From: Merhawie (merhawie@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Feb 09 2010 - 21:25:01 EST
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Clouded-Future-of-American/63353/
Can American Research Universities Remain the Best in the World?
[image: The Clouded Future of American Research Universities 1]
Dave Cutler for The Chronicle
Enlarge Photo<http://chronicle.com/article/The-Clouded-Future-of-American/63353/#>
By Jonathan R. Cole
Within the past century, and especially within the past 60 years, the United
States has built the greatest system of higher learning in the world. What
has made our universities so distinguished is not the quality of our
undergraduate education. Other systems of higher learning, including our own
liberal-arts colleges, compete well against research universities in
transmitting knowledge to undergraduates. While such transmission of
knowledge is a core mission of our universities, it is not what makes them
the best. Our finest universities have achieved international pre-eminence
because they produce a very high percentage of the most important
fundamental and practical discoveries in the world. That is true across the
board: in the sciences and engineering, the social and behavioral sciences,
and the humanistic disciplines.
Ambition to excel, and fierce competitiveness, have led American research
universities (about 120 institutions within the much larger system of higher
education) to become the engines of our prosperity. The laser,
magnetic-resonance imaging, FM radio, the algorithm for Google searches,
global-positioning systems, DNA fingerprinting, fetal monitoring, bar codes,
transistors, improved weather forecasting, mainframe computers, scientific
cattle breeding, advanced methods of surveying public opinion, even Viagra
had their origins in America's research universities. Those are only a few
of the tens of thousands of advances, originating on those campuses, that
have transformed the world.
Such discoveries have provided industry with the material needed for the
growth of new, high-technology businesses—and universities have trained most
of the highly skilled work force that populates our major industrial
laboratories. Stanford University reports, for example, that faculty
members, students, and alumni have founded more than 2,400 companies—and a
subset, including Cisco Systems, Google, and Hewlett-Packard, generated
$255-billion of total revenue among the "Silicon Valley 150" in 2008.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has reported that 4,000
MIT-related companies employ 1.1 million people and have annual world sales
of $232-billion—a little less than the gross domestic product of South
Africa and of Thailand, which would make MIT companies among the 40 largest
economies in the world.
By design, great universities challenge social values, policies, and
institutions. They are, in short, meant to be unsettling. They require
autonomy and trust within the larger society. Built as a hybrid of the
English undergraduate residential college and the German emphasis on
graduate specialization and research, the American system came to emphasize,
among other things, meritocracy, open communication of ideas, academic
freedom and free inquiry, skepticism about claims to fact and truth, the
creation of knowledge, standards of excellence based on peer review, and
scholarship without borders. It was a more democratic and less hierarchical
system than could be found in Europe. By the end of the 1930s, the core
values that were necessary for greatness were in place. The takeoff toward
pre-eminence began in January 1933, when Hitler dismantled the great German
university system, purging it of its Jewish scholars, many of whom migrated
to the United States and became leaders at American universities.
The American system flourished in a society that gave it unusual autonomy
under a post-World War II science policy that provided taxpayer dollars to
produce new knowledge at our universities rather than in
government-controlled laboratories. With huge resources for research in
hand, unusually prescient and creative leaders built steeples of excellence.
The universities delivered on their part of the contract with society by
producing the talented work force required in a postindustrial society, and
the fruits of discoveries that have transformed the quality of our lives.
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Despite this uniquely distinguished record of achievement, these
institutions remain fragile. Forces both outside and inside our most
distinguished universities are threatening their continued dominant position
in the world of higher education. I believe that the chief threats to our
standing come from within the United States rather than from foreign
competition.
Consider just a few of the internal threats to the values of free inquiry
and open communication of ideas that were exacerbated during the
administration of President George W. Bush: Brilliant young students were
denied entry into the United States because they were born in the "wrong"
countries, such as Iran. Invited scholars were denied visas to lecture and
conduct research. Engineers born in Iran, Cuba, and some other countries
were unable to publish in American scholarly journals, because such
publication would have been viewed as supporting an enemy. Any scholar who
sharply criticized the Israeli government's policies toward the Palestinians
was subjected to harassment and efforts by ideologically committed private
organizations to penalize those critics.
