Sias International U.’s administrative building

On a recent trip to China, I made a stop at Sias International University, in Xinzheng, Henan Province, to deliver a lecture on American popular culture. Sias is a relatively new private university that presents itself as an American-style college. Its founder, a local entrepreneur who made his fortune in the United States, believes in internationalism and in cooperation between China and the United States—so much so that he has infused the campus with this vision.

Street entrance to the Sias administrative building.

The effect is striking: It feels like a world’s fair. Touring the campus, I passed New York Street, Red Square, European Street, and Spanish Square. I wound up at the administration building, a bizarre Sino-American hybrid. After entering through its neo-Classical front, modeled on the U.S. Capitol, I found upon exiting that the building had morphed into the Forbidden City.

China’s current global turn marks the country’s second opening in the past 200 years. The first took place after the Opium War (1839-42). As someone who studies the history of Americans in China, I find it interesting to compare China’s earlier opening with the current one in the area of Sino-American intellectual exchange. Of course, the circumstances surrounding the two openings are quite different. The first was accomplished by British force and against China’s will; the second amounts to an act of self-determination on China’s part.

That said, China’s earlier opening does offer a lesson that could perhaps guide the numerous China-U.S. academic partnerships that have proliferated in recent years: Teachers should be learners.

Sino-American relations were first formalized in the Opium War’s wake. In 1843, the United States dispatched Rep. Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts, to secure an American treaty comparable to Britain’s Treaty of Nanjing. In a speech delivered in Boston before his departure, he acknowledged China’s past role in advancing civilization. However, he saw China’s defeat in the war as the dawn of a new era, one in which China must learn from the West. “We have become the teacher of our teachers,” he said. Assuming that China had interpreted the war in similar fashion, Cushing took with him a large inventory of mechanical inventions that constituted a showcase of modern American technology.

The bombast of his speech notwithstanding, Cushing developed a sincere interest in Chinese civilization while abroad. He studied both the Manchu language and Chinese culture, and upon returning stateside he delivered respectful lectures on Chinese civilization. What’s more, one young member of his legation assembled a vast collection of Chinese artifacts, which he later displayed in Boston to public acclaim. Another member, an artist, produced hundreds of sketches of Chinese life, which he later converted into a panoramic painting 12 feet high and one-third of a mile in length.

Nonetheless, Cushing’s tone in his formal communications with the Chinese was patronizing. Though they did work with him to hammer out a treaty, he neglected to exhibit his intellectually curious side, which might have placed China-U.S. relations on a strong footing at the outset.

The problem of cultural arrogance plagued both sides. In China, Cushing worked with Qiying, the Qing official who had negotiated with the British. Though Qiying signed the one-sided Treaty of Nanjing, he did not interpret the Opium War as a signal that the sun had set on Chinese supremacy. Nor, apparently, did he believe the United States had much to teach China. “Of all the countries,” Qiying wrote the emperor, America is “the most uncivilized and remote, … an isolated place outside the pale, solitary and ignorant.” The Americans, Qiying believed, needed to be taught civilization by the Chinese, who should adopt a simple style in communicating to their crude pupils from across the Pacific.

The first high-level Sino-American negotiations, in other words, resembled a classroom with two teachers and no students.  As a result, an opportunity was missed.

What, then, is the past’s lesson for the present? Put simply, the perception of cultural arrogance, regardless of whether that attitude is real, can impede meaningful exchanges between nations. In 2010, Terry Lautz wrote an excellent piece for The Chronicle in which he argued that China needed to do more to institutionalize the study of America. The piece attracted numerous critical comments, few of which addressed the specific points he had made. In fact, I’m not sure that many of the commenters really “heard” Lautz. Having judged him arrogant, they became unreceptive to his arguments.

The perception of arrogance can derail any intercultural communication, but Sino-U.S. dialogues seem especially susceptible.  I don’t know why that is, but I can speculate that exceptionalism plays a role. Historically, China and the United States each has entertained notions of its respective civilization’s exceptional nature. When a nation presents its way of life as the model that others should emulate, it tends to regard any competing model as a threat.

And if one of the nations is reputed to be in decline and the other ascendant, those perceived trends only exacerbate the problem. While I do not wish to comment here on the “decline of America” narrative, it is a fact that this narrative is widespread, and that Americans are growing increasingly sensitive about it. It is also true that, back in the 1840s, the roles were reversed: Energetic America played the rising power, and in China the empire was seemingly in decay.

Back then, it was, ironically, missionaries who grasped the importance of teaching and learning simultaneously. I say “ironically” because missionaries are often dismissed as preachy or maligned as cultural imperialists. Though much of the intellectual exchange they brokered was intended to promote evangelism, they learned about China while teaching the Chinese about America and the West.

