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Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Spring 2015

A New Model for the American Research University

By Michael M. Crow , William B. Dabars

The supposed conflict between research intensity and increased student access serves the branding needs of our elite universities, but not the social and economic needs of the nation. A new institutional design is emerging that meets the dual obligations of equity and excellence without compromising on either.

Headlines and pundits proclaiming a crisis in American higher education seem to proliferate on a daily basis. Accounts of skyrocketing sticker prices at our nation’s colleges and universities vie for attention with dire pronouncements about the value of a college degree in today’s challenging economy. There is a “crisis on campus” and the “education bubble is about to burst,” religions scholar Mark C. Taylor confidently informs us in his recent book, and according to sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, America’s students are “academically adrift.” This apocalyptic genre has become so commonplace, with assaults coming from all quarters and in so many creative guises, that it would be superfluous to cobble together even a representative compilation. As just one more random, high profile sample, consider Peter Thiel, cofounder and former CEO of PayPal, whose Thiel Fellowships provide $100,000 grants on the condition that recipients drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors. As Thiel reassures us in the New York Times , “Before long, spending four years in a lecture hall with a hangover will be revealed as an antiquated debt-fueled luxury good.” Cultural commentators and academics alike find it easy enough to represent higher education in various stages of catastrophic decline, but they have been less cognizant of the deeper phenomenon: the challenges that confront universities reflect a confluence of societal trends that threaten to undermine the egalitarian conception of higher education that has been integral to our national identity and success from the outset of the American republic.

A cover article in Forbes magazine asked: “Is Higher Education Still Worth It?” and concludes: “For many students, the answer is probably not—unless they are accomplished enough to be accepted by one of the schools ranked near the top of our annual list of America’s 650 Top Colleges.” This remarkably narrow perspective seems close to becoming consensus opinion. Yet the idea that higher education is only worth the investment for the rarified few admitted to one of our nation’s most selective institutions threatens to undermine the future of our collective quality of life, standard of living, and national economic competitiveness. In this article, we briefly describe one possible path forward and one full-scale, real-time experiment to move down this pathway as decisively as possible.

Although there are many types of colleges and universities, few critiques differentiate among the plurality of institutional types that constitute a heterogeneous academic marketplace. There are roughly 5,000 institutions of higher education in the United States, of which the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching categorizes only 108, both public and private, as major research universities. Approximately 100 additional universities with less extensive research portfolios comprise a second research-grade cohort. This aggregation of universities is held in considerable worldwide esteem. American institutions consistently occupy 17 of the top 20 slots in the authoritative ranking of world-class universities conducted by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and 14 of the top 20 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The number of international students seeking enrollment at American colleges and universities attests to the perception that these institutions offer opportunities found nowhere else.

The top 100 major research universities constitute the academic gold standard in American higher education. Apart from their role in the formation of successive generations of our nation’s scholars, scientists, and leaders in every sphere of endeavor, these institutions serve as the primary source of scientific discovery and technological innovation that fosters economic growth and social development across the global knowledge economy. But just as important are scholarly and creative endeavors in the arts, humanities, and social and behavioral sciences that too often escape notice, precisely because their influence already so fully informs our intellectual culture, as Columbia University provost emeritus Jonathan Cole points out in his indispensable volume, The Great American University .

There is no single model for the American research university—a set of institutions that includes public and private variants that range considerably in scale, from small private institutions, like Dartmouth and Caltech, to large public universities, like Ohio State. But for our purposes they bear a striking family resemblance that justifies our reference to the gold standard model. Yet despite their accomplishments, their institutional evolution since the 19th century has been only incremental. To an alarming extent, the American research university is captive to a set of institutional constraints that no longer aligns with the changing needs of our society. Despite the critical niche that research universities occupy in the knowledge economy, their preponderant commitment to discovery and innovation, carried out largely in isolation from the socioeconomic challenges faced by most Americans, will render these institutions increasingly incapable of contributing decisively to the collective good.

The objective of the new model is to produce not only knowledge and innovation, but also students who are adaptive master-learners, empowered to integrate a broad array of interrelated disciplines and negotiate over their lifetimes the changing workforce demands and shifts in the knowledge economy driven by continual innovation.

The institutional model that we delineate in our new book, Designing the New American University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), is intended to provide an alternative to the highly successful major research universities, and is only one among many possible variants on this institutional type. Thus, we use the somewhat infelicitous term “academic platform” to suggest that there are many unexplored and unexploited institutional models for higher education—especially those that can provide an excellent education while advancing knowledge and innovation at the scale and timeframe necessary to progress toward desired social and economic outcomes. Our model thus combines three foundational design components: 1) an academic platform committed to discovery and knowledge production, as with the standard model, linking pedagogy with research; 2) broad accessibility to students from highly diverse demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds; and 3) through its breadth of activities and functions, an institutional commitment to maximizing societal impact commensurate with the scale of enrollment demand and the needs of our nation. The model, that is, embodies a reconceptualization of the American research university as a complex and adaptive comprehensive knowledge enterprise committed to discovery, creativity, and innovation, accessible to the demographically broadest possible student body, socioeconomically as well as intellectually, and directly responsive to the needs of the nation and society more broadly. The objective of the new model is to produce not only knowledge and innovation, but also students who are adaptive master-learners, empowered to integrate a broad array of interrelated disciplines and negotiate over their lifetimes the changing workforce demands and shifts in the knowledge economy driven by continual innovation.

Accessibility to research-grade academic institutions

The confluence of economic, political, and social currents that propelled America to global preeminence in the 20th century engendered a social compact that produced world-leading levels of educational attainment. As economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz assess in The Race Between Education and Technology , public sector investment in higher education during the first three quarters of the 20th century served for millions as a springboard to economic mobility, and more broadly as the foundation of an increasingly widely shared prosperity built on the rapidly rising productivity made possible by an educated and innovative society. During the three decades following World War II, a period of expansion for colleges and universities that Louis Menand has termed the “Golden Age” of American higher education, growth in undergraduate enrollments, including community colleges, increased fivefold and nearly 900 percent in graduate schools.

Yet despite the success of this model, public investment in higher education has progressively declined ever since. In a 2014 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Robert J. Gordon finds that between 2001 and 2012, funding for higher education from states and municipalities fell by one-third when adjusted for inflation. Since 1985, state funding for the University of Colorado, for example, has declined from 37 percent to 9 percent of the institutional budget. Research by Phillip Oliff and colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPR) found that state appropriations for higher education declined 28 percent between fiscal years 2008 and 2013: “Eleven states have cut funding by more than one-third per student, and two states—Arizona and New Hampshire—have cut their higher education spending per student in half.” A 2014 CB PR update found that during the past year funding has been restored by an average of 7.2 percent, but state spending still remains 23 percent below prerecession levels: “Per student spending in Arizona, Louisiana, and South Carolina is down by more than 40 percent since the start of the recession.”

Such disinvestment—often concentrated in places most in need of precisely the opposite—is just one of the many factors stemming the momentum of increased accessibility to our nation’s colleges and universities that marked the course of previous decades. As a result, many of the students who would most benefit from this most obvious avenue of upward mobility—those whom we broadly categorize as “socioeconomically disadvantaged” or “historically underrepresented”—cannot gain admission to a research-grade university. The decline comes at a time when more and more Americans of all ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, levels of academic preparation, and types of intelligence and creativity seek enrollment, overwhelming a set of institutions built to accommodate the needs of our country prior to the Second World War, when the population was less than half its present number, and only slightly more than one percent of Americans enrolled in college. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that over the past quarter century, total enrollment in institutions of higher education has grown from under 13 million to more than 21 million, both undergraduate and graduate. Roughly three-fourths of high school graduates now enroll in some form of college, including community colleges and for-profit institutions—a fourfold increase since midcentury. By one estimate, community colleges enroll 45 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, and for-profit schools enroll 10 percent. Although such burgeoning enrollments would suggest progress in meeting demand, degree completion rates have fallen and the outcomes of attendance are drastically uneven, varying according to institutional type.

As nations worldwide invest strategically to educate broader segments of their citizenry for the knowledge economy, America’s educational infrastructure remains unable to accommodate projected enrollment demands, particularly at the level of research-intensive universities. America’s leading institutions have become increasingly exclusive and define—indeed, precisely quantify—their excellence through admissions practices based on the exclusion of the majority of applicants. Prestige is thus attained through the maintenance of scarcity. But if education is a public good, then this meritocratic pretense is a defensive posture and an abdication of implicit responsibility. Although our leading research universities, both public and private, consistently dominate global rankings, our success in establishing world-class excellence in a relative handful of elite institutions does little to ensure the broad distribution of the benefits of educational attainment, nor does it sufficiently advance the innovation that contributes to our continued national competitiveness, especially if we stop to consider the disproportionately few students fortunate enough to be admitted to these top schools. When Princeton historian Anthony Grafton referred to the “little group of traditional liberal arts colleges, all of whose students could fit in the football stadium of a single Big Ten school” in the New York Review of Books , he was not engaging in hyperbole. IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data show that the top 50 liberal arts colleges (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report for academic year 2012–2013) collectively enrolled 95,496 undergraduates. Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor seats roughly 110,000. The eight traditional Ivies enroll 65,677. Yale Bowl holds 61,446. These 50 top liberal arts schools, plus the Ivies, make up less than one percent of the total U.S. undergraduate population of 18.2 million students.

Perhaps this comparison unfairly circumscribes the size of the elite student body. If we take institutional membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents 60 leading research universities in the United States, both public and private, as proxy for academic quality, available seats for undergraduates climbs to 1.1 million. AAU reports that in 2011 its public member institutions enrolled 918,221, whereas AAU privates enrolled 211,500. This brings us to approximately 6 percent of college students in the United States.

Still too narrow a gauge? Adding the rest of the first-tier research universities to the 60 AAU schools gets us to a little more than 2 million, or roughly 11 percent of American students. And unlike schools devoted primarily to teaching, these institutions offer opportunities found nowhere else. As the late Charles M. Vest, then president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), observed in a 1994 letter to parents, the distinctive character of a research-grade university permits undergraduates to participate in research with scientists and scholars working at the frontiers of knowledge: “Our society will ask much more of these students—and they will ask more of themselves—than just to know what others have accomplished. If they are going to help us expand our knowledge and solve our problems, they are going to have to know how to research, to analyze, to synthesize, and to communicate. They must learn how to gather data, to develop hypotheses, to test and refine them, or throw them out when necessary and start over.”

The gold standard in American higher education represents an immensely successful institutional platform that invariably combines world-class teaching and research with modest levels of enrollment. During the current academic year, for example, undergraduate enrollment in Harvard College numbers roughly 6,700 and at its 363rd commencement in May 2014, the university awarded 1,662 baccalaureate degrees. In March 2014, Harvard College offered admission to 2,023 prospective students—5.9 percent of the pool of 34,295 applicants. Of these, we estimate that approximately 1,600 were likely to enroll, based on the pattern of yields obtained during the preceding three academic years. Harvard does maintain one of the larger graduate and professional student enrollments among the Ivies, however, which exceeds twice its undergraduate population and approaches the number of graduate students attending the University of Michigan.

Harvard’s undergraduate enrollment levels are generally typical of the platform type. In the fall term of 2013, MIT enrolled 4,528 undergraduate and 6,773 graduate students. A three-to-one student-faculty ratio at Caltech comes by dint of enrollment of 997 undergraduates during the academic year 2012–2013, along with 1,253 graduate students. Bard College enrolls roughly 2,000 undergraduates; Williams College about the same number; Bowdoin roughly 1,750; Swarthmore approximately 1,500.

Enrollments in public colleges and universities are normally far higher, of course. The entire student body of Harvard College corresponds roughly in number to the total of undergraduate degrees conferred yearly at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, or the number of undergraduates enrolled in the School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Yet, even these public institutions have not scaled up their enrollment capacities commensurate either to the requirements of the workforce or levels of population growth.

And how could they? The entrenchment of the present model is the very measure of its success. Because the prestige of these schools remains unrivaled, there is little incentive for them to seek change. As a consequence, these institutions have become so highly selective that the vast majority of academically qualified applicants are routinely excluded. According to one estimate based on IPEDS data, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by the eight institutions of the Ivy League during the academic year 2012–2013 totaled 15,541, whereas the top 50 liberal arts colleges awarded 23,672. In the same academic year, the Ivies rejected 222,279 applicants and the liberal arts colleges turned away 190,954.

This pattern of exclusion is consistent with the trend among leading public universities, which continue to raise standards even while enrollment demand increases. The ratio of California resident freshman applicants to students admitted at UC Berkeley from 1975 to 1995, for example, declined from 77 percent to 39 percent, according to John Aubrey Douglass. Institutional data show that between the fall semesters of 1989 and 2013, the ratio of admissions at Berkeley declined from 40 percent to 16.35 percent. The comparable figures for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) show a decline from 46.5 percent to 17.6 percent. The actual numbers present the scenario even more starkly. Of 43,255 resident applicants to Berkeley in the fall semester of 2013, only 7,073 were admitted, which means that 36,182 were turned away. At UCLA, 55,079 applied, but only 9,741 were admitted, which means that 44,338 were excluded. Although the UC system as a whole accepted 76.6 percent of resident freshmen in the fall semester of 1989, by 2013 the acceptance rate had declined to 63 percent. If leading research universities deem it appropriate to maintain limited enrollments while excluding the majority of applicants, other research-grade academic platforms must emerge that offer accessibility to substantially greater numbers of students—especially among public research universities, which typically serve more first-generation and socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

The implications of lack of accessibility

Such limited accessibility to research-grade institutions is out of proportion with workforce projections that indicate a shortfall by 2018 of three million educated workers. Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, and colleagues estimate that degree production would have to increase by roughly 10 percent each year to prevent that shortfall. For our nation to achieve the ambitious objectives for educational attainment specified by President Obama in his first address to a joint session of Congress in February 2009—the president envisioned an America that by the end of the present decade would again boast the highest proportion of college graduates in the world—our colleges and universities would have to produce an additional 8.2 million graduates by 2020. Another study led by Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose underscored the interrelationship between an “undereducated” society and increasing income inequality: “The undersupply of postsecondary-educated workers has led to two distinct problems: a problem of efficiency and a problem of equity.” At issue is the loss in productivity that comes with a workforce lacking advanced skills. At the same time, “scarcity has driven up the cost of postsecondary talent precipitously, exacerbating inequality.” The upshot, according to Carnevale, is that “to correct our undersupply and meet our efficiency and equity goals for the economy and for our society, we will need to add an additional 20 million postsecondary-educated workers to the economy by 2025.”

