Clark Kerr and The Uses of the University

Simon Marginson
CSHE Ideas and Issues in Higher Education seminar
15 December 2008
Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne
s.marginson@unimelb.edu.au
Introduction
This paper looks at where the leading or dominant model of the research university is
heading, moving rapidly from past to present to future and passing all too lightly over
the contexts of the ideas discussed. By research university I mean institutions that
combine teaching, research and service; work across a range of disciplines and
professional training rather than specializing in one or two areas; produce a mix of
public and private goods; pursue local, national and global agendas; and structure
educational and social opportunities and allocate places in professions and career
systems. The paper starts with J.H. Newmans The idea of a University1 and Wilhelm
von Humboldt2 in the nineteenth century before moving to its main discussion of Clark
Kerr3 who summarised the modern research university in his Harvard lectures in
1963. It then considers where the research university might be pushing beyond Clark
Kerrs account, in the era of globalization, the knowledge economy and the rise of
Asian science, and poses the question of the next Idea of a University.
JH Newman and The Idea of a University (1852)
Let us begin then with J.H. Newman and the original Idea of a University. The writing
is superb. Yet this is not the university we know. It was a teaching institution that
covered all intellectual fields. It was not a research institution. It was concerned with
the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than its advancement (p. xxviii).
Newman did not expect academic staff to combine teaching and research. To
discover and teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not
commonly found united in the same person. Most of the major intellectual discoveries
emerge from outside the universities, he said. But Newmans university was centrally
concerned with knowledge, received knowledge, and also with critical thought.
Newman saw as one of the chief benefits of the university the manner in which is
brought the separate and competing intellectual schools together in the one place.
The fields of knowledge were independent in themselves, he said, and each was
supreme within its own department, requiring no higher or general authority; but they
needed each other to be whole, being used to reflect on each other (p. 35, 39, 52 &
1

Newman, 1982 (1852).

von Humboldt, 1970 (1900. Written some time between Autumn 1809 and Autumn 1810, see p. 242).
3
Kerr, 2001 (1963).
2

2
58). The different fields complete, correct, balance each other (p. 75) All contributed
to the atmosphere of thought that every student breathed, even though the student
might specialize in only one or two areas (pp. 76-77). This made possible what he
called liberal education, whose business was the formation of the intellect - though
like other university leaders of his day, Newman was concerned only with male
intellects. Women were not admitted to his university in Dublin for another 70 years.
Liberal education also meant learning as an end in itself. Knowledge is capable of
being its own end, stated Newman. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that
any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward. Quoting Cicero, he
argued that knowledge was a fundamental human need. All people desire knowledge
and understanding. To make mistakes and to be deceived is seen as an evil and a
disgrace. Newman distinguished liberal education from commercial or professional
education (p. 80). He strenuously argued against John Locke and others for whom
knowledge should be useful and specifically rejected the notion that learning should
be judged according to its contribution to wealth. Newman saw utilitarian learning as
the opposite of learning for its own sake. He was uncompromising on this point. Truth
has two attributesbeauty and power; and while Useful Knowledge is the possession
of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful (p. 165).
Newman also made the point that liberal knowledge is lifelong in its benefits, an
acquired illumination, a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment.
Education, he argued, is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature,
and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent (pp. 8586). He acknowledged that higher education could have practical benefits, but saw
these as flowing indirectly from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Intellectual
culture is its own end; for what has its end in itself, has its use in itself also... (p. 122).
Newman also argued that university education had broader effects in civil society,
beyond the benefits for individuals. It raises the intellectual tone of society, cultivates
the public mind, purifies the national taste, and provides fixed aims to popular
aspiration, gives enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, and facilitates the
exercise of political power, while bringing refinement to private life (p. 134).
How much of Newman is still with us? Not his argument against the inclusion of
research in the university. Not his vision of the university as cut off from the ordinary
bustle of life, which long influenced the siting of new institutions but no longer fits with
our broadening practices of university engagement and city-university synergy. Not
his argument against utility of tertiary programs. Universities today are mass
institutions, they serve many purposes, and vocational utility is among the chief. It is
simply inconceivable that we could ignore the work-related outcomes of university.
Yet a surprising proportion of Newman survives. First, the almost post-modern points
about the multiple character of knowledge, that all fields constitute partial truths, that
all contribute to our understanding and they supplement each other, and that we gain
by placing them in a common container. Second, the emphases on the formative role
of learning and knowledge, the manner they shape the intellect and so shape the
person and her or his potentials, and on the lifelong nature of the effects. Newman

