77 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The costs of myopia, January 21, 2010
This review is from: The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (Hardcover)
This book is problematic because it gives a sharply slanted view of the university. In Cole's hands, it is "great" because it serves, with inventions, technology, and patents, the commercial life-blood of the US. That is why Stanford is great (Silicon Valley) and MIT is great (Rte. 128) and why Columbia could not be great under Jacques Barzun because THAT provost did not relish the connections between the campus and the business/governmental/medical interests of NYC. For Cole, universities in this country deserve our respect because they have learned how to couple inventive thinkers with commercial off-campus entities (computer companies, hospitals, the military) that develop practical uses for on-campus innovations. Owing to this servo-mechanistic function of the university, Cole displays no interest in the following: undergraduate education, disciplines such as history, the fine arts, philosophy, and literature; that is because they serve no interests other than themselves. Nor is he interested in why universities cost the consumer (students and parents) so much. Nor does he treat the ballooning growth of administrative salaries; the various scandals of inter-collegiate sports; the dramatic decline of tenured or tenurable professors and their replacement with part-time instructors; the complexities of affirmative action; nor the curriculum nor the ways in which some students are admitted and others rejected. For Cole's eye is on the prize: the "use" of the university, the fusion of mind with technology, the instrumentality of education. He champions one special aspect of higher education in this country; he neglects everything else; what he ignores is immense.
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28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An ironic illustration of the problems with American Universities, March 2, 2010
This review is from: The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (Hardcover)
This is a ironic book in that illustrates unintentionally the problems at the top of American higher education. The first problem is that education itself is considered completely irrelivant to the mission of the institution. Cole sees Universities as factories that produce "results" rather than serve a community, state or nation. They are entitled to an essentially unlimited amount of public funding to do whatever they please. And while they are funded with public money, they are not accountable to the public. The problem is of course that whatever these institutions have evolved into, they are certainly not universities anymore nor is their mission remotely educational.
What Cole's top universities resemble today are the system of national labratories created by the government. And there is nothing wrong with that. But its well past time to be honest about what these institutions are in structure and mission. They are not educational institutions anymore. Many of them should not have undergraduate programs at all.
Cole backs his arguments by the nortoriously useless evaluations of "top universities". These so-called evaluations amount to populatity polls among academics and brand names. And he neglects to see that often what really makes a top university in those sorts of polls is throwing money at top academic stars. He also has the usual fixation on noble prizes despite the backward looking nature of those prizes and the limited range of academic disciplines they cover.
Cole also decends into populist nonsense. He smears German higher educational institutions and claims not one of them is fit to be considered for a list of the top 50 insitutions in the world. All I can say is that no German institution is fit on his top 50, are there any non-American univerisities on his list?
Cole also has little to say about how research spending has been skewed toward medical projects in recent years to the determent of nearly every other source of research. He especially does not want to probably talk about how everything but medical research has been starved at Colombia.
The other irony in Cole's arguments is that he as much as admits that the great majority of universities are producing useless psuedo-research. This really undercuts his push for unlimited funding of higher education. The clear overall implication of his argument is that univerities could be far more cost effective if reorganized into a handful of national research labs while the larger majority of institutions would focus on education rather than producing useless research. It also raises the question of why the US higher education system produces so many PHDs who lack the ability to even do research.
The overall problem with the book is that basically advocates for the status quo. But the status quo in American higher education is one of costs spiraling out of control and people being priced out of the system. As with medical care costs, the country cannot afford to simply write an ever-expanding blank cheque to its universities. Cole believes otherwise.
Everyone knows that the university system in the United States is in need of basic reform. But vested interests (like the author) seemingly want to pretend otherwise.
There are areas that are ripe for investigation. There is the textbook "racket" where prices charged have nothing to do with the costs of publishing. There is the academic journal racket where university libraries are charged a fortune for subscriptions.
And then there are the abusive working conditions for graduate students at many of these universities. They don't get paid for the work they are doing. And they live in a system where a single professor can destroy their entire career with a frown.