America’s leading institutions have become increasingly exclusive and define—indeed, precisely quantify—their excellence through admissions practices based on the exclusion of the majority of applicants. Prestige is thus attained through the maintenance of scarcity.

Whatever specific numbers one chooses to adopt, there seems little disagreement that the demands of both equity and prosperity entail a capacity to create millions of additional graduates capable of both catalyzing and benefiting from the knowledge economy during the next several decades. But when academic culture assumes that enrollment growth must come at the expense of reputation and competitive standing, few are the institutions willing to pursue strategies to produce the additional graduates our nation needs. Indeed, scarcity is the brand that our elite universities are selling. The idea that these institutions could exercise their potential to produce millions of highly qualified, workforce-ready critical thinkers threatens the current business model.

Thus, in the Ivies and, more recently, the so-called public Ivies—the set of “flagship” public universities that rival private institutional peers in their pursuit of prestige—admissions policies are predicated on exclusion. The announcement by Stanford University in April 2014 that only 5 percent of applicants had been accepted epitomizes the increasing selectivity of top private universities. But leading public universities are becoming increasingly discerning as well, and the broad access to a quality education that could once be taken for granted is now flatly denied to the majority of qualified applicants. In the mid-20th century, high school students from middle-class families who brought home respectable grades could reasonably expect to be admitted to the leading public universities of their respective states. During the 1950s and 1960s, for example, California high school graduates who completed a set of required courses and attained a cumulative 3.0 grade point average qualified for admission to the University of California. The admissions policies of our top-tier institutions may appear meritocratic, but a significant proportion of alumni who graduated in the 1970s or 1980s—many of whom no doubt attribute their professional success in large measure to the caliber of their education—would be summarily turned away under current protocols. As literary scholar Christopher Newfield aptly put it in a 2010 article: “The entrenched practices, the deep culture, the lived ideology, the life-world of American higher education all point toward defining excellence through selectivity, and would seek to improve any university regardless of mission by tightening admissions standards.”

But large-scale enrollment can go hand-in-hand with academic excellence. The University of Toronto, for example, the largest major research university in Canada and a public AAU member institution, enrolls 67,128 undergraduates and 15,884 graduate students at three urban campuses and reports research expenditures exceeding $1.2 billion annually. The institution consistently ranks topmost among Canadian universities, 28th globally in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, and 20th globally in the most recent Times Higher Education World University Report. But whether by design or default, other leading research-grade universities have not similarly scaled up enrollment capacities commensurate with demand or proportionate to the growth of the population. Both the elite private and public research universities continue instead to raise thresholds for admission.

Nearly all leading colleges and universities offer opportunities to students of exceptional academic ability from underrepresented and socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. It is always possible to recruit academically gifted students from across the spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds. This way, a measure of diversity can be achieved without actually drawing more deeply from the broader talent pool of socioeconomically and ethnically diverse populations. As Robert Gordon observes, “Presidents of Ivy League colleges and other elite schools point to the lavish subsidies they provide as tuition discounts for low- and middle-income students, but this leaves behind the vast majority of American college students who are not lucky or smart enough to attend these elite institutions.” But intelligence is distributed throughout the population, and for many it manifests through skills, abilities, and experiences that current admissions protocols disregard. Admissions policies that merely skim from the conventionally defined top shortchange countless gifted and creative individuals. At issue is not the education of students from the top 5 percent of their high school classes, which represents business as usual at gold standard institutions, but rather the imperative to educate the top 25 percent to very high levels of achievement.

Economist and former Princeton president William G. Bowen and colleagues Martin Kurzweil and Eugene Tobin have framed this dilemma as a contest between “equity and excellence in American higher education.” In their acclaimed 2005 book of that name, they describe a “simmering debate over whether it is better to educate a small number of people to a very high standard or to extend educational opportunities much more broadly—even if this means accepting a somewhat lower standard of performance and, in general, spreading resources more thinly.” Equity and excellence are complementary, the authors observe, because talent is distributed throughout the socioeconomic spectrum; national competitiveness in educational attainment depends on extending opportunities to sufficient numbers from all demographic strata; diversity enhances the quality of the educational experience; and the success of our democracy depends on an educated citizenry. “In its most shallow construction, this linkage [between equity and excellence] takes the form of a direct, zero-sum tradeoff between the two ideals.” To move beyond this justification for the exclusionary business model, “society at large can build the educational scale that it requires only if its institutions of higher education tap every pool of talent.”

The New American University model attempts to transcend this self-aggrandizing zero-sum trade-off. The model brooks no compromise in the quality of knowledge production and insists that equity is attained only when all academically qualified students are offered an opportunity for access regardless of socioeconomic background. Whereas other assessments underscore focus on the socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically underrepresented, the New American University model embraces equally students from all demographic strata capable of accomplishment in a research-grade milieu, including the gifted and creative students who do not conform to a standard academic profile.

A prototype for the New American University model

Accessibility is by no means the sole dimension to the New American University model, nor the exclusive focus of our book. But inasmuch as access to knowledge underpins every societal objective in a pluralistic democracy, accessibility is at the core of the reconceptualization of Arizona State University (ASU), which represents the foundational prototype for the New American University. In the course of a decade, ASU reconstituted its curriculum, organization, and operations through a deliberate design process undertaken to build an institution committed to the pursuit of discovery and knowledge production, broad socioeconomic inclusiveness, and maximization of societal impact. The academic community has been consciously engaged in an effort to accelerate a process of institutional evolution that might otherwise have proceeded, at best, only incrementally, or possibly in the face of crisis. Initiated in part in response to the unprecedented shift in the regional demographic profile in one of the fastest-growing states in the nation, the design process constitutes an experiment at full institutional scale and in real time. We offer our account of the reconceptualization as a case study in innovation in American higher education.

To revive the social compact implicit in American public higher education, ASU revived the intentions and aspirations of the historical public research university model, which sought to provide broad accessibility as well as engagement with society. ASU resolved to expand enrollment capacity, promote diversity, and offer accessibility to world-class research and scholarship to a diverse and heterogeneous student body that includes a significant proportion of students from socioeconomically diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, including a preponderant share of first-generation college applicants. ASU thus implemented admissions policies similar to those of the University of California in the 1950s and 1960s. ASU’s attempt to realize an academic platform that combines world-class teaching and research with broad accessibility may be likened to coupling the research-intensive milieu of the University of California system with the accessibility offered by the Cal State system.

How is the experiment doing? Soaring enrollment growth has been accompanied by unprecedented increases in degree production, freshman persistence, minority enrollment, growth in research infrastructure and sponsored expenditures, academic accomplishment both for scholars and students, and the transdisciplinary reconfiguration of academic organizations around broad societal challenges rather than historically entrenched disciplines. Enrollment has risen from 55,491 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in the fall of 2002 to 83,301 in the fall of 2014—roughly a 50 percent increase. Degree production has increased even more sharply—more than 67 percent. ASU awarded 19,761 degrees in the academic year 2013–2014, including 5,380 graduate and professional degrees, up from 11,803 during ] 2002–2003. The university has conferred more than 100,000 degrees during the past six academic years. Minority enrollment from the fall of 2002 through the fall of 2014 increased 146 percent, currently constituting 34 percent of the total student population.

Leading scholars are increasingly attracted to and inspired by our academic community. Our faculty roster includes recipients of prestigious national and international honors, including three Nobel laureates and more memberships in the National Academies than during the entire history of the institution. And as a consequence of an ambitious expansion of the research enterprise, research-related expenditures over the period fiscal year (FY)2002 to FY2014 have grown by a factor of 3.5—without significant growth in the size of the faculty—reaching a record $425 million in FY 2014, up from $123 million in FY 2002. This, without a medical school, and during a period of declining federal research and development (R&D) investment, no less. Among U.S. universities with research portfolios exceeding $100 million in expenditures, ASU has hosted one of the fastest-growing research enterprises over the period FY2007 to FY2012, according to data from the National Science Foundation. ASU has outperformed peer institutions in this context, with total research expenditures growing 62 percent from FY2007 to FY2012, more than 2.5 times the average growth rate of its peer institutions.

We want to emphasize the significant simultaneous progress made by ASU on measures that are supposed to be contradictory. Increases in degree production, socioeconomic diversity, minority enrollment, and freshman persistence; improvements in academic achievement and faculty accomplishment and diversity; and the expansion of the research enterprise have been realized in a university committed to offering admission to all academically qualified Arizona residents regardless of financial need, and to maintaining a student body representative of the socioeconomic diversity of America. Improvement of graduation rates or freshman persistence could readily be achieved by limiting admissions to ever-more handpicked selections of graduating high school seniors. ASU has done it by offering admission to a widening range of academically qualified students of varied and diverse backgrounds to whom admission to a world-class research university would otherwise be denied. And it has done so in a period of both robust enrollment growth and historic disinvestment in public higher education. The New American University model defies the conventional wisdom that correlates excellence with exclusivity, which generally means the exclusion of the majority of qualified applicants.

Toward new models for the American research university

Unable or unwilling to accommodate our nation’s need to deliver superior higher education to millions of new students, most major research universities, both public and private, appear content to maintain the status quo and seek prestige through ever-increasing exclusivity. But success in maintaining excellence in a small number of elite institutions does little to advance our society or ensure continued national competitiveness. The issue of broad accessibility to research-grade academic platforms is far more urgent than policymakers realize, even those on the national stage charged with advancing higher education policy. Our national discussion on higher education must not simply focus on the production of more college graduates. Mere access for greater numbers to rudimentary forms of instruction will not deliver desired societal outcomes—on this point, Peter Thiel is exactly right. The imperative is to ensure that far more students —an order of magnitude more—have access to research-grade academic platforms that deliver advanced skills commensurate with the demands of the knowledge economy.

Our nation must begin in earnest to build a higher education infrastructure proportional to the task of educating to competitive levels of achievement not only the conventionally measured top 5 percent but the most capable 25 percent of academically qualified students representative of the socioeconomic and intellectual diversity of our society. The demand for advanced teaching and research, and for the production of new ideas, products, and processes that are its outputs, is at a fever pitch that far exceeds the current supply. Appropriate historical models from which to derive a course of action do not exist. Entrenched assumptions and rigid social constructs hinder adaptability, even though inherent design limitations hamper rapid change in response to real-time demand. Risk-taking in the academic sector is thus essential if our society is to thrive. As de facto national policy, excluding the majority of academically qualified students from the excellence of a research-grade university education is counterproductive and ethically unacceptable. To accelerate the evolution of our research universities, we must develop new models that insist upon and leverage the complementarities and synergies between discovery and accessibility.

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The Triumph of America's Research University

Since the 19th century, the institutions’ thinkers have discovered a dazzling array of new knowledge—yet attacks on academic freedom mean all their potential is now at risk.

Most members of the educated public probably think of America’s greatest universities in terms of undergraduate and professional education—in terms of teaching and the transmission of knowledge rather than the creation of new knowledge. This point of view is completely understandable. They are concerned about the education of their children and grandchildren or relate to their own educational experience.

But what has made American research universities the greatest in the world has not been the quality of their undergraduate education or their ability to transmit knowledge, as important as that is. Instead, it’s been their ability to fulfill one of the other central missions of great universities: the production of new knowledge through discoveries that change our lives and the world.

The teaching of undergraduate and graduate students is critically important and an integral part of the mission of great universities; some do this very well, others in a less distinguished manner. In many ways, such teaching is the faculty member’s first calling. At least at the graduate level, many of the great research discoveries are produced through a collaboration between a faculty member and her students. At the undergraduate level, there is, in fact, contrary to popular belief, a modest positive association between the quality of a professor’s research and the assessed quality of her teaching. But, the fulfillment of the undergraduate teaching mission is not what has made America’s universities the best in the world.

When educated Americans think of their best universities, they probably don’t think that lasers, FM radio, magnetic resonance imaging, global positioning systems, bar codes, the algorithm for Google, the fetal monitor, the nicotine patch, antibiotics, the Richter Scale, Buckyballs and nanotechnology, the discovery of the insulin gene, the origin of computers, of bioengineering through the discovery of recombinant DNA, transistors, improved weather forecasting, cures for childhood leukemia, the pap smear, scientific agriculture, methods for surveying public opinion, the concept of congestion pricing, human capital, or “the self-fulfilling prophecy” all had their origins in the country’s research universities. Even the electric toothbrush, Gatorade, the Heimlich maneuver, and Viagra had their origins at these great universities. These institutions have become the engines of innovation and discovery that now drive a large part of the economic growth and social change in the United States.

Of course, there are other great universities in Europe and Asia, but there is arguably no system of higher learning that matches that in the U.S.—as determined by the number of Nobel Prize winners it’s produced ( 350-plus ), the impact of its discoveries , the multiple international rankings that have American research universities at about 75 percent of the top 50 institutions and about 60 percent of the top 100. What, then, has made these universities the envy of the world? And how, in less than 75 years, have they become the preeminent backbone of higher education internationally—the place where many of the brightest and most able young people want to attend and work?