They both produced a Chinese-language Bible and translated parts of Chinese classics into English. They published a Chinese-language periodical to teach Chinese readers about the outside world and an English-language monthly to keep Westerners informed about China. One missionary wrote A Brief Account of the United States of America, a Chinese-language textbook on American civilization; another composed The Middle Kingdom, an overview of Chinese civilization that formed the foundation for American Sinology.

One fascinating text, The Chinese Chrestomathy, in the Cantonese dialect, epitomized the two-way nature of the missionary project. This single text both taught English speakers how to speak Cantonese and offered lessons on English to the Chinese. By fusing Chinese and American elements, the book constitutes a linguistic equivalent of Sias’s administration building.

I should admit that, when I first beheld the administration building, I judged its architecture to be over the top.  Looking back, though, I have come to recognize its rhetorical effectiveness. If the building could speak, its message would perhaps be, “We are proudly Chinese, but we wish to learn from America.” In hindsight, I recognize that the architecture’s message favorably affected my mood. I have never felt more welcome in a place where I was to teach a lesson on American culture. And I have never felt more ready to learn from my hosts.

[Photos courtesy of Sias International University]

A quick way to gauge how much undergraduates care about a particular issue is to look at the opinion pages of their student newspapers.

In November 2010, Duke University administrators canceled a much-loved student tailgating tradition when a cheerleader’s 14-year-old brother was found passed out drunk in a Port-a-Potty. By November 2011, the Duke Chronicle’s student columnists had written more than 40 opinion pieces mentioning the incident, and the topic still pops up in the editorial pages with relative frequency.

In 2009, Duke announced plans to build a campus in Kunshan, China. It has become a hot-button issue among faculty members and administrators, but there have been fewer student columns mentioning Kunshan in the past three or four years than those mentioning the tailgating incident in a single year. And oftentimes, those columns contained misunderstandings about the campus’s goals, costs, and the planning process.

Yet Duke students should pay attention to the developments overseas, as should students at other universities with controversial global ambitions, like New York University and Yale.

Although most people at Duke—the faculty and students alike—see the long-term benefits in establishing educational partnerships with China, a full-fledged, 200-acre campus comes with significant risks. Faculty members have raised countless concerns, including: a lack of transparency from Duke administrators and our Chinese partners; costs—both in terms of money and time—when the university is dealing with a strained budget; and that the educational mission and promises for academic freedom are vague.

If faculty members don’t have a good grasp of the project and its purpose, students are even less likely to understand it. For most of us, it’s an incomplete construction project 8,000 miles away, located in a town we’ve never heard of, with abstract academic opportunities, and an ambiguous target market—not to mention an opening date that’s been pushed back at least five times. As the beat reporter for the Duke Chronicle covering the campus, I see Kunshan as part of my daily routine, but I can’t recall a time when my friends and I talked about Kunshan outside of the newspaper office. My news articles are read by an audience of mostly professors and administrators.

But it can affect Duke students, who are concerned with what potential employers can expect from a Duke graduate. Even 8,000 miles away, the campus will affect Duke’s reputation and the value of a Duke degree. If Duke-Kunshan distracts administrators from the Durham campus, it could negatively impact the education students receive at home, reducing its position relative to its peer institutions. Additionally, Duke-Kunshan will matter outside of the higher-education circle because China is such a significant player in global business and politics.

Duke-Kunshan administrators have assembled a Kunshan Student Advisory Council—charged with advising them on student life in China. It may seem like the right group to collect and raise student concerns. But as a self-selecting group of about 20 students, many of whom are from China, the council appears to collectively assume that the international effort is a good idea in the first place. Additionally, as an arm of the administration, how likely will they be to push back on its most controversial elements?

Kunshan is also a buzzword among those students seeking leadership positions in student government. But student leaders are too busy working on immediate problems to take a stance on Duke-Kunshan. Although they have almost no say in the developing new campus, these student leaders are in a position to alert administrators to any students’ concerns, push for transparency, and ask difficult questions.

Students oftentimes have tunnel vision, concerning themselves with campus problems that have readily noticeable effects, while abstract initiatives like Duke-Kunshan remain in their periphery. But they should start to take a serious look at it and the questions it raises about Duke’s overall educational mission.

Do Duke’s ties with the Chinese government affect my academic freedom in the United States? If administrators are splitting their time between developing the China campus and providing a traditional Duke education, what’s getting lost in the shuffle? Will there be unexpected costs, and how does that impact the amount of tuition I pay? These questions should be part of regular campus conversation, not limited to faculty meetings and closed-door discussions among top administrators.

[Creative Commons Wikimedia image by Augiasstallputzer]

The French Institute, in Paris, which is home to the French Academy.

The French government has introduced legislation that aims to attack some of the greatest weaknesses of the national higher-education system, including the fragmentation of public universities and the chronically high failure rate of undergraduates. These problems have been analyzed and agonized over for years, so you might think that the public debate over the passage of this legislation would be about how, finally, someone is trying to fix the problems.