3
was right to argue that a healthy intellect is a good thing in itself because of the open
ended potentials it creates. Immediate graduate earnings are not the only purpose of
university. Thus third, the point about the indirect and unanticipated benefits, one that
applies to research as well as teaching. If we invest only in outputs we can predict the
creative potential of universities is much reduced. This does not negate utility as
such. Universities combine utilitarian and non-utilitarian outcomes. It is not either/or.
Finally, the points on the contributions of higher education to civil and political society.
Humboldt and university reform in Germany
Even while Newman was explaining his Idea of a teaching-only university, its
foundations had already been knocked away. More than forty years before Wilhelm
von Humboldt had instigated university reform in Germany. He sought to combine
received wisdom, and the formation of the individual intellect, with objective scientific
and scholarly knowledge, including scientific inquiry designed to push forward the
frontiers of knowledge (p. 243). Humboldt like Newman argued that knowledge should
be cultivated for its own sake and not its uses (p. 245). But his Idea of a University
was a teaching/research institution in which each function informed the other,
professors were free to teach and inquire as they wished, students were mature selfmotivated persons, and received authority was open to question. Science and
scholarship do not consist of closed bodies of permanently settled truths, he stated
(p. 244). One unique feature of higher education institutions is that they conceive of
science and scholarship as dealing with ultimately inexhaustible tasks: this means
they are engaged in an unceasing process of inquiry (p. 243). This opened the way
to the continuous critical striving for insight, novelty and invention, that was to
characterize the research university and positioned it as an engine of modernization.
Humboldt emphasized both science and scholarship in equal measure and sought to
reconcile specialized science with intellectual breadth as well as depth. The
University he founded in Berlin, which opened as Friedrich Wilhelm University in
1810, was dedicated to the spirit of the enlightenment. Hegel taught there. Later
academic faculty included Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Among its nineteenth
century students were Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels and the Brothers Grimm who
wrote the fairytales. Humboldts reform was followed in other German universities,
which became reorganized as teaching/research institutions focused on science.
Humboldt was especially interested in the conditions necessary for science and
scholarship. They rested on independent thought and stimulation (p. 248), so the
dominant principles of universities must be freedom and the absence of distraction
(p. 243). Intellectual work was essentially ungovernable and that the state should
respect this. The state must always remain conscious of the fact that it never has and
in principle never can, by its own action, bring about the fruitfulness of intellectual
activity. It must indeed be aware that it can only have a prejudicial influence if it
intervenes. The state must understand that intellectual work will go on infinitely better
if it does not intrude (p. 244). In relation to research and scholarship, its objective
should be to facilitate the creative process. It must therefore seek to maintain
intellectual activity at its liveliest and most productive level (p. 244). Government
should simply supply the organizational framework and the resources necessary for

