President's 2024 Year-end Essay
To: The Caltech Community
From: Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and Professor of Physics
Date: December 10, 2024
Re: 2024 Year-end Essay
In times of turmoil and change, it can be helpful to look close up from afar. Last summer, I traveled with Caltech alumni and associates to the Galapagos Islands. These volcanic islands, 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, have played an outsized role in our understanding of evolution. They also provide witness to a decades-long effort to reclaim their original history, flora, and fauna, from the ravages of exogenous exploitation.
Each island is different. Some are barren, with jagged lava flowing to the shore. Others are lush, with green vegetation barely contained. One can land on rocky shores or disembark on beaches of finely ground white, red, or black sand. Darwin's finches famously varied from island to island in response to local conditions, but there are examples of evolutionary adaptation that are stunning in scale: land iguanas that are now marine iguanas, having turned to the sea for their sustenance and survival; black, brown, gray, and green lava lizards decorated with metallic flecks and individualized to each island habitat; cormorants that have lost their ability to fly and whose vestigial wings propel them through the waters.
Faculty colleagues Rob Phillips and Victoria Orphan helped us to understand the science and, perhaps as importantly, the historical context. There is the joy of trying to make sense of disparate facts and piece together a coherent picture. Modern DNA analysis substantiates the observational record and underscores the importance of developing new tools to settle old controversies. Most of all, I was reminded of the courage it takes to stand by one's convictions, especially when the world at large has not accepted a paradigmatic shift mandated by the facts.
We live in a time when the evidence-based reasoning that we take for granted as the way to understand the world is challenged by ignorance and politics. Caltech is an institution animated by our ability to interrogate Nature in the search for new patterns and paradigms. We must remain sufficiently humble to adapt to the changing landscape of discovery and steadfast in our commitment to revealing the truth, whether or not accepted broadly.
A few weeks ago I returned to the equator – this time to Singapore. Singaporean students who had studied at Caltech commented that, when they returned home, parts of the island were unrecognizable given the surge of development. With a constrained urban setting and a lack of natural resources, the government has recognized that educating its people is its most effective way to advance. Societal endorsement of this priority has led to globally recognized universities. Prodigious capital investment, private and public, domestic and international, has followed.
We live in a time when higher education has lost the trust of a good part of the US public and is under assault. American higher education historically has been our nation's competitive advantage. We do not educate a great many students at Caltech, but the undergraduates and graduate students that we do educate change the world. We train our students to solve problems with flexibility of mind and the rigor of the scientific method. It is a skill that offers hope for the future and a mission that we must protect steadfastly.
The novelist Cormac McCarthy maintained that: "All courage [is] a form of constancy." We are fortunate to be part of an Institute that has a gimlet-eyed view of its mission of forefront research and education in service of society. We know, and we have demonstrated for over a hundred years, that educating the next generation of informed and involved citizens, and creating knowledge that improves people's lives, makes fundamental and lasting contributions to our nation and the world no matter the ephemera of politics. I wish you a New Year of constancy and courage.