Instead, the bill introduced in Parliament on May 21 by Geneviève Fioraso, the minister for higher education, and scheduled to be voted on May 28, has provoked a controversy over an issue that neither she nor her advisers saw coming. It’s a line in the law that officially authorizes French universities to teach some classes in English.

The reaction has been, well, furious. The Académie Française, which is the official guardian of French culture, immediately petitioned the government to drop the change, saying that it risked “marginalizing our language.” A chorus of intellectuals has taken up the baton. The philosopher Michel Serres says allowing English would be like giving in to “a form of colonization, under which a nation’s own language is unable to express everything.” Claude Hagège, professor at the College of France, has described the law as a “suicidal project.” Even some French-speaking American professors, including New York University’s Emily Apter and Jacques Lezra, and Michael Loriaux of Northwestern University, have expressed their sympathy, signing a petition in the daily newspaper Libération that called on France not to give up using its own language in the transmission of knowledge, “because you will impoverish yourselves and in doing so, impoverish the whole world.”

It’s easy to have sympathy with these arguments; no small part of France’s charm comes from the fact that it fiercely defends its culture and language as essential parts of its identify. Yet they raise the question of how a culture and intellectual ideas can have influence in the outside world if they are expressed only in a language that many don’t understand. Moreover, the protests are less an offensive against a looming external threat than a rear-guard action against an insurgency that has already captured strategic swathes of terrain.

For the best French higher-education establishments, the elite graduate schools known as grandes écoles, have been teaching in English for years. At Sciences Po, the leading institution of the social sciences, about one-third of classes are now in English . At HEC (École des Hautes Études Commerciales) Paris and other business schools, that proportion rises to about a half, and a significant number of faculty members are not French. It’s all part of a deliberate strategy of internationalization that has become commonplace not just in France but across Europe.

The public universities also already offer English-language classes, although to a lesser extent. Campus France, the official agency that promotes French higher-education abroad, boasts on its Web site that more than 700 programs are entirely taught in English. Over all, they amount to just 1 percent of the classes offered in France, but they nonetheless serve as an important magnet for international students. And when it comes to academic research, papers in fields from economics to medicine are almost always published in English. Even in disciplines like sociology, where many still publish in French, the authors routinely provide at least an abstract or a full translation of the findings in English.

In theory, much of this Anglophone activity is illegal, in direct contravention of the 1994 law named after the then-minister of culture, Jacques Toubon, which imposed strict rules about the use of French in public life, including the media, advertising, and academe. That law is why France, unlike most other European countries, systematically dubs American TV shows into French, rather than showing them in the original with subtitles. It’s also the basis on which the Académie Française has a full-time “terminology and neologism committee,” whose job is to devise French equivalents to English words that creep into the vocabulary, especially as a result of technology. One of its most recent pronouncements was that French Twitter users should stop using the word “hashtag” and instead use the invented equivalent, mot-dièse. Sometimes these words catch on, such as the word ordinateur for “computer.” Sometimes they don’t: “mail” has become the norm for “e-mail,” rather than the Académie-preferred courriel. And just try finding someone who calls his or her smartphone an ordiphone.

Minister Fioraso has some important reasons for instituting the linguistic change. Paris remains a powerful magnet for international students, but France is losing out to some other European countries including Germany, where universities offer a multitude of English-language classes. In 2012, about 12 percent of enrolled students in French higher education came from abroad, and Ms. Fioraso wants to increase that proportion to 15 percent.

What the heated public debate over English entirely misses, however, is the quality of the educational experience that non-French students have once they are in France. That’s a shame, because some of the provisions in the rest of the proposed legislation—the parts that aren’t being debated amid the public controversy over English—seek to address the systemic weaknesses that make the experience all too often a mediocre one. Most striking is the failure rate. About 50 percent of undergraduates in public universities currently fail their first year, and either repeat it, switch courses, or drop out altogether. Over all, less than 40 percent receive their bachelor’s degree within four years, a year longer than most undergraduate programs—and about half the success rate in British universities.

These woeful statistics are due in part to the French practice of not selecting students on entry to university, but instead allowing a Darwinian practice of selection by mass failure. In medicine, the first-year failure rate is 85 percent. In law it is 60 percent. This is an enormous waste of state resources, and it has the additional effect of demotivating tens of thousands of otherwise talented young people just as they embark on their lives after school.

Before the May 2012 election of President François Hollande, a think tank called Terra Nova that is close to his Socialist Party proposed some radical steps to change this situation, including by charging tuition at public universities, which are currently virtually free except for a small fee for health insurance. Minister Fioraso didn’t tread anywhere near that idea in her new legislation. The ensuing furor might just have drowned out the fuss over English.

[Wikimedia photo available under the GNU Free Documentation License]

In recent months, I have been involved in institutional assessments and government meetings on the topic in Finland, Romania, Ireland, and the United States—and shortly I’ll travel to Gabon on behalf of the European Union and the African Union to discuss quality issues.