4
the practice of science and scholarship (p. 244). Its only concern should be the
profusion (in the sense of mental power and variety) of intellectual talents to be
brought together in the institution (pp. 245-246). Humboldt also noted intellectual
freedom could be threatened not only by the state but by the intellectual institutions
themselves which often resisted new schools of thought (p. 246). He emphasized the
virtues of intellectual collaboration, and the passage of individual insights into
common knowledge, opening the way to a public good conception of research.
The world influence of the German research university was articulated not through
university reform in Britain, where Oxford and Cambridge were slow adopters, but in
the United States, beginning in 1876 with the foundation of Johns Hopkins University
as a graduate school dedicated to scientific inquiry. The teaching/research model was
progressively adopted by the new state universities and leading private universities
such as Harvard and reworked as the American research university. After world war
two, a conflict in which science played a principal role, it became globally hegemonic.
Clark Kerr and The Uses of the University (1963)
A century after Newman we have Clark Kerr and The Uses of the University, the
second great book on the Anglo-American university. But Clark Kerr is closer to
Humboldt than Newman, though Humboldts Idea was earlier in chronological time.
In 1963 Clark Kerr was president of the University of California system. He
understood the strengths, difficulties and dilemmas of the American research
university and described them with acute observation and remarkable clarity. With its
managed division of labour between stellar science universities such as Berkeley, the
Calstate universities and the community colleges, California was the most advanced
system in the world. Trends and developments apparent there in 1963 later became
general to higher education everywhere. Kerrs book has had a long life.
As with Newman and Humboldt, Clark Kerrs central motif was knowledge - new
knowledge as in Humboldt rather than received knowledge as in Newman. More
explicitly than in Humboldt, the driver of the university was its role in modernization.
Kerr described a research and teaching university animated by continuous discovery,
change, growth and national development. The research mission, funded by the
national American defence, science and medical budgets, was closest to his heart.
He was less excited by the formative teaching mission than Newman or by the
benefits of the teaching/research nexus as in Humboldt. Kerrs title The Uses of the
University seemed deliberately pitched against Newman and his rejection of utility.
What they have in common is multiplicity. Clark Kerr extended Newmans point about
many fields of knowledge, to the notion of multiple goals and multiple constituencies.
Kerr traced the origins of the American research university in the incorporation of
science after Johns Hopkins; the land grant movement, which fostered accessible
institutions dedicated to the service of the state via mass education for business and
agriculture; and federal research funding after world war two, which secured a
shaping role for government and underwrote the elite sector. In 1960 federal research
funding provided 15 per cent of university income, 57 per cent going to the leading six

5
institutions (pp. 40-41). This had changed everything. Research funding fragmented
the faculty; boosted the research active and the grant entrepreneurs, weakened the
research poor disciplines in the humanities, and triggered competition for talent. It had
begun to prise apart the teaching and research nexus and it downgraded teaching.
Knowledge, stated Clark Kerr, has certainly never in history been so central to the
conduct of an entire society (p. 66). The American research university, he said, has
demonstrated how adaptive it can be to new opportunities for creativity; how
responsive to money; how eagerly it can play a new and useful role; how fast it can
change while pretending that nothing has happened at all (pp. 34-35). It was
inconsistent internally but consistently productive. He noted that in the emerging
knowledge-driven economy the role of the research university would keep on
expanding. There was increasing recognition of its uses in economic growth, in
international competition, in political and social as well as cultural development (p.
xiii). He missed the coming revolution in communications but rightly anticipated that
the life sciences would be the next big thing in research. He described the clustering
of industry and research in the Bay Area near Berkeley and Stanford and in the
Boston Corridor, and remarked that the university and segments of industry are
becoming more alike (p. 68). These developments are all now familiar. Clark Kerrs
university also anticipated todays emphasis on external constituencies and
engagement; which extended beyond research to professional and vocational training
he noted that degree level study was becoming the gateway to every occupation
and to schools of business, university companies, and cultural activities for the public.
Clark Kerr was a university president and was preoccupied above all with what held
the university together. His Idea of a University was what he called The Multiversity.
It had no single animating principle. Humboldts coupling of teaching and research
was the first move in a fragmentation that had become emblematic. The University
was defined by ever-broadening roles in teaching, research and service; shaped by
its external relations at many points; while at the same time it was animated by its
own institutional identity, by its contrasting discipline communities, and by the campus
estates of administrators, students and faculty. This generated on-going tensions
between its outer and its inner aspects. As a new type of institution, he said, the
University is not really private and it is not really public; it is neither entirely of the
world nor entirely apart from it (p. 1). And wisely, he added that the internal illusion is
that it is a law unto itself; the external reality is that it is governed by history (p. 71).
The university is so many things to so many people that it must, of necessity, be
partially at war with itself, said Kerr (p. 7). What then gave it coherence? I have
sometimes thought of it as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together
by a common grievance over parking (p. 15), he joked. American public universities
were creatures of the state, so there was a potential for outside control. Fortunately
this was not exercised in ultimate fashion. The university turned on self-management.
This was one key to its achievements. Kerr identified the unifying elements as name
and reputation, the governing board, and of course the university president, the
understated initiator and mediator that held the multiversity together. Kerrs account of
the growth and professionalization of administration, and the rise and rise of the
executive class, anticipated changes still sweeping across the world today.

