Country of Exiles
Page 14
For years, MIT also boasted a degree program called “MIT Leaders in Manufacturing Program,” which allowed a whole fleet of transnational companies, from Alcoa to Digital, to “codify” what “principles should be taught and practiced in the future.”34 Its Industrial Liaison Program assembled a glittering roster of partnerships with more than three hundred companies, most with global ambitions. Fourteen Japanese firms provided nearly 20 percent of Media Lab’s sponsorship in 1987. By the late 1980s, partly at taxpayer expense and without taxpayer knowledge, globalization was already in high gear at MIT.35
For many people inside and outside of the academy, such partnerships had no downside. They offered an alternative to dependence on hard-to-predict federal funding; they allowed for the fast transfer of knowledge between universities and businesses; and they created conditions ideal for the employment of recently graduated, technically trained men and women. “Our leadership in technology today depends [on] the bonding relationships that our universities have with industry,” William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton and professor of engineering at Stanford, said in 1998.36
For others, however, such partnerships only subverted what was left of the boundedness of the university, and of its old liberal arts mission. “The university is being destroyed in bits and pieces,” one professor lamented.37 Such partnerships also accelerated the entry of the schools into a placeless global system, detaching them from the country (rather than from the nation-state, which aided in this transformation) to which they owed their existence.
RECRUITING FOREIGN-BORN TALENT:
THE “BRAIN GAIN” THESIS
Partnerships with global businesses, then, formed the bedrock for the new international identity of the research university. But there were other features of this makeover as well, including the recruitment of foreign-born students and scholars.
By the 1980s, American universities were competing fiercely for customers (students), particularly for students who could pay their way, but above all for wealthy foreign and immigrant students; as a result, many of the country’s most elite schools saw a marked dwindling of the traditional majority group. In 1989, more than 60 percent of NYU’s student body was native-born and white (while the figure for the school’s native-born black students stood almost at zero); by 1993, for the first time in its history, there was no native-born American majority in the incoming freshman class.38
Mass immigration after 1975, of course, partly explained this transformation, and whatever one might think of immigration’s overall impact on the country, it swelled the numbers of serious non-native-born students eager for an education and just as deserving of it as other young Americans.39 But the general immigration levels alone did not fully explain the magnitude of the immigrant community on America’s leading elite campuses, some of which—Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and so forth—had percentages of immigrant students well beyond 25 percent of the student body. These students were at these places not because they were enterprising immigrants but because a high proportion of them had affluent, college-educated parents who knew the money value of elite education and whose incomes far exceeded the American average.40
Besides well-off immigrants, universities also recruited large numbers of foreign students, scholars, and researchers. This recruitment was “an arms race,” as one admissions officer put it.41 From the eighties on, school after school sent recruiters abroad—to Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore—to rake in potential candidates, all able to pay whatever it cost to get to an American campus. Boston University even set up eight overseas recruitment posts to snag its prey, a policy imitated by other schools. By the eighties, schools were sizing up the world in much the same way that the tourist industry did—as a market with a seemingly bottomless pool of customers. The challenge was how to “sell” America’s educational “products” in the world market and how to keep other nations—Australia, England, and Canada—from winning the lion’s share of customers. “This is a product we are selling and that people are buying,” said one educator. Others said that we have got to get “our market share” or we “have to sell what we have.”42
In 1960 only about 40,000 foreign students, graduate and undergraduate, studied in American colleges and universities, a number, however, which began to rise in the 1970s as enrollments of native-born Americans as a percentage of the total began to drop.43 By the late 1980s, when more than 450,000 such students attended American schools, the United States had emerged as “by far the leading provider of education to international students.”44 Even after the Asian economic crisis hit, foreign enrollments remained high, partly as a result of vigorous recruitment by American schools.45 Many of these students paid their own way; as children of elite families, they could afford Yale or Cornell. At such places as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Miami, however, foreign students benefited equally with native-born Americans from “needs-blind admissions” policies, and they had the same access to financial help (this at a time when more and more native-born Americans could not afford to go to such schools).46
But graduate students, not undergraduates, formed the bulk of international enrollments. Most came from Asia (mainly China, Korea, the Philippines, and India), and, once again, they typically belonged to families at the very top economic and social tier of their societies, many accustomed to being waited on and eschewing all kinds of work “with the hands.”47 Most attended research universities and studied science and engineering. Throughout much of the 1990s, foreign students accounted for half of all Ph.D.s in mathematics, engineering, and science, well over half of all doctorates in civil engineering, nearly 40 percent in economics.48 In 1996 universities awarded foreign nationals with temporary and permanent visas 38 percent of all doctorates in the life sciences or in such fields as biotechnology, gene therapy and engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, environmental science, and agronomy.49
What was even more startling was the fact that a great percentage of these graduate students received financial aid, often at taxpayer expense in the form of federal “research grants,” a “pattern” that “prevailed for years,” according to David North, in a study for the Alfred Sloan Foundation.50 Other countries did not subsidize foreign students (Britain, for instance, granted aid only to British citizens), nor did most allow foreign students the right to earn incomes (American college students in internships abroad were forced to pay out of their own pockets to work for foreign companies).51 And only in America did so many graduate students stay in the country after graduation (since 1988, more than 60 percent every year), to find work as technicians in corporations, research park labs, or in universities.52
Indeed, besides recruiting foreign students, schools from Harvard to Berkeley hired thousands of foreign postgraduate scholars and faculty, a practice begun long before 1990. In the mid-seventies, in fact, the American Association of Universities, the lobby for research universities, urged Congress to permit more “professors and scientists” to immigrate on the grounds of “short domestic supply.”53 By the late eighties, the Association requested new visa categories and got them in the 1990 immigration law. One category, called the “Einstein exemption,” gave “preference” to “foreigners of extraordinary ability”; the other, the H-1B category of migrant, let schools hire foreigners on a six-year basis, so long as they could prove no qualified Americans wanted the jobs (it was the same law, as we saw in chapter 3, that benefited business as well).
