The history of the research university is a much-discussed thing. Fundamentally, these histories tend to focus on two countries: Germany, where it all began in 1810 thanks to the genius of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the United States, which took fitful steps towards challenging Germany from the 1870s to the 1930s, at which point American universities, taking advantage of the exodus of scientific talent from Europe, moved decisively into a position of global intellectual leadership.

And so things stayed for 70 years until a new challenger showed up: China. Building on a Confucian tradition of respect for knowledge, a century-old tradition of university building and a ton of newfound wealth, over the past 20 years China has been steadily building a set of institutions to take on the United States for scientific leadership.  But does it have the money, talent and recipe for governance required to achieve this goal?

Today my guest is William C. Kirby, T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. And formerly that university’s dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. Two years ago he wrote a book called Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University for Germany to America to China and it’s one of my favourite higher education books of this decade. Dr. Kirby, having had the rare good fortune to teach in all three countries is extremely well-placed to talk about how the top institutions in all three have evolved over the decade.

In this podcast, I try to avoid delving into the minutiae of the eight case studies — Humboldt University and the free University of Berlin in Germany; Harvard, Berkeley and Duke in America, and Tsinghua, Nanjing and the University of Hong Kong, but instead try to stick to a few big themes about what we can learn from all these institutions. How do top universities succeed and how do they falter? What role is played by leadership, planning and resources? And how much is played by institutional governance and academic freedom. Big questions, all. So, let’s get right to the interview.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.34 | Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China with William C. Kirby

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Bill, let’s start with how this book came to be and how you came to choose the scope of the book. As you note in the introduction, if you were looking to do a history just of great universities or a history of higher education, you might have picked a different set of institutions with a wider geographic base. Instead, you chose to focus on eight institutions in China, the United States, and Germany. Why these three countries and why these eight specific universities?

Bill Kirby (BK): The three countries is actually the easiest answer because these are the three nations that either have set global standards for research universities or have the prospect of setting global standards for research universities across the world. The Germans basically redefined what a university would be beginning in 1810 with the founding of the University of Berlin as the first research university, in my view and dedicated research university. The Americans had a very good 20th century, building on both kind of British undergraduate foundations, but above all, importing norms from German universities as to what makes for a great research university. There isn’t a serious American research university from the late 19th and early 20th century that is not profoundly influenced by German models. Even new universities like Stanford University whose motto is in German, Die Luft der Freiheit weht or the wind of freedom blows. The Americans had a very good 20th century. The question now is are the Americans at their height or are they in decline? No country has invested more financially, but more in terms of human capital in the building up of a modern higher education sector than China. It’s the fastest growing sector of higher education in the world in quality as well as quantity. So at the end of the day, a question to be asked is, can China lead the world of universities?

AU: Of course, you have your own personal history with these three countries, right? You’ve taught in two of them and your teaching subject is the third. You’re a China scholar who’s taught in both the United States and Germany. I think that’s correct.

BK: Yes, I’ve studied in Germany. I’ve taught in Germany. I’ve obviously taught and administered here in the United States, and I’ve been a visiting professor and honorary professor in eight different Chinese universities in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. But I might say that the moment in which I got intrigued about this topic was when I was invited to the 200th anniversary of the University of Berlin in 2010, and they had a huge conference there in the center of Berlin on “the original model,” as they called what is now called the Humboldt university. The president of the university welcomed us with these words, and this is a direct quote, “nobody would take my university as a model for anything today.”

Now, he’s no longer the president of the Humboldt University. Actually, he was very quickly no longer the president of the Humboldt University, but he wasn’t wrong. I was thinking, and this was something that consumed my thoughts when I was dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. How do great universities rise, but how do they maintain their excellence? And how do they decline? Because Humboldt is a university that was the best in the world for more than a hundred years and certainly the most admired in the world up to 1930. Now, it’s not the best in the world. It’s not the best in Germany. It’s no longer even the best in Berlin. Times change.

AU: On the subject of how to become a great university, one of our earlier guests on the show was Jamil Salmi. He’s written a book on world class universities where he talks about a recipe for institutional greatness. Two of the key factors that he identifies are a high concentration of talent and abundant resources. You sort of get the impression that the one pays for the other. Now, not all of the institutions that you’ve picked have those two qualities. Harvard does, obviously, but many others do not. How big a role does resources play in making a great university? What do you do if the resources aren’t there?