The American research university was born a century after the American Revolution, when Johns Hopkins University opened its doors in 1876. It was an amalgam of the British Oxbridge undergraduate system and the German emphasis on research; Hopkins’s focus on inquiry and experimentation drew the attention of some of the late 19th century’s great academic minds—people like Henry A. Rowland, who became the first president of the American Physical Society. America’s research universities, even in their early years, were far more open and democratic than their European counterparts.

Perhaps more importantly, the system was, from the beginning, fiercely competitive. Even in its neonatal state it represented the beginning of academic free agency; it was always competing with other institutions to be the best. The renowned Columbia University physicist I.I. Rabi in the 1930s said that the United States had young people as talented as any in the world, but that it lacked the established leadership found at great German, English, and French universities. As it turned out, the nightmare that was created by Hitler’s National Socialism represented, ironically, a boom for American research universities. The migration of Jews and others at risk in Europe—including intellectuals in virtually all fields—propelled the American higher-education system forward.

When this talent was combined with the internalization of the extraordinary value system that derived from the science revolutions of 17th-century England, the United States created the foundation on which great research universities could be built. Those core values included meritocracy; organized skepticism (the willingness to entertain the most radical of ideas, but subject the claims to truth and fact to the most rigorous scrutiny); the creation of new knowledge; the belief that discoveries should be available to everyone and that those that make discoveries should not profit from them; the peer-review system that relies on experts to judge the quality of proposed research that’s seeking funding; and academic freedom and free inquiry, without which no great university can be established. These values became part of the culture of America’s great research universities.

To be sure, these were ideals that have yet to be reached. Some of these values have, in fact, eroded over the past 25 years with the increased commodification of the university and the desire by universities and their faculty members to gain income from things like patented discoveries and from contracts with business that want to be associated with a university’s football or basketball team. But essentially, these values have represented the foundation on which these universities have been built.

Add to these values the implementation after World War II of the most enlightened federal science policy that the world has ever produced—one that used taxpayer money to fund research; that outsourced the work to the great universities on a competitive basis; that linked research and teaching by concentrating the training of advanced students with laboratory work with a leading professor; that produced funding for veterans to return to school and to those who could not afford college without financial aid; and that granted great autonomy to universities in exchange for the production of new discoveries, increased human capital, and more enlightened citizens—then you have some of the conditions that led to the international preeminence of the American research-university system.

Looking at the people who live in this community of scholars offers perhaps the best way to convey how research, combined with teaching, is the principal determinant of a university’s greatness. Take Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biology professor working with students from around the world who’s doing fundamental science at an extremely high level in her laboratory at Princeton University. She is charismatic and has won almost every prestigious award a scientist can hope for. Bassler works with bacteria that can cause lethal diseases such as anthrax, and her goal, of course, is to make fundamental discoveries that will lead to cures or treatments for these diseases.

She wants to develop molecules that will act as antimicrobial drugs aimed at bacteria that can cause lethal diseases. It turns out that these lethal bacteria are impotent against the human immune system when they attack it alone—but they have the ability to talk to each other (chemically), to strategize, and to attack the immune system at its weakest point. When they attack in great numbers, they can overwhelm a human’s immune system; Bassler and her students and colleagues want to find a way to stop the bacterial from “talking.”

Bassler is, of course, only one of thousands of extraordinarily talented scientists in America’s research universities who train a multinational group of students—who effectively become their extended family members—in how to conduct the research necessary to make profound discoveries. She and other world-class scientists and engineers and humanists show just how deeply embedded teaching is in the research function of America’s great universities. Postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and occasionally undergraduates are learning through doing—they are rubbing minds with some of the most original thinkers of the era. Even if this is not the teaching that the public hears most about, it is going on in abundance at the country’s major universities, and accounts for the research discoveries and innovations that they’re spearheading. Moreover, these research communities have become even more important amid the demise of so many prominent industrial research laboratories, such as the Bell Labs or Xerox laboratories.

Yet all of this research potential is now at risk. Academic freedom and free inquiry are under attack from many political leaders who endorse anti-science positions and who interfere with the relative autonomy of these institutions. The compact between the federal government and the universities is frayed, with weakening trust on both sides leading to thousands of federal government regulations, the stagnation of research budgets, unnecessary controls on research,  false claims that the universities are bilking the taxpayer, and, ultimately, the loss of American supremacy in some important research areas.

The universities, looking for new sources of revenue while competing for students and faculty, are increasingly becoming commodities—businesses to be run. Visa policies are far too restrictive—preventing unusual and creative talent from staying in the United States and working at its distinguished postsecondary institutions. There are few great, outspoken, and courageous higher-education leaders who have a vision for the future and the capacity to introduce significant change at their institutions. There are even fewer leaders who have “quitting issues”— who would be willing to resign when others undermine his or her core values. These threats represent real challenges for American universities’ continued preeminence and to the character of these great institutions of higher learning.

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The story behind the modern university.

Many of us take for granted that universities are a natural home for both research and teaching. But that wasn’t always the case: When the first U.S. and European colleges were established, they were largely religious institutions, designed to reinforce sectarian ideas and beliefs.

“Probably the most charitable reading was that they [offered preparation] for a learned clergy,” said Emily J. Levine , an associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE). “At worst, they were finishing schools…. These were not places that inspired awe in science and innovation.”

On this episode of School’s In , Levine, author of the new book Allies and Rivals (University of Chicago Press, 2021), joined GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope to talk about how academic entrepreneurs both competed and collaborated to shape the modern research university.

GSE Associate Professor Emily J. Levine

Levine, one of the principal investigators of a new Stanford Changing Human Experience grant, “Recovering the University as a Public Good,” also shared some of the lessons the institution’s history offers about academic leadership today.

The model for a university devoted to both research and teaching, Levine said, didn’t emerge until the 19th century, in Germany, with the rise of the nation-state. The German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt was tapped to create an institution that would cultivate civil servants and support a more competitive military – while providing scholars the autonomy to pursue their own areas of study. 

This hybrid institution became “the envy of the world,” Levine said, and drew thousands of American students to Germany for a singular educational experience. After returning home to the United States, many went on to become university presidents.

The traditional narrative, she said, has American returnees importing the German model to America. But Levine’s research reveals a more complicated story. 

“They [didn’t] just cut and paste the German graduate school,” she said. “They [created] a new hybrid institution of their own.”

As Germans and Americans – the “allies and rivals” of the book’s title – competed for world leadership, they collaborated to innovate in educational models. The process of “competitive emulation,” Levine said, gave rise to the now-familiar institution replicated around the globe.

This history offers lessons for academic leaders today, said Levine. “What we see among these academic entrepreneurs … is that they’re very skilled at moving back and forth between different circles: between the scholars and their values of science and pure research, and the needs of society, be they economic or political,” she said. “You often don’t know what side they’re really on, which I think is key. The chameleon-like quality of that negotiation required to move across this complex terrain is really what we need in our leaders today.”

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February 9, 2021

A new type of university is emerging to meet the challenges of today

by Arizona State University

The world is changing rapidly and in order to serve the human population dealing with those changes, American universities need to change, too. In fact, their role is to model the resiliency that all institutions need to embrace, according to Arizona State University President Michal M. Crow.

While many leading universities are poised to advance society and help respond to the challenges of disruptive change through their traditional role in education and discovery, many face a number of barriers that make them less prepared to respond to the rapidly changing conditions and the demands they create.

What is emerging is a new type of university, one that steps beyond the American research university model and is nimble and responsive, takes responsibility for what happens outside its walls and can scale up to meet the demands and challenges of modern society. ASU President Michael Crow says they are part of the "fifth wave" of universities.

Crow's comments came today (Feb. 9, 2021) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Crow's presentation, "A new evolution of research universities," touched on the history of universities, outlined the challenges they face today and explained how new universities of the fifth wave will rise to meet those challenges.

In his recent book "The Fifth Wave," (written with ASU senior research fellow William Dabars) Crow describes the emerging standard of research universities that will better align them with the needs of society in many ways, including contributing solutions to global problems.

The fifth wave is a manifestation of a new wave of American universities, a model embraced and advanced by Arizona State University. These universities are egalitarian, accessible, based in community impact and measured against social outcomes. They are scalable, they are technologically sophisticated and advanced. They educate not hundreds of students, but thousands and tens of thousands of students, Crow said.

Many of today's leading universities are American research universities, which emerged nearly 140 years ago—the fourth wave of university evolution. These universities have a long history of contributions to society, such as breakthrough advances in the fundamental understanding of nature, advancing applied science on a multitude of fronts, and advancing human culture , human's sense of place and sense of self.

"This has all has been fantastic, but inadequate," Crow said. "Because what happened during the evolution of the research university is that it has become more exclusive, more limited to smaller and smaller fragments of society, and more and more isolated from larger aspects of society itself."

The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point on the limits of the traditional research university.

"America's universities were about as unprepared for this pandemic as one could possibly imagine," Crow said. "Suddenly, we didn't know how to communicate science well enough, we didn't know how to engage in complexity well enough, we didn't know how to cut and cross between disciplines well enough, and we didn't know how to build confidence around knowledge well enough."

The pandemic shows that what is needed is an additional type of university, not a replacement for the ones that exist and are exemplars today, but an additional type of higher educational institutions. "The fifth wave will allow us to do it," Crow said.

The "new" universities are responsive to the rapidly evolving needs of society. Their hallmarks include being inclusive in their educational philosophy and understanding that all people are lifelong learners; contributing to the challenges humans face today on a grand scale, like climate change and the current pandemic; taking stock in their immediate surroundings and being responsible for the success of that setting and of society as a whole.

"We are faced with an evolutionary moment. The role of the university, its role in discovery, its role in creativity, its role in innovation has never been more important and also its limits have never been clearer," Crow said. "The significant role going forward is figuring out the role of existing research universities and the role of emerging universities, including those that need to operate at a new scale, a new speed and a new egalitarianism."

Crow warned, though, that certain barriers exist that can thwart the evolution of fifth wave universities.

"We form athletic leagues, but we don't form climate change research leagues," he said. "The current model is to have faculty largely work in small centers and small groups, each attempting to advance their fields in a highly competitive way to beat out their competitors. This leaves little room for working on the scaled problems, like how do we manage our relationship with the planet, how will we facilitate cultural and economic competitiveness and do so to the benefit of a highly diverse population. How do we map between Western science, Western culture, Western technology and Indigenous science, Indigenous culture and Indigenous technology?"

Crow explained that in shaping the New American University model is the idea that the university will take responsibility for actions outside of the institution itself.

"If K-12 is underperforming, the institution is partly responsible," Crow said. "If 50% of students graduating from high school are inadequately prepared for the society in which we live, the universities and colleges are partly responsible."

Once the institution takes on that responsibility outside of its walls, then its contribution to society becomes real in a daily way.

"Then we will have the emergence of a new type of American research university, one which is devoted to the actual measured success of the society in which it is embedded," Crow added. "Not in an abstract intergenerational way but in a functional way. In a day-to-day way."

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• Published: 26 January 2017

Higher education: The making of US academia

• Rogers Hollingsworth 1  

Nature volume  541 ,  pages 461–462 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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Rogers Hollingsworth traces the European influence on US research universities that began some 150 years ago.

The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook

• Louis Menand,
• Paul Reitter &
• Chad Wellmon

Vast technological, economic and political shifts are putting pressure on research universities, prompting heated debate over the nature, goals and value of these institutions. More than a century ago, there were similar debates in both Germany and the United States, where the German model was widely admired. Scholars argued over issues such as local autonomy versus central control, scientific breadth versus depth and emphasis on teaching over research. From around 1870 to 1920, the US research university took shape in new institutions including Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the University of Chicago in Illinois, and through reform at established universities such as Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Rise of the Research University — edited by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon — brings together 30 historical essays to shine a light on the evolution of German and US research universities during those years. Pieces by the likes of philosophers Friedrich Schiller, Johann Fichte and Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, are newly translated from German. The US offerings include essays by noted educators such as Henry Tappan, first president of the University of Michigan and a strong proponent of the German model; Charles William Eliot of Harvard; William Rainey Harper and Robert Maynard Hutchins, both of the University of Chicago; and Noah Porter of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The editors have also written valuable commentaries.

The essays range broadly. Some describe German research universities in the late nineteenth century. Others are reflections by US educators on the influence of German universities, or — like 'The Utility of Universities' (1885) by Johns Hopkins' first president, Daniel Coit Gilman — discuss the value of universities to society. There are essays on the emergence of higher education for women in Germany, and undergraduate education in the United States. Considerable attention is paid to the impact of US culture on its universities (as in Eliot's 'The New Education'; 1869) and on these institutions' important role in promoting and maintaining democratic society.

The Rise of the Research University delves into telling dissimilarities between the US and German models. The nineteenth-century German university tended to emphasize pure rather than applied research, and expected professors to be exemplary in both research and teaching. In time, the emphasis shifted to breadth over depth. Germany also has had many fewer professors per university than the United States — in part because of the common requirement for a habilitation (a degree beyond the PhD) to obtain a professorship. In the United States, expectations that professors should become specialized in teaching and research mean that universities have needed more of them. German federal state ministers have also occasionally influenced university appointments and approved curricula; US research universities have had much more autonomy.

By the early twentieth century, some of Germany's most distinguished professors began to demand better opportunities for specialized research, and to take on fewer students. They found those opportunities at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, created in 1911 and renamed the Max Planck Institutes after the Second World War. Many leading scientists emerged from these institutes — Nobel laureates such as Richard Willstätter, Fritz Haber, Otto Meyerhoff and Otto Warburg. (In fact, universities have protested that the institutes have co-opted the most talented scientists.)

As this volume shows, the US trajectory was very different, despite the efforts of academics trained in or influenced by the German model. Graduate programmes began to emerge largely from undergraduate instruction (particularly in northeastern institutions such as Harvard and Yale, where they were grafted on to the collegiate system). With the exception of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 — which gave land to states, enabling them to finance public agricultural and technical colleges — the US government was relatively uninvolved in research universities until after the Second World War. Public universities have dominated in the US Midwest, West and South, although these regions also have exceptional private research universities. Public universities have been more democratic about admissions, have had more students (graduate and undergraduate) and have been more vocationally oriented. To a greater extent than in Germany, many US professors have become academic entrepreneurs — teaching what they wish, developing their own research programmes, moving from discipline to discipline, obtaining large research grants that permit establishment of small firms and securing patents.

