Erasing Borders: The Changing Role of American Higher Education in the World

Abstract

American higher education has some severe problems. Those problems are systemic and long-term in nature; they are not just a small set of minor troubles which can be quickly fixed. Our problems are marked by a growing number of competitors who can do what we do, do it according to our measures of quality, do it better, and do it more economically than we. These problems are largely unacknowledged in the United States itself. The role of American colleges and universities in a global environment is not even a topic of serious discussion in the United States. It is widely believed and frequently reiterated that we have 'the best colleges and universities in the world'. To us, the rest of the world annually confirms our pre-eminence by sending increasing numbers of students to study with us. Because of that, we see no need to look about us to discover if we are either delivering a product that truly prepares our own young people for their own future or meeting competition from abroad. Overly satisfied with ourselves, we see no need to debate our fundamental mission and modes of operation. Instead, the national debates which ostensibly deal with higher education actually concern social issues which our society as a whole is unable to resolve and which we, through neglect of our intellectual mission, have agreed to take on despite lack of evidence that we can handle them. Because we refuse to clarify our raison d'etre as first and foremost education, we become distracted to the point that we not only confuse our intellectual purpose with social issues, but compound that muddle by mixing up genuinely important social problems (such as race relations) with the fundamentally silly and trivial, such as institutional control of offensive language and whether living units and clubs should be single-sex or co-educational. Viewed in an international context, the trivialisation of mind which has become too much of the standard discourse on higher education in America is a sign of the problems we face. No truly healthy system would be so simultaneously devoted to marginalia and to constant self-congratulation. In this article, I shall outline our problem. I shall not discuss the distractions with which we in American higher education too frequently occupy ourselves. Our professional tabloid, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and similar publications are already so replete with such matter that reiteration would be pointless. Instead, I shall attempt to show what underlies our problem. Our fundamental flaws are concerned most with things international, and they are best understood by looking at the interaction between American higher education and the rest of the world. 253