BK: That is a terrific question because when you think about it, not all great universities have been the richest places to be found. The two largest budgets in the world of research universities today are those of Harvard in the United States and Tsinghua University in China, which is nearly as large as Harvard’s budget. Almost nobody else is quite close to that. But money doesn’t automatically lead to excellence in this regard. If you think of the leading research university in pound-for-pound of impactful research faculty as a percentage of the faculty. The leading research university in 1910, according to the first ranking system that I’ve ever seen, was not Harvard. It was not the new research universities of Chicago or Hopkins. It was Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. A place that was, pound-for-pound, small but outstanding in this regard. It was the Caltech of its day. Now Caltech is not short of resources, but it’s what you make of your resources, that matters. The mark of great universities is not how good you are when the money keeps flowing in, but how good you are when it stops or when things begin to decline.

AU: One of the ways that a lot of universities try to get around this resource problem is through installing a charismatic leader. In the United States, Michael Crow usually is who people pick these days. But in your book, after Clark Kerr, who left office 60 years ago now, I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of examples of transformative institutional leaders. So why is that? Is presidential leadership overrated in higher education?

BK: I don’t think it’s overrated, but of course it used to matter a great deal more at a time when universities were small and the role of presidents of universities was very much more like the role of both presidents and deans put together today. As in Quincy of Harvard in the first half of the 19th century was not only president and began to adopt several of the aspects of German universities, but he was also chief disciplinarian. He read the papers of every student, and he was such a disciplinarian that the students revolted, hanged him in effigy, and he expelled the entire sophomore class. Now that was a president with very considerable power. The most transformative president of Harvard lasted for 40 years, Charles Eliot in the late 19th and early 20th century, transformed the institution. We’ve had several long standing presidents that have done very well since that time. But today, the challenge of the job is much greater. The universities are much more complex. Probably the last long serving and truly impactful president here at Harvard, for a decade but an extraordinary decade, was that of Neil Rudenstine in the 1990s. We’ve had 26 university presidents at Harvard in the first 386 years of the university, and six people have been president or acting president since the year 2000. The job gets more difficult, the half-life of American presidencies gets shorter.

But let me just comment about some leaders who have been extraordinary. If you look at university leaders that have transformed their institutions over time, you can look at William Danforth at Washington University in St. Louis, succeeded by Mark Wrighton. Each one of them serving more than 20 years and following an extraordinary president Elliott before that three in a row, making an enormous difference for what had been a regional school into a national and international academic powerhouse. Duke University also, since the presidency of Terry Sanford, has had a series of truly transformative presidencies, most recently Nan Keohane, and then the extraordinary presidency of Richard Brodhead, former dean of Yale, in making this the fastest rising American research university, and in many ways, the most intentionally international of major research universities in the United States.

AU: Let’s stick with Duke because I would say the second way that institutions deal with resources is meticulous planning. Your chapter on Duke really underlines the role that strategic planning has played in this rise of Duke University. What is it that Duke does well in strategic planning that makes it so successful?

BK: Well, it’s in part because its origins were comparatively humble. It was a liberal arts college called Trinity College until the major gift by James B. Duke in the 1930s who built this magnificent neogothic campus. But in the 1950s, the leadership woke up to the fact that they looked like a great university, but they knew they were not. They looked like a place that had been there forever, even the steps to Duke’s famous chapel were built preternaturally worn, as if generations of scholars had walked upon them. But, in fact, it was a parochial institution in a segregated South. They began to plan in a series of three- and five-year enterprises of what they were going to do and what they were going to not do.

The difference between them and many other universities is that they planned as a university, not simply school by school, as we do here because the center of the university is comparatively weak here at Harvard, but the presidents and provosts and the deans of all the schools worked together on a series of plans that are quite frank about what’s wrong with the institution. So many institutions give you academic plans in which everything is wonderful, everything is cheery and here’s what we’re going to do to be a leader in the next century and so on. Duke’s plans are honest and straightforward or have been very honest and straightforward. It has allowed it to transform itself from a regional parochial institution into a national and now leading international institution.

