Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes, left, receives a copy of The American University from John Ackerman, director of Cornell University Press. The volume contains revisions of papers presented at a symposium in 1995 honoring Rhodes. Robert Barker/University Photography
Even as American universities are recognized as the best in the world in conducting research and educating new generations of scientists and scholars, they are under attack as never before, politically and economically, from both ends of the political spectrum and by just about every constituent group.
What accounts for this contradiction? Will the pressures being exerted on institutions of higher education diminish their quality and turn America's national treasure into an endangered species? How can universities cope with the often conflicting needs and demands of students, faculties and the outside world?
These questions are examined in The American University, published this year by Cornell University Press in honor of Frank H.T. Rhodes, Cornell president emeritus. The volume contains revisions of presentations by five current and emeritus university presidents, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and others made at a symposium convened as part of events marking Rhodes' retirement in May 1995. The symposium was sponsored by the dean of the faculty and the University Faculty Council of Representatives. A commentary by Rhodes is included in the book.
Editor of the book is Ronald G. Ehrenberg, vice president for academic programs, planning and budgeting and the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell. He gives credit for the idea for and the development of the symposium program to Peter C. Stein, professor of physics and dean of the Cornell faculty, who also contributed the foreword to the book.
In the opening essay, Ehrenberg asks, "Will America's great research universities make the hard choices that will be necessary if they are to prosper in the years ahead?" After delineating challenges facing universities today, he concludes, "Our research universities will prosper in the years ahead only if they 'grow by substitution.' Resources to support new and emerging fields will be found only if institutions cut back on some of their activities . . . [and are] selective in what they seek to accomplish."
Recommendations and comments in the book include:
·William G. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and president emeritus of Princeton University, "No Limits": "A college or university, and its admissions staff, must also consider the longer-term benefits to the society at large that come from educating talented students from many races and backgrounds. A principal job of these institutions is to build human capital, for the long-term benefit of society at large. . . . They cannot escape the obligation to make hard decisions that transcend the immediate interests of particular individuals. If the admissions/learning process in fact contributes to building a more civilized world, everyone will benefit, including the hypothetical rejected white student and his or her children. Admission to selective colleges and universities is not a zero-sum game."
·Charles M. Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Research Universities: Overextended, Underfocused; Overstressed, Underfunded": "Universities must reinvigorate a commitment to excellence in our society. This nation has lost its will to excel. Perhaps this is a natural response in a relatively peaceful era in which our economy has been weak, but it creates an atmosphere that has permitted a rise in various forms of populism that do not value institutions and that question anything having the appearance of elitism or privilege. Analyzing or explaining away our predicament does not change the situation, however. America has to stop wallowing in negative journalism and visionless politics."
·Marye Anne Fox, vice president for research at the University of Texas at Austin, "Graduate Students: Too Many and Too Narrow?": "When the academy fails to teach learning to learn as the goal of higher education, it cheats at least some of its students, who erroneously accept the premise that their highest intellectual goal is to become a replica of their teacher. Such graduates reproduce their teachers' jobs, and often their professors' own thesis research problems, in a new environment, striving under adverse circumstances to come up with incremental advances. Such replication is tolerable when what is needed is geometric expansion of the personnel working in a given area; it fails miserably when there is a flat or declining academic base.... perhaps [educators] should not even think about whether there should be fewer graduate students but rather how to provide a new continuum of options for graduate and postgraduate programs."
·Neal Lane, NSF director, "Prospects for Science and Technology": "... the research community has generally lived an independent and somewhat isolated existence within American society. That is no longer tenable. Informed debate on public policy, high-value jobs, competition in global markets, and the education of current and future generations require that science become a more integral part of our national fabric. This does not mean that basic research will be any less important in the future than it has been in the past. But it does imply some change in behavior, in values, and in focus."
The American University also includes essays by Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University; Hanna H. Gray, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of History and president emeritus of the University of Chicago; and Urie Bronfenbrenner, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Cornell.