Office of the President, Lee C. BollingerUniversities Must Think Globally Financial Times Op-Ed November 14, 2003 At the beginning of the 20th century, Nicholas Murray Butler launched his astonishing 43-year tenure as president of Columbia University by defining the modern research university. “In these modern days,” he said, “the university is not apart from the activities of the world, but in them and of them. It deals with real problems and it relates itself to life as it is.”
In 1902, American universities were entering a century of growth and significance that would have been unimaginable then, perhaps even to Butler. Yet he sensed that the university could not function as a private sanctuary operated for the benefit of the few admitted to it. Universities were a public trust with a role to play in world affairs. Consequently “every legitimate demand for guidance, for leadership, for expert knowledge, for trained skill, for personal service, it is the...duty of the university to meet”. There was no place for what Butler called “academic aloofness”. Scholarship had to be tied to human needs.
The pressing importance of issues of globalisation will, one hopes, provide a force for change. I have seen this happen in my own field. I am a scholar and teacher of the first amendment rights of freedom of speech and press. On any big law school faculty today, I would be one of more than a dozen specialists in some aspect of US constitutional law. Fifty years ago, this was not the case. A handful would teach a single course on constitutional law. But, as the era of constitutionalism flourished in the late 1950s and 1960s, expertise in constitutional law subdivided the field. This should happen in law schools and throughout the university with the process of globalisation. As this happens, and it surely will, it is important to maintain the particular academic stance that defines the modern university and justifies its existence. Butler was right to reject “aloofness”. While we cannot order a faculty to study this or that, we must nevertheless be self-critical and aware of the tendency to drift into intellectual solipsism. It is seductive to work on the most fundamental questions, but not all of us can or should do so. Yet, by becoming too involved with contemporary issues, we risk duplicating the efforts of other actors outside the university and abandoning the vital role of trying to see the forest as well as the trees. Above all, too close an engagement risks turning the university into a partisan, debating society. It is an ideal, but one worth holding on to, that the university nurtures an intellectual character that enjoys the imaginative process of considering all perspectives on any given issue. Thus, as we reorient our modern universities and turn our focus more to-wards the extraordinary happenings on the global stage, we must bear in mind the fine line between being too much a part “of the activities of the world” and being too “aloof” from them.
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