This post is a review essay of a book called Research Universities and the Public Good. It appeared in the American Journal of Sociology. Here’s a link to a PDF of the original.
Research Universities and the Public Good: Discovery for an Uncertain Future
By Jason Owen-Smith.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2018. Pp. xii + 213. $35.00.
David F. Labaree
Stanford University
American higher education has long been immune to the kind of criticism levied against elementary and secondary education because it has been seen as a great success story, in contrast to the popular narrative of failure that has been applied to the lower levels of the system. And the rest of the world seems to agree with this distinction. Families outside the United States have not been eager to send their children to our schools but they have been clamoring for admission to the undergraduate and graduate programs at our colleges and universities. In the last few years, however, this reputational immunity has been quickly fading. The relentlessly rationalizing reformers who have done so much harm to US schools in the name of accountability have now started to direct their attention to higher education. Watch out: They’re coming for us.
One tiny sector of the huge and remarkably diverse structure of US higher education has been particularly vulnerable to this contagion, namely the research university. This group represents only 3 percent of the more than 5,000 degree-granting institutions in the country, and it educates only a small percentage of college students while sucking up a massive amount of public and private resources. Its highly paid faculty don’t teach very much, instead focusing their time instead on producing research on obscure topics published in journals for the perusal of their colleagues rather than the public. No wonder state governments have been reducing their funding for public research universities and the federal government has been cutting its support for research. No wonder there are strong calls for disaggregating the multiplicity of functions that make these institutions so complex, separating undergraduate from graduate instruction and teaching from research production, so that the various services of the university can be delivered more cost effectively to consumers.
In his new book, Jason Owen-Smith, a sociology professor at University of Michigan, mounts a valiant and highly effective defense of the apparently indefensible American research university. While acknowledging the complexity of functions that run through these institutions, he focuses his attention primarily on the public benefits that derive from their research production. As he notes, although they represent less than 3 percent of the institutions of higher education, they produce nearly 90 percent of the system’s research and development. In an era when education is increasingly portrayed as primarily a private good – providing degrees whose benefits only accrue to the degree holders – he deliberately zeroes in on the way that university research constitutes a public good whose benefits accrue to the community as a whole.
He argues that the core public functions of the research university are to serve as “sources of knowledge and skilled people, anchors for communities, industries, and regions, and hubs connecting all of the far-flung parts of society” (emphasis in original, p. 1). In chapter one he spells out the overall argument, in two he explores the usefulness of the peculiarly complex organization of the research university, in chapters three through five he examines in more detail each of the core functions, and at the end he suggests ways that university administrators can help position their institutions to demonstrate the value they provide the public.
The core function is to produce knowledge and skill. The most telling point the author makes about this function is that it works best if allowed to emerge organically from the complex incentive structure of the university itself instead of being directed by government or industry toward solving the most current problems. Trying to make research relevant may well make it dysfunctional. Mie Augier and James March (2007) argue that the pursuit of relevance is afflicted by both ambiguity (we don’t know what’s going to be relevant until we encounter the next problem) and myopia (by focusing too tightly on the current case we miss what it is a case of). In short, as Owen-Smith notes, investing in research universities is a kind of social insurance, in which we develop answers to problems that haven’t yet emerged; and, while the private sector focuses on applied research that is likely to have immediate utility, public funds are most needed to support the basic research whose timeline for utility is unknown but whose breadth of benefit is much greater.
The second function of the research university is to serve as a regional anchor. A creative tension that energizes this institution is that it’s both cosmopolitan and local. It aspires to universal knowledge but it’s deeply grounded in place. Companies can move but universities can’t. This isn’t just because of physical plant, a constraint that also effects companies; it’s because universities develop a complex web of relationships with the industries and governments and citizens their neighborhood. Think Stanford and Silicon Valley. Owen-Smith makes the analogy to the anchor store in a shopping mall.
The third function of the research university is to serve as a hub, which is the cosmopolitan side of its relationship with the world. It’s located in place, but it’s connected to the intellectual and economic world through a complex web of networks. Like the university itself, these webs emerge organically out of the actions of a vast array of actors pursuing their own research enterprises and connecting with colleagues and funding sources and clients and sites of application around the country and the globe. Research universities are uniquely capable of convening people from all sectors around issues of mutual interest. Such synergies benefit everyone.
The current discourse on universities, which narrowly conceives of them as mechanisms for delivering degrees to students, desperately needs the message that Owen-Smith delivers here. Students may be able to get a degree through a cheap online program, but only the complex and costly system of research universities can deliver the kinds of knowledge production, copmmunity development, and network building that provide such invaluable benefits for the public as a whole. One thing I would add to the author’s analysis is that American research universities have been able to develop such strong public support in the past in large part because they combine top-flight scholarship with large programs of undergraduate education that are relatively accessible to the public and rather undemanding intellectually. Elite graduate programs and research projects rest on a firm populist base that may help the university survive the current assaults, a base grounded as much in football and fraternities as in the erudition of its faculty. This, however, is but a footnote to this powerfully framed contribution to the literature on U.S. higher education.
Augier, Mie & March, James G. (2007). The pursuit of relevance in management education. California Management Review, 49:3 (Spring), 129-146.
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 