As someone who has spent a lot (some would say too much) of his life in universities, I have been following the U.S. president’s attack on Harvard in particular, and the third level sector in general. Granted the president’s wish to boost investment in the U.S. economy, snuffing out the independence and funding for universities is the last place he should start (a recent headline from NBC News captured the illogic of this: “New images could change cancer diagnostics but ICE detained the Harvard scientist who analyzes them”).
In my own experience, universities are one of the best places in our societies — somewhere for young people to grow up, to learn and if they stay on as post-graduates, to produce knowledge. The best universities are smaller, have plenty of distractions for students (sports and clubs) and adequate accommodation.
The U.S. system at least appears to have figured out that most young people don’t necessarily know what they want to specialize in (or what occupation to pursue), so that undergraduates can mix various course options in their early years, before channelling themselves into subjects they find stimulating. That is not the case in Ireland and Britain, but labor markets are somewhat forgiving, such that someone with a good history degree could end up working in banking.
In contrast, the French system is based around universities that are generally too big, don’t have enough by way of extracurricular activities, and funnel students towards occupations where they may be unhappily trapped, unless of course, a student manages to make it to an elite school, whereupon they will be happily funneled into the upper reaches of French society. Germany is not dissimilar, and in places more archaic and hierarchical, though the older universities like Heidelberg and Marburg are more conduits into professions like law than public life.
At the risk of sounding overly idealistic, my sense is that universities in the U.S. and Europe have changed in at least two respects in the past two decades.
Many of them seem to behave as if they are businesses rather than public goods, and in some cases the heads of universities have appeared to use their roles as career steppingstones. At the same time, too many universities have grown too quickly in particular taking in international students (to help pay the bills) who are less invested in college life, without at the same time investing in teaching staff and well-planned accommodation. One risk that emanates from these trends is that students, in some cases, feel like consumers and are treated as such, and that this produces a poor student-teacher relationship. Social media and artificial intelligence do not help at all in this regard.
It used to be that universities could ignore the world beyond them, and vice versa. Disputes within universities were typically, and still are, vicious, because as Henry Kissinger said, there is so little at stake. CP Snow’s book, “The Masters” is a good example, and any readers wanting some light relief this weekend should read Tom Sharpe’s “Porterhouse Blue” (the ITV tv series is even better).
The Trump administration’s attack on universities brings them into the spotlight and opens up the disturbing scenario that American universities follow the examples set in Turkey and Hungary. In Hungary, a country with a brilliant academic pedigree, Viktor Orban (who won a Soros-funded place at Oxford) has corrupted, bullied and undercut universities. With seven of the top 10 universities in the world located in the U.S. (and half of the top 50 Times Higher Education rankings), the assault on university funding in the U.S. is troubling in many ways and worrying that relatively few academics have reacted so far.
The saving grace of the larger U.S. universities is their alumni base and large endowments, which puts them in a less vulnerable position than universities in Europe. Still, with colleges like MIT and Georgia Tech heavily dependent on government funding for research in the nuclear, semiconductor and space fields, there is plenty to worry about, and the risk is that the U.S. is on the verge of a negative innovation shock.
While universities are highly diverse, the advent of this new world order will bring several changes.
The first is that in democratic countries, the onus on universities to produce educated, active citizens will be greater, and it might be that more debate than ‘safe spaces’ on campus is a good thing. By extension, there should be a greater obligation on governments to provide (no strings attached) funding for universities, as opposed to forcing them to go cap in hand to industry or wealthy Asian parents. If European governments are serious about enacting the Draghi reforms (and on capitalizing on a brain drain from the U.S.) they need to invest much, much more in universities. Switzerland is the benchmark here.
An extension of this is that there is an understanding that universities are a key part of the innovation process in dynamic economies (the countries with the highest number of STEM students per capita are Switzerland, the Nordics, Ireland and France), but that the state should not try to impose a policy model on them, rather allow good universities to quietly get on with their research.
The second change is that many universities need to become smaller (the average size of the ten largest universities — excluding the Open University — in the U.K. is 40,000 students) and arguably more coherent in their focus. Relatedly, beyond early year undergraduates, I expect we will see a greater focus on specialization and excellence in the sense that in a given country or region (Ireland is the example I have in mind) one university will be the ‘best’ at medicine, and another the ‘best’ at engineering. The constituent parts of the University of London, like Imperial and Kings, are good examples.
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