Today the United States is considered the world leader in higher education. Yet the country could risk losing that top spot, particularly with China opening some of the most innovative educational centers across the globe in recent years, says Harvard Business School Professor William C. Kirby.
“Will China threaten American supremacy?” asks Kirby in his new book Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.
Kirby—a historian of modern China who is the T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at HBS—explores the many ways the three countries have made their mark in higher education over the past two centuries.
Here are five excerpts from the book, based largely on Kirby’s case studies of several universities from Boston and Beijing to Berlin and Berkeley.
“Public institutions in the United States educate three-quarters of all American university students. They count among their ranks many of the world’s leading universities. It is an ongoing tragedy when even the states most historically supportive of public higher education, such as California and Michigan, fail to reinvest in their extraordinary flagship institutions. As the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2009, ‘It will say a great deal about what kind of nation we’ve become if we let these most valuable assets slip into a period of decline.’”
“Make no mistake: the slow-motion defunding of US public higher education will have consequences also for the private schools, the Stanfords and the Harvards. If the public universities decline, so in time will the private ones, who compete with their public counterparts for the same faculty, graduate students, and senior administrators. There is no greater threat to the leading position of American higher education than America’s growing parsimony in the support of public higher education. I had a premonitory shiver in 1991, when I was considering taking a senior leadership position at the University of Washington. I had been invited to a private dinner with the university’s president, the late Bill Gerberding. The president was delayed in arriving, being held up in meetings with the legislature on the university’s budget. I will never forget his arrival. He came in, wordlessly, and he ordered an enormous Scotch. Then he told me: ‘You know, Mr. Kirby, this is a much better university than the taxpayers of this state deserve.’”
“As the oldest university in the United States, Harvard reflects the country of its origin. Born of immigrants, it remade its identity on these shores, while continuing to import the best ideas and people from abroad. It carries a belief, like so many Americans, of the virtues of limited government, and as a result it has the smallest and least intrusive central administration of any major American university and is undistinguished in central planning. Its faculties and schools defend their autonomy and (the rich ones) their endowments with tenacity. It is a place, like the contemporary United States, of real income inequality across its schools, even as its students are recruited from every sector of American life. Like the United States, it has enviable resources, and it manages to exhaust almost all of them. It has survived a revolution, a civil war, and multiple periods of domestic unrest. But can this systemically decentralized Harvard continue to be the ‘Harvard’ of the 21st century?”
“As Germany retools and revives its universities, and as America disinvests, at least from its public institutions, China has shown an unmatched ambition to build more of the best, ‘world-class’ universities than anyone else. To this effort it has mobilized both state and private resources, and it has at hand more of the best human capital—Chinese scholars at home or in the diaspora—than any university system in the world.
Chinese universities continue to rise in the various rankings tables, and two of them, Tsinghua and Beida, will surely be among the world’s top 10 in short order. For their ascent is a factor both of their own growing excellence and the broader geopolitical rise of China.
The rise of China and its modern universities has been coterminous with periods of openness and internationalization. Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union have at different times and places all played the role of partner. The very short period of Chinese ‘self-reliance’ during Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a near-death experience for Chinese universities. There is little question that Chinese universities will continue their international engagement, but in which direction?”
“China’s universities today boast superb scholars and among the world’s most talented students. China’s university leaders have been among the best in the world. But in recent ideological campaigns, its students are forced to sit through required courses in Party ideology, and they learn a comic book version of the history of their own nation. Despite excellent new programs of general education, in the realm of politics and history the distance between what students have to learn in order to graduate, and what they know to be true, grows greater every year.
[And yet] no civilization has a longer or more enduringly successful record than China of educating, examining, and promoting talent to serve state and society. Over the course of the past 130 years, modern universities have propelled China to the first ranks in science and engineering, while—whenever political circumstances have permitted—also promoting the values of open inquiry that have marked the world’s leading institutions of higher learning.
Chinese universities were founded in the late Qing dynasty, they flourished in the early Republic, and several became notable national institutions of international repute under the Nationalist government. They educated young Chinese leaders from the back country of Free China during World War II. They survived war, civil war, sovietization, and the Cultural Revolution. They have outlived an empire, several republics, and multiple incarnations of the People’s Republic of China. They have seen political campaigns, such as the current ones, come and go. They must take the long view. So should we.”
Adapted from Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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