PrintStanding on the northwest corner of Broadway and 120th Street and looking to the southeast, there is a cold metal box. This imposing, unfinished building obstructs the view of what would otherwise be a cohesively designed campus composed of turn-of-the-20th-century brick and stone buildings designed by the renowned architectural firm McKim, Mead, and White.
The new science building, along with the similarly modern Diana Center across the street, is a symbol of the jarring changes that Columbia and other major research universities find themselves facing. As the 21st century brings new challenges to American dominance in the fields of economics, politics, and the sciences, the preeminence of thought at American institutions may cease to be a given.
This phenomenon is at the heart of Jonathan Cole’s most recent book, The Great American University: Its Rise To Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected.
Cole, the John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University as well as the former provost and dean of faculties, argues that American society is where it is today largely as a result of the great body of intellectual innovation that its research universities produce. These institutions—Columbia included—are limited in number, but have been enormously influential within the global scope of the formation of knowledge.
But that vision is the legacy of the 20th century, the century of the American empire. In a new millennium, the rules are changing, and many countries are racing to catch up with American intellectual power. If Columbia expects to remain at its high seat on the global academic totem pole, then it will have to address the many challenges it will soon face.
From small change to “Big Science”
To understand the changes Columbia must initiate, it is helpful to look at its origins. It was in the late 19th century that American research universities started to become what they are today. According to Robert McCaughey, professor of history and social sciences at Barnard, it wasn’t until after the Industrial Revolution that the importance of technological innovation prompted the university to transition from solely a place of learning to a center of innovation and discovery.
“There were three to four American colleges that became universities in the late 19th century, and Columbia was one of them,” he says. Yale and Harvard rounded out the competition.
Cole references the process of how universities started to become integral to American society. The understanding was that universities would produce a trained workforce and discoveries that “could yield practical benefits for American citizens.” In return, they could continue to exist autonomously.
At the beginning of the 20th century, according to McCaughey, Columbia was cultivating more research scholars than any other university in America. It was early to the movement that would become known as “Big Science” at the beginning of the Cold War. Even in the 1930s, legendary scientists were developing technologies at Columbia that would come to shape American society.
In 1933, Edwin Armstrong developed the FM radio in the basement of Philosophy Hall. In Pupin Laboratories in 1939, Enrico Fermi split the first uranium atom in the United States, leading to the Manhattan Project. In 1951, Charles Townes, among others, invented the maser (which eventually became the laser). Townes’ maser was at the time simply “a discovery in search of applications,” says Cole. It is now the basis for such various things as weaponry, surgery, grocery scanning, and CD-ROMs.
During World War II, and especially after the success of the atom bomb, the American government saw the potential power of university research. Governmental organizations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health began funding universities.
“After the war, there was a very, very enlightened governmental policy relating to science. There were enormous advances that could help out the health of the nation, [which were] related to its military security and other things,” says Cole.
While the government supported research, the GI bill simultaneously increased demand for college education. In addition to that, the middle of the 20th century saw a major influx of intellectuals from all over the world, all coming to study in the United States, either attracted by academic freedom or escape from persecution in their home countries.
As the quality of the research institution increased, so did political and social unease in the United States. A discussion of the rise and fall of the research university as we know it cannot be complete without a mention of what Cole refers to as simply “The Year.” After years of growth in student body, faculty, budget and prestige, Columbia’s expansion was brought to a halt in just a few days.
In late April of 1968, “the campus was essentially in flames,” says Cole. It was a year of protests and radicalism—one in which Columbia played a vital role. Less than a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., student protesters took over several buildings on campus and brought the university to a standstill. Eventually, the authorities were called in. The morning after the police bust of protesters in Hamilton Hall, the Strike Steering Committee sent out a press release proclaiming: “At 2:30 AM, Tuesday, April 30th, Columbia University died.”