After the Second World War, the US federal government became a major source of research funding, through the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the departments of defence, energy, agriculture and education. This influenced the research agendas of universities — facilitating both basic and applied research — and the number of researchers. US universities have also long had more funding from private foundations than have German institutions.

By the end of the twentieth century, many US public research universities had, unlike Germany's, become huge, bureaucratic, self-organizing and vastly complex. Some have numerous vice-chancellors, provosts and vice-provosts; more than half a dozen colleges (each with deans, associate deans and assistant deans); colleges with multiple departments (some with as many as 90 highly specialized faculty members); sprawling hospitals; and huge athletic programmes. Some have also managed large federal laboratories. And today, US universities seem to be in existential flux, questioning their size, function, structure, nature, philosophical bases and monumental student fees.

The Rise of the Research University charts how unpredictable and unstable university systems have been on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It reveals that academic soul-searching about the role of research universities is as prevalent now as it was 150 years ago. But it also shows how important these bodies remain, in both the United States and Europe, in advancing understanding of the world.

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• > The European and American University since 1800
• > The modern university: the three transformations

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• Notes on the contributors
• Introduction: universities and ‘higher education’
• Part I Fact and ideals in liberal education
• Part 2 The State, the university, and the professions
• Part 3 The ambiguities of university research in Sweden and the United States
• Part 4 Complexity
• Part 5 The ironies of university history
• 9 The modern university: the three transformations

9 - The modern university: the three transformations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Introduction

The university is, together with the Church, the most time-honoured of all present-day macro-societal institutions. Yet arguably it is also the most innovative. It is the source of our ever-growing technical mastery of nature and of the meaning we attribute to that mastery. Bits and pieces of university-based knowledge constantly trickle into the daily discourse of society, provide information and ammunition for public debate, and, more fundamentally but also more inadvertently, for basic reconceptualisations of societal order.

Modern social science emerged in a university environment as part of the efforts of individuals to understand the wide-ranging effects of industrialisation, urbanisation, and deep-seated social change. This process of change also posed questions as to the nature and possibility of a cultural identity beyond the limited experiential horizons of traditional rural society. There was also a close link between the new social sciences and a general societal concern about the formation of new political and cultural institutions to cope with the changing social conditions. One important part of these institutional transformations focused on the shaping of more effective representative and administrative institutions in the new and reformed nation-states, but another was directly concerned with public affairs, such as new social policies to help solve the so-called social question, die soziale Frage .

Yet for all the innovative capacity of contemporary universities, the research function is relatively new. It is co-terminous with the nineteenth-century transformation of universities from institutions for the trans- mission of a received body of knowledge to generally immature adolescents into research-oriented institutions, the ‘axial’ institutions of the modern world.

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• The modern university: the three transformations
• By Björn Wittrock
• Edited by Sheldon Rothblatt , University of California, Berkeley , Bjorn Wittrock , Göteborgs Universitet, Sweden
• Book: The European and American University since 1800
• Online publication: 04 August 2010
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511720925.010

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A NEW MODEL FOR THE AMERICAN RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

A New Model for the American Research University

Equity and excellence: William Dabars presents a new institutional design  

BERKELEY, CA, Nov. 2, 2015 – William Dabars will discuss his new book,  Designing the New American University , which he co-authored with Arizona State University president Michael M. Crow, in a talk on Nov. 5 th  at Berkeley.  The book examines the American research university in its contemporary societal context and posits the imperative for a new institutional model.

America’s research universities consistently dominate global rankings but may be entrenched in a model that no longer accomplishes their purposes. With their multiple roles of discovery, teaching, and public service, these institutions represent the gold standard in American higher education, but their evolution since the nineteenth century has been only incremental.  America’s leading institutions have become increasingly exclusive and define – indeed, precisely quantify – their excellence through admissions practices based on the exclusion of the majority of academically qualified applicants.  Limited access- ibility to research-grade institutions is out of proportion with workforce projections that indicate a shortfall by 2018 of three million educated workers.

 In  Designing the New American University  (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), Crow and Dabars argue that institutions themselves must re-conceptualize their design, especially in terms of scale and accessibility.  They present a new institutional model intended for a subset of public research universities to complement the highly successful existing model. As they have written, their model combines three foundational design components:

1) anacademic platform committed to discovery and knowledge production, as with the standard model, linking pedagogy with research;

2) broad accessibility to students from highly diverse demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds and;

3) through its breadth of activities and functions, an institutional commitment to maximizing societal impact commensurate with the scale of enrollment demand and the needs of our nation.

The objective of the new model is to produce not only knowledge and innovation, but also students who are adaptive master-learners, empowered to integrate a broad array of interrelated disciplines and negotiate over their lifetimes the changing workforce demands and shifts in the knowledge economy driven by continual innovation.

In their book, Crow and Dabars observe that equity and excellence are complementary because talent is distributed throughout the socioeconomic spectrum; national competitiveness in educational attainment depends on extending opportunities to sufficient numbers from all demographic strata. The authors state, “Society at large can build the educational scale that it requires only if its institutions of higher education tap every pool of talent.”

“The issue of broad accessibility to research-grade academic platforms is far more urgent than policymakers realize.  The imperative is to ensure that far more students have access to academic platforms that deliver advanced skills commensurate with the demands of the knowledge economy.” In their book, the authors assert that the nation must build a higher education infrastructure for not only the top five percent but for the most capable 25 percent of academically qualified students from all segments of our society.  The authors state:

 “The demand for advanced teaching and research and for the production of new ideas, products, and processes that are its outputs is at a fever pitch that far exceeds the current supply.”

 “As de facto national policy, excluding the majority of academically qualified students from the excellence of a research-grade university education is counterproductive and ethically unacceptable. To accelerate the evolution of our research universities, we must develop new models that insist upon and leverage the complementaries and synergies between discovery and accessibility.”

Carol Christ, Director of Center for Studies in Higher Education, will moderate the presentation by William Dabars at Barrows Hall, 8 th  Floor, Social Science Matrix, from  4-5pm on Thursday, 11/5

Sponsored by: The Center for Studies in Higher Education and the Social Science Matrix

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

William Dabars  is Senior Research Fellow for University Design and Director of Research for the New American University in the Office of the President, Arizona State University. Dabars is also an associate research professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and an affiliate scholar in the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO).  Dabars has served in various research capacities for the University of Southern California, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Getty Research Institute, and as a consultant for the Getty Conservation Institute and University of Colorado, Boulder.  He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Carol Christ istheDirector, Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley; former President, Smith College; and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, UC Berkeley.

Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE ) was established in 1956 and was the first research institute in the United States devoted to the study of systems, institutions, and processes of higher education.  The Center’s mission is to produce and support multi-disciplinary scholarly perspectives on strategic issues in higher education, to conduct relevant policy research, to promote the development of a community of scholars and policymakers engaged in policy-oriented discussion, and to serve the public as a resource on higher education.   http://cshe.berkeley.edu

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AP US 2 > Chapter 25 > Flashcards

Chapter 25 Flashcards

Settlement houses, such as Hull House, engaged in all of the following activities except

evangelical religious instruction

One of the early symbols of the dawning era of consumerism in urban America was

large department stores

Which one of the following has the least in common with the other four

bedroom communities

The New Immigrants who came to the United States after 1880

were culturally different from previous immigrants

A bird of passage was an immigrant who

came to America to work for a short time and then returned to Europe

New Immigrant groups were regarded with special hostility by mainly nativist Americans because

their religions were distinctly different and some New Immigrants were politically radical

While big city political bosses and their machines were often criticized, they proved necessary and effective in the new urban environment because

they were more effective in serving urban immigrants’ needs than weak state or local governments

The major factor in drawing country people off the farm and into the big cities was the

availability of industrial jobs

Prominent Protestant pastors like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden argued that

the Christian Gospel required that churches address poverty and other burning social issues of the day

In the new urban environment, most liberal Protestants

rejected biblical literalism and adapted religious ideas to modern culture

Besides serving immigrants and the poor in urban neighborhoods, settlement workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley

actively lobbied for social reforms like anti-sweatshop laws and child labor laws

The place that offered the greatest opportunities for American women in the period 1865-1900 was

the big city

In the 1890s, white collar positions for women as secretaries, department store clerks, and telephone operators were largely reserved for

native-born Americans

The vast majority of employed female workers in the late nineteenth century were

Labor unions favored immigration restriction because most immigrants were all of the following except

opposed to factory labor

The American Protective Association

supported immigration restrictions

The intellectual development that seriously disturbed the churches in the late nineteenth century was the

biology of Charles Darwin

The new, research-oriented modern American university tended to

de-emphasize religious and moral instruction in favor of practical subjects and professional specialization

Booker T. Washington believed that the key to political and civil rights for African Americans was

economic independence

That a talented tenth of American blacks should lead the race to full social and political equality with whites was the view of

W.E.B. DuBois

Black leader, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois

demanded complete equality for African Americans

Which of the following was not among the major new research universities founded in the post-Civil War era

Harvard University

The two late-nineteenth-century newspaper publishers whose competition for circulation fueled the rise of sensationalist yellow journalism were

William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer

American newspapers expanded their circulation and public attention by

printing sensationalist stories of sex and scandal

General Lewis Wallace’s book, Ben Hur

defended Christianity against Darwinism

American novelist’ turn from romanticism and transcendentalism to rugged social realism reflected the

materialism and conflicts of the new industrial society

By 1900, advocates of women’s suffrage

argued that the vote would enable women to extend their roles as mothers and homemakers to the public world

Which of the following sports was not developed in the decades following the Civil War

The Darwinian theory of organic evolution through natural selection affected American religion by

creating a split between religious conservatives who denied evolution and accomodationists who supported it

Henry George argued that the windfall real estate profits caused by rising land prices should be

taxed at a 100 percent rate by the government

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Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital to Our Nation's Prosperity and Security: Summary (2012)

Chapter: research universities and the future of america.

Research Universities

and the Future of America

America is driven by innovation — advances in ideas, products, and processes that create new industries and jobs, contribute to our nation’s health and security, and support a high standard of living. In the past half-century, innovation itself has been increasingly driven by educated people and the knowledge they produce. Our nation’s primary source of both new knowledge and graduates with advanced skills continues to be our research universities.

However, these institutions now face an array of challenges, from unstable revenue streams and antiquated policies and practices to increasing competition from universities abroad. It is essential that we as a nation reaffirm and revitalize the unique partnership that has long existed among research universities, the federal government, the states, and philanthropy, and strengthen its links with business and industry. In doing so, we will encourage the innovation that leads to high-quality jobs, increased incomes, and security, health, and prosperity for our nation.

A PARTNERSHIP FOR INNOVATION

As America pursues economic growth and other national goals, its research universities have emerged as a major national asset — perhaps even its most potent one. This did not happen by accident; it is the result of forward-looking and deliberate federal and state policies. These began with the Morrill Act of 1862, which established a partnership between the federal government and the states to build universities that would address the challenges of creating a modern agricultural and industrial economy for the 20th century.

The government–university partnership was expanded in the 1950s and 1960s to contribute to national security, public health, and economic growth. Through this expanded partnership, basic research — the source of new ideas for the long term — would be increasingly funded by the federal government and largely concentrated in the nation’s research universities.

This partnership, which over time grew to include industry and philanthropy, has led to significant benefits for America’s economy and quality of life. Lasers, radar, synthetic insulin, blood thinners, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computers, and rocket fuel are among the countless innovations in which university research has played an essential role. And talented graduates of these institutions have created and populated many new businesses that have employed millions of Americans.

NEW AND CRITICAL CHALLENGES

American research universities are widely recognized as the best in the world, admired for their education and research. They have the potential to drive innovation in areas important to America’s future, including health and medicine, energy security and efficiency, education, and defense and homeland security.

Yet research universities now confront critical pressures, including unstable revenue streams, demographic shifts in the U.S. population, changes in the organization and scale of research, and shifting relationships between research universities, government, and industry. Research universities also face growing competition from their counterparts abroad. While U.S. institutions have long attracted outstanding students and scholars from around the world who have contributed substantially to our research and innovative capacity, other countries are rapidly strengthening their institutions to compete for the best international students and for faculty, resources, and reputation.

With these developments in mind, we have identified a set of specific challenges and opportunities that a reasoned set of policies must address in order to produce the greatest return to our society, our security, and our economy:

• Federal funding for university research has been unstable and, in real terms, declining at a time when other countries have increased funding for research and development (R&D).

• State funding for higher education, already eroding in real terms for more than two decades, has been cut further during the recent recession.

• Business and industry have largely dismantled the large corporate research laboratories that drove American industrial leadership in the 20th century (e.g., Bell Labs), but have not yet fully partnered with research universities to fill the gap at a time when the new knowledge and ideas emerging from university research are needed by society more than ever.

• Research universities must improve management, productivity, and cost efficiency in both administration and academics.

• Young faculty have insufficient opportunities to launch academic careers and research programs.

• There has been an underinvestment in campus infrastructure, particularly in cyberinfrastructure that could lead to long-term increases in productivity, cost-effectiveness, and innovation in research, education, and administration.

• The cost of sponsored research is not fully covered by those who procure it, which means that universities have to cross-subsidize sponsored research from other sources.

• A burdensome accumulation of federal and state regulatory and reporting requirements increases costs and sometimes challenges academic freedom and integrity.

• Doctoral and postdoctoral preparation could be enhanced by shortening time-to-degree, raising completion rates, and enhancing programs’ effectiveness in providing training for highly productive careers.

