“That is what I love about Stony Brook. I love the boldness of its ambitions, the blindness to obstacles, the recklessness of ignoring “why we can’t” for
“let’s do it,” the spirit of adventure. I love the fact that we are still an adolescent university; we are not finished yet; we are still open to change…”
Print Speech 
5 of 5 
Inventing the Future
This 50th year provides us the perfect opportunity to look ahead. When I came to Stony Brook, I said that to be a great national university, we must be a great local university. That is a truth that seemed far more controversial then than it does now. Our economic development responsibilities through research, educating the leaders of the future, and providing world-class health care to the citizens of Suffolk County are more important than ever. We must design the new products, develop ecological sustainability, find the cures, and create the arts that make Long Island a desirable and productive home to all its citizens.
At the same time, we must protect our nation through our interconnections with Brookhaven, our BioLevel 3 Lab, our work on sensors and material science and other engineering initiatives, sophisticated research for the public good. And we must continue to build our international initiatives, through outstanding research such as what we are doing in Kenya and Madagascar, through continuing to build relationships as we are doing in China and Korea and India, through our exchanges with great European and Asian universities—the planet is also our neighborhood now.
But we cannot oversimplify to believe that the world’s ills will be solved by science and technology alone. The issues of sustainability, for example, are not just matters of biology and chemistry; protecting our planet will involve political science and economics and philosophy and psychology and the arts.
We must understand that interdisciplinarity in research and in education is key to the future, that interuniversity research will increasingly be necessary to discover the answers to the big questions, that we must educate our students to live and prosper in a world of complexity and ambiguity. This year, with a host of public lectures, conferences, and symposia, will be the perfect time to look at the long-range future in as clearheaded and far-reaching and inventive ways as possible.
This, our 50th anniversary year, is really the beginning. Welcome to a future in which Stony Brook will continue to grow and thrive as it has done so extraordinarily in its remarkable first 50 years.