Country of Exiles (18 page)

But the linkages between universities and transnational companies also flowered as
individual
partnerships, each seeking “new products and processes of economic value to society,” in the words of Paul Gray, a former president of MIT.

University after university has signed on as partner with one or more of America’s premier global firms, many at the cutting edge of “miracle-making” in computing and genetic engineering. Cows were cloned in 1997 by scientists at the University of Massachusetts, the outcome of a partnership with Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology start-up company in Worcester, Massachusetts. Around the same time, Pfizer, the global pharmaceuticals firm, formed a partnership with the University of Connecticut to create a laboratory for “joint research projects in which company scientists will work alongside professors and students.” “If we want to be recognized as a world-class institution,” the University of Connecticut’s chancellor said of this marriage between private industry and the university, “we need world-class partners.” In 1997 Virginia Commonwealth University secured a partnership with global Motorola, by promising to build a new $11-million engineering school—funded by the state legislature of Virginia—for the benefit of Motorola, which had begun construction of a
new plant near the university (in 1998, however, Motorola stopped construction, leaving the university holding the bag).
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Among the most prolific of such couplings has been the one between Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Monsanto, a bioengineering firm with global reach and famed for its “genetically improved” soybeans, its herbicides, and its “bovine growth hormones,” each the progeny of Monsanto’s “joint discovery program” with Washington University. This program, begun in 1982, matched scientists at Monsanto with those at Washington University to yield more than fifty patents of new drugs. In exchange for ownership of these patents, Monsanto doled out millions of dollars for nearly fifty research projects at the university’s medical school. The school’s researchers, of course, kept clean by doing only the “discovery” work, leaving the “specific drug design” to the Monsanto labs.
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The program, in effect, transformed Washington University’s medical school into a research arm of Monsanto.
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Ohio University, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida at Gainesville, Emory, Harvard, and, most impressive of all, Stanford and MIT have all courted alliances with business. In 1983 Stanford University, adept at such liaisons dating back to the 1950s when it pioneered the Stanford Research Park, opened the Center for Independent Systems, part of the School of Engineering and supported by “industrial partners” in the high-tech business, the soon-to-be superstars of Silicon Valley. At first it had only American corporations as members (Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, and so on), each paying an annual fee of $120,000 to participate in “any number of research areas.” But in the nineties it invited European companies to join, then Asian firms, on the grounds that “in this new world order, everybody is transnational,” as one Stanford professor put it.
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In 1998 Stanford took an even more audacious step: it cut a deal with Japanese-owned Yamaha to incorporate a new business called Sondius-XG, a company that made synthesized music for video games. No longer just an academic powerhouse, Stanford had become a “real” transnational business firm.
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Of all the institutions at the forefront of such relations none was “more merrily in bed with industry” than MIT.
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In a 1997 essay on universities, Charles Vest, then president of MIT, complained indignantly that the federal government might cut back on funding to MIT. What has happened, he asked, to “our national will to excel?” We must “reaffirm a national commitment to excellence.” But Vest was disingenuous; the government never seriously cut back on anything, despite some windy threats to do so; furthermore, in technology and science, MIT was notorious for its internationalism or for being a big “blurmeister,” the university in need of federal dollars but oblivious to all boundaries or national differences.
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Its stellar Media Lab, staffed by an army of futurists (experts in robotics and artificial intelligence), was acclaimed for its belief that all borders were breachable and that “given enough time and money, almost anything is possible.”
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“Ten to twenty years from now,” Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab’s director, said in 1997, “kids won’t care much about countries.”
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Michael Dertouzos, head of another MIT facility—the Laboratory for Computer Science—likewise observed in his 1997 book
What Will Be
that soon nations will no longer matter as “geographical” entities. “Language, culture, history, and religion are disengaging from geographic bounds, as many people emigrate or work abroad.” “These forces are all losing their physical locality.” Everybody, everything, has been set free, including Dertouzos; a holder of dual (U.S. and Greek)
citizenship, he wrote that soon “we will no longer be talking of the Greek nation as the physical country of Greece, but as the Greek Network, linking the Hellenes around the world.”
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For years, MIT also boasted a degree program called “MIT Leaders in Manufacturing Program,” which allowed a whole fleet of transnational companies, from Alcoa to Digital, to “codify” what “principles should be taught and practiced in the future.”
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Its Industrial Liaison Program assembled a glittering roster of partnerships with more than three hundred companies, most with global ambitions. Fourteen Japanese firms provided nearly 20 percent of Media Lab’s sponsorship in 1987. By the late 1980s, partly at taxpayer expense and without taxpayer knowledge, globalization was already in high gear at MIT.
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For many people inside and outside of the academy, such partnerships had no downside. They offered an alternative to dependence on hard-to-predict federal funding; they allowed for the fast transfer of knowledge between universities and businesses; and they created conditions ideal for the employment of recently graduated, technically trained men and women. “Our leadership in technology today depends [on] the bonding relationships that our universities have with industry,” William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under Clinton and professor of engineering at Stanford, said in 1998.
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For others, however, such partnerships only subverted what was left of the boundedness of the university, and of its old liberal arts mission. “The university is being destroyed in bits and pieces,” one professor lamented.
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Such partnerships also accelerated the entry of the schools into a placeless global system, detaching them from the country (rather than from the nation-state, which aided in this transformation) to which they owed their existence.

Partnerships with global businesses, then, formed the bedrock for the new international identity of the research university. But there were other features of this makeover as well, including the recruitment of foreign-born students and scholars.