• Demographic change in the U.S. population necessitates strategies for increasing the success of female and underrepresented minority students.

• Institutions abroad are increasingly competing for international students, researchers, and scholars.

The principles and recommendations that follow are designed to help federal and state policymakers, universities, and businesses overcome these hurdles and capitalize on these opportunities. Strong leadership — and partnership — will be needed by these parties if our research universities and our nation are to thrive.

REVITALIZING THE PARTNERSHIP

We believe that America’s research universities are today a key asset for our nation’s future. They are so because of the considered and deliberate decisions made in the past by policymakers, even in difficult times. Our future now depends on the willingness of our current policymakers to follow their example and make the decisions that will allow us to continue to compete, prosper, and shape our destiny.

It is essential that we as a nation reaffirm, revitalize, and strengthen substantially the unique partnership that has long existed among the nation’s research universities, the federal government, the states, and philanthropy by enhancing their individual roles and the links among them and also by providing incentives for stronger partnership with business and industry. In doing so, we will encourage the ideas and innovations that will lead to more high-end jobs, increased incomes, and the national security, health, and prosperity we expect.

Reaffirming and strengthening the unique partnership that has long existed among the nation’s research universities, the federal government, the states, and business will require:

• A balanced set of commitments by each of the partners — the federal government, state governments, research universities, and business and industry — to provide leadership for the nation in a knowledge-intensive world and to develop and implement enlightened policies, efficient operating practices, and necessary investments.

• The use of requirements for matching funds among these commitments, which provide strong incentives for participation at comparable levels by each partner.

• Sufficient flexibility to accommodate differences among research universities and the diversity of their stakeholders.

• A commitment to a decade-long effort that seeks both to address challenges and to take advantage of opportunities as they emerge.

• A recognition of the importance of supporting the comprehensive nature of the research university, spanning the full spectrum of academic and professional disciplines, including the physical, life, social, and behavioral sciences; engineering; the arts and humanities; and the professions, all of which enable universities to provide the broad research and education programs required by a knowledge- and innovation-driven global economy.

Within this partnership, our research universities — with a historical commitment to excellence, academic freedom, and service to society — must pledge themselves to a new level of partnership with government and business, strive anew to be the places where the best minds in the world want to work, think, educate, and create new ideas, and commit to delivering better outcomes for each dollar spent.

TEN STRATEGIC ACTIONS

We recommend ten actions designed to accomplish three broad goals:

Revitalizing the partnership. The first four actions will strengthen the partnership among universities, federal and state governments, philanthropy, and the business community in order to revitalize university research and speed its translation into innovative products and services.

Strengthening institutions. The next three actions will streamline and improve the productivity of research operations within universities.

Building talent. The final three actions will ensure that America’s pipeline of future talent in science, engineering, and other research areas remains creative and vital, leveraging the abilities of all of its citizens and attracting the best students and scholars from around the world.

Recommendation 1

Federal Action

Within the broader framework of U.S. innovation and R&D strategies, the federal government should adopt stable and effective policies, practices, and funding for university-performed R&D and graduate education so that the nation will have a stream of new knowledge and educated people to power our future, helping us meet national goals and ensure prosperity and security.

TO IMPLEMENT THIS RECOMMENDATION:

• The federal government should review and modify policies and practices governing university research and graduate education that have become burdensome and inefficient, such as research cost reimbursement, unnecessary regulation, and awkward variation and coordination among federal agencies.
• Over the next decade, as the economy improves, the federal government should invest in basic research and graduate education sufficient to produce the new knowledge and educated citizens the nation needs to reach its goals. As a core component of a national plan to raise total national R&D funded by all sources — government, industry, and philanthropy — to 3 percent of gross domestic product, Congress and the administration should provide full funding of the amount authorized by the America COMPETES Act, doubling the level of basic research conducted by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. A portion of the increase should be directed to high-risk, innovative research. Investment should also be sustained in other key areas, such as biomedical research.
• On an annual basis in the President’s annual budget request, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), together with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), should develop and present a federal science and technology budget that addresses priorities for sustaining a world-class U.S. science and technology enterprise. And every 4 years, OSTP and OMB should review federal science and technology spending and outcomes to ensure that spending is adequate to support our economy and targeted to meet national goals. We recommend that this process consider U.S. global leadership, a focus on developing new knowledge, balance in the science and technology portfolio, reliable and predictable streams of funding, and a commitment to merit review.

By completing funding increases that Congress has already authorized through the America COMPETES Act, the nation would ensure robust support for critical basic research programs, achieving a balanced research portfolio capable of driving the innovation necessary for economic prosperity. Together with cost-efficient regulation, this stable funding will enable universities to make comparable investments in research facilities and graduate programs. And because research and education are intertwined in universities, this funding will also ensure that we continue to produce the scientists, engineers, and other knowledge professionals the nation needs.

Recommendation 2

State Action

Provide greater autonomy for public research universities so that these institutions may leverage local and regional strengths to compete strategically and respond with agility to new opportunities. At the same time, restore state appropriations for higher education, including graduate education and research, to levels that allow public research universities to operate at world-class levels.

• State governments should move rapidly to provide their public research universities with sufficient autonomy and agility to navigate an extended period with limited state support.
• As state budgets recover from the current recession, states should strive to restore and maintain per-student funding for higher education, including public research universities, to the mean level for the 15-year period 1987-2002, as adjusted for inflation.
• Federal programs designed to stimulate innovation and workforce development at the state level, including those recommended in this report, should be accompanied by strong incentives to stimulate and sustain state support for their public universities, which are both state and national assets.

For states to compete for the prosperity and welfare of their citizens in a knowledge-driven global economy, the advanced education, research, and innovation programs provided by their research universities are absolutely essential. And the importance of these universities extends far beyond state borders; these institutions play a critical role in the prosperity, public health, and security of their regions and the entire nation.

However, an alarming erosion in state support for higher education over the past decade has put the quality and capacity of public research universities at great risk. State cuts in appropriations to public research universities over the years 2002 to 2010 are estimated to average 25 percent, ranging as high as 50 percent for some universities — resulting in the need for institutions to increase tuition or to reduce either activities or quality.

There has been a downward trend since the late 1980s in state and local funding per full-time student for public universities with high and very high levels of research, with the steepest decline starting in 2002.

While over time states should strive to restore appropriations that were cut during that decade, budget challenges and shifting priorities may make this very difficult in the near term. Therefore it is equally important for states to provide their public research universities with enough autonomy to navigate what could be an extended period with inadequate state funding. Both steps — restoring state funding and increasing university autonomy — are in the long-term interests of the states and the nation.

Recommendation 3

Strengthening Partnerships with Business

Strengthen the business role in the research partnership, facilitating the transfer of knowledge, ideas, and technology to society, and accelerate “time-to-innovation” in order to achieve our national goals.

• The federal government should continue to fund and expand research support mechanisms that promote collaboration and innovation.
• The federal government should, within the context of also making the R&D tax credit permanent, implement new tax policies that incentivize business to develop partnerships with universities (and other research organizations as warranted) for research that results in new economic activities located in the United States.
• The relationship between business and higher education should become more peer-to-peer in nature, stressing collaboration in areas of joint interest rather than remaining in a traditional customer-supplier relationship, in which business procures graduates and intellectual property from universities.
• Businesses and universities should work closely together to develop new graduate degree programs that address strategic workforce gaps for science-based employers.
• Collaboration among national laboratories, the business community, and universities is encouraged because the large-scale, sustained research projects of national laboratories both support and depend on the participation of university faculty and graduate students as well as the marketplace.
• Universities should improve management of intellectual property to improve technology transfer.

Using research support mechanisms that promote collaboration between business and universities will lead to the creation and efficient use of knowledge to achieve national goals. Tax incentives can also provide practical motivation to establish new partnerships. Although these tax policies will have a cost to the federal budget as a “tax expenditure,” it would be a relatively minor component of the cost of current proposals to make permanent the R&D tax credit. And the partnerships that result will generate new knowledge and ideas, achieving national goals in key policy areas and the economic growth and jobs that result from new activity. Meanwhile, improving university management of intellectual property will result in more effective dissemination of research results, generating economic activity and jobs.

Protecting Earth’s Ozone Shield

The ozone layer is an important component of Earth’s upper atmosphere that protects human health. Ozone absorbs medium-wavelength ultraviolet rays from the Sun, providing a protective barrier from harmful radiation that contributes to the development of skin cancer and cataracts in humans. Important work from American research universities has shown that the ozone layer is directly endangered by human activity — specifically by chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases released into the atmosphere by aerosol cans, older model refrigerators, and other sources.

NASA image of ozone hole over Antarctica, 1985.

In 1970, Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, then affiliated with Oxford University, demonstrated that nitric oxide reached the stratosphere and could deplete the ozone layer. Building on this work, Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California, Irvine, who had studied the properties of CFC gases, hypothesized that these gases could deplete the ozone layer as well. Based on their research, Molina and Rowland published an influential article in the journal Nature in 1974 that predicted the destruction of the ozone layer through the breakdown of CFC gases in the upper atmosphere. Two years later, a National Academy of Sciences report found strong scientific evidence to support the Rowland–Molina hypothesis, leading the United States and other governments to restrict use of CFC gases. In response to the environmental and health concerns raised by the hypothesis, the use of CFC gases in aerosol cans was banned in the United States in 1978.

Scientists release a balloon from McMurdo Station in Antarctica carrying instruments that measure ozone depletion in the stratosphere.

Seven years later, in 1985, a team of British scientists announced that they had discovered ozone depletion over Antarctica, proving the Rowland–Molina hypothesis correct. A global response to the crisis followed, with international agreements in 1985 and 1987 providing specific means for reducing the production and use of ozone-depleting substances. Fully in force by 1989, the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer relied on scientific findings from American research universities to build an international consensus on action to phase out the use of ozone-depleting substances. Had these steps not been taken, nearly two-thirds of Earth’s protective ozone would have been destroyed by 2065, according to a team of atmospheric chemists from NASA, Johns Hopkins University, and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

Recommendation 4

Improving University Productivity

Increase university cost-effectiveness and productivity in order to provide a greater return on investment for taxpayers, philanthropists, corporations, foundations, and other research sponsors.

• The nation’s research universities should set and achieve bold goals in cost containment, efficiency, and productivity in business operations and academic programs. Universities should strive to limit the cost escalation of all ongoing activities — academic and auxiliary — to the inflation rate or less through improved efficiency and productivity. In addition to implementing efficient business practices, universities should review existing academic programs from the perspectives of centrality, quality, and cost-effectiveness, adopting modern instructional methods such as cyberlearning. Universities should also encourage greater collaboration among research investigators and among research institutions, particularly in acquiring and using expensive research equipment and facilities.
• University associations should develop and make available more powerful and strategic tools for financial management and cost accounting that enable universities to determine the most effective ways to contain costs and increase productivity and efficiency. As part of this effort, they should develop metrics that allow universities to communicate their level of cost-effectiveness to the general public.
• Working together with key stakeholders, universities should intensify efforts to educate key audiences about the unique character of U.S. research universities and their importance to state, regional, and national goals, including economic prosperity, public health, and national security.

By increasing cost-effectiveness and productivity, institutions will realize significant cost savings in operations that may be used to improve their performance, allowing them to shift resources strategically and/or reduce growth in their need for resources such as tuition. Many institutions have already demonstrated that significant cost efficiencies are attainable. If research universities can take action, states and the nation will realize greater returns on their investments, and the savings associated with cost containment and greater productivity can then be deployed to other priorities such as constraining tuition increases, increasing student financial aid, or launching new programs.

Forensic DNA Analysis

Forensic DNA analysis — familiar to many from TV crime shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — produces reliable evidence used in criminal investigations and trials, helping to identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent. The technique, which depends on a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), became possible and practical because of discoveries at American research universities.

PCR works by repeatedly copying DNA, which is composed of two strands that fit together to form the now well-known double helix. First, the DNA is “unzipped” into two strands — a process that uses high heat — and then a copy of the segment of interest is made using an enzyme called DNA polymerase. This process is repeated multiple times to generate copies of the DNA sequence; having many copies of the sequence allows it to be read clearly and reliably. It is then possible to determine whether the DNA sequence in a piece of evidence — say, the root of a human hair — matches that of a suspect or victim.

Kary Mullis invented PCR in 1983 while working for Cetus Corporation, but at first the process was slow and impractical for wide use, because there was no version of DNA polymerase available that could endure the high temperatures needed to unzip the DNA, a step that happens repeatedly during the PCR process. To make it possible to do PCR quickly and reliably on a broad scale, Mullis and his colleagues drew on two discoveries by university researchers.

Thomas Brock of Indiana University stands next to Mushroom Spring in Yellowstone National Park, one of the hot springs where he and his colleagues found the bacterium Thermus aquaticus.

In 1969, Thomas Brock and Hudson Freeze of Indiana University had isolated the heat-loving bacterium Thermus aquaticus from thermal springs in Wyoming and California. In subsequent work in 1976 at the University of Cincinnati, John Trela and his coworkers isolated the DNA polymerase enzyme from Thermus aquaticus . Harnessing this enzyme — which continues to function despite the high heat used in the unzipping stage of the PCR cycle — allowed the Cetus researchers to turn PCR into an automated process, an advance that made the technology useful in the criminal justice system, the Human Genome Project, and a wide range of biotechnology applications.

Recommendation 5

A Strategic Investment Program

Create a Strategic Investment Program that funds initiatives at research universities critical to advancing education and research in areas of key national priority.