While the discussions vary, what’s clear is that quality is no longer solely the domain of higher-education providers or independent agencies, like accreditors. Many governments want to step up their role in assuring that educational programs are worthwhile.

In the United States, this point is recently illustrated by the Obama administration’s College Scorecard and its 2014 budget proposal to examine “new quality validation systems that can identify appropriate competencies, assessments, and curricula.” Greater accountability had previously been proposed in 2006 by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, established by the Bush administration. Its strong support for more federal involvement caused great controversy within higher education at the time.

There is little doubt in my mind that global rankings have played a big role in placing higher-education quality on the policy agenda. If higher education is the engine of the economy, then the quality of higher education and research are vital indicators of national competitiveness. Universities act as a magnet for students, business, and investment. The growth of a global labor market relies upon graduate and employer confidence in the quality and comparability of qualifications. Similarly, the increasing presence of for-profit and international branch campuses and programs requires internationally recognized regulation as a safeguard. These developments have transformed quality from something led by higher education into something driven and regulated by government.

Traditionally, academe relied on peer review and internal procedures of quality assurance at the individual program or institutional level. This would be the common approach of U.S. accreditation and European institutional reviews. The process relies on comparability of standards, and involves intense engagement that can take time and be financially consuming. However, the final report that comes from that process is usually written in opaque academic language, making it difficult to understand or compare performance between institutions, especially internationally. This has contributed to a breakdown in trust between institutions and students, policy makers, and others.

Rankings have prospered in this void. Despite all their limitations, they have exposed an information deficit. They have charmed audiences around the world by their crude simplicity. By equating inputs with outputs, rankings privilege age, size, and wealth. This makes comparisons between publicly supported systems and institutions with top-performing U.S. private universities, in particular, pernicious. The pervasiveness of focusing on the top institutions also obscures the fact that the majority of students attend higher-education institutions that are not elite.

Today, government involvement in the process and the assessment of quality is everywhere. At one extreme is the light-touch institutional audit operated by the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council, which focuses on quality enhancement processes. In this approach, universities are assessed against their own criteria with the aim of helping them to improve their own efforts to bolster quality.

At the other extreme is the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, in Australia. It emphasizes standards and outcomes, with extensive powers to regulate and to evaluate the performance of higher-education providers against (teaching) standards set by the government. The “voluntary” or “enhancement” aspect of many processes hides the reality that confidential outcomes are no longer acceptable. Failure to participate can have significant implications for institutional legitimacy, financial support, or reputation.

The Carnegie Classification system sought to provide a framework to describe differences between institutions according to mission. That idea was copied by the European Union with its U-Map project. Taking this a step forward, many governments have developed a qualifications framework as an educational road map for students and other stakeholders to explain what often appears to be a mystifying and fragmented landscape of higher-education options. Even the European Union has gotten in on the act. In the United States, the Lumina Foundation has promoted its Degree Qualifications Profile.

Rankings have taken determination of quality beyond both the university and the nation-state. Open-source and social-networking sites go still further and put tools directly into the hands of students and other stakeholders, bypassing higher education and government altogether. For example, Australia, Britain,  and the Catalonia region of Spain have made university statistics and performance open to public scrutiny. The Chronicle has even developed its own guide to college performance. And it is not too fanciful to image a TripAdvisor-type site for higher education in the near future.

Another paradigm shift is evident in efforts like the European Union’s U-Multirank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s work to design a tool for the assessment and comparability of learning outcomes. Both projects were started with great fanfare about challenging the powerful global university-ranking systems, but both have run into some difficulty—effectively demonstrating the complexity with measuring quality.

Nonetheless, all these developments demonstrate that a Rubicon has been crossed. While higher education has traditionally been the primary guardian of quality, its role has effectively been usurped. If it wishes to regain some degree of control, then it needs to ensure that it is involved in a more meaningful way than it was previously. Urgent action is required to agree on how quality can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of all stakeholders.

Students increasingly arrive at university having grown up in a world in which their habits of study are heavily influenced by new media. They are used to media acting as a continuous stream of content that is more like a river of images than a page of text. According to one account, that means much shorter attention spans, much greater attention to visual modes of understanding, greater modulation of time, more and more reliance on interfaces, and so on. (See, most recently, Stephen Apkon’s The Age of the Image.)

Now, I think it is true that our students have become accustomed to being presented with bite-size chunks of information in ways that can leave their instructors concerned and frustrated about their ability to read in depth. See just the latest story in The Chronicle about the reading habits and use of social media by students. Again, look at the way in which news is presented on younger-demographic sites like Vice to see how increasingly entertainment and news are mixed together in ways that are, well, entertaining but also often profoundly suspect in the way that they encourage readers to see the world as a resource to be consumed rather than as a responsibility. (Much of the same could be said about many newspapers.)

But does all this presage the death of Western civilization? I doubt it, and for three main reasons.

