Science makes the world go around.  Even if the political world we inhabit is increasingly vibes-based rather than evidence-based, the physical world around us is becoming more driven by technology and science every day. Nowadays, science and universities are seen almost as two sides of the same coin. But it wasn’t always that way and there have been alternatives. Go back 250 years and it wasn’t at all clear that science and universities were meant for each other for laboratories were often operated in private. And many countries have experimented — and indeed continue to do so — with performing science mainly in institutes rather than in organizations devoted ostensibly to teaching.

Today, my guest is Dr David Baker and he is co-author of a new book from Stanford University Press called ‘Global Mega-Science‘. It’s a bracing global history of how university science went from a system of 10,000 journal articles a year in 1900 to over 3 million articles a year just over a century later and- maybe more importantly – from an enterprise undertaken by individual laboratory leaders at a tiny handful of universities to a genuinely global and collaborative exercise. David walks us through how universities became the central organizing tool of science, why the university-science model conquered all comers, and why it is likely to keep besting all the alternatives for some time to come.   

It’s a great conversation, even if I am still not entirely persuaded  that “journal articles” represent a stable quantum of knowledge over time. But I’ll let David persuade you. Here he is.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 3.7 | Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaboration, and Knowledge Production with David Baker

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): David, your book is called Global Mega-Science. What are we talking about here? What’s the difference between science and mega-science?

David Baker (DB): Well, it’s really global megascientific research. It’s about the sheer size of science—how much capacity there is to do research worldwide. Science has also become very global. There are really three main things about global mega-science. First, it’s the size, as I mentioned, but also that it’s subsidized by society and cross-subsidized by education, which we can talk about more in a moment. Second, it’s complexly collaborative. And lastly, it’s becoming increasingly transnational. The idea that there’s American science, Canadian science, Chinese science is a bit outdated. What do you call a paper where there are two Canadians, two Americans, and two Peruvians on it? You can force it into categories by country, but that betrays the international collaborative nature of science, which has been a big story recently. So, all of that together is global mega-science, and it’s really been building since 1900. That’s what the book is about.

AU: You spend a fair bit of time in the opening chapters talking about how global science is underpinned by what you, quoting Talcott Parsons, call the “education revolution.” What is the education revolution exactly?

DB: About six or more years ago, I wrote a book called The Schooled Society about how society changes when more and more people get educated for longer and longer periods. It’s a dramatic shift. As you mentioned, sociologists in the 60s and 70s were already looking at how this will be a massive game changer for universities. Along with capitalism and representative democracy, you could argue that education has become one of the major pillars of liberal society. That doesn’t mean everyone’s happy about it, but it’s definitely one of the foundational elements. The education revolution is not just more people going to school for longer periods, but a deep-seated belief that education is the best way to develop individuals and societies. Whether or not that’s true is open for debate, but many people believe that education is the best way to run societies. Education has gone from something for the privileged few to a human right for all. The world has seen dramatic increases in literacy and school attendance. It wasn’t too long ago that most of the world was illiterate. Now, that’s disappearing. Fifty years ago, if you’d said that 40 percent of young people would be in post-secondary education, people would have thought you were crazy. But that’s where we are now. So, the education revolution is this massive transformation in how societies view and value education.

AU: You talk in the book about how the education revolution eventually led to what you call the “university science” model. What is university science, and how does it differ from other modes of science production?

DB: Sure. It started at the turn of the last century in a group of German and Central European universities. As you and your audience probably know, the 18th-century university wasn’t a place for science, or even for much scholarship. It was more focused on teaching. But over the next 50, 60, 70 years, it changed its relationship with society. By 1900 in Germany, for example, there had been massive increases in enrollment—mostly men at first, but increasingly women, too. The number of students went from 5 percent in 1870 to 20 percent by 1920. That’s a huge jump, and it started training people for all kinds of upper positions in society. The university also became a place where scholarship was done, and the idea took hold that scholarship, including science, would add to the teaching environment, and vice versa. This is a Humboldtian idea. And this grew over time, happening in country after country.

The idea that faculty are both scholars/scientists and teachers became what we call the university science model. This model has spread all over the world. Now, just to make it clear, I’m a sociologist who studies history, so I look at the world from a bird’s-eye view. When I listen to some of your podcasts, I hear experts getting down into the weeds, talking about what happens in one country versus another. But I’m looking for big, stable trends. And what we see from a high level, looking across millions of publications, is that as universities expanded and changed their relationship with society, faculty members began doing more scholarship and science, which increasingly supported science as a whole. That change has only continued over time, and it’s what has brought us to the era of megascience.

