to poverty to climate change and religious
tolerance – are so complex and far reaching that
solving them requires contributions from many
fields. An education that prepares future leaders
to address these significant challenges and
questions about a wider world, about complex
problems, and about difficult choices for global
citizens and leaders is not simply desirable, it is
essential. It requires the creativity and innovation
that are the outcomes of a liberal arts education.
Steve Jobs, creator and CEO of Apple famously
said “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone
is not enough. That it’s technology married with
liberal arts, married with the humanities that
yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”
I couldn’t agree more. Many breakthroughs
in research, whether in the sciences or the
humanities or technology, involve bringing ideas
from one area to bear in another.
Here is an example of this entrepreneurial mindset.
While Jane Chen was a student at Pomona College
she majored in psychology, mentored at-risk high
school students, and spent a semester abroad
in Nanjing, which kindled her interest in working
internationally. After reading about villages in China
hard hit by AIDS, she became a program director
at a startup that funded and operated projects in
education and care for children affected by AIDS.
She then returned to the U.S. to earn an MBA in
a public policy program at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business and the John F. Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard. During her time at
Stanford, she learned that four million low-birth
weight babies die each year because they don’t have
enough fat to regulate their body temperature, and
they don’t have access to hospitals with high-cost
incubators. She and several of her fellow students
at Stanford created a prototype for a new infant
warmer that costs about US$200 – a fraction of the
cost of an incubator – and tested it in rural villages.
She went on to found Embrace, a non-profit that
provides these warmers free-of-charge to families
in developing countries. Since its launch just
three years ago, she has been credited with saving
thousands of lives around the world. I would also
point out that Matthew Estes, another Pomona
graduate, and founder and CEO of Babycare
Ltd., based here in Beijing, also exemplifies this
problem-solving and innovative mindset. This is
what a liberal arts education d