AU: Interesting. I guess the last way of sort of muddling your way through a lack of resources is careful husbanding of those resources, and you speak admiringly of Peter Lange the Freie University of Berlin’s so-called iron chancellor in shepherding an institution that was not terribly well funded. Into, as you say, one that could outdo Humboldt University the University of Berlin. What did he do well that others in similar positions tend not to achieve?

BK: In my book, there are two Peter Langes. One is Peter Lange the long serving chancellor of Freie University of Berlin, we would call that person the vice president for finance. One of the marks of success of great universities is the success of enduring professionals who run the institution who are themselves not faculty. There are people here at Harvard who are executive deans of different schools, who are the history, memory, and in many ways the soul the institution. Peter Lange was that over several presidencies for the Freie University of Berlin. He knew where the money was and he knew how to husband it, but also to work with the presidents and with the faculty on how to distribute it in a strategic way. He was a very powerful, although not well known even on campus, individual who helped propel that university forward. There are equivalents at other universities who do as a part of what in German would be called the professional civil service of higher education. At Duke, for example, Peter Lange’s counterpart told me that his one rule was, as he tried to bring more money to the center of the university for strategic purposes, never take money that people know that they have. There’s a lot of funds in and around universities that are in different schools or in different endowments that can be husbanded for strategic resources. Peter Lange in Berlin and Peter Lange at Duke were extraordinary at this.

AU: Bill, I just want to get back to Jamil Salmi’s recipe for world class universities. The third ingredient that he talks about is academic freedom and good governance, but I want to know your opinion about whether or not the academic freedom part might be a little bit overrated. I mean, Humboldt University has been under, I would say illiberal management for the vast majority of existence in Wilhelmine Germany and Nazi Germany and in the socialist period. China obviously has issues in this regard. Yet all four of the universities you talk about the three in China and Humboldt, they’re still world leaders. So, how important is academic freedom in the way that we tend to talk about it in North America?

BK: Well, in Europe or in North America, academic freedom is a wonderful ideal and never fully realized in any institutional setting. In the University of Berlin, the concepts of Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach and Lernfreiheit the freedom to learn, which Humboldt articulated in 1810 these, of course, would be adopted by institutions over the world who believed in conceptions of academic freedom. There was much more of it in that institution than ever before in the history certainly of German universities. It set a goal never perfectly realized for others to follow. But as Max Weber in 1908, looking back over the history of the University of Berlin said “yes, there is academic freedom within the realm of political and ecclesiastical orthodoxy.” But this was a university that reflected the elites of its day. The Social Democratic Party, for example, was the largest party in Germany by 1913, and there wasn’t a single Social Democrat on the Berlin faculty. It was a very conservative institution politically. Academic freedom, of course, in our country, we take it almost for granted as the ideal that every institution must adhere to, and yet we have seen, not only in the last year, but back in periods of political division in the United States, how quickly it can be challenged. I’ve gone through some of the archives of the McCarthyite period here at Harvard, in which the Harvard leadership and that of the Harvard Corporation were very imperfect stewards of academic freedom protecting, in several cases, neither their faculty nor their students. No one has gotten it right.

AU: Let’s go to China, because I think one thing that’s quite fascinating to me is that when Jamil came up with his list of ingredients, the last thing he said was time. It takes time to create a great university. Yet, as we’ve seen over the past couple of decades with the startling rise of Chinese universities in major global rankings, it is possible to make incredible progress in a short period of time and on budgets that are tiny compared to the big American research universities, Tsinghua apart. What is it that Chinese universities have learned to do that others have not in terms of improving their performance in a short space of time?

BK: Well, it would be a mistake to look at the rise of Chinese universities now like the rise of China as simply a recent phenomenon. They are building on 130 years of institutional history. Chinese universities are founded not long after the major American research universities are founded in the second half of the 19th century. The oldest one is founded in 1893. They grow up and emulate the great universities of Europe and North America. Peking University becomes a great university under the leadership of Cai Yuanpei, a German educated philosopher who was an admirer of Humboldt and believed in bringing to Peking university in the 1910s and 20s scholars from all kinds of different political points of view so that the students could make up their own minds. Tsinghua University, probably the leading research university in China by the 1930s, a place where my mentor, John Fairbank, in Chinese history learned his Chinese history from a great China historian there at Tsinghua University was devoted to the protection of academic freedom and advancement of great research, even under the Kuomintang dictatorship of that period of time. The history and memory of this foundational period of Chinese universities has in my view been essential for their return to excellence or their resurgence, and of course, massive growth in recent times. It doesn’t come by men by waving a magic wind and suddenly giving people a lot of money. They have a deep institutional history and deep commitment to excellence.

