America's Great Universities and How We Live Our Lives

America's research universities represent 65 percent of the top 100 and 80 percent of the top 20 universities in the world. Their faculty members dominate the receipt of Nobel Prizes; their scientists and scholars produce discoveries and scholarship that receive the lion's share of citations in the published literature. American universities have become the engine of our national prosperity, and will become of even greater importance for the nation as the 21^st century moves on. Why, then, are they so underappreciated and poorly understood by legislative leaders and even by much of the educated public?

When most Americans think about our great universities, they don't think that lasers, FM radio, magnetic resonance imaging, bar codes, the algorithm for Google, the fetal monitor, the nicotine patch, the discovery of the insulin gene, the origin of computers, improved weather forecasting, cures for childhood leukemia, the pap smear, scientific agriculture, Viagra, public opinion surveys, the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy, our understanding of foreign cultures, had their origins at our great research universities.

While high quality undergraduate education is essential to our universities' mission, and improving graduation rates is critical for the nation, it is not the transmission of knowledge that defines our greatness. It is the production of new knowledge that distinguishes American universities.

How have we in only 75 years come to dominate higher learning in the world - and become perhaps the only American industry with a favorable balance of trade? In my book I discuss how a set of values and structures evolved through interactions between universities and the larger society. Core values included: a strong belief in meritocracy, an incessant questioning of claims to fact and truth, free and open communication of ideas, free inquiry and academic freedom, and a peer review system to assess quality. Additionally, our universities' commitment to a high level of autonomy from government control, a willingness to welcome exceptionally talented people from anywhere in the world, a set of enlightened early leaders, and a vast infusion of taxpayer dollars by the federal government after World War II, were ingredients needed for preeminence.

The economic payoff can be seen in a few statistics produced by Stanford University and the University of California system. Stanford reports that its faculty members, students, and alumni have founded more than 2,400 companies, including Cisco Systems, Google, and Hewlett-Packard. In 2008, they generated $255 billion in total revenue for the "Silicon Valley 150." - equivalent to one of the top 40 economies in the world. Spending roughly $5 billion per year on research, the University of California and has been instrumental in the growth of the biotechnology, information technology, and telecommunications industries. Yet, the California state legislature seems determined to spend more on its prisons than on higher education, and seems truly ignorant of the fact that it is far more difficult to recreate world class universities once destroyed than to maintain their excellence once achieved. In short, to paraphrase Walt Kelley's wonderful cartoon character, Pogo, "The enemy is us."

* Jonathan R. Cole is the John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University and was from 1989 to 2003 the Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia University. His recently published The Great American University: Its Rise To Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Rose; Why It Must Be Protected (PublicAffairs, 2010)