Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education

8: Flat-World Contrarians

126 Flat-World Contrarians 8 Colleges and universities are forever on retreats— presidents convene them, trustees love them, consultants depend on them for their livelihood. Most retreats focus on institutional issues: the preparation for a campaign, the quality of campus life, the strength of the curriculum, or, as is most often the case, simply the need to get better organized. Beginning in the summer of 2005, however, an inordinately large number of such gatherings took a different tack, inspired by the publication of Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat. The book, thick though it was, was a natural read for academics : this narrative full of clever stories and individual success stories was current, and above all its message resonated with the academy’s sense that the world had indeed changed. Higher education ’s future lay in going global! I was certainly among the smitten. For the last three decades, I have spent a substantial portion of each year working and traveling outside the United States. Like many academics, I have in my study a world map full of black and red pins testifying to the fact that professionally I have been busy going places I have never been before. When I read The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman’s initial volume on the push for globalization, it seemed as if I had spent a lifetime getting ready for the world Friedman was describing. I began using The Lexus and the Olive Tree in my classes, noting with a twinge of alarm that universities were largely absent as principal players in the drama 127 FLAT-WORLD CONTRARIANS Friedman was describing. In his new world of global connections, universities were like warehouses, full of interesting people who were fun to drop in on and have lunch with. But universities per se were not global players, not part of the growing network of connections that defined the rampant globalism that so fascinated Friedman. By the time Friedman came to write The World Is Flat, he had clearly changed his mind. Universities and the education and research they provided were essential—both as means and as ends in themselves . But by then I was not so sure. Beneath Friedman’s obvious skill at storytelling and his inventive cleverisms—I am particularly fond of DOS Capital 2.0 from The Lexus and the Olive Tree—lay a remarkably robust definition of globalization. An enterprise or industry could be said to be global if its transactions were transparent, its products widely distributed without reference to national boundaries, and its prices set in fully convertible currencies. In global enterprises both time and space come to mean less and less. In this world without places to hide, cultural sanctuaries, or golden ponds on which to drift in quiet contemplation only the pursuit of high-value commodities matters. In a global world technology is king. Production cycles become ever shorter. Labor becomes increasingly mobile. Consumers constantly broaden their searches for better products at better prices. Individual enterprises lose their competitiveness unless they become integral parts of an expanding set of networks. Two decades into the global revolution, this list of attributes can be said to apply to few, if any, of the world’s leading universities. Most observers outside the academy would argue, correctly I believe, that universities , in both their operations and their governance, remain opaque, even obtuse, rather than transparent. Few transactions can be said to be instantaneous, while the time necessary to develop new educational programs has probably lengthened rather than shortened. True, there is an international labor market for young scholars, principally postdocs, for Asian and Latin American PhDs trained in Europe and the United States returning to their own countries or continents to begin their careers, and for very senior academics with international reputations. But these transnational patterns of long standing suggest that globalization had little if anything to do with their particular emergence. Student markets have remained decidedly local. Even less global are the mechanisms by which prices are set for a university education. In most settings and most countries, even in the European Union to a still considerable extent, governmental subsidies to both students and institutions reflecting local conditions and local political considerations determine what students pay and, in some cases still, how much students are paid. While some students shop internationally for better prices as well as better products—Canadian universities continue to seek U.S. students...