• The federal government should create a new Strategic Investment Program to support initiatives that advance education and research at the nation’s research universities. This should be designed as a “living” program that responds to changing needs and opportunities; as such, it will be composed of term-limited initiatives requiring matching grants in critical areas that will change over time. We recommend that the program begin with two 10-year initiatives: an endowed faculty chairs program to facilitate the careers of young investigators and a research infrastructure program initially focused on advancing campus cyberinfrastructure, but perhaps evolving later to address emerging needs for physical research infrastructure. Federal investments in these initiatives would be intended for both public and private research universities, and they would require institutions to obtain matching funds from states, philanthropy, business, or other sources. We recommend that the federal government support these first two initiatives in the Strategic Investment Program at $7 billion per year over the next decade. These funds will leverage an additional $9 billion per year through matching grants from other partners.
• Universities should compete for funding under these initiatives, bringing in partners — states, business, philanthropy, and others — that will support projects by providing required matching funds.

In the biomedical sciences, fewer recent doctorates are obtaining tenure-track faculty positions and, as this figure shows, the average age at receipt of one’s first NIH research grant has increased to over 43 years old.

This program will develop and enhance the human, physical, and cyberinfrastructure necessary for cutting-edge research and advanced education. The investment in rapidly evolving cyberinfrastructure will increase productivity and collaboration in research and may also increase productivity in administration and education. Also of critical importance is the endowment of chairs, particularly for promising young faculty, during a time of serious financial stress and limited faculty retirements. This initiative will ensure that we are building our research faculty for the future, so that the nation can reap the rewards of their work over the long term.

Recommendation 6

Full Federal Funding of Research

The federal government and other research sponsors should strive to cover the full costs of research projects and other activities they procure from research universities in a consistent and transparent manner.

• The federal government and other research sponsors should strive to support the full cost, direct and indirect, of research and other activities they procure from universities so that it is no longer necessary to subsidize these sponsored grants by drawing on resources intended to support other important university missions such as undergraduate education and clinical care. Both sponsored research policies and cost-recovery negotiations should be developed and applied in a consistent fashion across all federal agencies and academic institutions, public and private.

Over the past two decades, universities have had to cover an increasing share of the costs of research that the government has procured but not fully supported. If the government covers the full costs of research it procures, universities will be able to hold steady or reduce the amount of research funding they contribute from other sources, such as tuition revenue or patient clinical fees. Consequently, universities will be able to allocate their resources from other sources more strategically, directing them to the programs and purposes for which they were originally intended. This change will entail no net change in cost to the federal government, since federal coverage of a higher portion of indirect costs would, at the margins, shift part of federal research funding from direct to indirect costs.

Recommendation 7

Reducing Regulatory Burdens

Reduce or eliminate regulations that increase administrative costs, impede research productivity, and deflect creative energy without substantially improving the research environment.

• Federal policymakers and regulators (OMB, Congress, agencies) and their state counterparts should review the costs and benefits of federal and state regulations, eliminating those that are redundant, ineffective, inappropriately applied to the higher education sector, or that impose costs that outweigh the benefits to society.
• The federal government should also make regulations and reporting requirements more consistent across federal agencies so that universities can maintain one system for all federal requirements rather than several, thereby reducing costs.

Reducing or eliminating regulations can reduce administrative costs, enhance productivity, and increase the agility of institutions. Minimizing administrative and compliance costs will also provide a cost benefit to the federal government and to university administrators, faculty, and students by freeing up resources and time to support education and research efforts directly. With greater resources and freedom, universities will be better positioned to respond to the needs of their constituents in an increasingly competitive environment.

Although the staff time to review regulatory and reporting requirements has a small cost in the near term, the savings to universities and federal and state governments over the long run will be substantial. It is not feasible to estimate the savings in advance of a review, but we believe they could run into the billions of dollars over the next decade.

Making the Web Easy to Navigate

The first widely-used World Wide Web browser, NCSA Mosaic, heralded the beginning of a new era in the development and use of the Internet. In 1991 the Internet was largely a network connecting federal agencies, universities, and companies that was accessible only to those capable of navigating its cumbersome interface through dial-up connections. That changed with the development of the Mosaic browser, a university invention that transformed use of the Web by making it easier for people to navigate.

Funding provided under the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 promoted the development of the National Information Infrastructure, better known as the “information superhighway.” This legislation facilitated the work of researchers Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, who developed the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

A screen shot of the Mosaic home page from 1997, viewed in the Mosaic browser window.

Released publicly in 1993, Mosaic revolutionized how users accessed information on the Web and provided many of the fundamental tools of Web browsing we still use today, such as the “back” button, bookmarks, and the address bar. Although Mosaic ceased development in 1997, it influenced the development of later browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome.

Through Mosaic, and later through other browsers whose technology built upon Mosaic, the Web empowered individuals and stimulated online commerce. In recent years it has exploded into a major source of economic growth, technological innovation, and social interaction. It is not hard to see that the Web has changed the world, and a university’s development of the first popular Web browser played an essential role in that transformation.

Recommendation 8

Reforming Graduate Education

Improve the capacity of graduate programs to attract talented students by addressing issues such as attrition rates, time-to-degree, funding, and alignment with both student career opportunities and national interests.

• Research universities should restructure doctoral education to enhance pathways for talented undergraduates, improve completion rates, shorten time-to-degree, and strengthen the preparation of graduates for careers both in and beyond the academy.
• Research universities and federal agencies should ensure, as they implement the above measures, that they improve education across the full spectrum of research university graduate programs — including the social and behavioral sciences, the humanities, and the arts — because of the increasing breadth of academic and professional disciplines necessary to address the challenges facing our changing world.
• The federal government should significantly increase its support for graduate education through balanced programs of fellowships, traineeships, and research assistantships provided by all science agencies that depend upon individuals with advanced training.
• Employers — businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits — that hire master’s- and doctorate-level graduates should more deeply engage programs in research universities by providing internships, student projects, advice on curriculum design, and real-time information on employment opportunities.

The number of federal fellowships and traineeships should be increased to support 5,000 new graduate students per year in science and engineering, an investment amounting to $325 million in year 1 and climbing to a steady-state expenditure of $1.625 billion per year. This funding is not designed to increase the overall numbers of doctoral students per se, but to provide incentives for students to pursue areas responding to national needs and to shift support from research assistantships to mechanisms that strengthen doctoral training. Implementing other aspects of our recommendation will save money for the federal government, universities, and students. Improving completion rates and reducing time-to-degree in doctoral programs, for example, will increase the cost-effectiveness of federal and other investments in this area.

Overall, 57 percent of doctoral candidates complete their degrees by the end of 10 years, with a high of 64 percent in engineering and a low of 49 percent in the humanities.

On the whole, improving pathways to doctoral degrees will ensure that we draw strongly from among the “best and brightest” across fields that are critical to our nation’s future. Strengthening preparation of doctorates for a broad range of careers, not just those in academia, assists students in their careers, along with employers who need their staff to be productive in the short term.

Providing Data on U.S. Households

The Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), which collects data on a representative sample of the U.S. population over time, is the longest-running household survey of its kind. PSID has helped researchers and policymakers stay in touch with the status of individuals and families — including their income, social connections, and health — for more than 40 years. The survey was developed at an American research university with federal funding.

PSID began in 1968 at the University of Michigan with a survey of 5,000 households. The survey questions were designed to gather a wide range of information about each household — from family members’ income and education levels to the number of rooms in the house. Over time, the study has expanded and evolved. The study now surveys over 9,000 families every 2 years and has collected data on more than 70,000 individuals over the past four decades.

PSID has proved essential to understanding long-term trends in Americans’ labor market participation, family connections, and economic well-being. Last year, for example, the study found that 23 percent of families had no savings at all in liquid assets such as savings or checking accounts. Researchers from universities across the country use the survey’s data to investigate issues as diverse as the use of food stamps by different age groups, the effect of childhood relationships on future job performance, and the health effects of losing one’s job. By enabling this kind of research — which has both informed the development of laws and helped policymakers understand the impact of their work — American universities have contributed an essential data resource for the social sciences and the public.

Recommendation 9

STEM Pathways and Diversity

Secure for the United States the full benefits of education for all Americans, including women and underrepresented minorities, in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology.

• Research universities should engage in efforts to improve education for all students at all levels in the United States by reaching out to K-12 school districts and by taking steps to improve access and completion in their own institutions.
• Research universities should assist efforts to improve the education and preparation of those who teach science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects in grades K-12. Universities should also strive to improve undergraduate education, including persistence and completion rates in STEM.
• All stakeholders — the federal government, states, local school districts, industry, philanthropy, and universities — should take urgent, sustained, and intensive action to increase the participation and success of women and underrepresented minorities across all academic and professional disciplines, especially in science, mathematics, and engineering.

Our nation’s greatest asset is its people. Improving the educational success of our citizens at all levels improves our democracy, our culture and society, social mobility, and both individual and national economic success. As career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math continue to expand at a rapid pace, recruiting more underrepresented minorities and women into STEM careers and ensuring that they remain in the pipeline is essential not only for meeting the workforce needs of an increasingly technological nation, but also for obtaining the intellectual vitality and innovation necessary for economic prosperity, national security, and social well-being.

Latino, Black, and Native American students have significantly lower completion rates after 4 and 5 years of study in STEM fields than white and Asian American students.

A Sustainable Cancer Treatment

Nature provides researchers with many compounds that can potentially be used as drugs or precursors to drugs to treat a wide variety of human illnesses. Occasionally the harvesting of these natural compounds comes at a cost to the environment, as happened with the development of Taxol, a breakthrough drug in the treatment of ovarian, breast, and lung cancer. Taxol was isolated from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, a threatened species that is home to another threatened species, the spotted owl. Production of Taxol initially required harvesting enormous quantities of bark from the trees, leading to their destruction and a loss of habitat for spotted owls.

In response, chemist Robert Holton of Florida State University set out to find a method of producing Taxol that did not kill the Pacific yew trees. While others were looking for a completely synthetic alternative, Holton focused on finding a semi-synthetic method. After years of research, in 1991 Holton succeeded in developing a method that used only the needles and twigs from English yew trees, leaving the trees themselves to thrive. Taxol continues to be hailed as a fundamental anticancer tool, and research conducted at American universities resulted in an environmentally sustainable method for its preparation.

Spotted owl perching in a Pacific yew tree, old growth forest, Oregon.

Recommendation 10

International Students and Scholars

Ensure that the United States will continue to benefit strongly from the participation of international students and scholars in our research enterprise.

• Federal agencies should ensure that visa processing for international students and scholars who wish to study or conduct research in the United States is as efficient and effective as possible consistent with homeland security considerations.
• To ensure that a high proportion of non-U.S. doctoral researchers remain in the country, the federal government should streamline the processes for these researchers to obtain permanent residency or U.S. citizenship. The United States should consider taking the strong step of granting residency (a green card) to each non-U.S. citizen who earns a doctorate in an area of national need from an accredited research university. The Department of Homeland Security should set the criteria for and make selections of areas of national need and of the set of accredited institutions, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
• The federal government should proactively recruit international students and scholars.

The United States has benefited significantly over the past half-century and more from highly talented individuals who have come to this country from abroad to study or conduct research. Today, there is increasing competition for these students and researchers both in general and from their home countries. It is in our nation’s interest to attract and keep individuals who will create new knowledge or convert it to new products, industries, and jobs in the United States.

The number of doctoral degrees awarded to temporary visa holders (international students), shown here by field, is particularly high in the physical sciences and engineering.

Protecting Against Terrorism at U.S. Ports

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a major security concern has been that a terrorist group would try to smuggle nuclear or chemical weapons, or materials that could be used to make them, in one of the 10 million to 15 million cargo containers that enter U.S. ports every year. A new imaging technology that had its beginnings at an American university may enable rapid security screening of these containers without the need to physically inspect each one.

Nuclear resonance fluorescence imaging, which is being developed by researcher William Bertozzi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses gamma rays to determine the chemical composition of concealed materials. Bertozzi had been working on NRF imaging for over a decade when the 2001 attacks galvanized efforts to protect the nation against further attack. Private and government funding helped to establish a company dedicated to developing NRF as a method to image cargo.

Using rays that can penetrate even lead-lined vessels, this technology allows for fast, easy identification of the materials inside sealed containers. The continued development of NRF imaging may provide an efficient way to scan cargo entering American ports, improving security without disrupting the pace of international trade.

Research Universities and the Future of America presents critically important strategies for ensuring that our nation's research universities contribute strongly to America's prosperity, security, and national goals. Widely considered the best in the world, our nation's research universities today confront significant financial pressures, important advances in technology, a changing demographic landscape, and increased international competition. This report provides a course of action for ensuring our universities continue to produce the knowledge, ideas, and talent the United States needs to be a global leader in the 21st century.

Research Universities and the Future of America focuses on strengthening and expanding the partnership among universities and government, business, and philanthropy that has been central to American prosperity and security. The report focuses on the top 10 actions that Congress, the federal government, state governments, research universities, and others could take to strengthen the research and education missions of our research universities, their relationships with other parts of the national research enterprise, and their ability to transfer new knowledge and ideas to those who productively use them in our society and economy.

This report examines trends in university finance, prospects for improving university operations, opportunities for deploying technology, and improvement in the regulation of higher education institutions. It also explores ways to improve pathways to graduate education, take advantage of opportunities to increase student diversity, and realign doctoral education for the careers new doctorates will follow. Research Universities and the Future of America is an important resource for policy makers on the federal and state levels, university administrators, philanthropic organizations, faculty, technology transfer specialists, libraries, and researchers.

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A new history of faculty governance.

The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University by Larry G. Gerber. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Before the modern American university took shape in the 1870s, institutional governance was mainly in the hands of governing boards and the college presidents they appointed. This autocratic model of governance, Gerber argues, went hand in hand with a lack of professionalization among the teaching staff, who were often young, had no advanced training or specialized expertise, were not expected to engage in original research, and “often did not see teaching as a career but rather as a form of temporary employment before finding a pulpit or embarking on some other occupation.”