Kerr predicted the coming transformation of worldwide higher education system along
the lines of the American model (p. 65), though this was incidental to his fascination
with his own nation. The US universities had helped to change the world but have
themselves been much less changed than most of the rest of the world, he remarked.
(p. 116). It is true that since 1963, everywhere else, national policy and university
practice have moved closer to the American model. (No doubt other governments
also like the contradiction of American autonomy: that remarkable combination of selfdetermining higher education institutions, owning their own missions, that
nevertheless move lock step with social culture, national agendas and the demands
of global hegemony). And for a long time Kerrs notion of unchanging American
universities with a one-way flow of influence over the rest of the higher education
world was also borne out by events. But other centres of power are emerging. In a
globalizing world there is complacency, even a whiff of hubris, in that vision.
What else was missing from Clark Kerrs account? Though he discussed the impact
of business models and the danger programs not supported by market forces would
be undervalued in the eyes of university leaders and governments; he underplayed
the potential tensions between commercialization and intellectual freedom, for
example in sponsorship and pharmaceutical research, as were discussed by a later
American university President, Derek Bok, in his monograph on commercialization.4
Kerr also missed the full impact of resource dependency, the degree to which
revenue goals would come to drive university priorities, especially in institutions below
the top tier; and he underestimated the role of universities in the allocation of social
status, the shaping influence of the competition for prestige in American higher
education, and the rising tuition prices and wasteful expenditures associated with it.
And while Kerr anticipated a shift to student-centred learning he underestimated the
degree to which students are capable of independent agency. He had little insight into
teaching and was insensitive to the formative effects of learning and knowledge for
individuals, the element at the heart of Newmans argument. He discussed the
modernizing role of universities in abstract and aggregated terms, as economic and
social development. He misses the growing importance of the self-determining
individual as the subject of modernity. This in turn led him to underestimate the role of
the university in the enlargement of human freedoms. Reflexive self-forming human
subjects are not simply means to economic prosperity; munitions in the arms race in
innovation, cannon fodder for the global competition state; but are themselves one of
the ends of university education. Again, JH Newman had imagined this better, though
for Newman the element of self-formation was much less developed than it is now.
Above all Kerr failed to predict globalization (though he was not alone in that!). He did
not anticipate the Internet; the explosive growth in academic communications and
university networking, and the one world system of research and knowledge.
The Global Research University

Bok, 2003.

