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The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected

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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.

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.

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.

I could not put this book down. Provost Cole's prose flows smoothly. It takes the reader through the methodology of getting at the truth. Citing the evidence of discoveries accomplished by the Great American Universities, Provost Cole builds the case for strong government support of research universities. Operating under a rigorous peer review system, American research universities allocate resources without government interference. The goal is to ensure the best allocation of limited funding to put the brightest minds to work. The product of this work has the largest impact on the public. The algorithm used in the Google search engine, the nicotine patch, the Heimlich maneuver, Gatorade, the laser had their origins in great American research universities. Why are American research universities so important to scientific discovery? Provost Cole clarifies that only at great American universities scientists are able to take research to the next level because they are only subject to peer review, not to direct government control, as they would be if operating within government agencies.
The relationship universities - government has been critical to the development of great American research universities. `Only in America', foreign readers might be tempted to think, would government allocate funds for research and not claim control on how taxpayers money is spent. Well, there have been bumps in the road. Provost Cole reviews the impact of the Patriot Act introduced by the Bush Administration as a response to the heightened security immediately following the September 11 attack, and reauthorized without substantial changes by the Democratic Congress in 2006. A sense of suspicion of all things foreign, including brilliant scholars, had taken hold of the government and of groups of advocates lobbying Congress to enhance control. Faced with the choice between flying home to visit a sick parent and losing their visa, or staying, some scholars picked the first. And the research projects they were working on in great American universities had come to a halt.
A new label introduced for research that involved `sensitive but unclassified information' generated ambiguity in labs across the US. At Cornell, the number of faculty members doing research on select agents - smallpox, anthrax and 300 other plagues - went from 38 to 2.
All foreigners who are thinking of studying in one of the great American universities should read this book. Why? Because Provost Cole believes that Europe and Asia, who have great human capital, still don't pose a threat to the position of US universities on the world scale of higher education. There's got to be something to learn!

This is a very large book (600pp.+) on an equally large subject. Its author is a distinguished academic, principally known for his service as provost at Columbia. He is a sociologist. I have had occasion to work with him when he served as a member of a site visit team evaluating the structure and positioning of one of our schools at Georgetown University. He has superb academic judgment and rock-solid academic instincts, coupled with (and informed by) deep experience.

He tilts left (as a New York academic sociologist would be expected to) but he is free of the extremes of political correctness. His take on the nature and importance of our major research universities is very predictable. That is not a criticism, but an observation that his views speak for the views of many. Hence, the book is extremely `representative' though few would be able to write it.

His audience is a large one--those individuals interested in our top research universities and their pivotal role in our society, the threats that challenge them, the opportunities that await them, the accomplishments that are a proper source of our collective pride in them.

The book `feels' different than that, however. It feels like a (highly-informed) lobbyist's document, in its thrusts, its tone and its emphases (though not, of course, in its length). Cole spends over 80 pp. decrying the threats to research universities posed by the (George W.) Bush administration and expresses hope concerning the Obama administration. He also expresses disappointment that President Obama has continued many of the policies of President Bush. It is not fawning or worshipful with regard to President Obama, but it is hortatory, the voice of one who would be sympathetic, quietly urging government benevolence with regard to the funding of the institutions which the author represents.

These institutions represent, of course, a very small (though very important) subset of American higher education. The fact that the Bush administration is perceived to have pressed a political orientation on the recipients of Title VI Area Studies grants, e.g., will not be of great concern to the thousands of institutions which have not received such grants. Similarly, the growing disparity between Harvard's endowment and the endowments of other once-more-financially-comparable institutions like Chicago will not make those at small liberal arts colleges and regional publics lose a great deal of sleep. That is not to say that those issues are unimportant, but one must reinforce the fact that Cole's book and many like it speak to the concerns of a small number of institutions (though these institutions have a disproportionate impact on our country).

The section on the American research universities' rise to preeminence is the strongest, by a wide margin. Hence, the book has great value for reference purposes. The section on research universities' discoveries and accomplishments is very interesting and readable, though far stronger on engineering and the physical and life sciences than on the social sciences. The section on the humanities is perfunctory and provincial. His examples of great accomplishments in literary studies, for example, now seem quaint (Lionel Trilling is mentioned prominently) and Edward Said comes in for a great deal of praise (though no criticism, with the acknowledgment in the appendix material that Said was one of Cole's close friends). There is almost nothing on the research achievements of historians; this is very curious, considering the fact that Columbia has traditionally had one of the truly great programs in that field.

The policy section (urging the acceptance of some practices, the jettisoning of others) is very interesting, but it is not likely to be of much use. Like most academic policy statements (and strategic planning documents) it offers hundreds of recommendations. That is all well and good, but such documents are generally met with smiles of recognition, sprinkles of holy water, polite bows and a quick return to the status quo. Major policy initiatives should be few in number, high in importance and pressed with rigor.

He does not exempt the universities themselves from criticism (this is much more than a `give us more' document), but his focus is basically on graduate education and big science and not undergraduate education. He says very little, for example, about the erosion of general education. General education is foundational and it was once very linguistic and literary, involving as it did the study of the classics, foreign languages, philosophy and English and American literature. The sometime focus on language in British institutions, e.g., has long given them a `cultural' advantage (Why can't our presidents speak like their prime ministers?) and there is no question that our country prizes literacy and articulate speech, sometimes to the exclusion of what is actually being said (or not said). This has now all changed within our universities and carries deep and important consequences. Since Columbia has long been distinguished from some of its Ivy peers for its adherence to traditional standards in this regard (in its undergraduate focus on specific texts, e.g.), I was surprised to see little or no attention given to this fact.