The period from the founding in 1876 of Johns Hopkins University as America’s first research-oriented institution to the formation in 1915 of the AAUP saw the emergence of the large, modern university in the United States. With its academic specialization, graduate education, and research orientation, the modern university was “predicated on the increasing professionalization of American faculty, who would use their new status” to make claims to a “greater role in institutional governance” and to the academic freedom necessary to “fulfill their mission as professionals.” As Gerber points out, the connection between expertise and academic freedom distinguished the latter from the more general freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. However, because faculty claims were based on expertise, they raised questions about which members of the teaching staff were qualified to participate in institutional governance, and they militated against trade unionism, which many professors considered to be incompatible with claims to professional status. Both of these issues, Gerber shows, have “spur[red] debate on American campuses to the present day.”

The expansion of higher education, an increasing faculty role in institutional governance, and the continuing professionalization of the faculty were closely associated during the interwar period from 1920 to 1940. This period also saw a “trend toward expanding involvement in institutional governance to include more—though by no means all—faculty members,” as well as efforts to unionize among faculty at the City College of New York. Although the CCNY faculty rejected the opposition between professionalism and unionism, their efforts highlighted an enduring “tension between arguments based on professional expertise and those putting more emphasis on purely democratic values.”

The golden age of American higher education from the Second World War to the mid-1970s was marked by the growth and rising global preeminence of American universities, the professionalism of the faculty, and the development of a broad consensus that “faculty should exercise primary responsibility over academic matters.” The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities , jointly formulated by the AAUP, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the American Council on Education, exemplified this consensus. Gerber describes the emergence of new challenges for faculty governance at the end of this period, including the rise of multi-campus systems, the changing national economy, and the surge in faculty unionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s (which the AAUP ultimately endorsed despite its earlier reservations). His discussion of the reasons for faculty unionism, the variation in faculty responses to unionism, and the relationship between faculty governance and unionization (which proved to be complementary in the “dual-track” system of collective bargaining) is especially illuminating.

Examining the changes since the mid-1970s that have undermined faculty governance, Gerber mainly emphasizes the rise of a “market model” of governance that empowers administrators, “consumers,” and corporate donors at the expense of a deprofessionalized faculty. Deprofessionalization is crucial to his argument because it represents a historic reversal of the status on which faculty claims to participate in governance previously rested. Deprofessionalization primarily takes the form of a growing proportion of non-tenure-track faculty, who have “fewer protections of their academic freedom” and “little prospect of developing full-time careers at a college or university” and therefore are less likely to develop a “long-term identification with the institution” where they teach.

Gerber concludes that the market model of governance is antithetical to “the ideal of professionalism . . . premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to advance the common good.” This model threatens not only the “broader democratic mission” of American colleges and universities but also their “global preeminence.” Just as professionalization was a necessary precondition for shared governance, a robust system of shared governance was indispensable to “a system of higher education that became the envy of the rest of the world.”

Academic freedom and faculty governance are threatened by political as well as market forces, and I wish Gerber had devoted more attention to the former. On the one hand, he only briefly notes the limitation of academic freedom by McCarthyism, and he says nothing about what in my view are comparable efforts today to blacklist Israeli scholars and institutions, which the AAUP rightly opposes as a threat to academic freedom. On the other hand, Gerber’s warnings about the dangers of the market model are familiar and convincing. They dovetail with my own experiences in Wisconsin, where the governor and legislative leaders are now threatening to strip shared governance and tenure from state law while imposing deep budget cuts on the state university system. In this instance it is political forces that brazenly promote the market model of governance.

Perhaps more controversial will be Gerber’s defense of professionalism. Some readers who share his critique of the market model may view professionalism with suspicion, assuming that it is elitist and antidemocratic, contrary to the broad class solidarity implied by unionism, or at odds with political activism. However, I think Gerber persuasively shows that professionalism can be articulated in more than one way, that it includes the ideal of public service, that it is compatible with unionism, and that it can provide an effective basis for mobilization and making political claims. In sum, he has written a valuable and accessible study about a subject of vital importance to American faculty, which every one of us should read.

Chad Alan Goldberg is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has served as a faculty senator and is a longtime member of United Faculty and Academic Staff, American Federation of Teachers Local 223. His e-mail address is  [email protected] .

Through an arrangement with the AAUP, Johns Hopkins University Press is offering a 30% discount off this book for AAUP members. Please order directly from the press's website, http://www.press.jhu.edu/ , using the discount code HWUP .

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APUSH Chapter 25 Flashcards

The tremendously rapid growth of American cities in the post-Civil War decades was:

A. uniquely American.

B. fueled by an agricultural system suffering from poor production levels.

C. attributable to the closing of the frontier.

D. a trend that affected Europe as well.

E. a result of natural reproduction.

The major factor in drawing country people off the farms and into the big cities was the

A. development of the skyscraper.

B. availability of industrial jobs.

C. compact nature of those large communities.

D. advent of new housing structures known as dumbbell tenements.

E. lure of cultural excitement.

In 1900, the two largest cities in the world were

A. Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

B. Paris and London.

C. Shanghai and Calcutta.

D. London and New York City.

E. Berlin and Madrid.

The development of electric trolleys in the late nineteenth century transformed the American city by

A. ending horse-drawn transportation in the city.

B. enabling cities to build upward as well as outward.

C. separating the mass transportation of the working class from the private vehicles of the wealthy.

D. enabling cities to plan streets along regular grid lines.

E. creating distinct districts devoted to residential neighborhoods, commerce, and industry.

All of these were factors that increasingly made cities more attractive than farms for young adults except

A. electricity, indoor plumbing, and telephones.

B. the advent of skyscrapers and suspension bridges.

C. urban nightlife.

D. industrial jobs.

E. the lower cost of living.

One of the early symbols of the dawning era of consumerism in urban America was

A. mass-production factories.

B. the Sears catalog.

C. advertising billboards.

D. public transportation systems.

E. large department stores.

The move to cities led to what major and enduring change in American lifestyles?

A. Delayed marriages

B. Fragmented family life

C. More waste and the need for waste disposal

D. An emphasis on thrift

E. Increased wealth

Which one of the following has the least in common with the other four?

B. Dumbbell tenements

C. Bedroom Communities

D. Flophouses

E. The "Lung Block"

C. Bedroom communities

American cities increasingly abandoned wooden construction for brick and steel in their downtown districts after

A. the great Chicago fire of 1871.

B. the development of the electric elevator and the skyscraper.

C. brickmaking became cheaper and iron was superseded by more durable steel for construction purposes.

D. architects like Louis Sullivan preferred to design steel and brick structures.

E. wooden tenements collapsed in the New York inner city in the 1880s.

The New Immigrants who came to the United States after 1880

A. had experience with democratic governments.

B. arrived primarily from Germany, Sweden, and Norway.

C. were culturally different from previous immigrants.

D. received a warm welcome from the Old Immigrants.

E. represented nonwhite racial groups.

The two immigrant ethnic groups who were most harshly treated in the mid to late nineteenth century were the

A. Spanish and Greeks.

B. Irish and Chinese.

C. Germans and Swedes.

D. Japanese and Filipinos.

E. French and Russians.

B. Irish and Chinese

Most Italian immigrants to the United States between 1880 and 1920 came to escape

A. political oppression.

C. the political disintegration of their country.

D. the military draft.

E. the point of poverty and backwardness of Southern Italy.

A bird of passage was an immigrant who

A. passed quickly from eastern ports to the Midwest or West.

B. only passed through America on the way to Canada.

C. came to the United States looking for a wife

D. came to America to work for a short time and then returned to Europe.

E. flew from job to job.

Most New Immigrants

A. eventually returned to their country of origin

B. tried to preserve their Old Country culture in America

C. were subjected to stringent immigration restrictions.

D. quickly assimilated into the mainstream of American life.

E. converted to mainstream Protestantism.

By the late nineteen century, most of the Old Immigrant groups from northern and Western Europe

actively promoted the idea of a multicultural America.

were still regarded with suspicion and hostility by the majority of native Americans.

had largely abandoned their ethnically based churches, clubs, and neighborhoods.

were largely accepted as American, even though they often lived in separate ethnic neighborhoods.

still maintained a primary loyalty to their country of origin, especially Ireland or Germany.

D. were largely accepted as America, even though they often lived in separate ethnic neighborhoods.

New Immigrant groups were regarded with special hostility by many nativist Americans because

most Americans considered Italian, Greek, or Jewish culture inferior to their own.

many New Immigrants attempted to convert Americans to Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, or Judaism.

in many New Immigrant families, women were kept in distinctly subordinate roles.

New Immigrants were often more politically loyal to their homelands than to the United States.

their religions were distinctly different and some New Immigrants were politically radical.

E. their religions were distinctly different and some New Immigrants were politically radical.

While big city political bosses and their machines were often criticized, they proved necessary and effective in the new urban environment because

they were better able to leverage grant money from the federal government.

they consistently upheld high ethical standards.

they were closely allied to other urban institutions like the church and big business.

they were more effective in serving urban immigrants' needs than weak state or local governments.

their support for the Democratic party helped to balance small-town Republican power.

D. they were more effective in serving urban immigrants' needs than weak state or local governments

Prominent Protestant pastors like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden argued that

the ancient Bible should be replaced by more modern scientific sociology and social theory.

the Christian Gospel required that churches address poverty and other burning social issues of the day.

the churches were in danger of being taken over by anti-intellectual fundamentalism.

it was up to women to lead the church in an age of industrial democracy.

the clergy should become the advance guard of a militant working class revolution.

B. the Christian Gospel required that churches address poverty and other burning social issues of the day.

In the new urban environment, most liberal Protestants

believed that a final Judgment Day was coming soon.

were driven out of mainstream seminaries and colleges.

welcomed ecumenical conversations with Roman Catholics.

sharply criticized American society and American government.

rejected biblical literalism and adapted religious ideas to modern culture.

E. rejected biblical literalism and adapted religious ideas to modern culture.

A sign of increasing diversity, by the late 1890s the number of religious denominations in America topped

The Darwinian theory of organic evolution through natural selection affected American religion by

turning most scientists against religion.

creating a split between religious conservatives who denied evolution and accomodationists who supported it.

raising awareness of the close spiritual kinship between animals and human beings.

causing a revival of the doctrine of original sin.

sparking the rise of new denominations based on modern science.

B. creating a split between religious conservatives who denied evolution and accomodationists who supported it.

Besides serving immigrants and the poor in urban neighborhoods, settlement workers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley

actively lobbied for social reforms like anti-sweatshop laws and child labor laws.

created the new, largely female profession of teaching.

looked down on the immigrant populations they served.

saw themselves primarily as feminists who worked to advance women's causes.

steered clear of controversial international questions like war and peace.

A. actively lobbied for social reforms like anti-sweatshop laws and child labor laws.

Settlement houses, such as Hull House, engaged in all of the following activities except

child care.

instruction in English.

cultural activities.

evangelical religious instruction.

lobbying for social reform.

D. Evangelical religious instruction

The place that offered the greatest opportunities for American women in the period 1865-1900 was

the big city.

suburban communities.

rural America.

New England.

A. the big city

In the 1890s, white collar positions for women as secretaries, department store clerks, and telephone operators were largely reserved for

Irish-Americans.

African Americans.

the college-educated.

native-born Americans.

E. native-born Americans

The vast majority of employed female workers in the late nineteenth century were

just arrived from the country.

married but without children.

college-educated.

Labor unions favored immigration restriction because most immigrants were all of the following except

opposed to factory labor.

used as strikebreakers.

willing to work for lower wages.

difficult to unionize.

non-English speaking.

A. opposed to factory labor

The American Protective Association

preached the social gospel that churches were obligated to protect New Immigrants.

was led for many years by Florence Kelley and Jane Addams.

supported immigration restrictions.

established settlement houses in several major cities in order to aid New Immigrants.

sought to organize mutual-aid associations.

C. supported immigration restrictions

The religious denomination that was most positively engaged with the New Immigration was

Roman Catholics.

Episcopalians.

Christian Scientists.

A. Roman Catholics

The intellectual development that seriously disturbed the churches in the late nineteenth century was the

growing feminist assault on theories of male superiority.

growing awareness of non-Christian religions.

rise of theories of white racial superiority.

new geological studies.

biology of Charles Darwin.

E. biology of Charles Darwin

When liberal Protestantism attempted to accommodate religion to modern science, it also tended to

relegate religion to a private sphere of personal conduct and family life.

make Protestantism a powerful actor on the national political stage.

link religion to theories of racial superiority and imperialistic survival of the fittest.

try to prove that religion itself was rooted in scientific fact.

survive only in the universities and advanced intellectual circles.

A. relegate religion to a private sphere of personal conduct and family life

The new, research-oriented modern American university tended to

focus primarily on theory rather than practical subjects.

give a new emphasis to the importance of religion and cultural tradition.

take the lead in movements of social and political reform.

challenge Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution and natural selection.

de-emphasize religious and moral instruction in favor of practical subjects and professional specialization.

E. de-emphasize religious and moral instruction in favor of practical subjects and professional specialization.

The two major sources of funding for the powerful new American research universities were

tuition paid by undergraduate students and fees charged to those served by the universities.

state land grants and wealthy, philanthropic industrialists.

the federal government and local communities.

income from successful patents and corporate research grants.

churches and numerous private individual donors.

B. state land grants and wealthy, philanthropic industrialists

The pragmatists were a school of American philosophers who emphasized

the provisional and fallible nature of knowledge and the value of ideas that solved problems.

that ideas were largely worthless and only practical experience should be pursued.

that the traditional Greek ideals of Plato and Aristotle should be revived.

that scientific experimentation provided a new and absolutely certain basis for knowledge.

that most academic knowledge was based on bourgeois ideas that oppressed the working class.

A. the provisional and fallible nature of knowledge and the value of ideas that solved problems

Americans offered growing support for a free public education system

to combat the growing strength of Catholic parochial schools.

when the Chautauqua movement began to decline.

because they accepted the idea that a free government cannot function without educated citizens.

when private schools began to fold.

as a way of identifying an intellectual elite.