7
Is the research university of today different to Clark Kerrs multiversity? The institution
that Kerr described is still largely in place. But there are two additional elements. The
first is globalization. Not just global knowledge (always part of the university) but
globalization of vision and association. In Kerrs time the horizon was the nation. Now
it is the world. The second element is related - the fast growing knowledge economy
and its wash-back into the university. The new knowledge that excited Kerrs
imagination has moved from being a large piece of the Idea of a University to the
dominant motif for the whole. We have moved further from Newmans teaching-only
university. I will now examine the constituents of this new kind of university.
Globalization is the process of partial convergence and integration across national
borders. Todays globalization is above all a product of the one world communicative
environment that emerged in the early 1990s. We are at a key turning point in history,
comparable in its transformative impact with the industrial revolution, perhaps with the
Neolithic (agricultural) revolution. The world is becoming one zone of association in
which all human activities interface with each other and with a common store of
knowledge.5 The system of communications, information and knowledge constitutes a
single world mind. This is a staggering change, with consequences we cannot yet
see, and higher education is at the centre of it. The world remains diverse in political,
linguistic and cultural terms; nation states are robust and political economy continues
to be partly national in form: the global knowledge economy is primarily integrated by
knowledge, language and communications rather than economy. But the different
nations and cultures have become transparent to each other; and creativity in all its
forms, from scientific discoveries to management innovations to works of art, is now
universal in reach. Successful human traditions are projected and reproduced not just
on the national but the global scale. We begin to glimpse the future world society.
The motor of networks is continuous expansion. As each node joins the network the
unit cost is the same. But each node connects to a growing number of others so that
the unit benefits increase. The cost function is linear and the benefits exponential.
Networks expand at an increasing rate until universal coverage is reached. Hence the
extraordinary dynamism of networks, and their quasi-democratic inclusiveness.6
OECD surveys show that some countries in North America and Europe are
approaching two thirds home computer access and broadband Internet per 100
persons is approaching the 25 mark. The worldwide number of websites is at 110
million. Blogs were at 60 million in 2006. Both indicators are rising exponentially.7
To higher education globalization has brought the growing mobility of researchers,
university administrators and students; the cross-border market in degrees sustained
by globally mobile work; global e-learning; foreign campuses in East and Southeast
Asia; global networking and alliances; twinning and other partnerships, and global
referencing, including rankings with their transformative effects. Research universities
are now partly disembedded from local constituencies and nation-states via offshore

Peters, et al., 2009.

Castells, 2000 & 2001.
7
OECD, 2008a.
6

8
activity, funding and accreditation. The potential for cooperative global public goods
has grown. Then there is Bologna in Europe and the rise of Asian science.8
At the same time there has been a partial and often voluntary global convergence
across the worlds universities, in their academic behaviours and institutional forms,
and in an Americanized political economy of the sector parallel evolutions between
national higher education systems, including the corporatization of public institutions
and their partial autonomy from government; mixed funding and partly private
systems, external engagement and nominal student-centredness; more professional
executive management and executive steering; quality assurance; and the doctoral
training of professors according to increasingly common international norms.
In sum, international relations have moved from the margins to the centre of the Idea
of a University. Jane Knights idea of internationalization was coined 15 years ago to
talk up the need for cross-border and intercultural elements in institutional strategy,
services, teaching and learning.9 Some are still unaware that the world has changed,
but a normative definition is no longer needed. There will be no return to purely
national or local models. There will be no return to the age of innocence before the
Internet, or the Jiao Tong. Universities that turn their back on globalization will wither.
The national and local dimensions are still important. Non research higher education
is primarily national and local. Research-intensive universities continue to work these
dimensions; and are closely shaped by national policy and investment. But research
universities are also closely shaped by global flows. They are glo-na-cal institutions;
global, national and local at the same time.10 Newmans Idea of a University and
Clark Kerrs Multiversity have become the Global Research University, or GRU.
The global knowledge economy
And the GRU has become locked into the global knowledge economy. It is positioned
as a key agent of the nation as global competition state. At the same time it plays a
direct global role as the arbiter of the value of knowledge in the k-economy. The keconomy is less closed and heteronomous than the financial and industrial
economies, which provides the leading universities with a certain room to move.
The Internet-based knowledge economy is characterised by the explosive growth of
instantly circulated open source global knowledge. Global knowledge flows are
sourced by business and industry and feed into the innovation cycle. They also feed
into governments and much of modern culture. Once networks are created the cost of
dissemination is minor. In economic terms knowledge is primarily a public good.11 It
sustains a coherent property regime only at the point of creation, prior to initial
dissemination, when there is first mover advantage. Once knowledge is disseminated
it remains useful but it is non-excludable and non rivalrous and its market price is
zero. Most knowledge takes the form not of commercial intellectual property but freely
8

Marginson & van der Wende, 2007.

