The biggest threats to American universities come not from foreign competition, but instead from the U.S. federal and state governments and from within the institutions themselves, Columbia University sociologist Jonathan Cole said on Tuesday during his lecture, "The Great American University Today and Tomorrow: A Quest for Utopia." The event, which was the ninth talk and this term's final installment in the "Leading Voices in Higher Education" strategic planning lecture series, was held in the Rockefeller Center and attended primarily by faculty members.
Cole wrote "The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected" and served as Columbia's provost from 1994 to 2003, spearheading an effort analogous to Dartmouth's current strategic planning initiative.
American universities currently face a paradox while they are considered the best in the world, Americans are insecure about maintaining this distinction, Cole said.
"There is an uneasy feeling among us," Cole said. "If we're so good, why do we feel so bad? Why is there a feeling that our system of higher education is at risk?"
Although global competition is widely seen as a threat to American universities' prominence, it will take countries with emerging economies 20 to 25 years to be able to build their own great universities, he said. Even if these countries build universities that do compete with American institutions, they will positively increase the growth of knowledge and facilitate more rapid problem-solving "in a competitive way," he said.
The real threat "to not be able to reach our full potential" comes from within our country, Cole said.
The federal government's passage of legislation such as the Patriot Act has imposed "untenable" restrictions on research, Cole said. These restrictions allow the FBI to collect email and library records of researchers who work with dangerous viruses in research laboratories to find cures.
Fewer students and professors are willing to work on this variety of research due to the potential for scrutiny, Cole said. The federal government also places restrictions on scientists, such as limitations on embryonic stem cell research, Cole said.
"The government has tried to invade academic freedom in a variety of ways," he said.
Restrictive visa policies prevent the U.S. from welcoming "the best minds from abroad," especially in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, Cole said.
Government at the state level also harms universities, which are being "dismantled" by state budget cuts that can amount to 20 percent per year, according to Cole.
The result is a cascade effect, Cole said. When state universities lose funding, private colleges obtain their best faculty members, who leave with their grants and graduate students.
Academic institutions themselves have created problems, according to Cole. The commercialization of intellectual property has created a conflict of interest between researchers' roles as university professors and employees of private companies.
The pattern of growing endowments of America's wealthiest universities may lead to "an English-type system where a handful of universities have much more money than their peer institutions and use the other universities as a farm system,'" Cole said.
For example, Harvard University's endowment doubles every seven years and will continually loom over those of other institutions, he said.
The solutions to these problems are multifaceted, Cole said. First, the cost structure of universities must be changed.
While schools like Dartmouth can survive "because so many people want to be here, and they're willing to pay a price to do so," "second-tier" institutions will not be able to sustain demand if they keep increasing tuition because viable alternatives exist.
Additionally, universities cannot maintain the "ossified" structures that have been built during the last 65 to 70 years, Cole said. In 20 years, chemistry or philosophy buildings will be replaced by multidisciplinary spaces that facilitate problem solving.
The admissions process is also currently moving toward a strategy that "rewards compliance," benefitting those students who "never did poorly in one subject," Cole said.
The process must be changed to stop universities from enrolling "a lot of goody-goody kids" who may lack the nuanced types of intelligence and creative problem-solving abilities possessed by "quirky kids," he said.
Although universities currently succeed at sharing libraries, they must become more cooperative and share faculty and curricula, Cole said. The ability of professors to move between institutions would benefit all universities involved, he said.
Cole said he predicts an "inversion" of the traditional lecture format in which universities use technology and make multimedia recordings of the best professors available to students. Students will then be able to perform problem sets in seminar rooms overseen by professors instead of attending class and doing work alone.
Realizing these changes requires strong faculty, administration and board leadership to create a new university model so the U.S. can "maintain its dominant position among dominant research universities," Cole said.
Cole was an appropriate choice for the term's final lecture due to the breadth of his work, College Provost Carol Folt said in her opening remarks. He was among the top choices of the faculty steering committee that nominated speakers for the series, she said.
Government professor William Wohlforth said that Cole represents "the whole trifecta," serving as a researcher, university administrator and scholar.
Women and gender studies program chair Annabel Martin said she enjoyed the lecture but was surprised that Cole did not elaborate on new ways of learning that transcend the traditional model of "the professor being the recipient of knowledge and then being the transmitter of that knowledge to students."
