No borders

16th September 2010

Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust hymns the restless quest for wisdom that defines higher education's highest goals

Prevailing discourse emphasises the university as a paramount player in a global system increasingly driven by knowledge, information and ideas. Knowledge is replacing other resources as the main engine of economic growth, and as the new knowledge economy is necessarily global, the reach of universities must be so, too.

Throughout higher education, borderless partnerships are flourishing as never before, improving learning and lives in dramatic ways. Often, universities' international initiatives are framed as a competitive necessity. But if these are competitions, they are ones in which everyone can win. As other institutions falter in dispiriting succession, universities nurture the hopes of the world: in solving challenges that cross borders; in unlocking new knowledge; in building cultural and political understanding; and in modelling environments that promote dialogue and debate.

Yet even as we marvel at higher education's global expansion, we see its future imperilled. We find that the global economic crisis has slowed our cross-border momentum. As the world oscillates between openness and insularity, many worry that we are entering a more inward-looking period, when national anxieties risk trumping international aspirations. In the years following the 9/11 terror attacks, security concerns have inhibited ease of movement for many. And in the wake of the global recession, fears of economic competition have intensified resistance to immigration. Talent comes with many different passports. Yet, as we at universities work to attract the most promising and creative minds, we face the spectre of heightened impediments to border crossings, at a moment when higher education increasingly requires the free flow of talent and ideas.

The global recession has of course produced an even more direct threat — a financial one. While the knowledge economy draws fuel from the unprecedented growth of higher education, many university budgets face serious cutbacks, even as enrolments and expectations rise. Perhaps the most dramatic US example involves the University of California system, the gold standard of American public higher education, which was confronted with a 20 per cent budget cut this past fiscal year. Higher education in the UK and Ireland faces similar challenges. We are caught in the paradox of celebrating the global knowledge economy while simultaneously undermining its very foundations.

At such a time, there is a danger that the focus on higher education as the fundamental engine of economic growth is proving so powerful that it will distort our understanding of all that universities should and must be. Such assumptions can, for example, encourage a

devaluation of basic scientific research, of investigation that may not yield immediate payoffs or solve concrete problems. The intensely competitive global economy has driven governments to demand more immediate, tangible returns on their investments.

Too often, such an emphasis can mean especially painful cuts for disciplines whose value, though harder to measure, is no less real. As stewards of centuries-old traditions of higher learning, we must work to ensure that the understandable effort to promote what is valuable does not eclipse our support for what is invaluable.

When we define higher education's role principally as driving economic development and solving society's most urgent problems, we risk losing sight of the kinds of enquiry that enable the critical stance, that build the humane perspective, that foster the restless scepticism and unbounded curiosity from which our profoundest understandings so often emerge. Too narrow a focus on the present can come at the expense of the past and future, of the long view that has always been higher learning's special concern.

How can we create minds capable of innovation if they are unable to imagine a world different from the one in which we live now? History teaches contingency; it demonstrates that the world has been different and could and will be different again. Anthropology can show that societies are and have been different elsewhere, across space as well as time. Literature can teach us many things, including empathy — how to picture ourselves inside another person's head, life, experience — and how to see the world through a different lens, which the study of the arts offers as well.

Economic growth and scientific and technological advances are necessary but not sufficient purposes for a university. And within the domain of science, universities have a distinctive obligation to fulfil the deep human desire to understand ourselves and the world we inhabit — even when there is no practical application close in view. It is worth remembering that the most transformative scientific discoveries often trace their origins to research born of sheer curiosity about who we are and how we can fathom the most intriguing mysteries of the natural world.