To begin with, all of this can be seen as a transition to new modes of literacy, as Apkon points out. Like all such transitions, something is gained and something is lost. One of my favorite books is M. T. Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record in which he documents the long and involved history of the transition from oral tradition to literacy in England and the ways in which the participants had to forge new senses of what was real and reputable, material and immaterial.

Then, there is the issue that there is simply more material available than it is humanly possible to read or otherwise take in anyway. The number of documents in the world has expanded exponentially, and it may be that a certain kind of grazing behavior is the only way to deal with the vast profusion of sources that are now available. There are at least 14 billion pages on the Web, 155.3 million items in the Library of Congress, of which 35 million are books, and 150 million items in the British Library—and that is before we get to the new Digital Public Library of America. So the rise of search engines to trawl all this material can hardly be counted as a metaphysical threat, as some commentators would have it.

Lastly, it is possible to derive new modes of interrogation. I am struck by the effort going into producing new means of summarizing information and comment, although, like many, I am also concerned that the associated personalization of this information can narrow horizons. But perhaps, in time, we will be able to get the balance right so that the world can still impinge in unexpected ways.

Whatever the case, universities and academics can intervene. So far as their own practices are concerned there are several efforts to produce search engines which can trawl material in much more specific and useful ways and code for depth of content rather than quasi-commercial imperatives. Then there is the fact that academics are among those who have some of the best practical and theoretical grasp of the new visual grammar that is now unfolding, and have the ability to do things about it. Finally, many academics have real influence—and responsibility—in this new world and can use it accordingly. For example, the British scientist and TV personality Brian Cox gets significantly more searches on some days than the (large) university in which he is based.

So we can expect more elegies to old ways of doing things. But we need to balance them out with practical strategies that acknowledge new ways of doing things while retaining a commitment to contemplation and rigor—and concentrated attention—in our teaching and research.

[Creative Commons Wikimedia photo by Jeremy Keith]

He was right about the importance of such links. But things are not so dire as our colleague predicted.

Just a few days ago, President Obama announced a new United States-Mexico Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation, and Research. “This forum will build upon the many positive educational and research linkages that already exist through federal, state, and local governments, public and private academic institutions, civil society, and the private sector,” a press release notes. “It will bring together government agency counterparts to deepen cooperation on higher education, innovation, and research. It will also draw on the expertise of the higher-education community in both countries.”

So, what are these existing linkages?

A recent book published by the Institute of International Education, Latin America’s New Knowledge Economy: Higher Education, Government, and International Collaboration, highlights many of these relationships.

While the U.S. government did stop financing the U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Progam, it sustained connections with Latin America in other ways. There are several agreements with the United States’ southern neighbors, including one dating back to 1972 with Argentina to support the development of science and technology. More recently, in 2011, the National Science Foundation entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education. This update of a 1984 agreement supports collaboration between researchers in both nations. Also, in 2011 the United States and Chile developed a partnership on English-language programs, Fulbright exchanges, and centers to provide information to students wanting to study in the United States, among other work.

More broadly, to increase the flow of students between the United States and its Latin American neighbors, the U.S. Department of State created 100,000 Strong in the Americas. The goal is to increase the number of student exchanges between Latin America and the United States to 100,000 in each direction. And Brazil has its own program, Science Without Borders, which aims to provide 75,000 scholarships for Brazilian students to study in a foreign country, including the United States. As of the fall of 2012, this program had placed nearly 2,000 undergraduate students from Brazil at 238 institutions in the United States.

Other countries have developed efforts to support specific areas of research or teaching. Starting in 1963, Chile developed a partnership with the University of California system focusing on technical cooperation in the areas of agriculture, education, water-resource management, and highway transportation. In 2008, a series of new agreements were signed establishing the Chile-California Partnership for the 21st Century. The Chile-California Program on Human Capital Development was created to foster greater educational opportunities for Chilean students, including providing access to graduate programs in the California system.

University of Buenos Aires has an exchange program with the University of Pennsylvania.

And connections are driven by more than government initiatives. Much of the cross-border engagement happens at the institutional level. For example, the University of Pennsylvania has exchange agreements with the University of Torcuao Di Tella, the University of Salvador, and the University of Buenos Aires. Three community colleges (Houston, Jackson, and Red Rocks) are working with the National Industrial Apprenticeship Service of Brazil and the Social Service Industry of Brazil to develop work-force training opportunities for students in both countries.

Beyond partnerships, institutions have also developed foreign outposts. At least five universities in the United States now operate branch campuses in Latin America (Aliant University in Mexico, Ave Maria University in Nicaragua; Broward College in Ecuador; Endicott College in Mexico; and Florida State University in Panama).  We’ve also seen U.S.-based education conglomerates like the Apollo Group (which owns University of Phoenix) and Laureate International Universities purchasing and operating campuses throughout Latin America. And, like the exchange programs, the flow is not in one direction. Jose Maria Vargas University from Venezuela has a campus in the United States.