Between 1991 and 1995 the total number of Einsteins reached nearly 10,000 professors. In 1994 alone, more than 60,000 foreign temps—not just the Einsteins but all scholars, teachers, and researchers—came on board, with Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, and Stanford getting the most. “The population of foreign scholars and postdocs is always growing here, believe me,” said Lee Madden, assistant director of foreign scholar services at Stanford in 1994. “There’s never a diminution in these numbers.” Throughout the nineties, each year set a new record.54
&nb
sp; Among the many flexible individuals on university payrolls, these foreign temps were called “the migrating workers of modern research, the hapless platoons of postdocs.”55 They belonged to many fields, but most were postdoctoral men and women (but mainly men, since countries like China and India restricted women’s education) who specialized in such prestigious fields as particle physics and molecular biology. These people expected to parlay their temporary visa status into permanent residence in the United States. They worked long hours for tiny stipends, usually far less than industry paid for comparable work, without the protection of labor regulations or unions. Their employers were often full professors who did research at taxpayers’ expense and from whom corporations often benefited, amounting to a hidden business subsidy.
Throughout the nineties, foreign workers on temporary visas held more than half of all postdoctoral positions in the United States (even as they were awarded, in some fields, nearly the same number of doctorates). Harvard, MIT, the University of California, Penn, and the like, depended on their labors.56 The Johns Hopkins Medical School had one hundred such temps on hand a year, whereas Duke Medical School boasted two hundred a year, and the University of Maryland at College Park found room for one hundred foreign temp professionals yearly, along with more than 140 other international faculty members and researchers.57
So far had this practice proceeded that in 1995 more than one hundred native-born American scientists organized a group called the Network of Emerging Scientists (NES), with the intent of helping “highly trained, hard-working individuals” find “stable employment” and to publicize and confront what they perceived to be an inequity. Jenny Cohen, a physics Ph.D. who worked briefly at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, served as first director of NES. Cohen was born in Minnesota and educated in New Mexico. The mother of a little girl and a devoutly religious orthodox Jew, she was married to a Cornell-educated physicist and had longed for a stable career in science and to settle down. But she (and others like her) were forced to move from town to town to find work. “We’ve been moving for work ever since we left Cornell in 1987,” she reported. She had also repeatedly lost out to temporary foreign professionals. “I care about people in this country,” Cohen said in 1996. “I would like to see the people of this country given some type of preference.”58
In the face of such objections, universities have continued to justify their recruitment of foreign faculty, scholars, and graduate students (even as 75 percent of American workers themselves, many eager for an education, did not have college degrees).59 One argument has been that international students and scholars enriched campus culture, added to its “diversity,” and gave everyone insight into people “from all different backgrounds,” as a Harvard official put it. “Foreign students” correct the “Eurocentric bias,” echoed another educator from Georgetown University, “bringing a special angle Americans lack”—for instance, “the Brazilian, Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, or Indonesian way of thinking.”60 Others have emphasized economic arguments—the “cheap labor” supplied by the post-docs, graduate students, and faculty (although in some cases foreign faculty received very high salaries); or the “billions of dollars” spent by foreign-born students on tuitions, housing, entertainment, and food.61 Still others have mounted no defense whatever but have explained the influx as a logical outcome of “free market prices” (people go automatically where they get paid the most) or of “the global restructuring process” beyond anyone’s control (individuals cannot be blamed, in other words, for what “world forces” make them do).62
The economic rationales seemed the most correct, as well as the most obvious. But officials preferred another position in line with their global ideology, which said that it no longer mattered where skilled people came from or why. What mattered was excellence, getting the best students and the most cutting-edge faculty. In 1990 William Kirwan, president of the University of Maryland at College Park and spokesman for many university associations, testified on this issue before Congress, which was then debating the merits of immigration reform. “The subject of global interdependence,” he said, in what was already a standard line, “is no more evident than in academia, where the development and exchange of knowledge is increasingly an international exercise. Ideas and learning know no national boundaries.” Besides, he said, “the excellence of our programs” has rested on “the quality of faculty we are able to recruit from an international pool of teachers and scholars.” Moreover, this dependence is greater today than ever, given the “shortage of world-class excellence in our university and college faculties. Academic institutions must have access to the very best … from this nation and from across the world. Merely being qualified would not be sufficient.”63
