Trump's Attack On Harvard Could Have Unexpected Consequences
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA - May 22, 2023: Students in graduation gowns and families in front of ... More the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library (c. 1915). Harvard VERITAS banners hang in front of building. The library houses some 3.5 million books in its stacks and is the centerpiece of the Harvard College Libraries. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener.
If Donald Trump's political reasons for attacking Harvard don't make any sense, then the historic angle of this story should make it clear how completely off the wall this is. America's growth, progress, and leadership have always been driven by its unequaled partnership of its universities and businesses.
America didn't become the world's leader and unparalleled power in science, engineering, research, and innovation – and in business, for that matter – by accident. It happened as a result of plentiful support for higher education by the federal government, state governments, and private enterprise that blossomed in the 19th century, together with an unlimited flow of highly educated college graduates to meet the increasing needs of the workforce.
Here's another very big point. These colleges and universities not only educated America's population; they attracted talent from abroad to come here and teach, run laboratories, lead research, and so on. Richard Florida, sociologist and economist, wrote in his 2002 landmark book The Rise of the Creative Class that America's colleges and corporations constituted the 'first stop for students and the last stop for scientists.' Three years later, in The Flight of the Creative Class, he presented expansive data showing that we were unfortunately reversing that position, losing talent to places like Helsinki, Eindhoven, Dublin, Tel Aviv, Vancouver, and Wellington. Donald Trump's misplaced aggression will only serve to accelerate the trend all the more, and one thing that will be impossible to measure is how much talent never considers coming here to begin with if America defaults on its support of and love affair with higher education.
The United States has never had a national university, as many other countries do, but it's not that we haven't tried. George Washington first proposed the idea and offered to donate some of his land to the effort. Years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson proposed the idea – along with plans – but it went nowhere. The states couldn't agree on what such an institution would be like.
However, there are today 3,931 institutions of higher learning in the Unted States: 1,892 public and 2,039 private. Only eleven existed before the Industrial Revolution began (using 1764 as the year). The confluence of American business with higher education is one of the easiest sets of dots to connect. For instance, there are 109 land grant universities, at least one in every state, and they have always been directly tied to the commitment to mutual growth.
Albert Einstein first visited the United States in April 1921, when he was 42. Here was his first impression: 'What strikes a visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life. The American is friendly, self-confident, optimistic, and without envy.'
Not a decade later, after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics and becoming the most famous person in the world, he chose to live the rest of his life in Princeton, New Jersey. He was appointed the first faculty member at the nascent Institute for Advanced Study, an open, expansive campus tucked nearby – but independent of – Princeton University. He bought a house on Mercer Street, equidistant and walking distance from the two great institutions, one that had been for almost 200 years already, the other that has been for nearly 100 years since.
Fleeing the Nazis, Einstein was heavily courted by universities in Zurich, Leiden, Paris, Budapest, Oxford, and others, plus heavy come-ons from Caltech and Princeton. Albert Einstein was at home here.
You may not recognize the name Mikhail Brin, or his son Sergey, but Mikhail's arrival in the U.S. set the stage for one of history's greatest transformations. A brilliant mathematician in the Soviet Union, Mikhail and his family felt the anti-Semitic wrath in the USSR that, among other things, limited his academic and professional opportunities. After a protracted effort to leave, the family was granted emigrate status from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1979, when Sergey was just six years old.
Once in the United States, Mikhail Brin became a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, while Sergey eventually went on to do graduate work at Stanford University and to eventually co-found Google with Larry Page. As we see, the higher education environment was welcoming, kind, and supportive. Mikhail wanted to come here and nowhere else.
The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Jonas Salk grew up and was educated in New York City and earned his medical degree from NYU in 1939. While his fellow graduates pursued lucrative private practices, Salk went into research, situating himself at the University of Pittsburgh and was ultimately running a lab where he developed his polio vaccine in 1954. The university was highly supportive of his work, which he acknowledged often.
Trace our world of computers back, and it doesn't take long to come to the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1930s and 1940s, In huge, cavernous rooms up to 1,800 square feet, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) and UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) were designed for military and commercial purposes respectively. ENIAC went into operation in 1945 and UNIVAC followed in 1951. The times, the temperature, and the atmosphere were all just right.
The message Donald Trump is sending now is not the same message that our universities sent out to Einstein, Brin, Salk, and millions of others. Harvard, with growing support from many other institutions, has taken up the fight. Place your bets.
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