AU: One of the basic points you make is that the Education Revolution, specifically the increase in enrollments, has led to cross-subsidization of research by expanding university facilities. I was a bit skeptical of this because the degree and nature of cross-subsidization varies from place to place. In many places, it’s not as extensive as in North America. But you point to data from Germany showing that university researchers are more productive than institute-based researchers. Why do you think that is?

DB: Well, it’s not necessarily that they’re more productive per person. In fact, institute-based researchers—those working in places like the Max Planck Institutes—often publish slightly more on average. But the sheer number of university-based scientists in Germany means that universities produce about three-quarters of the country’s research output. University scientists are doing research while also teaching and training the next generation of scientists, creating a very productive research conglomerate as Roger Geiger, a historian, calls it.

Even though the system varies by country, the university-science model is dominant globally. I have not heard of a country where university faculty don’t do any research or scholarship. In Germany, for example, the universities are critical to the country’s research output, even though the prestige often lies with the non-university research institutes. But the data shows that universities are the real engine of scientific production. This is true in many other countries as well— on average there are about 4million research papers a year globally, and 85-90% have at least one university-based researcher involved, and many papers are produced entirely by university scientists.

AU: One thing that occurred to me as I was reading your book is that university science operates on a cross-subsidy from teaching, but it’s not always explicit. Some might view this as underhanded, or even anti-democratic—like elites taking money for one purpose and using it for another. Is that a fair criticism? Might this be part of why universities are losing democratic legitimacy in the 21st century?

DB: That’s a great question. I think there’s a tendency to view things through a populist lens these days, which can lead to that kind of critique. But I don’t see it as underhanded at all. If anything, the integration of teaching and research has democratized science—more people are involved in science than ever before, both as students and as researchers.

Research at universities also helps to legitimize the institution and improve the quality of teaching. This has been shown in studies. So I don’t think it’s about elites siphoning off money for secret purposes. Instead, universities are contributing to the public good by advancing both education and research.

Now, the criticism of universities, in general, might stem from the fact that education has become such a dominant institution. When institutions become dominant, they’re always a bit oppressive. There are winners and losers. But if you really look at it, say, a faculty member in Canada or the U. S., who is very research involved might teach just two classes two courses a semester. That’s part of the expense. That’s true. But also then the world gets an incredible amount of science out of that. And a lot of people are involved. And a lot of students get a lot of involvement in science as well. So I don’t think you can make that elitist argument very well.

AU: One thing that seems to be potentially contestable in your work is the use of the peer-reviewed journal article as the unit of output, right? I mean, you’re saying, “Look at this great output!” But, yeah, I mean, it’s absolutely true—there has been a huge growth in the number of papers. You mention something like a 300-fold increase in the number of STEM articles in the last hundred years. But what if a paper isn’t what it used to be? There has been a critique from Nicholas Bloom and others, in a very influential American Economic Review article called “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” They suggest that research productivity, in the sense of things that turn into long-term economic growth, has fallen off in the last couple of decades despite the number of papers. How would you incorporate that critique into your analysis?

DB: Sure. Those are actually two questions: how much can we believe papers to tell us about science, and are they showing that science is becoming more vacuous? Let me start with the second one. No, ideas aren’t necessarily getting harder to find; they’re just becoming more standardized. When you have a very heated-up capacity for research, you find something, and the next day, my team sees that Alex is onto something, so we jump in, too. We’re actually doing some technical analysis that shows this.

A lot of the early studies on this came up with these exciting, negative ideas—that science was becoming vacuous. But when you stop and think about it, the institution has gotten larger. The number of areas it covers is massive. How can something get larger and more vacuous at the same time? It doesn’t really make sense. What’s happening is that the size of the institution has changed the pace and dimension of discovery. I think we’re going to show, and others will too, that this idea that science is getting vacuous just isn’t true.

Now, about papers—are they still good indicators? Well, they’ve saved the study of science. Up until we had bibliometric data, we were in the dark with metrics like R&D expenditure and the number of scientists, which weren’t great indicators. Papers are an improvement in that sense. So we should celebrate that for a moment. But then you have to ask, is a paper today the same thing it was in 1900? Most of the data suggests that the paper has become so standard and so symbolic process that, yes, it’s still valid to use it across time. Are there more papers with mundane discoveries? Sure. Not every paper is by Einstein, right?