Mr. Marmolejo was right to suggest that ties between higher-education institutions in the United States and Latin America should be strengthened. The new book suggests that this is now a strategic priority for the United States, with mutually beneficial programs increasingly part of the hemispheric higher education environment.

Follow us on Twitter: @KevinKinser and @ProfJasonLane.

Disclosure: Jason Lane contributed a chapter to “Latin America’s New Knowledge Economy: Higher Education, Government, and International Collaboration.”

[Creative Commons Wikimedia graphic of Latin America and the University of Buenos Aires authorized under the GNU Free documentation and Attribution 3.0 unported licenses, respectively.]

Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities

U.S. higher education is uniquely positioned to contribute to the agriculture, health, and economic prosperity of developing countries. And the U.S. government plays an important role supporting such work. But that partnership between government and universities could be threatened as lawmakers look for places to cut federal spending— and with foreign aid an all-too-frequent target. As a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a former president of Michigan State University, I’ve seen what we can do in developing countries and strongly believe we must continue to do such work even in tight budgetary times.

Broad-based economic growth in developing countries requires three things: a more educated population, stronger institutions, and new technology. U.S. higher education has in the past made a contribution to those areas and must continue to to do so.

First, a more educated population is a foundation for sustained growth. For many years, donors like USAID and many developing countries focused on helping people attain primary and, to some extent, high-school degrees. But many have learned that a country is not built on high-school diplomas alone. Low-income countries need engineers and economists, teachers and university professors, doctors and nurses, agricultural specialists and entrepreneurs to provide the type of economic growth that a country needs. These leadership roles usually require college and some graduate degrees.

The U.S. government started providing funds for this work in a major way after World War II. In great part with USAID support, universities and colleges have trained hundreds of thousands of people from developing countries in the United States.

Second, developing countries need effective institutions since trained people often cannot be productive unless they are part of a larger organization. Training people and building and strengthening institutions go hand in hand. In the United States, we complain about our institutions but take for granted a reasonably effective university system, health-care system, private sector, and government. But in developing countries there are usually major institutional gaps.

Returned Peace Corps volunteers had a major impact on U.S. development thinking when they came back to work at USAID or did other international work; they had learned how often things did not work in places that lacked effective institutions. For example, having a school building does not mean that the teachers are paid and come to work just like the existence of a bus company does not mean that buses show up. U.S. universities and colleges have worked to build a whole range of institutions in developing countries.

Third, the creation of appropriate technology is key. My experience is that, for example, a poor farmer is a fairly good judge of how to get the most from the technology she or he has available. Orville Freeman, the wise secretary of agriculture under President John F. Kennedy, told me years ago, “I have known poor farmers who cannot read and write, but I have never known one who could not add and subtract.”

As in the United States, new technology can revolutionize what’s possible. Look at the impact of the “green revolution,” which produced huge increases in production of wheat and rice in poor countries that had starving populations. As a young person I recall hearing about the famines in India, but there has not been a major famine there since the green revolution. Less well known is the impact of higher yielding corn in East Africa and many other technological improvements over the decades. U.S. land-grant universities have been involved in much of this. Bob Gates, former secretary of defense and former president of Texas A&M, said at last year’s national meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities that there is no way that the world can meet its food needs without the deep involvement of U.S. universities.

Much of the university work in developing countries has been done with USAID as the primary source of support. During the latter half of the 1980s and in the 1990s, USAID significantly reduced its efforts to work with higher education. But recently the agency has  embraced it again.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, USAID started to work with universities and colleges in more substantial ways. And under President Obama and Raj Shah, the current agency administrator, it’s now USAID policy to again expand involvement of U.S. higher education. In recent months, USAID committed $125-million for the Higher Education Solutions Networks for innovation and new technology. USAID is strongly supporting certain agriculture research. There has been some increased support for partnerships with U.S. and African universities, including those created a few years ago. For example, there is a new $25-million partnership between Ohio State University and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, just the sort of partnership that had such a powerful impact a few decades ago. This partnership, which will involve the U.S. training of over 100 master’s and Ph.D. students, will help build the capacity of Sokoine to educate thousands more and will strengthen the university’s capacity to innovate for its country.

Yet this renewed alliance between the government and higher education could succumb to budget pressures. Some in Congress have questioned U.S. support for higher education in other countries as the sequester affects federal programs closer to home. We need to argue to policy makers that poverty is still a major global issue and that higher education must play its critical role with the strong support of the government. We must continue and expand upon our work to educate people, build and strengthen institutions, and generate new technology.

An administrative building at Tsinghua University, in Beijing.

When Cecil Rhodes created a set of eponymous scholarships to Oxford, his vision was to “render war impossible” through fostering mutual understanding between nations.

Last week Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, announced a set of international scholarships with the same basic objective. But instead of shipping college graduates to the dreaming spires of England, the scholarships will enroll 200 students in a specialized one-year master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The inaugural class will enter in 2016, drawing most recipients from the United States and China.