While that ended up being far from the truth, Columbia’s prestige did take a hit. As a result of the fiasco, Columbia canceled its first big capital campaign and lost many faculty members. New leadership as a result of the protest brought a different administrative mind-set to the fore, drastically altering the face of the university. Yet the system continued to grow. Though it had setbacks, forty years after it “died,” Columbia is still consistently ranked in the top ten universities in the world, along with many of America’s other top institutions, along with powerhouses Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and MIT.
America remains the sole superpower two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its universities are consistently ranked at the top in terms of quality and research production. According to Cole, 80 percent of the top 20 universities in the world are in the United States, along with 75 percent of the top 50. However, cracks may be beginning to show.
Many of the factors that contributed to the growth of the system—especially the support and autonomy the government granted its most prized research facilities—are becoming increasingly scarce.
As the country faces an economic crisis and soaring budget deficits, the government is now reexamining the value it places on equality in higher education, and the use of education as a means towards social and economic mobility.
Budget woes
Cole makes the argument that part of the emergence of the research university in the United States came from the country’s new focus on equal opportunity. People started to think of universities as seminal to social mobility.
This was an easy goal to achieve when there was plenty of federal money to invest in education and research. But as state and federal budgets become increasingly low on funds, universities must rely more and more on private sources of funding. For research, for financial aid, and for expansion, a top-notch research facility can only stay on top if it balances its budget.
This can mean more research paid for by private companies, cuts to financial aid, or cuts to other parts of the budget in order to avoid financial aid cuts.
The budget of Columbia University, a nonprofit entity, was nearly $3 billion in 2008. A quarter of that came from the government, mostly in the form of research grants from organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Should government funding be further cut, tuition increases, job losses, or overcrowding may occur as the University attempts to bring in more revenue.
This phenomenon is especially apparent at public schools, where a larger percentage of the budget comes from the government, and schools get less help from tuition. The University of California system is possibly the first major research university to feel the blow of the economic crisis. In November, students conducted sit-ins and protests as a result of an announced one-third increase in student fees. The steep increase resulted from the state of California’s $637 million cut in the system’s budget, in an effort to curb its own budget woes.
In addition to an increase in fees, faculty have been laid off, hundreds of classes have been cut, and the number of TAs is limited, forcing some professors to reduce their course sizes.
“Stuck in this downturn-oriented mind-set we have now, we think the system is either spiraling down in quality, skyrocketing in cost and pace of privatization, or both,” says University of California, Berkeley senior Chadd Hollowed.
Yet he thinks that not all hope is lost. “The UC system is fine in the long run. If it comes down to higher costs or privatization to retain quality, I’m sad to say that’s a possibility.”
That’s not to say this process will be easy. Cole thinks that the California model presents a major problem. “What is happening to California today is a great tragedy. This is the greatest system of public education that has ever been created, and now they are systematically dismantling it because they are willing to spend more money on prisons than they are willing to spend on higher education,” he says, adding that “It is infinitely harder to recreate greatness in universities than it is to sustain it,” Cole says.
The question remains whether privatization or higher tuition can really keep American research universities on track. Financial problems are mirrored by a changing global dynamic, and both threaten the status quo of American universities as it stands. As countries like China, India, and South Korea race to create their own top research facilities, foreign students have less incentive to study in the United States, a problem especially pertinent to a school like Columbia with such a large international student population.
“We have undervalued the humanities locally,” Cole says, “But in a cosmopolitan way, we are not producing enough scientists and engineers to staff the needs that we have, not only in universities, but in industry. So consequently, we have been importing talent from abroad.” And that talent pool is slowly drying up as more opportunities become available around the world.
“Nations ... become stronger in their own way in terms of universities, and the possibilities of what one can use universities for to develop discoveries. We may find ourselves without that flow of talent to us ... then, the United States would be in very difficult straits, in terms of the production of scientific and technological talent,” Cole says.
New challenges
What the United States lacks in physicists and engineers, it makes up for in health science researchers. Health science has replaced Big Science as the major driver of research at major universities. This is especially true at Columbia. The Columbia University Medical Center made up more than 50 percent of the total University expenditures in 2005-2006, coming in at well over $1 billion.