This argument was flawed, not least because it was terribly wrong about the “shortage of world-class excellence” in America. Ever since the mid-1970s (if not earlier), American educators predicted that a scarcity of talent would cripple education and the economy and that unless American universities recruited foreigners, the nation would lose the competitive struggle or the “struggle for excellence.” No such scarcity ever happened, however. What happened was glut, a surfeit of Einsteins in many fields—and especially in those fields (engineering, biotech, molecular biology, neuroscience, and so forth) that formed the foundation of the “new economy.” At the same time, ever since the late 1980s, the available jobs in these professions have shrunk dramatically, with the results that an extraordinary pool of skilled labor—of young people unable to find permanent positions but, given the steep investment in their education, willing to take whatever they could—has been at the beck-and-call of universities and corporations.64 Employers and “mature scientists” in need of lab technicians, of course, have celebrated this state of things, since they have enjoyed optimal access to skilled labor at bargain-basement prices; foreign nationals, too, have had cause for satisfaction, since they have received stipends exceeding anything possible in their homelands. For native-born Americans, however, the situation has been a disaster. It has produced for them what the National Research Council, a prestigious research body in Washington, has called a “crisis of expectations.” Forced to compete with an ever-growing number of foreign nationals and compelled to find work that does not fulfill them, many have increasingly lost hope in the future.65
But Kirwan’s position was flawed as well because it dismissed the gravity of what was once called the “brain drain.” Years ago, statesmen worried that rich nations were robbing poor ones of desperately needed human capital. In the late 1960s, Paul Douglas, liberal senator from Illinois and an architect of workers’ compensation laws during the New Deal as well as of later civil rights legislation, argued that “from the standpoint of the world and of the developing countries, it would be socially desirable that fewer scientists and technicians should migrate and that they should instead stay at home or return there after their training elsewhere.” Douglas even suggested that the United States help set up “great international universities … in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to help train the most talented without deracinating them.”66
Despite these concerns, hospitals and schools throughout the country turned heavily in the 1970s to immigrant professionals to fill jobs, spurred by a “brain drain” preference visa in the 1965 immigration law. By 1980 more than one-fourth of all immigrants who had arrived in the 1970s were technicians or professionals, including 7,000 Filipino doctors (1,000 more than the number of African-American physicians). Such use of immigrants reinforced institutional racism in the country, discouraging the training and hiring of native-born minorities. Nevertheless, anxieties about the international brain drain continued to dribble away, replaced in the 1990s by a fresh concept, the “brain gain.” Even such an authority on the migration of talent as Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading international economist at Columbia University, dropped the brain-drain concept for brain gain, although for a long time he had wrestled with the moral challenge of brain drain from d
ifferent angles.67
The son of Brahmans (his brother was for years the chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court), Bhagwati was born in Bombay in 1934, and received higher degrees in England (at Cambridge University) and in the United States (at MIT). In the late sixties he returned home to India, only to complain about Indian policies that restricted the flow of scholars abroad. It was about this time, too, that he first defended the brain drain, on the grounds that India had little to offer ambitious people like him—no core, he said, of “eminent people to generate purely locally the kind of atmosphere and possibilities of continuing mutual discussions which alone can keep one on one’s toes.” India was so intellectually desolate, he argued in 1967, that “the talented Indian academic” who refused to leave would be “committing ‘academic suicide.’ ”68
Bhagwati soon left India for a job at MIT, where he had second thoughts about the brain drain, thoughts he continued to have into the next few decades, as he struggled to put the phenomenon into some kind of moral light. He wondered, in 1976, “Which country does the mobile citizen ‘belong to’?” “If there is international mobility of people,” he asked, “how” can they be made accountable? Shouldn’t “intellectuals at many levels” who had enjoyed so many advantages from their own countries and had prospered abroad be “taxed” or compelled to share with their brethren some of the benefits reaped from their migration?69 Bhagwati believed that some kind of “global” tax plan, managed by the United Nations, might appeal to the “moral instincts” of the many eminent people who had left their homelands.
By the early nineties, however, Bhagwati had thrown in the towel, disavowing the brain-drain argument—and along with it any hand-wringing over taxation—for brain gain. In a co-authored article titled “Foreign Students Spur U.S. Brain Gain,” versions of which appeared in Challenge and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, he returned in spirit to a position he had advanced in the late 1960s. He argued that skilled migrants did not “drain” so much as “bring glory to their countries of origins”; and they “helped” their countries “through political lobbying in the U.S.” America benefited, too, now more than ever. Singling out Indian students, he reminded his readers that these students were “among the best” who “have gone to the best institutions at home,” graduates of India’s government-funded “Institutes of Technology modeled on MIT.” Korean and Taiwanese students, too, he noted, belonged to the “top” echelons of their societies. America was indeed lucky and should reward all these students—especially those in “science and engineering”—with “automatic green cards.”70