Critics have questioned the program’s brevity, exclusiveness, and claims of academic freedom. Others have hinted at ulterior business motives.

Assuming that the scholarship has been conceived in good faith — which I think it has been — the program now faces the daunting task of devising selection procedures that will adequately carry out Schwarzman’s vision. Of particular difficulty will be determining the process for selecting the annual class of 40 students from mainland China. What kinds of future Chinese leaders does Schwarzman have in mind? And how will he find them?

This may be one of the toughest decisions scholarship administrators face. Considerations in eligibility and selection procedures that may seem minor can greatly affect the types of candidates chosen.

Take, for instance, the question of endorsement. The Rhodes Scholarship requires universities to first nominate qualified applicants before they can compete in a wider pool, in part to ease the reading load of its selectors. Given the size of China’s university population, a similar kind of culling makes practical sense. But in light of the influence that internal Communist Party committees wield at most Chinese universities, how can administrators of the scholarship ensure that the program receives applications not only from students preselected for their ideological fealty? Might young liberal reformers, who are no less “Chinese” than their Marxist peers, also merit consideration?

In other words, if the goal is, in Schwarzman’s words, to create a “global network” of future leaders, it may be difficult to avoid making an implicit judgment call as to what that future might look like. An ardent believer in the longevity of the Communist Party might simply ask the party itself to endorse its 40 most talented young prospects, or its next generation of ascendant princelings, while a political reformer would search for students of a decidedly different stripe. Given China’s uncertain future, Schwarzman’s best bet — and he is no stranger to this — may be to hedge. It is probably as unacceptable for all 40 mainland scholars to be Communist Party members as it is for all 40 to be liberal activists. The selection process should focus on promoting a genuine diversity of viewpoints. To that end, if a senior education official wishes to serve on a selection panel, why not also ask a liberal law professor to join?

Ethnic diversity is equally important. At a time when educational attainment by Han Chinese greatly outstrips that of minority populations, the prospect of an exclusively Han presence in the scholarship looms as a real and serious possibility. Casual one-off tourists to China might be forgiven for not interacting with some of the 55 ethnic minority groups in China, but that shouldn’t be true of non-Chinese Schwarzman Scholars, who presumably will be expected to familiarize themselves with a vast and complex civilization.

Fortunately, there are ways to institutionalize diversity. The scholarship program could, for instance, reserve three spots every year for students from Minzu University in Beijing, China’s top school for ethnic minorities, or adopt, much like the Rhodes Scholarship, a system of regional quotas. The latter method could be designed so that minority-heavy regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Yunnan wouldn’t be paired with Shanghai, Beijing, or other high-performing provinces and municipalities.

In short, the devising of selection procedures cannot be based exclusively on abstract principles of meritocracy. Each seemingly minor decision — in areas like eligibility, allocation, and panel composition — could structurally bias outcomes in favor of certain types of students. Given the ambition of the Schwarzman Scholarship, and its potential to promote the kind of mutual understanding Cecil Rhodes envisioned a century ago, now is the time to think methodically about how to select and assemble the next generation of Chinese leaders.

[Wikimedia image by pfctdayelise available under Creative Commons license]

China in recent years has aggressively moved to make its universities “world-class,” and top institutions have instituted numerous policies to achieve this goal. Two such policies are recruiting faculty who have been educated overseas and pushing faculty members to publish more academic work. While these strategies have their benefits, they run the risk of creating significant divisions in Chinese academe.

The high value placed on foreign degrees has shaken up the job market. It has become easier for foreign-trained Chinese scholars to return home and get jobs at prestigious universities; and non-Chinese academics have an even easier time. By contrast, the chance for a domestically trained scholar to work at a prestigious university is dwindling, even if they get their doctorate from one of China’s top institutions. For instance, at a university that is a member of China’s Ivy League, the C-9, the policy is that 50 percent of newly hired faculty should be foreign-trained. Considering the number of doctorates awarded by Chinese universities—there were 50,289 in 2011, according to Chinese Ministry of Education data—it’s clear that a domestic degree is not the best path into a top institution.

What’s more, foreign-trained academics—and particularly non-Chinese—have more bargaining power when it comes to salary. As a result, differences in income are quite staggering: At one C-9 university, a foreign-trained Western lecturer makes more than three times what a domestically trained Chinese lecturer does, despite a similar teaching load. At another, the salary difference between a foreign-trained full professor and a domestically trained lecturer could be up to 10 times. Domestically trained Chinese scholars are not happy with this, of course. They attempt to overcome the vast difference in income by bringing in monetary rewards from research projects, spinoff companies, and partnerships with private firms or the government. But the amount of these rewards varies, and while sometimes they can be quite significant sums, there is intense competition for them, and once awarded they become the property of the university, and are thus retrievable only through complicated bureaucratic procedures.

