American research universities are clearly the finest in the world. As of 2015, and for at least 40 years, the United States has had by far the greatest system of higher education in the world. By most reckonings, we have roughly 80 percent of the top 20 universities, 70 percent of the top 50, and 60 percent of the top 100. We win the majority of Nobel science and economics prizes and other internationally prestigious awards for scholarly achievement. Research produced by our universities dominates most fields.
The majority of the educated American public, however, think of our universities in terms of teaching and the transmission of knowledge rather than the creation of knowledge, and most critiques of higher education focus on undergraduate education. Let me be emphatically clear: Excellent teaching of undergraduates and graduate students is crucially important and an integral part of the mission of great universities. It is perhaps our first calling. But it is not what has made our research universities the best in the world. Rather, our ability to fulfill one of the other central missions of great universities — the production of knowledge through discoveries that actually change the world — has created our pre-eminence.
Unfortunately, what most newly industrial nations are striving to imitate in our great universities is what we were and what we are, not what we will or should be later in the 21st century.
Our nation’s founders took a far more detailed interest in formulating a model for higher learning than do our current leaders. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had clear ideas about college. Beginning in 1876, with the opening of the Johns Hopkins University, academic leaders (and their critics) participated in a debate about what the research university ought to look like and how it should differ from the best systems of higher learning in the world at the time, the German and British universities. This debate filtered into a continuing discussion in the 1920s and early 1930s. What emerged was the system that took shape in the 1930s and began its ascent following World War II. For more than 75 years, that model has provided the United States with enormous social and economic returns, as well as with better-informed and effective citizens. Indeed, the model has been so successful that there has been little debate over improving it.
The core values of our best universities consist of fundamental, aspirational goals — academic freedom and free inquiry, meritocracy, organized skepticism and open communication of ideas, disinterestedness, creation of knowledge, excellence in research and teaching, a peer-review system, and governance by authority rather than by sheer power, among others. Those values continue to be what we ought to maintain in the future. The problem is not with the values themselves, but with the fact that some have eroded over time, and important new ones need to be incorporated into the fabric of the research university.
‘Academic leagues’ — de facto mergers of strong programs on multiple campuses — would enhance the capabilities of great universities and perhaps lower the cost of education.
In The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (PublicAffairs, 2010), I wrote that the essential threats to universities were internal, coming not from competition abroad but internally, from within the United States. I still believe that to be true. Threats to academic freedom and free inquiry continue — both from government and from the academic community. We obstruct research and publication, and sometimes teaching, on the basis of ideology; we have outdated immigration policies that limit the exchange of ideas; we cut back on support for basic and goal-oriented research; we don’t tackle the cost of higher learning and its effects on our pool of talent. We hammer the arts and humanities, and we allow political criteria to intrude into the peer-review system.
Despite those internal threats, our great universities remain the queens and kings of the mountain. Yet they have, in my view, not come close to reaching their full potential. I cannot predict what will actually happen to our university system over the next 25 years (that being a fool’s errand). I do believe, however, that we should consider and debate overhauling basic features of the best universities: how we admit students; what we ought to focus on in undergraduate education; how we structure intercollegiate athletics; how we design professional schools (and whether all of them should exist); how we organize and configure buildings on a campus that increasingly depends on interdisciplinary research and teaching, far different from the Oxbridge quadrangle; the role of the humanities; the affordability and value of higher learning; a reassessment of whether the university’s core values are still appropriate in the 21st century; structural changes in our silos to encourage the growth of knowledge and in the way universities are governed; and a reconceptualization of the university-government compact.
My new book, Toward a More Perfect University, takes on many of those issues. Here I want to focus on a topic that is central to the intellectual health of our universities. Our system today has “steeples of excellence,” clusters of some of the top researchers and teachers in the world. But what has made us great could also become our undoing.
Competition for talented professors and students has been a hallmark of American research universities since their inception, in the latter part of the 19th century. Little has changed 100 years later except that the competition has become fiercer and more costly in an era of academic free agency.
The competitive spirit was an important part of the process leading to our pre-eminence because it required large-scale investments in the infrastructure necessary to conduct cutting-edge research. Although new instruments and machinery were costly, they were, in part, what lured great professors — and groups of professors who found value in collaborating with one another — to join new faculties. Competition spurred the willingness of academic leaders to open up novel fields of inquiry like molecular biology, biochemistry, and biomechanical engineering, spinoffs from more-traditional disciplines. Such new fields led to an expansion of academic jobs in hot areas of science and technology, as well as in law, medicine, and other professional arenas. The cost of a university education, too, was affected by competition, as the increase in dollars needed to recruit exceptional talent often far outpaced the national rate of inflation.
The intense and ubiquitous competition of the 20th century may turn out to have been too much of a good thing for the 21st. The research enterprise and the way we transmit knowledge have changed. We need more-extensive collaborations, both national and international — and those require new structural relationships that may challenge the idea of institutional autonomy.
