Country of Exiles

by William R. Leach

  After 1980, research universities shifted from national to global terrain. They embraced the transnational economy, striking alliances with companies around the world. Concerned about shrinking enrollments of native-born Americans, they turned to recruiting foreign students, foreign scholars, and wealthy immigrants. And they developed a new campus culture that welcomed all outsiders, withheld judgment in regard to a wide range of behaviors (in the manner of the casino culture), and showed little interest in fostering assimilation into American society, except into the American culture of “free market” consumer capitalism.

  FROM NATIONAL TO “QUINTESSENTIAL GLOBAL UNIVERSITY”

  Well into the twentieth century, America’s universities and colleges rarely exerted the same influence on the national scene as did business or government. Even in 1940, only 14 percent of all high school graduates attended them, and what research was conducted was largely funded by foundations. After World War II, however, a seismic shift occurred in higher education, propelled at first by the G.I Bill, which brought millions of veterans to college and opened the way for the massive federal investment in education in the 1950s and sixties. In these later decades, moreover, when student and faculty numbers soared to record figures, universities—especially the research institutions—were beginning to look like cumbersome conglomerates. They had become so big, in fact, as to lack visible unity. Most were also relying for research monies on the federal government, which was replacing private foundations as the major funding source and which connected universities—more than ever—to the interests of the nation-state.1

  By 1970 more than 50 percent of all high school graduates were going to college.2 Many traveled far away for their education, even clear across the country, a pattern that democratized education while potentially limiting it as well; now parents had to pay not only tuition but also the cost of room, board, entertainment, and periodic visits with their children.3

  In no other country did the fantasy of getting out and never returning, of mixing social with geographical mobility, become so prevalent as it did in the United States. The federal government, with its student loan programs, funded the mobility, and many elite campuses, whose reputations depended, in part, on having diverse student bodies, beckoned young people from every nook and cranny of the country.4 Administrators, too, became more migratory; so did the faculty, whom one educator called in 1972 “the nomads of the twentieth century.”5 By the late sixties the concession to movement as a fact of life affected every faculty member, from fledgling doctoral students, whose success hinged on their willingness to teach in “nowhere places,” to tenured professors, who compulsively “considered new job possibilities” to advance their careers. Such a concession may have modified the meaning of community for many faculty, detaching university livelihood from specific physical places and shaping it far more than it had ever been into something abstract (the academic community) to which anyone with credentials might belong and which could exist anywhere.6

  In fact, so common did this pattern within higher education become that over time many people believed that the need for mobility was etched into the makeup of a whole class of people who hated real places but loved the disembodied freedom of the academy. “Having no concepts of links that cannot be broken,” wrote Bill Bray, an American Indian, “Euro-Americans can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and plant themselves firmly in academic community, a community historically conceived to take care of them.” “Aside from a few minor scrapes and disharmonies, they fit academia like a hand sliding into a glove.”7 The mentality of mobility saturated teaching thoroughly, as an expression of what the faculty had learned to accept as both inevitable and desirable. Who can say, moreover, how far this concession to movement reached into the character of what was taught, especially in the humanities and the social sciences where interpretation often outweighed knowledge or fact as central to teaching?

  Nonetheless, despite the centrifugal trend of the system, with its bias against regional and local places (but closer ties to an abstract nation-state), universities still recruited mostly American-born students and faculty. Enough domestic middle-class wealth existed to carry the burden.

  At the same time, many faculty refused to play the “mobility game,” and instead settled down, often raised families, and got involved in the community life beyond the university. The majority of colleges and universities were also still local in character, educating students for work in surrounding regions. For all the mobility, the palette of higher education before 1975 remained place-oriented; it ranged from many community colleges and Bible schools to such historically black colleges as Spelman, Morehouse, and Fisk, and such regionals as Berea College in Kentucky (free to Appalachian residents) and the University of the Ozarks in Arkansas (free to mountain youth).8

  Perhaps most interesting, many American campuses were exclusive physical spaces, segregated purposefully from the rest of society, antiurban in character and preoccupied with place-making to a degree unmatched or unknown by most university systems in the world (except the British). American universities and colleges, in fact, gave rise to “the occupation of campus planning,” with its peculiar, almost old-fashioned fascination with special topographical features, from yards and groves to fountains and lawns, as historian of the university, Sheldon Rothblatt, has observed. “The American campus,” Rothblatt writes, “was developed as and designed to be a place for growing up, an immense and sophisticated kindergarten, commingling personal retreats with public zones …, jealous of its perimeters and prerogatives.”9

  After the period 1975–80, however, this centripetal aspect of higher education began to give way before the more substantial centrifugal impulse, one not only national but now transnational in character. The great research universities, empowered by a constant stream of investment from the federal government, led this evolution.10

