The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web by Charles M. Vest

Author:Charles M. Vest [Charles M. Vest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: aVe4EvA
ISBN: 9781435611412
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007-05-08T20:00:00+00:00

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Openness

Education, Research, and Scholarly Communication in an Age of Globalization and Terrorism

Of all the things that have changed since Clark Kerr’s 1963 God-kin Lectures, I suspect that the extent of the internationalization of our faculties and graduate-student populations in science, engineering, and management is one of the most dramatic. This change is matched or exceeded by the role of new communications and information technologies that connect and inform us instantaneously throughout our campuses and around the globe. These are two important aspects of the essential openness of American universities.

I have come to believe that the openness of American campuses in many dimensions is one of our most important defi ning characteristics. Openness describes the state of our research universities at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and it establishes a remarkable field of opportunity and responsibility in the globalization of higher education going forward. But today our openness is also threatened, largely because of our national struggle to come to grips with the reality of terrorism.

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My purpose here is to share some thoughts about the interconnection of such seemingly disparate themes as the Age of the Internet, terrorism, and the global opportunity and responsibility of universities.

THINGS WE TAKE FOR GRANTED

Faculty and students of my generation, and certainly those who are younger, take for granted the open flow across the borders of our campuses and nation—the open flow of students, scholars, faculty, scientific and scholarly information, and educational knowledge and tools.

Our nearly unanimous opinion undoubtedly is that the openness of our national borders and especially of our campuses to talented men and women from other lands is a major factor in our academic excellence, our cultural richness, our economic success, and, in a strategic sense, our national security. At MIT, we are very proud of the Nobel Laureates who teach and work on our campus. Those who received their Nobel Prizes in recent decades were born in the United States, India, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Japan. Similarly, the recent Laureates from the University of California were born in the United States, Taiwan, Poland, France, Hungary, Germany, Austria, and Norway.

In a similar manner, universities like the University of California and MIT have prided themselves in being meritocracies that benefit from, and provide opportunity to, talented students from across America’s broad spectrum of cultural, economic, and racial backgrounds. As a private institution, MIT would add geographic background to this list, and so would the University of California, though within the constraints of an institution designed to serve California citizens first and foremost.

We also would take as a given that scientific and scholarly knowledge should freely pass back and forth across our campus boundaries. Science thrives in unfettered communication among scientists everywhere, and has always had an international culture. Indeed, the conduct of science requires criticism and testing of the repeatability of experiments by other scientists. Scholarly pursuits more broadly require access to knowledge and artifacts, and are strengthened by criticism and exploration from different vantage points. One need only look back to the

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