The integrity of science at our universities was imperiled following
September 11, 2001, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act, in 2001, and
the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act,
in 2002. Scientists working with "select agents," which included 80-some
viruses, bacteria, or toxins that could be used as weapons, were required to
register with the federal government and clear any movement of those
materials with the FBI.
Plagued by potential criminal violations of those acts, scientists began to
abandon their research to find vaccines, antidotes, and methods of dealing
with the pathogens. Thomas C. Butler, one of the nation's leading
immunologists, who was studying plague at Texas Tech University, lost his
job and found himself in jail after a trial that found him innocent of all
major violations of the Patriot Act, but guilty of minor charges of
improperly transporting biohazardous materials (in the same way he had
transported them for 25 years) as well as numerous other trumped-up charges,
including tax evasion.
More than 35 Cornell scientists all but abandoned promising scientific work
on select agents, leaving the nation with fewer people working on
interventions to vaccinate against diseases such as anthrax, West Nile
virus, and many other scourges. More recently, political appointees at NASA
tried to censor the scientific papers and speeches of one of the world's
most distinguished climate scientists, James E. Hansen, who worked at NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies and at Columbia University. Attacks on
the peer-review process at the National Institutes of Health and the
National Science Foundation by politicians who disapprove of the content of
ideas, regardless of their scientific merit, undermined still further the
central values of great universities.
Further evidence that we are our own worst enemy can be found in the
responses by state legislators and governors to the financial crisis of
2008-9. The University of California, arguably the greatest public system of
higher learning in the world, is at risk of being slowly dismantled through
fiscal policies that are starving it. According to a ranking of world
universities done in Shanghai, four of the top 20 research universities in
the world are part of the public-education system in California, and their
discoveries have transformed the state's economy. Yet if the financial
famine continues, the exodus of high-quality minds will escalate. What most
legislators in California and other states fail to appreciate is that it is
far more costly to rebuild lost excellence than to maintain it.
Threats to our pre-eminence also can be found within the bellies of our
great universities themselves. The commercialization of intellectual
property undermines the core values of open communication and the normative
prohibition on individual scientists' and scholars' profiting directly from
their discoveries. Are our extraordinary universities selling their souls to
the devil when scientists pursue the financially most lucrative research
rather than the most fundamental problems? And how are scholars handling
potential conflicts of interest produced by cozy financial relationships
among physicians, scientists, and pharmaceutical companies? Meanwhile, a
continued intolerance for ideas that challenge orthodoxy, or that run
counter to the dominant intellectual fashions of the day, greatly inhibits
the growth of knowledge and the instruction of students. There are too many
subjects, like the relative influence of genetics versus environment in
determining behavior patterns, that never enter the marketplace of ideas
because of a fear of informal or formal retribution by colleagues or
students.
While European nations, China, India, Japan, South Korea, and others have an
abundance of human capital and a deep respect for intellect and discovery,
few are, at the moment, in a position, for structural and ideological
reasons, to challenge the dominance of American universities. Britain comes
the closest to a fair representation of great universities among the very
best, but other European and Asian nations lag far behind. There is not one
German university in the top 50 today, and not one Chinese university in the
top 200, by their own reckoning.
Still, within the next 25 years, we may find that a greater number of
universities in other nations have achieved true distinction. European and
Asian societies may leap ahead of us in training their youth, catch up with
us in the production of scientific knowledge, and notably increase their
investments in their universities, as some Asian countries have already
begun to do. That should be viewed positively by the United States.
Competition from abroad can lead American universities, as well as our
international counterparts, to increase the rate of discovery, improving
economic prosperity and the quality of life throughout the world. The
potential for research discoveries in our universities seems limitless. We
have the opportunity to change the world through the development of
knowledge. There is a national need to retain our pre-eminent position in
the world of learning, discovery, and application, but we do not have to be
the sole occupants at the top of the food chain of knowledge.
We should fear that, as a society, we might allow anti-intellectual forces,
which seem always to loom in the background, to come forward and
successfully attack the structure and values of our institutions of higher
learning. It is our decision, the decision of all Americans. Are we willing
to make the choices, sometimes difficult choices, that are necessary to keep
our great American universities the best in the world?
Jonathan R. Cole is a university professor at Columbia University. He was
provost and dean of faculties there from 1989-2003. This essay is adapted
from his book The Great American University: Its Rise to Pre-eminence, Its
Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected, published this
month by PublicAffairs.
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