Cole also wants to protect tenure at universities. But the joke of tenure is that those who have it don't need it. If you are going to be destroyed at a university, it will happen in the PHD program or it will happen as a junior facalty member spending years on the "tenure track". The people who need protection are the people at the bottom of the academic system, not those at the top.
By what he says and more importantly what he does not say, Cole has unintentionally made the case very effectively as to why higher education in the US needs to be comprehensively reformed from the outside. That change is either going come from original thinkers inside who challenge the status quo or its going to come from the outside in the form of drastic budget cuts.
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20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Background -, February 12, 2010
This review is from: The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (Hardcover)
Johnathan Cole is proud of America's preeminent research universities and worried that their future is threatened not by China or Europe, but by forces inside the U.S. These include Patriot Act impediments to overseas students coming to the U.S., inequities in university research endowments, the rise of 'political' science (Global Warming censorship; stem-cell research limitations; limitations on research with potential WMD agents) during the Bush years, and 'PC-police' (feminists, Israel supporters, IQ-testing opponents). Cole's "The Great American University" also provides a convincing case that American research universities have helped better the lives of ordinary Americans and boosted our economy.
Early in the book Cole cites a 2008 study at a Chinese university that evaluated 500 of the world's universities, largely on their research performance. That study found that 17 of the 20 most distinguished research universities were in the U.S., as were 40 of the top 50. Other studies have reached similar conclusions. Since the 1930s, about 60% of all Nobel Prizes have gone to Americans. Before Hitler, German universities were the world's best - now not one is ranked in the world's top 50. Hitler's rise created an intellectual migration that brought more than 100 physicists alone to the U.S. between 1933 and 1941, including Albert Einstein.
Cole asserts that about 260 U.S. schools offering master's degrees can be classified as research universities, though only about 125 contribute in meaningful ways to the growth of knowledge. Coe lists a small sample of their contributions as including "the laser, MRI, FM radio, Google's initial search algorithm, GPS, DNA fingerprinting, fetal monitoring, scientific cattle breeding, and advanced methods of surveying public opinion," though in truth major advances often occur in cooperation with government and private industry. Coe later devotes 135 pages to greater detail on seemingly innumerable relatively recent contributions of American research universities to U.S. industry and users.
University research, however, became heavily weighted towards medical centers and other health-related departments after 1960. For example, Columbia University Medical Center accounted for 11% of the university's overall budget in 1960-61, and 54% in 2005-06. Unwittingly, Cole is weakening his case as Marcia Angell, former Editor in Chief of the "New England Journal of Medicine" points out in her "The Truth About Drug Companies." She states that "only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years . . . the great majority of 'new' drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market . . . (and are) called 'me-too' drugs." Further, much of recent drug-efficacy 'research' has been tainted by experimental designs intentionally biased to favor funding drug companies. Finally, the economic impact of these efforts is limited - drug-testing, a major research expense component, is increasingly likely to move overseas to Asia for lower costs, increasing proportions of our drugs are manufactured overseas, and they generate little, if anything, in exports.
Some research universities earn substantial revenues from their efforts - Columbia earned over $150 million/year in the late 1990s and early 2000s from the revenues of a few patents, and Stanford has recently garnered over $100 million/year, plus a one-time $336 million from the sale of Google stock given in return for the founders' early research at Stanford. Coe adds that by 2006, about 30 research universities raked in at least $5 million/year from their patents and licenses. Cole is worried that these revenues will skew research from general to applied. Actually, this 'feedback' is highly useful, though drug companies have created conflicts of interest and skewed reports.
One of "The Great American University's" strengths is that Coe doesn't overstate his case, and admits that "most scholars and scientists receive almost no citations to their work" - and a very few generate the greatest number. Nobel-prize winner Julius Axelrod (1970 - medicine) claims that "99% of the discoveries are made by 1% of the scientists." Here, Cole and Axelrod have identified one of the weaknesses of arguments for increased across-the-board funding for American research universities. A second is that contributions from the social sciences have been far fewer and less impressive, at best.
