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Sunday, March 11, 2007
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An Opinion Piece Somewhat at Odds With the NYRB Piece By Andrew Delbanco... ...about the same subject. In today's Washington Post, David Ignatius points out what's often been discussed on this blog: the staggering global dominance of American universities. Higher education is arguably the last area in which the United States dominates the world.... in this globalized world, American universities remain the gold standard. And thanks to aggressive university presidents, they are widening their lead. With dramatically internationalized student bodies, and growing campuses abroad, Ignatius concludes, "American education is a smart bomb that actually works. When we think about the foreign outreach efforts by these university presidents and dozens of others, we should recognize that they are a national security asset -- making the world safer, as well as wiser." UD remembers lecturing, years ago, to a small class at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Of the twenty or so students, at least ten were foreign. But it's important to keep in mind what Delbanco's telling us a post or two down there, too. Most of those GSD students were buff beyond belief. Merely with clothes, accent, and hair, they conveyed to UD the presence of a private jet to Gstaad, idling at that moment on a nearby tarmac for them. The foreign students at our great universities are part of the same wealthy cohort Delbanco's talking about. We're educating the global elite. Which is fine. But we're also educating, at our best schools, our own established elite, to the growing exclusion of other sorts of people here. The combination of these two groups on our campuses is unlikely to move us in a direction toward greater creativity, or even toward greater global awareness. It's too socially narrow. |