Cole notes the erosion of elementary and particularly secondary education in America, but has little to say about the erosion of undergraduate education and its consequences. He hovers above, focusing on great schools, great accomplishments and great challenges. The next book that I am reading is Bill Readings' The University in Ruins. There is little talk of `ruins' in Cole's book. Thus, despite its deep erudition and wide frame of reference it sounds a bit like the work of a lobbyist rather than a historian or analyst. It is not without its criticisms but they are subordinated to larger issues.

Jonathan R. Cole, American sociologist, a pioneer in the sociology of science, served as as Columbia University's Provost and Dean of Faculties for 14 years. He returned to the faculty in 2003, so he has valuable insight and experiences at a research university.

Here he writes about the rise of American Universities, at least the elite ones. Until about the mid-20th century, our scholars went to "Mother Europe" to finish their graduate education. That has now changed and although there is much to be desired with our K-12 system, and even some of our four year colleges, the entire world flocks to the U.S. for graduate education. Why? Because quite simply we are the best. Thousands come every year; many more would like to come. That's a given.

Cole calls our 125 doctoral universities the "jewels in our nation's crown." They provide innovation that have added not only to our but to the world's store house of knowledge. He lists many of their contributions that might surprise the average person. But Cole fears changing circumstances threaten their hegemony and leadership role.

He doesn't believe their success will be threatened by other countries but does see worrisome problems within the United States. He fumes against the differing sizes of endowment funds, which he fears gives the richest ones an unfair advantage in hiring talent. He criticizes the Bush administration which he claims distrusted scholarship. Bush, although Yale graudated, will probably see Cole as another Eastern elite.

There is something unsettling about this book. Cole doesn't really come to grips with why or how these universities became great. It would have be useful had he shared some of their histories, how they motivated their faculties and students, etc.

Maybe Cole should have put the manuscript aside for six months, thought a bit more and then rewritten it. Or maybe Cole should stick to the sociology of science. Sorry, but the book is disappointing.

Written by the former provost of Columbia University, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, and Why It Must Be Protected is an exhaustive and compelling presentation focusing on the invaluable contributions that American Universities have made to scientific, technological, and societal knowledge - and therefore the wealth and standard of living of the nation. From genetic and medical research, to the convenience of bar codes, to potentially life-saving GPS technology, America's universities have helped to keep the nation on the cutting edge - but that could change (and perhaps already has). Restrictive post-9/11 policies have discouraged talented foreign graduate students from training in America; fallout from the international financial crisis threatens university endowments and state investments; and perhaps most insidious, governmental ideological constraints on freedom of inquiry (especially notable during the Bush administration) threaten to undermine the academic and scientific bedrock of the university system. Appendices listing top-ranked American Research Universities, and an online source of information about university discoveries, as well as exhaustive notes and an index round out this thorough, cautionary account of the benefits universities bring, and how they need to be protected.

Jonathan R. Cole who for many years was Provost of
Columbia University writes here a paean to the American Research university. He traces the history of the University in America and shows how only in the nineteen- thirties with the exodus from Nazi Germany did American universities begin to be foremost in the world. He says at the outset that there are more than forty-five hundred degree giving institutions of higher- learning in America but that the ones who make the real contribution to society are the top one- hundred twenty- five research universities. Thus his focus in this work is not on undergraduate studies, or university teaching, or equality of opportunity for young people to study at these more presitigious and highly expensive reseach universities. Cole outlines a long - list of contributions to society made both in fundamental science, and in the area of building- a - better mouse trap. Again it is a small percentage of all universities, and within the world of working scientists a small percentage of them who make the real contributions. One-percent make ninety- percent of the contributions according to Richard Axelrod. All this would not however be possible without certain core- values which Cole thinks are significant. Peer- review, and the freedom of inquiry and experimentation are among these values. And it is important to note that part of the work takes on a polemic tone as Cole criticizes the Bush Administration's restrictive immigration policies, and attempted imposition of limitations on areas of scientific research, most notably stem- cell research. The polemic aspect of the work is to my mind one- sided, for Cole egregiously ignores the overwhelming left- wing slant of university Social Sciences and Humanities' Departments. He ignores wholly the kind of silencing and manipulation done in Middle East studies by the often Saudi funded endowmented departments. In this regard his own University, Columbia is one of the most notable for incidents of intimidation not only of scholars but of students. The danger of mob- mentality coming to the University world was recently seen at UC Irvine where Islamist students shouted down the distinguished scholar Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. The University which thrives on openness of discussion, dialogue, and freedom of inquiry is endanged by the importation of totalitarian mentality into its halls.
Cole points out that seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world and thirty- six of the top fifty are in the U.S. He suggests that there is no real competitor. The great German research universities were destroyed by the Nazis. There is not one German university in the top twenty. The Chinese according to Cole have not really assimilated a basic value required for real research i.e. freedom of inquiry. The United States before 9/11 was open to the best minds of the world. And it is still true that the largest share of them wish to be part of the American university world.
Cole's work on this book is monumental and commendable. He in a way supplies a strong argument against those speaking incessantly about American decline. In this he is in silent league with Joel Kotkin who argues that it is American demographics which are the key to American future predominance.
But critics of Cole point to a number of reservations about his conclusions. One relates to his not really detailing the role of the Business world in the area of Research, in its involvement with university researchers. Cole does mention the importance of increasing funding not only for the Sciences but also for the Humanities. His focus is not however on the great mass of American students who will not approach the top world and do the top work.
Nonetheless this is an invaluable study of American higher education and what it has given, and hopefully will give the world.

When the author provides facts based on his experience, he is a valuable source regarding the characteristics of great universities. He gives factual insight into what universities must achieve to raise their standing. However, the author gets off topic with his political opinions. His views are very narrow and elitist and serve no purpose other than to satisfy his own feelings regarding his positions.

This is a great book, especially for anyone who wants a comprehensive overview of the history of US higher education.