  Some of these research institutions were old (Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and so on). Still others had shed older identities, for example, New York University, which metamorphosed from a drab little commuter school at odds with its neighborhood (dirty, dangerous, radical Greenwich Village) into the Versace of American universities. By the 1990s NYU was one of the biggest landlords in lower Manhattan. Far from being a busy bee in the midst of hip, it now squatted like some giant spider at the heart of a nest of retail stores, restaurants and food outlets, chain bookstores, nightclubs, and theaters, a disarmed outsider culture over which the university presided and which it helped to create (Greenwich Village was no longer dirty, dangerous, or radical).11

  By the late 1990s NYU was among nearly a hundred such mega-research institutions in the country, each with a private security force, an ever-rising tuition rate unpayable by most Americans, an endowment so enormous as to act as a buffer against nearly every economic storm, and a budget equal in value to a major Las Vegas casino (around $1 billion in 1997), though, alas, not as big as the budget of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ($2 billion).12 By the 1990s these institutions had become semiautonomous, even semi-sovereign bodies similar to the port terminals and the casino-reservations (similar, of course, in character; in influence, the universities, as a whole, far exceeded both these entities). “Campuses today are Athenian city-states,” Vartan Gregorian, head of the Carnegie Foundation and former president of Brown University, said in 1996.13

  By the nineties, moreover, many university presidents had adopted “internationalization” as the governing mandate of their incumbency.14 Among them were George Rupp of Columbia and L. Jay Oliva of NYU. Rupp was an ordained Protestant minister with a doctorate in religion, the former head of Rice University before taking the Columbia position, and author of such books as Beyond Existentialism and Zen: Religion in a Pluralistic World (Oxford, 1979). In his 1995 President’s Report, he wrote that “we intend to make Columbia an increasingly international community of teaching and learning. As distinct from institutions imbued with the provincialism of Western acad
emic disciplines, [we] are moving more and more across boundaries.” Columbia, in fact, “is well-positioned to be America’s premier international university,” a phrase he repeated again in his 1996 report.15

  L. Jay Oliva, an historian of Russia, went one step beyond Rupp by dropping “international” for the more fashionable “global” as the way to describe his school’s ambitions. “Through all my years at NYU,” he said in a 1996 speech, “an international vision has been a fundamental part of our mission.… But now we have reached a level of institutional strength that permits us to take that vision to a new place … to open up the next century as the quintessential global university.” “We plan to enter the next century,” he told the New York Times, twice in the same year, “as the world’s first truly global university.”16

  This new global agenda took many forms, perhaps the foremost of which was immersion in the world’s marketplace through the forging of partnerships with transnational companies.

  PARTNERS WITH GLOBAL BUSINESS

  Since the 1980s, research universities have cast beyond their historical base for bigger fish. They have dissolved the lines that once marked them off from the outside (lines already fuzzed before 1980) and implicated themselves deeply in the market—above all in the transnational market. As one NYU educator, pleased about this trend, put it, we have “outgrown” the old “bounded notion of the academy.”17

  This shift has resulted in the emergence of for-profit universities to convey practical knowledge, some doing business online as virtual universities.18 But, above all, research universities have allied with transnational firms in the pursuit of economic development.19

  Close contacts between industry and the academy were hardly new, of course, although in the past the federal government had mediated them in the form of defense contracts. The government still manages these relations in some measure today, but since 1980 they have become not only more frequent but more direct, fostered by universities in quest of revenues; by governors and legislatures determined to bring new industry to their states and willing to bargain away the kitchen sink to get it; and by firms (pharmaceutical, biotech, genetic) that had shut down their own research labs and were looking to universities for ideas and knowledge. The federal government itself sanctioned this shift from mediated to direct relations. In 1986 Congress passed a law allowing universities and business to collaborate in the pursuit of commercial patents; and in 1990 it created the Advanced Technology Program, which promoted links between universities and business designed to produce “high-risk, enabling technologies with significant commercial/economic potential.”20

  The very identity of the modern university, with its many discrete faculties at odds with one another, each fighting for a piece of the pie, played its part in clearing the way for an outside force besides the federal government to assert its claim. “Initiative is shifting to the outside,” Sheldon Rothblatt has written, “where giant electronics firms and global pharmaceutical interests are clearer about their objectives.”21

  Most spectacularly, such contacts appeared as “research parks” or “units of organized research” between universities and firms in such fields as biotechnology, microelectronics, and artificial intelligence. Operated by landlord-agencies, which sold and leased properties to the various tenants, many of these research parks resembled on a smaller scale the country’s port authorities in their structure and semi-sovereign character. In 1975 only ten such parks existed; a decade later, thirty; by 1997, nearly 140 were in business, many formed between universities and global industries and all managed in such a way as to elude the burden of taxation (as “nonprofit” entities similar again to port authorities).22