AU: One could read your book and view your placement of the various universities as a king of progression, right? Germany representing the past glory of research universities, and then you move to America and that’s maybe the present of research universities. I think implicitly the way you position China is as perhaps the wave of the future. Is that actually your view? What is it you think that’s special about Chinese universities that potentially place them in such a way as maybe to surpass American research universities at some point in the future.

BK: I think what is special that they have not only the largest pool of human capital but also educated human capital in the world to pull from. They have built over more than a century, particularly in the large cities, extraordinary secondary schools, so they get extraordinary students. They have at their disposal faculty from within China and from the Chinese diaspora and international faculty, but also a greater pool and larger pool of outstanding faculty then virtually any competitor except the United States. And they have had extraordinary funding, particularly from the 1990s until recently. That is beginning to change, and the large challenge for them is as state support diminishes in a comparative way, how will they make up for it with private and other support? They have become much more like American universities and seeking private sources also. But the big question here is, leadership is comparative. It’s not an absolute: they win we lose it so on. And right now, higher education is maybe the one industry in which the United States is still number one. But we are disinvesting in higher education. 43 out of 50 American states have disinvested in public higher education where 80 percent of our students get their education, since the year 2008. If places like the Berkleys and the Michigans decline, the private universities in this country will also decline because we compete for the same faculty, graduate students, and senior administrators as they do. Competition is the key to excellence in education as anywhere else. So I think it’s really up to us. We are still the venue of choice for students all over the world. Yet, as we’ve seen in this last year, there is vast political suspicion of American universities by political leaders, sometimes of all parties, that has changed the relationship between the support of public higher education here and the support of it elsewhere. I think that is a very risky thing for the leadership of American universities.

AU: Let’s finish by thinking a little bit about the future of research universities. It’s been a tough few year everywhere. You talked about disinvestment in the United States, but you know, even in China budgets are starting to pinch. We published an analysis a few weeks ago showing that increases in public funding for C9 universities have largely ground to a halt. How do you think universities in your three countries are going to adapt to a leaner financial future? If you had to pick one of these countries to have a thriving higher education sector, say in 25 years from now, which would it be?

BK: Well, I actually think all three of them will have a thriving higher education sector. You see a real reinvention of German universities in recent years with the excellence initiative bringing about extraordinary competition between them and experimentation in the liberal arts with small liberal arts colleges, often called university colleges, springing up within the walls of major research universities. The Netherlands has been the leader in this. There’s an enormous amount of experimentation around the world and by our colleague Howard Gardner and our colleague Wendy Fishman and I have just edited it in addition of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, looking at innovation and experimentation in international higher education. I think you see the same happening in China and in certain places also in the United States. I think all three places will thrive. The question and, perhaps it’s the wrong question to ask is, will there be one single leader of the world of higher education? In this bifurcated world at the moment, geopolitically, particularly between China and the United States, there seems to be a belief on the part of political leaders on both sides that one side has to prevail and the other side not. One side has to win in semiconductors and the other has to lose. Well, it’s not true. It’s surely not true in the world of universities. Chinese universities, in particular, despite an effort by some on the left in China to say that we have to withdraw from these global rankings and pursue an education with Chinese characteristics, whatever that is, these are universities that have grown up in the globalized world company of the great universities of Europe and America. That’s the company they want to keep and that is the company that they hope someday perhaps to be.

AU: William Kirby, thank you very much indeed.

BK: Thank you so much, Alex. These are great questions and enduring ones.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s podcast, please don’t hesitate to contact us at podcast@highedstrategy.com. This is our final episode for the season. We will be back in early September, just after Labor Day with another great season for you. If you’ve got any suggestions for the lineup next year, again, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. Have a great summer, everybody. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.