Becoming a Global University

Harvard is fortunate to have as its new president-designate a dynamic, worldly and highly intelligent individual. And former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers is fortunate to take on the presidency of Harvard at a time when the University is unmatched in intellectual and financial strength. But in today's world, booms can turn quickly to busts, and today's leading institutions can quickly become tomorrow's dinosaurs. It is said that President James Bryant Conant '14 took the lead of a regional university and helped to make it a national university. Summer's task is to take the leading national university and help make it a truly international university. That means a new view of the classroom, of the research process and of Harvard's links to the broader world.

The great intellectual issues of the day transcend traditional boundaries, of nations and increasingly, of scholarly disciplines. Whether the issues are in the arts and humanities, culture and anthropology, applied sciences such as medicine, environment and ecology or societal concerns of governance and economic development, the problems invariably cut across national boundaries. A U.S.-centered view of the world makes little sense when the U.S. is just 5 percent (and declining) of the world's population, and when the so-called developing world is 85 percent (and rising) of the world's population.

The problems are also being redefined across traditional disciplines. Ecology, for example, was hardly a field 40 years ago, and is now at the center of how we must think about the world in this new century. And yet issues of ecological concern extend far beyond the biology department, since they involve atmospheric sciences, applied mathematics, economics, public policy, human population dynamics and so forth. The international scientific effort on man-made climate change is a remarkable network of thousands of scientists working across countries and across disciplines.

Research funding and organization itself are also changing rapidly as the economic institutions of the broader society evolve. More than ever today, economic value follows the creation of new knowledge. And during the past 20 years, knowledge has increasingly been packaged in patents and other formalized intellectual property that has drawn academic scholars into much closer contact with the business world. We have yet to find good answers to the proper ethical and financial relations of universities with the business world, as well as to the appropriate limits of intellectual property itself.

Summer's main task is not fundraising--assuming that the stock market boom of the Clinton administration in which he served doesn't end as the great stock market bust--but in carefully helping to guide the College and the University into new directions of teaching and research that reflect the rapidly changing nature of scholarly inquiry and the expanded horizons of a global society.

Are today's students at Harvard College properly prepared for the new global society? While many graduate programs at Harvard have a quarter or more of their students coming from abroad, fewer than 10 percent of the College students are international, too little for the American students to gain a real knowledge of the rest of the world, and certainly under-representative of the world-class excellence to be found in the rest of the world. Moreover, the strong interest of College students in international issues is not yet being slaked. When our new Center for International Development introduced a series of international programs for undergrads this past year, hundreds of students have been active participants. But unlike other major universities, Harvard College has done relatively little to encourage actual travel and study abroad during the College years. And so far there has been little systematic use of the new information technologies that could dramatically expand the scope and coverage of teaching materials, for example, through live videoconferencing of lectures or joint seminars with students in other parts of the world.

Similar problems of "institutional lag" are found in the organization of research in the University. Harvard's policy of "each tub on its own bottom," in which each faculty manages its own budget, and even "each tublet on its own bottom," in which various centers and institutes are on their own in fund-raising and budgeting, makes a lot of sense for administration and for turning the faculty into mini-fundraisers. But it probably doesn't best serve intellectual life at the University. It seriously shortchanges the cross-disciplinary and cross-faculty enterprises, and dramatically underutilizes the potential of international networks of scholars as well. In recent years I've seen repeatedly that even intellectually close faculties such as the medical school, the school of public health or the Kennedy School of Government, and the economics and government departments, have little real intellectual discourse or common projects, largely because of the way that money is channeled within the University.

Harvard is at the top of the world in discipline after discipline, but its cross-disciplinary activities--in environment, ecology, economic development, public health, mind and brain, international studies and many other areas--have struggled for funding and for an institutional structure within the University. Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine's initiatives in this area have not achieved the depth and durability that he hoped a decade ago. With $19 billion in the bank, Summers could do much more. The new president should explore a kind of internal venture capital market in which non-traditional intellectual disciplines or cross-disciplinary programs are given the backing and sustenance by the University for a decade to see whether they can get off the ground and prove their worth.

Summers will no doubt find that dealing with a large, powerful, fiercely independent group of faculties will be reminiscent of struggling with the power barons of Congress during his time at the U.S. Treasury. And a Harvard president certainly has fewer constitutional powers than his former boss Bill Clinton. But the Harvard president has a bully pulpit second to none in the world of higher education, and here, too, where Summers will need to make his mark. Some of the tasks are crucial but relatively straightforward--explaining to the American people the critical importance of funding higher education as well as the arts and sciences generally. But some of the "bully pulpit" tasks are really new, and Summers is well placed to make an enormous difference.

In the domestic scene, Summers can work with heads of other universities to help sort out the critical issues of business-university relations and the underlying ethical issues involved. Beyond the U.S., Summers will recognize that for the developing world, improved higher education is not just a luxury, but now life or death for these societies. For decades the rich world told the poor world to focus on primary education, even to the neglect of higher education. But this won't do in today's "knowledge economy," where higher education is essential for effective leadership and for technological advance. Harvard should help to lead a worldwide revolution in higher education, to ensure not just our own quality of education, but to help Africa, Asia and Latin America to foster world-class institutions to help build their own societies. It can do this through advocacy, through wise use of donor funding for international projects and by fostering far more active networks of international scholarship.

I've been lucky to know Larry Summers for 25 years, from late-nighters in grad school through appointments together on the faculty through work together (and occasionally in friendly jousting) on international economics. He has the breadth of view and the experience to help lead Harvard into new ways of teaching, research, and involvement with the world. We all wish him well and should offer our strong support for those efforts.

Stone Professor of International Trade Jeffrey D. Sachs '76 is the director of the Center for International Development.