The intense competition of the 20th century may turn out to have been too much of a good thing for the 21st. We need more-extensive collaborations, both national and international.
High-quality research institutions, especially the elite Eastern universities, have not thought about combining their strengths. The closures and mergers that have taken place have generally involved second- or third-tier institutions. Most of the great state universities have continued to expand, in response to growing populations of students and to the political pressures of geographic constituencies. Some joint programs have emerged, generally crafted by professional schools in different locations — including some in the United States and other nations. But I cannot think of a single large-scale merger of any portion of two great universities in the past 25 years other than attempts to unite university-affiliated or university-owned hospitals. Almost all of those attempts have failed.
The leagues that have grown up around America’s best universities have been based almost entirely on athletics. Even the Ivy League had its origins in football. Throughout the United States, athletics conferences compete with one another and share revenues from television and other contractual arrangements while also competing with nonconference colleges. (Perhaps not surprisingly, then, when I was provost at Columbia University, the Board of Trustees spent more time discussing athletics — at Columbia, hardly a growth industry — than they did existing or proposed academic programs.)
The library is the one feature of academic research organization that has flourished through partnerships. Not only have some groups of universities merged their holdings in state-of-the-art remote-storage facilities (such as the one created by Columbia, Princeton University, and the New York Public Library), but cross-library borrowing has also been highly successful over the past 30 years, allowing universities to greatly reduce the number of serial titles they purchase. The emergence of online archives, such as JSTOR, an academic archive of journals, books, and other primary sources, has made individual university subscriptions to many publications obsolete. Informal arrangements among institutions to share the teaching of “exotic” languages have begun, and faculty members in certain graduate departments at some universities teach students from other universities.
But combining collections in remote-storage facilities, subscribing to JSTOR, or teaching a few students at another university is one thing; de facto mergers of academic programs are another.
In the next 25 or 30 years, we ought to shift our glance away from intercollegiate athletics associations to academic associations. These would not be formal mergers, but “academic leagues” that would enhance the capabilities of great universities and, at least potentially, lower the cost of education.
These academic leagues must be built “strength on strength”; otherwise, they will never work. A great mathematics or economics department would not consider a de facto merger with a third-tier program: There must be value added in the collaborations. The units of merger can and should vary, and, where possible, include international entities. Administrative activities also need to be a part of the restructuring. For example, does every great university need to reinvent the wheel on how to to properly identify and commercialize its intellectual property? Isn’t it possible that a single office of technology transfer can be developed for use by a league of great universities?
Faculty members at the major universities have often been a step or two ahead of their academic leaders in moving toward informal new combinations. In part, that is a result of the growth of “invisible colleges,” networks of scientists around the world who communicate with one another, collaborate on scientific and technical papers, and meet informally at conferences to discuss their research. Some networks have been institutionalized, such as the Gordon Research Conferences, at which leading biologists come together to hear about the latest and most significant advances in the biological sciences.
If the invisible colleges are research-centered, there have also been faculty attempts to produce quasi-mergers for teaching purposes. For example, the philosophy departments at universities in and near New York City are very strong and have competed with one another for talent for some time — with the winners gaining prestige and the losers becoming weaker. But what has been won or lost for the students in these programs if a professor moves from Columbia University to New York University, or the reverse? Aware that there are no real gains for higher education in that kind of system, the philosophers at these departments have forged informal relationships that, on a small scale, allow graduate students at Columbia to take courses for credit at NYU, Rutgers University, and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. CUNY’s Interuniversity Doctoral Consortium allows doctoral students in the arts and sciences to cross-register at a few institutions in the region. Students can also ask professors at other institutions to serve as mentors and to participate in their doctoral-dissertation defense.
But as far as I know, few formal arrangements for this kind of multi-university use of exceptional talent for doctoral programs exist. And even fewer offer joint degrees. Increasingly, with the development of new technologies, the full teaching resources of a league’s members should be available to undergraduates as well as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, even if their campuses aren’t in proximity.
Creating de facto merged programs is apt to meet with a variety of forms of resistance. Faculty opposition, for instance, is likely. While I was provost at Columbia, I discussed with my counterpart at another Ivy League university a possible de facto merger of two of our institutions’ strongest departments — both arguably among the top five in the nation. Each department had roughly 60 members. The professors represented a wide array of academic specialties. A joint venture, in which each university admitted its own graduate students, determined its Ph.D. requirements, and offered its own degrees, would have created overnight the finest faculty and the finest program in the world. Ph.D. students would have been permitted to take courses at the other university and to work on their dissertations with any member of the department there. Faculty members at one institution could have (with prior arrangement) occasionally lived and taught at the other. At the time, the idea was limited to graduate students, because they could travel to take courses at the other institution. Today new technology could open such intellectual resources up to both graduate and undergraduate students.