Knight, 2004.
10
Marginson & Rhoades, 2002,
11
Stiglitz, 1999
9

9
exchanged open source knowledge and digital cultural goods reproduced at little or
no cost.12 In its 2008 advice on tertiary education the OECD swung the main focus
from the creation of commercializable IP to the dissemination of open science.13
But open source knowledge presents one key difficulty. The value of commercial IP is
determined in the market. The value of other knowledge cannot be so determined. It
is subject to free exchange and has a natural price of zero. Here universities, and
academic publishers, have assumed a crucial function in the systems for codifying
and selecting knowledge and assigning unequal values to it. University personnel
allocate knowledge to journals, ranked in journal hierarchies. Meanwhile university
research rankings, and publication and citation metrics, have established a hierarchy
of knowledge producers. Together these systems regulate the value of open source
knowledge and guide investments in the k-economy by industry and government.
This locks in the GRU as a central part of the k-economy. Its role extends beyond
knowledge production and research training, to regulator of the relations between
knowledge and commerce, and the relations between knowledge and government.
In turn this has confirmed research and knowledge as the heart of the GRU. This is
consistent with modernization itself, with the centrality of what Kerr called new
knowledge to what we call innovation. Perpetual change. If not innovation, then
renovation and reinvention. Thus the research-based reflexivities of critical inquiry,
inquiry-driven transformation and self-renewal have come to permeate the unviersity.
Action research and similar reflexive behaviours are routine parts of professional
training. Scholarship in the humanities and law, even works of art, are redefined as
empirical research for funding purposes. We find the extension and intensification of
research techniques in every institutional function, from marketing and service design,
to human resource management, student feedback and quality assurance.
Research is also the main medium for cross-border collaboration between institutions.
And unequivocally, research and knowledge have become the primary source of
university status, money and power. Research is central to the economic fortunes of
leading institutions through its direct effect on revenues and its indirect effects via
status. All universities have been drawn into the one-world knowledge system,
entrenched by global rankings and above all by the research outcomes in the
Shanghai Jiao Tong league tables. In this process the teaching-research nexus has
been further weakened. Active researchers buy out their teaching time. Teaching
might have formal parity of esteem, but teaching-only institutions have lesser status.
Even institutions with negligible research are at pains to sustain a nominal research
role. Correspondingly, in national policy R&D is seen as the engine of innovation and
competitiveness. Investment in research has leapt in China, Korea and Singapore
and is climbing in Europe, driven by the Lisbon target of 3 per cent of GDP. The
English-speaking nations will follow. Analysts talk about an arms race in innovation.
In sum, the trend apparent in Kerrs time has markedly advanced. Amid globalization
and the knowledge economy research has become the dominant source of instinct,
12
13

Marginson, forthcoming.
.OECD, 2008b, pp. 102-103.

10
meaning, status and revenue in higher education especially at the top of the
university totem poll. Despite the widespread gesturing to customer-centredness,
Newmans teaching mission has been largely eclipsed. The misuses of the Shanghai
Jiao Tong ranking confirm this. These research rankings are widely used to inform
student and family decisions about undergraduate teaching. This is so blatantly
inappropriate, and the error has been pointed out so often, that we must ask
ourselves why it persists. The answer lies in the centrality of new knowledge and its
reflexivities, not only in the Idea of a University and the determination of value within
it, but in modern culture, in the way we think about ourselves and how we live.
Where is the GRU going?
Where then is the global research university (GRU) going? What are the likely
developments? Summarizing, we can understand the research university as the
conjunction of four systems. The system of open source knowledge, horizontal in
character, fast moving, chaotic, only partly tamed by formal research mechanisms.
The system for allocating positional status and prestige to universities themselves,
and within that to graduates on one hand and parcels of knowledge on the other:
ordered, vertical, joining higher education to the social and economic status quo.14
The system of financial and industrial markets, connecting higher education to the
economy outside; and inside the institutions as revenue-raising entrepreneurship,
academic capitalism,15 and quasi-market competition in the allocation of funds. And
the system of governmental policy, financing and regulation, that tethers the global
research university with varying effectiveness to national growth and modernization.
Much of the critique of higher education has been directed against academic
capitalism, and the business and commodity models called up by neo-liberal reform,
which imagines all educational goods as private goods. Is higher education becoming
a commodity like any other? As we have seen, these problems were underestimated
by Kerr. Yet the potential of academic capitalism to transform higher education can
be overstated also. Commodification has taken place mostly at the margins, in the
for-profit sector, non-core revenue raising in the non-profit sector, and specialized
zones such as pharmaceutical research and international business education. The
public good character of knowledge and general education sets limits. The main
contribution of education and research to the economy lies not in the direct creation of
market value but in the expansion of human capacity and knowledge so as to create
more favourable conditions for production and innovation in other sectors.
In higher education policy and management, there is a continuing commitment to
New Public Management but I think the heyday of neo-liberal NPM has passed.
Australia and the other Westminster polities, and Japan, are unusual in the extent to
which neo-liberal ideas still hold sway in higher education policy talk. Corporate
reform continues to roll out in Europe and East Asian institutions. Revenue from
private sources is up and competitive systems and business models remain in vogue.
But state investment is increasing in many countries; few have created a genuine
14
15