I think it’s a very reasonable indicator overall. It’s not the only one, and we’re going to get more sophisticated about how we use it. But papers have really opened up the ability to test hypotheses in ways we couldn’t before.

The dark side is that universities are increasingly using this kind of data, and we’re going to see the number of papers a scientist publishes become more central—especially for younger scientists. There are also growing concerns about plagiarism, and these issues reflect the centrality and symbolic importance of papers. So it’s a game-changer, and we’ll see where it goes.

AU: One of the features of global mega-science that you highlight is its global nature. We’ve seen the expansion of universities and science production in places like China, India, Indonesia, and Iran. You also talk a lot about cooperation—how it’s not just that science is happening in more places, but that there’s collaboration across these sites. But your data ends in 2010 or thereabouts in this book, and that’s around the time Xi Jinping came to power in China. Since then, the atmosphere around international cooperation in science has changed, especially between China and the U.S. And of course, Russia has become a factor in the last few years. How big of a threat is this to global mega-science? Is it a temporary irritant or a long-term danger?

DB: I would say it’s a temporary irritant. I know that science and university watchers make a big deal about this, and it’s certainly something to think about. But from a bird’s-eye view and a long historical perspective, the transnational nature of science is like a wave—it’s just gathered more and more power. Universities are also very good at operating with other universities.

Now, there are extreme cases, like Putin’s Russia, where things have been shut down. But I’d like to see the evidence. I bet you the collaboration between Chinese and American scientists, across most fields, continues to proceed. Iranians collaborate with Americans, Poles collaborate with Germans—you name it. What we’ve seen is the growth of super-hubs of universities, first in the U.S., then in Europe—well before China. Everyone makes a big deal about China, but the real story is U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia over the century. There’s much more parity across regions now in paper production, as the overall number of papers expands dramatically.

I don’t think this will stop what we call the “collaboration dividend.” It’s too embedded, and it would be very difficult to shut down. There can be threats, sure, especially with populist rhetoric in the U.S. and elsewhere. But from the scientists I’ve talked to and the papers I’ve looked at, I haven’t seen any major dent in international collaboration. I know some of your guests have talked about specific areas where this might be happening, and that can be the case in some fields. But overall, I don’t see a huge shift right now.

AU: You start the book by pointing out that people were calling big science a bubble 50 years ago, and you gently explain why they were wrong and how science has continued to expand. But you end the book by acknowledging that the S-curve has to kick in sometime, right? So, when do you think the production of scientific articles will level out? Even if you can’t give me a year, what are the factors that will eventually limit scientific production?

DB: Well, as your podcast shows, the factors are in higher ed—people, money, and political will, right? If this model is going to continue, the reason it’s escaped the usual laws of growth is because it has attracted a lot of resources. Right now, about 40 percent of the world’s youth are in higher education. That’s not even half full yet. But the more people who go to post-secondary education, the more expensive it gets.

Science has also expanded to all kinds of post-secondary institutions. Faculty at two-year colleges in the U.S., and places where research wasn’t traditionally done, now conduct research as part of their jobs. And they want it. So those are contrasting forces. In the end, political will is key. Not every scientific discovery has a groundbreaking application that will change everyone’s life. That’s a big fantasy about science. But overall, it has been positive, and I’m not sure this model will end anytime soon.

That said, a lot of future development will have to happen in the global South, and it’s an open question how far that will go. For example, Korea is running out of people to attend higher education. They’re shutting universities, which changes their science landscape. Now, international collaboration can offset that for a while, but eventually, there will be some reckoning. So yeah, I can’t give you a specific year or decade, but there are challenges ahead.

The bigger message for science policy is that education development policy is deeply intertwined with science. It’s not just about scientists doing some work at universities—universities are the research centers for the world’s scientists. Policymakers have to think about education development and science together.

AU: David Baker is the co-author, along with Justin Powell, of ‘Global Mega-Science’. It’s out from Stanford University Press. David, thanks so much for being with us.

DB: Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, the listener, for tuning in. If you have any questions or comments about this week’s episode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. And also, sign up for our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of The World of Higher Education podcast. Next week is a break week for us, but we’ll be back on October 31st, when we’ll be speaking to Miles Taylor of Humboldt University in Berlin about his co-edited book of essays, Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s. Bye for now.

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