, Dubai, St Petersburg, London, and Durham, North Carolina, and giving students an experience of global embeddedness and linking research activities in each site. I welcome the chance to meet colleagues this week at TERI, the Energy and Research Institute, to explore possible collaborations on the environmental side. (Duke and TERI have recently signed a MOU to develop joint training programs for environmental managers.) Duke already has many friends in India through the collaborative programs between our Sanford Institute of Public Policy and the Ministry of Personnel and Training. One hundred mid-level IAS officers a year have been completing a Duke program on public administration, with the first weeks held in India and the last weeks spent on our Durham campus.

Let me give one last example of a new form of education we have created to develop talent in new ways. Duke students are full of altruism and inventiveness, and energy, but in the past there has been a tendency for classroom learning to remain separate from the rest of their lives—for academics to seem, as they say, a little academic. But we want our students to think of the things they learn in class as tools they can use in adaptive ways to deal with challenges in the real-world.

So last year, with funding from our graduate Melinda Gates and the Duke Endowment of Charlotte, we announced a program that will give financial and logistical support to any student willing to immerse himself in an unfamiliar human scene outside our walls and use their education to wrestle with its challenges. Last summer Duke Engage had more than 360 undergraduates working at service sites in 100 countries. When engineering students come back to Duke from devising clean water projects in sub-Saharan Africa, when public policy students come back from working on literacy or health education projects in Hyderabad and Delhi or New Orleans or Seattle, they come back transformed. They have a richer sense of the world; and they have a new sense of themselves as active problem-solvers in the world.

My message is that our time is going to need new kinds of talent, and that universities need to consciously work to produce these new kinds of talent if they are to deliver their full benefit to their societies. At this time of massive economic dislocation and uncertainty about the future of global growth, you might think this talk of a brave new world to be unduly optimistic. Indeed, I cannot be certain what our trajectory will be, in India, in the United States, or anywhere else.

But the greatest mistake we could make would be to forget that education will be the enabler of every future development, so education requires investment and imagination now more than ever. The dynamism of the modern economy has always been driven by smart minds envisioning better ways to do things. Our universities have been the seed beds of every explosive innovation, from information technology to biotech and materials science to all the growth fields that still await us. So trained intelligence is still our most valuable asset for growth: Horace Mann, leader of the movement for universal public education in the United States, came up with this variant on Adam Smith in the 1840s: “Intelligence is the most important ingredient in the wealth of nations.” Meanwhile, problems of health, environment, economic development, and unequal access to human opportunity will loom over the successes of our cultures in more and more menacing fashion if we do not find creative ways to address them. Here too we need to look to education to train the innovators and social entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

From my trip to India I hope to build lasting relationships that will help secure a shared future of teaching and learning. None of us have got where we are today without the stimulation of minds from foreign cultures. Now we need to promote cross-disciplinary training and cross-cultural contacts in a more strategic fashion. I hope to work with all of you to make that future a reality.