When I raised the idea with my fellow provost, he was intrigued and spoke with the president of his university, who suggested that it be brought to the department’s faculty — which almost instantly turned it down. Perhaps it was because it was a “top-down proposal”; perhaps it was perceived as a threat to the autonomy of the department and its prerogatives, such as making faculty appointments. I have little doubt that the reception would have been similar at Columbia. There are several “laws” about academic life, one of which is that there is a very strong bias for the status quo.
The new campuses would reimagine and reconstruct the boundary between the campus and the community. The university would become, in a sense, a museum for the interested public.
Nonetheless, regardless of initial faculty skepticism, academic leagues ought to be part of the landscape of the research university of the future. The units of merger can and should differ and will vary widely across great universities. Some might be formed around a topic or problem. Columbia’s distinguished economist and director of its Earth Institute, Jeffrey D. Sachs, has informally put together a consortium of 15 to 20 universities around the world concerned with, and expert in, the issue of sustainability. Only a few of the member programs have a significant number of faculty members working on the issue, and they come from different disciplinary backgrounds. But student interest at each university is high. Through the consortium, experts lecture or hold seminars online or through other real-time technologies for students at affiliated universities. Together the faculty members have produced a single course open to students at each of these universities, who can sign up, take the course, and become certified as having mastered the material through some form of examination. The lectures are also videotaped, stored, and can be referred to whenever students wish to access them when studying for exams. Within a short period of time, small faculties have become larger and more knowledgeable. No additional faculty members are hired at any of the universities, except to replace those who retire or move — or to acquire those who offer a new kind of expertise. The program takes on an international flavor and begins to approach what can truly be called global.
Another type of de facto merger could build more extensively on the model of the New York-area philosophy departments. Suppose we decide to merge the departments of music at Indiana, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities and the University of Chicago and the University of California at Los Angeles, strong programs with somewhat differing traditions and strengths. Plainly, other universities could be considered in the same league and might be participants in the new group, although the complexity of running these programs grows exponentially as we add members. If we include in the mix schools with units of music composition and conservatory-type schools like the Juilliard School, the complexity becomes still greater — but so does the potential strength.
It should be possible for some liberal-arts colleges to tap into these new combinations, extending what they can offer their students without expanding their size greatly, if at all. In every case, individual universities would continue to use their own admissions and certification criteria and control the awarding of degrees. De facto mergers could also allow existing programs or institutes, such as those that have emerged to study inequalities of income and wealth, to combine their strengths for the benefit of researchers and their students. Imagine a league that included individuals like Sir Anthony B. Atkinson, at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science; Thomas Piketty, at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, the Paris School of Economics, and LSE; Joseph E. Stiglitz, at Columbia; Emmanuel Saez, at the University of California at Berkeley; and Paul Krugman, at CUNY. Consider how, in combination, they could offer enormous advantages for students and their research if they were to form an academic league to study inequality.
Top universities ought also to be devising novel ways of learning that extend beyond the university itself to form alliances that can be called “knowledge communities"— a form of academic village. These would include a set of great universities as well as participating art and science museums, film forums, and excellent libraries. Although students could use the campuses of the participants, most of the materials would be presented online and would occupy a specific space on the Internet devoted to high-level knowledge and open, yet unanswered questions. The new campuses would reimagine and reconstruct the boundary between the campus and the community. The university would become, in a sense, a museum for the interested public.
Would new governance structures be needed? Perhaps. For example, some professors are fabulous in lecture-type settings; others are far better with smaller groups and seminars. But the choice of what to teach, which is now to a significant degree left up to faculty members, would have to yield to some degree to a principle of maximizing the use of the teaching talents of the professors and may need to involve faculty committees and administrators.
Would there be exchanges in payments among members of these leagues? Institutions could keep tallies of use by other members of a consortium. If there is a strong imbalance in the “attendance” in the courses of one university compared with another, or in the use of a museum or archive, arrangements for a balance of payments could be made.
Will de facto mergers, which imply greater cooperation and less direct competition, have an adverse affect on the level of excellence of the overall system of American higher learning? I imagine that the opposite will be true. Quality will be improved by extending the number and caliber of options open to students and faculty. Competition for resources and superior faculty members will still exist, but it might increasingly shift from individual colleges to de facto leagues or knowledge communities. Furthermore, since there are so many different forms of de facto mergers, the leagues will be based on differing goals.
At the same time, they will allow universities to find an alternative to the “infinite growth” model that has dominated the psychology of great university faculty and their leaders over the past generation.
Jonathan R. Cole is a university professor at Columbia University, where he was provost and dean of faculties from 1989 to 2003. This essay is adapted from his new book, Toward a More Perfect University, to be published this month by PublicAffairs.