Marginson, 2004.
Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004.

11
tuition market; the GATS process did not trigger wholesale marketization as
expected; the trend away from basic research may be reversing; there is a new
emphasis on creating more favourable conditions for creative work. The OECDs
position is a sign of the times. Its 2008 report on research and innovation questions
top-down decision-making, short term output drivers and the use of product formats.16
Commodification as such plays out primarily in mass for-profit higher education rather
than in the research university sector. It can compromise social access to quality
teaching, and capture the integrity of individual researchers in the life sciences, but
has failed to capture science and scholarship wholistically. The use of business
formats to secure a greater measure of control and predictability should be
distinguished from genuine market formation. Control issues are much older than the
Thatcher neo-liberalism instigated in the 1980s. The primary tensions are between
open source creativity and the hierarchy of research value; and open source creativity
and state regulation and intervention; the problems Humboldt anticipated with clarity
two centuries ago. States find it hard not to second guess research contents, priorities
and direction. One of the strengths of the American research system has been the
degree of academic control over creativity, as Clark Kerr noted 45 years ago.
But what about teaching and learning, the empty space in global modernization?
Much of student learning is vectored by communications, much of it is self-learning
and at present much of it takes place outside the university curriculum. Student
disengagement is a constant of the OECD countries. While the decline of financial
support and growth of student work are factors in some nations, I suspect the core
problem is that students have outstripped many of their teachers in communicative
competence, in technologies and (in the non-English speaking countries) in English.
This suggests the next round of university innovation will be in student learning as
self-learning. Reflexive modernization, the continual drive to criticize, improve and
reinvent, has been installed at the core of our organizational cultures, and profoundly
shapes the evolution of research, the knowledge economy and the role of universities
within it. It is equally profound in reshaping our personal identity and daily life. It has
yet to become installed in university learning. But knowledge is powerful. Disciplinary
knowledges acquired at university are a potent source of self-transformation. Sooner
or later student self-formation will lock into the curriculum. When that happens there
will be a proliferation of new educational forms. But I must add that this is no more
than a hunch on my part. There is no immediate evidence it is about to happen.
We can be more certain about another development: the global pluralization of
research capacity. Since world war two the dominant knowledge economy has been
the United States,17 with 54 research universities in the Jiao Tong top 100, and 17 of
the top 20. The UK is number two.18 Europe and East Asia are now moving up and
this will show itself more clearly in the Jiao Tong research rankings in future years.
Germany and France are fostering stronger universities by funding or merger and
spending 2 billion and 5 billion extra euros, respectively. Switzerland, Sweden,
16

OECD, 2008b, p. 124.