  Among the grandest (and oldest) is Research Triangle Park, a 6500-acre strip of buildings nestled in the piney woods of North Carolina and ideally situated—like a huge mall—near major airports and interstate highways. Begun in 1959 to serve the research needs of a few big American companies (notably IBM), it did not succeed until the 1980s, by which time firm after firm had begun to participate (fifty by 1988) and the place had turned into a major landscape of its own, with several restaurants, a hotel, and many pay-as-you-go services. While the state built and kept up the park roads, most of the tenants supplied their own police, garbage collection, landscaping, and eating facilities. By 1990, nearly one hundred firms packed the park, including many from Asia, Europe, and Canada. All worked closely with the faculty of three nearby universities—Duke University in Durham; North Carolina State University in Raleigh; and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.23

  But the linkages between universities and transnational companies also flowered as individual partnerships, each seeking “new products and processes of economic value to society,” in the words of Paul Gray, a former president of MIT.

  University after university has signed on as partner with one or more of America’s premier global firms, many at the cutting edge of “miracle-making” in computing and genetic engineering. Cows were cloned in 1997 by scientists at the University of Massachusetts, the outcome of a partnership with Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology start-up company in Worcester, Massachusetts. Around the same time, Pfizer, the global pharmaceuticals firm, formed a partnership with the University of Connecticut to create a laboratory for “joint research projects in which company scientists will work alongside professors and students.” “If we want to be recognized as a world-class institution,” the University of Connecticut’s chancellor said of this marriage between private industry and the university, “we need world-class partners.” In 1997 Virginia Commonwealth University secured a partnership with global Motorola, by promising to build a new $11-million engineering school—funded by the state legislature of Virginia—for the benefit of Motorola, which had begun construction of a new plant near the university (in 1998, however, Motorola stopped construction, leaving the university holding the bag).24

  Among the most prolific of such couplings has been the one between Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Monsanto, a bioengineering firm with global reach and famed for its “genetically improved” soybeans, its herbicides, and its “bovine growth hormones,” each the progeny of Monsanto’s “joint discovery program” with Washington University. This program, begun in 1982, matched scientists at Monsanto with those at Washington University to yield more than fifty patents of new drugs. In exchange for ownership of these patents, Monsanto doled out millions of dollars for nearly fifty research projects at the university’s medical school. The school’s researchers, of course, kept clean by doing only the “discovery” work, leaving the “specific drug design” to the Monsanto labs.25 The program, in effect, transformed Washington University’s medical school into a research arm of Monsanto.26

  Ohio University, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida at Gainesville, Emory, Harvard, and, most impressive of all, Stanford and MIT have all courted alliances with business. In 1983 Stanford University, adept at such liaisons dating back to the 1950s when it pioneered the Stanford Research Park, opened the Center for Independent Systems, part of the School of Engineering and supported by “industrial partners” in the high-tech business, the soon-to-be superstars of Silicon Valley. At first it had only American corporations as members (Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, and so on), each paying an annual fee of $120,000 to participate in “any number of research areas.” But in the nineties it invited European companies to join, then Asian firms, on the grounds that “in this new world order, everybody is transnational,” as one Stanford professor put it.27

  In 1998 Stanford took an even more audacious step: it cut a deal with Japanese-owned Yamaha to incorporate a new business called Sondius-XG, a company that made synthesized music for video games. No longer just an academic powerhouse, Stanford had become a “real” transnational business firm.28

  Of all the institutions at the forefront of such relations none was “more merrily in bed with industry” than MIT.29 In a 1997 essay on unive
rsities, Charles Vest, then president of MIT, complained indignantly that the federal government might cut back on funding to MIT. What has happened, he asked, to “our national will to excel?” We must “reaffirm a national commitment to excellence.” But Vest was disingenuous; the government never seriously cut back on anything, despite some windy threats to do so; furthermore, in technology and science, MIT was notorious for its internationalism or for being a big “blurmeister,” the university in need of federal dollars but oblivious to all boundaries or national differences.30 Its stellar Media Lab, staffed by an army of futurists (experts in robotics and artificial intelligence), was acclaimed for its belief that all borders were breachable and that “given enough time and money, almost anything is possible.”31 “Ten to twenty years from now,” Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab’s director, said in 1997, “kids won’t care much about countries.”32

  Michael Dertouzos, head of another MIT facility—the Laboratory for Computer Science—likewise observed in his 1997 book What Will Be that soon nations will no longer matter as “geographical” entities. “Language, culture, history, and religion are disengaging from geographic bounds, as many people emigrate or work abroad.” “These forces are all losing their physical locality.” Everybody, everything, has been set free, including Dertouzos; a holder of dual (U.S. and Greek) citizenship, he wrote that soon “we will no longer be talking of the Greek nation as the physical country of Greece, but as the Greek Network, linking the Hellenes around the world.”33