Strong Nations, Strong Universities

 Strong Nations, Strong Universities

"Empires of Ideas

By William C. Kirby

(Belknap/Harvard, 492 pages, $37.95)

Before the 19th century, post-secondary education was dedicated to training professionals and passing along a cultural canon, but there was no expectation that universities would make efforts to discover new things.

This changed in 19th-century Germany. A program of education in the service of the nation began in German-speaking Europe after Napoleon's armies conquered it. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a man of letters and civil servant, created a powerful design for education at all levels.

At the Humboldtian university, students and teachers would all be pursuing Wissenschaft, science in the broad sense of organized knowledge, including the humanities. The pursuit entailed the development of what we have come to call "academic freedom," the ability to follow inquiry wherever it might lead. For Humboldt, advanced study was founded in liberal learning. Students needed to be free to choose a course of study. Research might demand specialization, but everyone should begin with broad exposure to disciplines across the arts and sciences.

In "Empires of Ideas" William C. Kirby approaches the history of the research university by focusing on three settings: 19th-century Germany, 20th-century America and 21st-century China, providing case studies of institutions within each.

Mr. Kirby is a distinguished Harvard historian of China with a long record of facilitating international cooperation in higher education, and in this timely book he makes a powerful argument about what it takes to be a leading university dedicated to the creation of new knowledge.

By the last quarter of the 19th century, scholars from all over Europe and the United States had been drawn to German universities. The model of research seminars or experimental labs building on broad intellectual foundations became the standard for universities eager to make new discoveries -- from astronomy and chemistry to sociology and history. Mr. Kirby shows how German universities were disrupted by political events in the first half of the 20th century, and how they were nearly destroyed during the Nazi period. He is particularly insightful about how the University of Berlin's trajectory intersected with major world events -- from the creation of communist East Germany to the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. Mr. Kirby describes as well how, in recent years, the national government has tried to make German higher education a world leader again.

American institutions began emulating their German counterparts by the early 20th century, starting at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. This meant investing in research-intensive graduate programs and recruiting and retaining faculty whose publications (and inventions) would have effects and influence beyond the campus. Big money went to big schools with strong graduate programs, particularly in the sciences. Government funding aligned with industry and philanthropy to support basic research that often had substantial practical applications. Mr. Kirby says little about the ramifications of this emphasis on elite graduate studies for American education more generally, and he says nothing about how research universities' quest for higher rankings is related to their dependence on part-time, underpaid instructors to teach undergraduates.

Magazine rankings are remarkably unproblematic for Mr. Kirby. He is confident that they show which research universities are "world-class" or dominant. "Everything from fine wine to hotels to dishwashers is given grades or ranks," he writes. "Why not universities?" Even when the University of Hong Kong jumps 15 spots in one year, his confidence in a simple hierarchy of institutions is unshaken, and throughout the book we learn little about why schools advance or decline. We learn nothing from "Empire of Ideas" about how the pursuit of high rankings might change a school's research and teaching, or its employment practices.

We do, however, learn a great deal about how Chinese universities have come to educate an extraordinary number of students and produce cutting-edge research, especially in STEM fields. At the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s, universities in China enrolled fewer than 900,000 students; by 2020, there were 40 million. The revitalization of Chinese universities, combined with the presence of American university campuses in China, has made for momentous changes. Strong research universities go hand in hand with a developing economy and a national culture that plays a role on the international stage. This was true for Germany in the 19th century and has also been the case for America and China. Mr. Kirby wonders whether this correlation will continue.

"The greatest challenge confronting Chinese universities today," Mr. Kirby writes, "is not the competition they face abroad but the obstruction they encounter at home." Ideological uniformity enforced by government censors and an effort to turn to the Silk Road instead of Western university partners seems, to Mr. Kirby, to be placing Chinese universities on a road to ruin. Forcing students to study the thought of Communist Party chief Xi Jinping provides "thin gruel indeed." Chinese educational institutions have great potential, he indicates, but the government might squander it.

Mr. Kirby is not sanguine about the future of American universities, either. Surprisingly, he says nothing about the dangers of state-sponsored censorship in the United States, nor about the myriad threats to academic freedom on U.S. campuses.

What he does provide is a sobering account of the defunding of the University of California system, which he sees as a parlous precedent. Mr. Kirby's fine study ends with a warning: "There is no greater threat to the leading position of American higher education than America's growing parsimony in the support of public higher education."

Universities are not actually like fine wines or dishwashers, but they are crucial to the public good. Mr. Kirby's book shows how catalytic is the combination of strong nations and universities that advance knowledge and foster critical and creative thinking. Now more, perhaps, than ever.

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Mr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University. Among his recent books is "Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters."” [1]

 

Truly, without people educated in good modern universities, life in Lithuania becomes too primitive, we are dying out. Unfortunately, our economy is too small to support high-level modern universities. As Americans used to study in German universities, so we let our most talented ones study in Warsaw (Čiurlionis) and Moscow (many others) universities. Now the most talented leave on their own and don't come back to us. It's a mistake. We must learn to select those who would receive a good university education abroad at the expense of the Lithuanian state and would like to work in Lithuania. Of course, competitive working conditions, including salary, must be created for such people in Lithuania.

 

1.  Strong Nations, Strong Education
Roth, Michael S. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 25 Aug 2022: A.13.