As part of this push to become world-class, the universities and education officials are also reinforcing a “publish or perish” mentality. Chinese universities are attempting to improve their standing in global university rankings rapidly. To do so, they are trying to improve the research areas that the rankings rely on. For publishing, this means that articles in Thomson Citation Index-listed journals are encouraged above all else—in fact, no other international indexes are even considered or recognized, and such language is written into faculty contracts. In consequence, book publishing is considered unimportant and is even openly discouraged in faculty discussions.

There are various policies in place to persuade faculty to submit exclusively to such outlets, the most obvious being financial rewards for successful publication. Most universities will pay between 5,000 and 10,000 RMB (or 750 and 1,500 USD) per article. Importantly, only the first author or corresponding author gets these financial benefits, and this effectively persuades colleagues not to work together.

Publication in indexed journals also has significant implications for promotion, as a Thomson-indexed article outweighs any publication in a Chinese journal—a university could equate one Thomson-indexed publication with up to five Chinese publications, for instance. This policy is frustrating for domestically trained Chinese academics, as it is significantly more difficult for them to write articles in a nonnative language in which they have not been trained.

Ultimately, such policies hurt collegiality and actually hinder the development of productive research relationships amongst colleagues. Domestically trained Chinese academics are extremely reluctant to cooperate with foreign-trained colleagues in publications or to participate with them in rigorous academic conferences.

Foreign-trained academics continue to advocate for such activities, and as a result the division between colleagues continues to grow. Professors who studied overseas are left in one group attempting to foster a robust intellectual environment as domestically trained Chinese remain on the outside looking in.

While the hiring and publishing policies may move Chinese universities up in the rankings, they are failing to promote a collegial and productive intellectual environment—and indeed, they may hurt the ability of China’s higher-education institutions to become world-class.

[Wikimedia image by Berdea available under Creative Commons license]

There are many different campuses that are leading society to a better place by setting an example themselves. In the past, they were on the forefront of battles over gender and racial equality. But the story doesn’t end there. I see progress recently in four other important areas: gun control, sustainability, community outreach, and global health.

In the United States, the most recent instance is the campaign by many college and university presidents to take on the gun lobby and reassert the need for gun-free campuses—against considerable pressure from state legislatures in some cases. Five states now permit the concealed carry of firearms at public institutions. As other state legislators introduce bills to allow concealed firearms on campuses, higher-education leaders are stepping into the fight to prevent the proposals from becoming law.

Then there is the issue of sustainability. Many universities are in the forefront of the battle to produce sustainable campuses and they are often signatories to the 2012 United Nations Commitment to Sustainable Practices of Higher Education Institutions. Particularly noteworthy are the University of California at Los Angeles, which is able to reel off a list of wide-ranging sustainability initiatives, and the University of New South Wales, in Australia, which has similar efforts.

Again, there is the issue of community involvement. Every campus interacts in all kinds of ways with its community. That has been the case for a long time, but what has changed is the scale of the ambition. Take, for example, the recently opened Penn Park at the University of Pennsylvania: 24 acres of community facilities. Or take the way in which many universities are expanding their arts centers to serve larger communities.

Perhaps the best illustration of my idea is the issue of public health. Global public health has become a matter of pressing concern. There is still much to do. Although many infectious diseases are coming under control, noncommunicable diseases like cancer and heart disease are big and increasing killers and also have devastating effects upon dependents (medical treatment is one of the chief causes of impoverishment in many parts of the world, not to mention the loss of a breadwinner). Many of these noncommunicable diseases are the result of adverse lifestyles like obesity or alcohol abuse or smoking. It follows that, if lifestyle changes, so will the incidence of these diseases. Preventive medicine is the way forward.

By one estimate, there are going to be 262 million students in the world by 2025, of which eight million will be studying abroad. If just these students were to adopt healthier lifestyles, then a significant part of the battle could begin to be won, since students are significant influencers. Add in university staff, and here is a cohort of people who can really make a difference through example and by proselytizing. Of course, many students and staff already follow healthy lifestyles. But others do not. So changing their habits can make a real difference.

University leaders are beginning to realize this. It is not about promoting sports, although that is an important ingredient. It is about getting a modicum of physical exercise, about appropriate diet, about spotting early signs of disease. For example, nonsmoking campuses are spreading. An interest in sports is turning into a more general interest in exercise. Early testing for susceptibility to noncommunicable diseases is becoming a regular campus event, often helped by student-run charities.

One way of helping to foster these kinds of commitments is by signing up with U.N. Academic Impact, a recent effort aimed at aligning higher-education institutions with the United Nations to actively support universally accepted principles in areas like human rights, literacy, sustainability, and conflict resolution. Another is to align each higher-education effort with ventures like the Clinton Global Initiative University. There are numerous other means of demonstrating why campuses are more than campuses, but hopefully the point is made. When it comes to their role as public goods, campuses are, in many ways, becoming more rather than less focused on public benefit.