“Among major universities with medical schools, I think it has had a distinguished record for securing patents and bringing medical inventions and drugs to market,” McCaughey says. “So its capacities to produce inventions and conduct research that yields changes in the medical marketplace—I would count that as a significant contribution.”
But more than ever, doctors and researchers in the health sciences are turning to private industry for supplemental income, blurring the lines between private industry and university research.
With this system, not only could new discoveries be made, but they could be turned over for profit. In fact, the Columbia Technology Ventures office manages over 600 patents and has over 175 active license agreements, which generate billions in revenue for the University. Many professors are also allotted a certain amount of time in which they can work on projects for private industry.
However, ethical concerns generated by stronger ties between researchers and corporations have come into the spotlight with this new system. Last year, the Columbia University Senate spent a significant portion of time developing a unified financial conflict of interest policy for the entire university.
Financial conflict of interest is “a situation where an individual’s private financial interest might interfere or might look as though it interferes with the conduct of research or professional obligations to Columbia,” Naomi Schrag, the associate vice president for research compliance, said last April at a University Senate subcommittee meeting on the topic. “They can divert the academic mission and degrade the public trust,” she continued.
This push towards a more stringent and streamlined policy came about in 2008, around the same time that United States Senators Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) began an inquiry into financial conflicts of interest on Columbia’s medical campus as part of a general inquiry into the relationship between industries and medical schools nationwide.
The distribution of Columbia’s finances is complex, with the equivalent of a $3 billion nonprofit corporation being served by a staff much smaller than most $3 billion corporations, according to Cole. The university also serves a different set of values than most nonprofits. “You’re running it on principles which are not hierarchical. You govern by the consent of the governed: the faculty and the students,” says Cole.
The extent to which this statement is true is debatable. If there were a place for the governed to decide on the University’s principles of distributing its budget, it would have to be the University Senate, where students, faculty, researchers, and administration meet on a monthly basis to discuss university issues. But most agree that the body is cumbersome and ineffective.
“The University Senate was put into place largely ... as a way of faculty and students to blow off steam,” Cole says, “But it was given relatively few powers.”
Even with the limited powers it has, it can be difficult for members from different schools to agree with each other because of conflicting interests.
McCaughey points out that it can be helpful to have so many overlapping departments. “I think it is a strength that there is a working engineering department that can work with the chemistry department,” he says.
The question remains whether such a large institution really can remain true to the values it started with: namely, academic freedom and a merit-based system. Cole thinks that it can, and does.
“The scale of the enterprise, [and] the magnitude of the enterprise have changed enormously over time, but the structure of the institutions has not changed very much, and the value system has not changed very much at all,” said Cole.
The threat comes, then, from the outside. Cole used one of his colleagues, James Hansen, adjunct professor in the earth and environmental sciences and a foremost climate expert, as an example of governmental pressure on universities. “When he would give scientific talks, some of the agencies of the Bush administration would try to censor his talks … that’s a real threat to the independence and autonomy of universities and university life. It has a chilling effect when the government becomes overly involved in the activities of universities, and their autonomy is not preserved,” Cole says.
How do we continue from here?
Columbia is not bankrupt, nor is it set to fade from its standing ranking as one of the top 10 research universities in the world. But it is being forced to change.
The American university must confront globalization and to adapt accordingly, by developing new technologies and global communications methods. In the past year, Columbia started two Global Centers abroad: one in Beijing and the other in Amman, Jordan, both of which launched in March of 2009.
“The focus is on establishing a network of partnerships in international capitals to collaboratively address complex global challenges by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields,” according to the Amman Center’s website. This is reminiscent of Cole’s idea of what makes a research university great.
In the his book, Cole quotes Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand, who says that academic freedom—no matter what the cost—“is the key legitimating concept of the entire enterprise.” This is the one part of the equation that has not changed.
“We still have the most unrealized potential of greatness out of all of the great universities,” Cole says. “We still have miles to go in terms of greatness.”