Changing Higher Education

Excess Intellectual Capacity

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to Globalization II. As I thought about Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research - in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated, context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create “scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people, and supporting high level research. Most interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated and driven. Bush defined this goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use in an as-yet unknown circumstance.

The many pathways to globalization

    "Merchants have no country.  The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
                                Thomas Jefferson

If one looks to the globalization of the corporate world as giving hints as to possible futures of higher education (I am certainly one of those), then How We Compete: What Companies Around The World Are Doing To Make It In Today’s Global Economy by Suzanne Berger is not to be missed. Professor Berger and her colleagues at the MIT Industrial Performance Center set out to study how individual corporations are actually responding to the pressures of globalization.   Over a five year period, they conducted interviews at over 500 companies of varying size worldwide.  They focused on sectors where underlying technologies are rapidly and on those where the underlying technologies are slowly changing. In the former, they looked at electronics and software, and in the latter, auto and auto parts and textile and apparel.  Their goal was to let data, rather than theory, drive conclusions about the impacts of globalization on corporations.  That is to say, this book is neither impressionistic nor evangelical, as are many of the other books looking at the effects of globalization, but rather is data driven.

Many contend that the forces of globalization are so huge and monolithic that all corporations will be forced to respond in a more-or-less uniform fashion. The results of this study argue strongly against that view. Indeed, the research team found an enormous divergence of strategies being used - apparently successfully - to respond to globalization. Over and over, they found multiple corporations in the same industry and generally the same geographic location using radically different routes to success. While they don’t claim to show that this divergence will be maintained into the future, they find no evidence that suggests that it cannot.

What happens if there is too much democracy?

Fareed Zakaria recently published a fascinating book about democracy called The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Much of his discussion in the latter part of the book - the "Illiberal Democracy at Home" part- raises important questions regarding the possible futures of higher education in the US.

Zakaria begins with the powerful insight that the West, when it uses the term Ademocracy@ tends to mean a special type of democracy that is built on Aconstitutional liberalism@:

AFor people in the West, democracy means > liberal democracy=: a system marked not only by free and fair elections but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.@

A D- in science education

It is not unusual for a Nobel laureate to change institutions. It is, however, for such a change to occur because the new institution agrees to set up a $12M initiative in science education. That is just what happened recently when Carl Wieman announced that he was moving from the University of Colorado to the University of British Columbia. Wieman was the correcipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate, and was named the Carnegie-CASE US University Professor of the Year in 2004.

Weiman believes that most science education today is generally not effective- often counterproductive, in fact. At the same time, the world is facing many critical problems that have a huge technical/scientific component, and the economic health of an industrialized nation is dependent on a workforce with high-level technological skills. Thus significantly improving science education has becomes a high-priority imperative for Carl.