University research in the area of management practice would seem a natural source of economic progress - however, none of the 20th-century management breakthroughs (Taylorism, Ford's assembly line, the Toyota Production System, Jack Welch's off-shoring, be #1 or #2 in the industry, and delayering strategies) came from universities. One could even argue that all today's managers need to know is where to offshore (China for manufacturing, India for software, accounting, consulting, and call-centers), and where to find cheap illegal immigrant workers (local Home Depot parking lot). No research or MBA needed!
Vested interests are part of the problem in social science research - especially education. The late James Coleman, sociologist at the University of Chicago, conducted one of the largest and most credible studies of factors influencing pupil achievement and reported that factors outside the school were the most significant. Instead of acting upon that finding (confirmed by many other quality studies), educators instead chose other poorly designed studies that 'proved' more money was the key. As a result, we have wasted decades, probably over a trillion dollars going down the wrong path in education, and our pupils, economy, and research universities have suffered.
American university researchers in the field of economics deserve a special place in Hell for their 'contributions.' These include the erroneous contention that 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs deepened and prolonged the Great Depression (net exports at the time represented only about .1% of U.S. GDP) which has created unquestioning support for 'Free Trade," the loss of millions of American jobs, and today's floundering economy. It's true that Bernanke's research on the Great Depression helped prevent a 2008 repeat, however, his misreading of early signals also deepened the 2008 Great Recession. Regardless, President Truman was so frustrated with their advice that he complained that he never could find a 'one-handed economist' with a clear answer. Meanwhile, the decades-old debate between 'the Chicago school' and Keynesians continues unresolved, and America's research economists have yet to contribute a cogent approach to reforming health care - absent reform predicted to consume 37% of GDP by 2050, despite growing numbers of uninsured and an estimated 100,000/year killed due to malpractice.
University research in finance has also brought disaster, only slightly less serious - Scholes (Harvard) and Merton (Stanford) won the Nobel Prize (1997) for their 'new method to determine the value of derivatives,' then ran their Long Term Capital Management off the cliff ($4.6 billion in losses), and inadvertently helped design Wall Street's 2006-08 equivalent of the 'neutron bomb' - widespread over-leveraging combined with derivatives.
Much university research takes place in the humanities - primarily brought to us not because of its value, but because university administrators are too gutless to force these professors to either produce something benefiting society or teach more classes. We certainly passed the point of diminishing returns in humanities research long ago when it comes to eg. reinterpretations of arcane literature, or newly nuanced historical findings that even researchers' academic colleagues don't bother to cite.
Foreign students collected 40% of 2005-06 American-granted PhDs in the physical sciences, and 57% in engineering. Coe points out that this strengthens the student pool, and many stay in the U.S. True. However, China is increasingly focused on, and successful at enticing their foreign students to return. Those students occupied seats that sometimes could be filled by Americans - thus acerbating the outsourcing of American jobs. Perhaps we should require such foreign students who return within eg. five years of graduating to fund the studies of an American student who will stay and contribute.
Bottom-Line: "The American Research University" provides an excellent summary of recent contributions made by our top institutions. However, that does not translate into a good case for providing more money overall - there also is clear evidence of enormous waste. The 1910 Flexner Report revolutionized and improved American medical education, starting with more rigorous admission standards. Today, nearly half of matriculating students fail to graduate, largely because they aren't qualified or that interested. Another outcome was that the number of medical schools fell from 155 to 66, by 1935. Coe himself admits that most American universities and researchers contribute little (if anything). Why not a similar purge today of research programs at lesser-ranked colleges and universities, and social sciences and humanities in general? Part of the reason higher education costs have exploded in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to a growing surfeit of research. Savings from eliminating both useless programs and unqualified students could be split - half poured back into the best of the best research universities, and the other half returned to parents and taxpayers. The result - more qualified American pupils could attend our colleges and great research universities.
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