Spurred by the publication of Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, much of American higher education has convinced itself that relevance and prosperity means going global! It seems to me, however, that the more likely outcome of an increasingly flat world is a global marketplace in which American colleges and universities, as presently configured, find themselves increasingly disadvantaged.
To understand why, it helps to strip “globalization” of some of its romanticism. An enterprise or industry can be said to be global if its transactions are transparent, its products are both standardized and widely distributed without reference to national boundaries, and its prices are set in fully convertible currencies. In global enterprises both time and space come to mean less and less. It is a world without places to hide, no cultural sanctuaries, no golden ponds on which to drift in quiet contemplation — only the pursuit of high-value commodities.
In a global world technology is king. Production cycles become ever shorter. Labor becomes increasingly mobile. Consumers constantly broaden their searches for better products at better prices. Individual enterprises lose their competitiveness unless they become integral parts of an ever expanding set of networks.
It is a list of attributes that can be said to apply to few, if any, of this country’s leading universities. Most observers outside the academy would argue, correctly I believe, that American colleges and universities, both in their operations and their governance remain opaque, even obtuse, rather than transparent. Few transactions can be said to be instantaneous, while the time necessary to develop new educational programs has probably lengthened rather than shortened. American colleges and universities celebrate their uniqueness, inevitably putting obstacles in the way of the smooth transferring of academic credits from one institution to another. Being there — on a specific campus at a specific time — is still much more important than being there virtually. While university research labs have played a major role in developing the new technologies, American higher education has proved remarkably impervious to the kind of technological change that has made being global a reality in so much of the rest of the world.
In considering the allure of being global it also helps to remember that Tom Friedman’s conception of a flat world is one without intermediaries. But colleges and universities are nothing if not intermediaries. A world without intermediaries might just be a world without the kind of colleges and universities that we have so long celebrated.
American higher education just might get what it has wished for — a truly global system of higher education — and then discover it wasn’t what it wanted after all.
More on Wednesday …