Marginson, 2008.
18
SJTUIHE, 2008.
17

12
Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Flanders have fine research universities.
Larger changes are happening in the Asia-Pacific. Japan, the worlds second largest
university sector, has been joined by the rising new Asian science powers China
including Hong Kong, Taiwan China, Korea and Singapore. Between 1995 and 2005
the annual output of scientific papers grew rapidly in these nations. China was the
leader at 16.5 per cent per annum.19 Chinas output of science papers multiplied by
four and a half times and its investment in R&D rose from 0.6 to 1.4 per cent of
GDP.20 From 1998 to 2005 the number of tertiary students multiplied by four times.21
In the late 1970s Chinas share of world GDP was less than 5 per cent. By 2030 it will
be 25 per cent.22 China will be a great knowledge economy power, second to the
USA. Mainland academic salaries, currently less than half of those in the USA and
Europe, will be closer to the global standard. China and India will provide most of the
PhDs and competition for top researchers will no longer be monopolized by the USA.
Chinas mass university graduates will create a professional workforce and civil
society that is socially, economically, politically and culturally transformative. They will
render the party more transparent and hold government to account, in a step-by-step
liberalization of the regime. They will bring China to the world, and the world to China.
There is still a significant gap in research capacity and performance, between the
emerging Asian science powers and the mature knowledge economies. However part
of the gap is due to lag effects. It takes up to a decade for an increased investment in
university research to show itself in concentrated productive capacity, and another
decade for this to realize itself in publication and citation measures. The investment in
R&D in China has yet to fully show itself in the Jiao Tong rankings. That will come.
The future character of research and universities in China is less clear. Will research
capacity in higher education feed into an open, creative and innovative culture in all
fields, from high science to the social sciences and the arts? Much will depend on the
degree to which independent university research cultures are fostered. For example
can part of the R&D investment that has been settled on industry in the quest for
immediate economic pay-offs, be rerouted to higher education which has the potential
for open research programs with broad and long-term benefits? Can the nation
achieve a productive arms length relationship between on one hand an autonomous
modernizing university management, essential to the progress of universities; and on
the other hand the nation-state and its global strategies? Can Humboldtian freedoms
in science and scholarship be effectively positioned within policy and management?
Conclusion
Let me move to conclusions.
The Global Research University combines Newmans and Humboldts formation of
individuals, with the projects of research and modernization introduced by Humboldt
19

National Science Bureau, 2008.

World Bank, 2008.
21
Li, et al., 2008.
22
Maddison, 2007.
20

13
and expressed so well by Clark Kerr. The Global Research University is Clark Kerrs
multiversity but it has added global networks, global referencing, global competition
and global public goods on top. It has also taken research further and taken it
everywhere. In contrast with Kerrs multiversity, there is a single dominant purpose,
that of modernizing research and its reflexivities. I suspect also that in the Global
Research University the locus of student formation has shifted from the authority of
the University and its scholar-teachers to the students themselves, though this has
yet to clearly emerge. We sense the new kinds student subjectivity only in their
negation, which is student disengagement. The Global Research University remains
Anglo-American but has the potential to evolve elsewhere and in different directions.
At any given time there is always a leading or dominant model of research university,
an Idea of a University. The Idea of a University changes over time in response to
(1) changes in higher education and in its context, and (2) changes in the discourse
about the University. In the Global Research University, global comparisons of
universities such as rankings are inevitable. The dominant Idea of a University
provides the template for comparison. Of course the Idea of a University can be
defined and measured in more than one way, and it can be done well or done badly.
Global comparisons of research universities should take all of their main functions
into account and not just research and knowledge, important though they have
become. But the content and quality of university rankings is a topic for another day.
In the constantly changing landscape of the Global Research University there is
potential for a new model, a new Idea of a University. In a more plural higher
education world, this could emerge from the English-speaking world, Bologna Europe
or East and Southeast Asia. Will the rise of the research university in China,
Singapore and Korea simply replicate the Anglo-American research university? Will it
be a Western university with Chinese, or Singaporean, or Korean characteristics? Or
will new forms of global research university appear that are hybrids of old and new, in
the manner of Humboldts innovation in Germany? Will East Asia and/or Singapore
Asia constitute a new and leading Idea of a University for the first time in history?
Will Chinese universities combine Confucian ideas about ethical and moral formation
with communications-based self-formation by students to create a renovated learning
ethos? Or will Australia be the well-spring of the next idea of a University?
This paper is a revised and developed version of papers at East China Normal University, Shanghai,
China (4 November 2008), Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia (21 November
2008) and the University of Hong Kong (10 December 2008). Thank you to Fazal Rizvi. It is best to
read the paper in conjunction with its PowerPoint slides.

14
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