C. because they accepted the idea that a free government cannot function without educated citizens

Booker T. Washington believed that the key to political and civil rights for African Americans was

rigorous academic training.

the rejection of accommodationist attitudes.

to directly challenge white supremacy.

economic independence and education

E. economic independence and education

The post-Civil War era witnessed

an increase in compulsory school-attendance laws.

the collapse of the Chautauqua movement.

rejection of the German system of kindergartens.

a slow rise in the illiteracy rate.

an emphasis on liberal arts colleges.

A. an increase in compulsory school-attendance laws

The success of the public schools is best evidenced by

the large numbers of students graduating from them.

the ways in which they helped assimilate massive numbers of immigrants.

the falling illiteracy rate to just over 10 percent by 1900.

the large numbers of average Americans going on to attend college.

the movement of men into the teaching profession.

C. the falling illiteracy rate to just over 10 percent by 1900.

As a leader of the African American community, Booker T. Washington

helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

advocated social equality.

discovered hundreds of uses for the peanut.

promoted black self-help but did not challenge segregation.

promoted black political activism.

D. promoted black self-help but did not challenge segregation

The Morrill Act of 1862

established women's colleges like Vassar.

required compulsory school attendance through high school.

established the modern American research university.

mandated racial integration in public schools.

granted public lands to states to support higher education.

E. granted public lands to states to support higher education

In criticizing Booker T. Washington's educational emphasis on manual labor and industrial training, W.E.B. DuBois emphasized instead that black education should concentrate on

adult education.

education for political action.

developing separate black schools and colleges.

primary and secondary education.

an intellectually gifted talented tenth.

E. an intellectually gifted talented tenth

Black leader, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois

demanded complete equality for African Americans.

established an industrial school at Tuskegee, Alabama.

supported the goals of Booker T. Washington.

was an ex-slave who rose to fame.

None of these

A. demanded complete equality for African Americans

In the decades after the Civil War, college education for women

became more difficult to obtain.

was confined to women's colleges.

became much more common.

resulted in the passage of the Hatch Act.

blossomed especially in the South.

C. became much more common

Which of the following was not among the major new research universities founded in the post-Civil War era?

Harvard University

The University of California

Johns Hopkins University

The University of Chicago

Stanford University

A. Harvard University

During the industrial revolution, life expectancy

changed very little.

was much higher in Europe than in the United States.

measurably increased.

rose for women more than men.

D. measurably increased

The public library movement across America was greatly aided by the generous financial support from

the federal government's Morrill Act.

Andrew Carnegie.

John D. Rockefeller.

local "friends of the library."

women's organizations.

B. Andrew Carnegie

The two late-nineteenth-century newspaper publishers whose competition for circulation fueled the rise of sensationalistic yellow journalism were

Horatio Alger and Harlan E. Halsey.

Henry Adams and Henry James.

Henry George and Edward Bellamy.

William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

Edwin L. Godkin and Stephen Crane.

D. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer

American newspapers expanded their circulation and public attention by

printing hard-hitting editorials.

crusading for social reform.

repudiating the tactics of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

focusing on coverage of the local community and avoiding syndicalized material.

printing sensationalist stories of sex and scandal.

E. printing sensationalist stories of sex and scandal

Henry George believed that the root of social inequality and social injustice lay in

stock speculators and financiers who manipulated the price of real goods and services.

labor unions that artificially drove up the prices of wages and therefore goods.

landowners who gained unearned wealth from rising land values.

businesspeople who gained excessive profits by exploiting workers.

patriarchal ideologies that regarded women as inferior domestic beings.

C. landowners who gained unearned wealth from rising land values

Edward Bellamy's novel, Looking Backward , inspired numerous late-nineteenth-century social reformers by

demonstrating that women's work in the home was seriously undervalued.

showing how a single tax on land speculation would end poverty.

portraying the sufferings of an immigrant worker in Chicago's stockyard meat industry.

showing the hypocrisy of the urban wealthy.

portraying a utopian America in the year 2000, where nationalized industry had solved all social problems.

E. portraying a utopian American in the year 2000, where the nationalized industry had solved all social problems

General Lewis Wallace's book, Ben Hur

achieved success only after his death.

was based on a popular early movie.

emphasized that virtue, honesty, and hard work were rewarded by success.

detailed Wallace's experiences in the Civil War.

defended Christianity against Darwinism.

E. defended Christianity against Darwinism.

Match each of these late-nineteenth-century writers with the theme of his work.

Lewis Wallace

Horatio Alger

Henry James

William Dean Howells

success and honor as the products of honesty and hard work

anti-Darwinism support for the Holy Scriptures

contemporary social problems like divorce, labor strikes, and socialism

psychological realism and the dilemmas of sophisticated women.

A-4, B-2, C-3, D-1

A-1, B-3, C-2, D-4

A-2, B-1, C-4, D-3

A-3, B-4, C-1, D-2

A-4, B-3, C-2, D-1

C. A-2, B-1, C-4, D-3

Which of the following prominent post-Civil War writers did not reflect the increased attention to social problems by those from less affluent backgrounds?

Stephen Crane

Kate Chopin

Henry Adams

E. Henry Adams

In the decades after the Civil War, changes in sexual attitudes and practices were reflected in all of the following except

soaring divorce rates.

the spreading practice of birth control.

more children being born out of wedlock.

increasingly frank discussion of sexual topics.

more women working outside the home.

C. more children being born out of wedlock

In the course of the late nineteenth century

the birthrate increased.

the divorce rate fell.

family size gradually declined.

people tended to marry at an earlier age.

children were seen as a greater economic asset.

C. family size gradually declined

By 1900, advocates of women's suffrage

acknowledged that women were biologically weaker than men but claimed that they deserved the vote anyway.

temporarily abandoned the movement for the vote.

formed strong alliances with African Americans seeking voting rights.

argued that the vote would enable women to extend their roles as mothers and homemakers to the public world.

insisted on the inherent political and moral equality of men and women.

D. argued that the vote would enable women to extend their roles as mother and homemakers to the public world.

One of the most important factors leading to an increased divorce rate in the late nineteenth century was the

decline in farm income.

stresses of urban life.

emerging feminist movement.

passage of more liberal divorce laws.

decline of religious organizations.

B. stresses of urban life.

Reflecting women's increasing independence in the late 1890s, author and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman supported all of the following except

women abandoning their dependent status.

women seeking power via their roles as wives and mothers.

notions that biology made women fundamentally different from men.

centralized nurseries and cooperative kitchens.

women becoming productive members of the economy as workers.

B. women seeking power via their roles as wives and mothers

The National American Woman Suffrage Association

achieved its central political goal in 1898.

conducted an integrated campaign for equal rights.

abandoned the goals of Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

elected Ida B. Wells as its president.

limited its membership to whites.

E. limited its membership to whites.

The growing prohibition movement especially reflected the concerns of

the new immigrants.

big business.

the poor and working classes.

middle class women.

industrial labor unions.

D. middle class women

During industrialization, Americans increasingly

had less free time.

outlawed cruel and violent sports like boxing.

became less involved in physical sports and games.

shared a common and standardized popular culture.

fragmented into diverse consumer markets.

D. shared a common and standardized popular culture.

Which of the following sports was not developed in the decades following the Civil War?

College football

E. Baseball

More From Forbes

The role of research at universities: why it matters.

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Teaching and learning, research and discovery, synthesis and creativity, understanding and engagement, service and outreach. There are many “core elements” to the mission of a great university. Teaching would seem the most obvious, but for those outside of the university, “research” (taken to include scientific research, scholarship more broadly, as well as creative activity) may be the least well understood. This creates misunderstanding of how universities invest resources, especially those deriving from undergraduate tuition and state (or other public) support, and the misperception that those resources are being diverted away from what is believed should be the core (and sole) focus, teaching. This has led to a loss of trust, confidence, and willingness to continue to invest or otherwise support (especially our public) universities.

Why are universities engaged in the conduct of research? Who pays? Who benefits? And why does it all matter? Good questions. Let’s get to some straightforward answers. Because the academic research enterprise really is not that difficult to explain, and its impacts are profound.

So let’s demystify university-based research. And in doing so, hopefully we can begin building both better understanding and a better relationship between the public and higher education, both of which are essential to the future of US higher education.   

Why are universities engaged in the conduct of research?

Universities engage in research as part of their missions around learning and discovery. This, in turn, contributes directly and indirectly to their primary mission of teaching. Universities and many colleges (the exception being those dedicated exclusively to undergraduate teaching) have as part of their mission the pursuit of scholarship. This can come in the form of fundamental or applied research (both are most common in the STEM fields, broadly defined), research-based scholarship or what often is called “scholarly activity” (most common in the social sciences and humanities), or creative activity (most common in the arts). Increasingly, these simple categorizations are being blurred, for all good reasons and to the good of the discovery of new knowledge and greater understanding of complex (transdisciplinary) challenges and the creation of increasingly interrelated fields needed to address them.

It goes without saying that the advancement of knowledge (discovery, innovation, creation) is essential to any civilization. Our nation’s research universities represent some of the most concentrated communities of scholars, facilities, and collective expertise engaged in these activities. But more importantly, this is where higher education is delivered, where students develop breadth and depth of knowledge in foundational and advanced subjects, where the skills for knowledge acquisition and understanding (including contextualization, interpretation, and inference) are honed, and where students are educated, trained, and otherwise prepared for successful careers. Part of that training and preparation derives from exposure to faculty who are engaged at the leading-edge of their fields, through their research and scholarly work. The best faculty, the teacher-scholars, seamlessly weave their teaching and research efforts together, to their mutual benefit, and in a way that excites and engages their students. In this way, the next generation of scholars (academic or otherwise) is trained, research and discovery continue to advance inter-generationally, and the cycle is perpetuated.

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University research can be expensive, particularly in laboratory-intensive fields. But the responsibility for much (indeed most) of the cost of conducting research falls to the faculty member. Faculty who are engaged in research write grants for funding (e.g., from federal and state agencies, foundations, and private companies) to support their work and the work of their students and staff. In some cases, the universities do need to invest heavily in equipment, facilities, and personnel to support select research activities. But they do so judiciously, with an eye toward both their mission, their strategic priorities, and their available resources.

Medical research, and medical education more broadly, is expensive and often requires substantial institutional investment beyond what can be covered by clinical operations or externally funded research. But universities with medical schools/medical centers have determined that the value to their educational and training missions as well as to their communities justifies the investment. And most would agree that university-based medical centers are of significant value to their communities, often providing best-in-class treatment and care in midsize and smaller communities at a level more often seen in larger metropolitan areas.

Research in the STEM fields (broadly defined) can also be expensive. Scientific (including medical) and engineering research often involves specialized facilities or pieces of equipment, advanced computing capabilities, materials requiring controlled handling and storage, and so forth. But much of this work is funded, in large part, by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, US Department of Energy, US Department of Agriculture, and many others.

Research in the social sciences is often (not always) less expensive, requiring smaller amount of grant funding. As mentioned previously, however, it is now becoming common to have physical, natural, and social scientist teams pursuing large grant funding. This is an exciting and very promising trend for many reasons, not the least of which is the nature of the complex problems being studied.

Research in the arts and humanities typically requires the least amount of funding as it rarely requires the expensive items listed previously. Funding from such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and private foundations may be able to support significant scholarship and creation of new knowledge or works through much more modest grants than would be required in the natural or physical sciences, for example.

Philanthropy may also be directed toward the support of research and scholarly activity at universities. Support from individual donors, family foundations, private or corporate foundations may be directed to support students, faculty, labs or other facilities, research programs, galleries, centers, and institutes.

Who benefits?

Students, both undergraduate and graduate, benefit from studying in an environment rich with research and discovery. Besides what the faculty can bring back to the classroom, there are opportunities to engage with faculty as part of their research teams and even conduct independent research under their supervision, often for credit. There are opportunities to learn about and learn on state-of-the-art equipment, in state-of-the-art laboratories, and from those working on the leading edge in a discipline. There are opportunities to co-author, present at conferences, make important connections, and explore post-graduate pathways.

The broader university benefits from active research programs. Research on timely and important topics attracts attention, which in turn leads to greater institutional visibility and reputation. As a university becomes known for its research in certain fields, they become magnets for students, faculty, grants, media coverage, and even philanthropy. Strength in research helps to define a university’s “brand” in the national and international marketplace, impacting everything from student recruitment, to faculty retention, to attracting new investments.

The community, region, and state benefits from the research activity of the university. This is especially true for public research universities. Research also contributes directly to economic development, clinical, commercial, and business opportunities. Resources brought into the university through grants and contracts support faculty, staff, and student salaries, often adding additional jobs, contributing directly to the tax base. Research universities, through their expertise, reputation, and facilities, can attract new businesses into their communities or states. They can also launch and incubate startup companies, or license and sell their technologies to other companies. Research universities often host meeting and conferences which creates revenue for local hotels, restaurants, event centers, and more. And as mentioned previously, university medical centers provide high-quality medical care, often in midsize communities that wouldn’t otherwise have such outstanding services and state-of-the-art facilities.

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And finally, why does this all matter?

Research is essential to advancing society, strengthening the economy, driving innovation, and addressing the vexing and challenging problems we face as a people, place, and planet. It’s through research, scholarship, and discovery that we learn about our history and ourselves, understand the present context in which we live, and plan for and secure our future.

Research universities are vibrant, exciting, and inspiring places to learn and to work. They offer opportunities for students that few other institutions can match – whether small liberal arts colleges, mid-size teaching universities, or community colleges – and while not right for every learner or every educator, they are right for many, if not most. The advantages simply cannot be ignored. Neither can the importance or the need for these institutions. They need not be for everyone, and everyone need not find their way to study or work at our research universities, and we stipulate that there are many outstanding options to meet and support different learning styles and provide different environments for teaching and learning. But it’s critically important that we continue to support, protect, and respect research universities for all they do for their students, their communities and states, our standing in the global scientific community, our economy, and our nation.

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