By the 1980s, American universities were competing fiercely for customers (students), particularly for students who could pay their way, but above all for wealthy foreign and immigrant students; as a result, many of the country’s most elite schools saw a marked dwindling of the traditional majority group. In 1989, more than 60 percent of NYU’s student body was native-born and white (while the figure for the school’s native-born black students stood almost at zero); by 1993, for the first time in its history, there was no native-born American majority in the incoming freshman class.
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Mass immigration after 1975, of course, partly explained this transformation, and whatever one might think of immigration’s overall impact on the country, it swelled the numbers of serious non-native-born students eager for an education and just as deserving of it as other young Americans.
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But the general immigration levels alone did not fully explain the magnitude of the immigrant community on America’s leading elite campuses, some of which—Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and so forth—had percentages of immigrant students well beyond 25 percent of the student body. These students were at these places not because they were enterprising immigrants but because a high proportion of them had affluent, college-educated parents who knew the money value of elite education and whose incomes far exceeded the American average.
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Besides well-off immigrants, universities also recruited
large numbers of foreign students, scholars, and researchers. This recruitment was “an arms race,” as one admissions officer put it.
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From the eighties on, school after school sent recruiters abroad—to Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore—to rake in potential candidates, all able to pay whatever it cost to get to an American campus. Boston University even set up eight overseas recruitment posts to snag its prey, a policy imitated by other schools. By the eighties, schools were sizing up the world in much the same way that the tourist industry did—as a market with a seemingly bottomless pool of customers. The challenge was how to “sell” America’s educational “products” in the world market and how to keep other nations—Australia, England, and Canada—from winning the lion’s share of customers. “This is a product we are selling and that people are buying,” said one educator. Others said that we have got to get “our market share” or we “have to sell what we have.”
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In 1960 only about 40,000 foreign students, graduate and undergraduate, studied in American colleges and universities, a number, however, which began to rise in the 1970s as enrollments of native-born Americans as a percentage of the total began to drop.
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By the late 1980s, when more than 450,000 such students attended American schools, the United States had emerged as “by far the leading provider of education to international students.”
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Even after the Asian economic crisis hit, foreign enrollments remained high, partly as a result of vigorous recruitment by American schools.
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Many of these students paid their own way; as children of elite families, they could afford Yale or Cornell. At such places as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Miami, however, foreign students benefited equally with native-born Americans from “needs-blind admissions” policies, and they had the same access to financial help (this at a time when more and more native-born Americans could not afford to go to such schools).
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But graduate students, not undergraduates, formed the bulk of international enrollments. Most came from Asia (mainly China, Korea, the Philippines, and India), and, once again, they typically belonged to families at the very top economic and social tier of their societies, many accustomed to being waited on and eschewing all kinds of work “with the hands.”
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Most attended research universities and studied science and engineering. Throughout much of the 1990s, foreign students accounted for half of all Ph.D.s in mathematics, engineering, and science, well over half of all doctorates in civil engineering, nearly 40 percent in economics.
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In 1996 universities awarded foreign nationals with temporary and permanent visas 38 percent of all doctorates in the life sciences or in such fields as biotechnology, gene therapy and engineering, biochemistry, molecular biology, environmental science, and agronomy.
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What was even more startling was the fact that a great percentage of these graduate students received financial aid, often at taxpayer expense in the form of federal “research grants,” a “pattern” that “prevailed for years,” according to David North, in a study for the Alfred Sloan Foundation.
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Other countries did not subsidize foreign students (Britain, for instance, granted aid only to British citizens), nor did most allow foreign students the right to earn incomes (American college students in internships abroad were forced to pay out of their own pockets to work for foreign companies).
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And only in America did so many graduate students stay in the country after graduation (since 1988, more than 60 percent every year), to find work as technicians in corporations, research park labs, or in universities.
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Indeed, besides recruiting foreign students, schools from Harvard to Berkeley hired thousands of foreign postgraduate scholars and faculty, a practice begun long before 1990. In the mid-seventies, in fact, the American Association of Universities,
the lobby for research universities, urged Congress to permit more “professors and scientists” to immigrate on the grounds of “short domestic supply.”
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By the late eighties, the Association requested new visa categories and got them in the 1990 immigration law. One category, called the “Einstein exemption,” gave “preference” to “foreigners of extraordinary ability”; the other, the H-1B category of migrant, let schools hire foreigners on a six-year basis, so long as they could prove no qualified Americans wanted the jobs (it was the same law, as we saw in
chapter 3
, that benefited business as well).

Between 1991 and 1995 the total number of Einsteins reached nearly 10,000 professors. In 1994 alone, more than 60,000 foreign temps—not just the Einsteins but all scholars, teachers, and researchers—came on board, with Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, and Stanford getting the most. “The population of foreign scholars and postdocs is always growing here, believe me,” said Lee Madden, assistant director of foreign scholar services at Stanford in 1994. “There’s never a diminution in these numbers.” Throughout the nineties, each year set a new record.
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Among the many flexible individuals on university payrolls, these foreign temps were called “the migrating workers of modern research, the hapless platoons of postdocs.”
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They belonged to many fields, but most were postdoctoral men and women (but mainly men, since countries like China and India restricted women’s education) who specialized in such prestigious fields as particle physics and molecular biology. These people expected to parlay their temporary visa status into permanent residence in the United States. They worked long hours for tiny stipends, usually far less than industry paid for comparable work, without the protection of labor regulations or unions. Their employers were often full professors who did
research at taxpayers’ expense and from whom corporations often benefited, amounting to a hidden business subsidy.