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the great american university
columbia college today
Social, Cultural and Ethical
Impacts of Universities
For many generations, we Americans
have thought of education as a public as
well as a private good. An investment in
the education of our young people was
an investment in the nation. We created
land-grant colleges after the 1862 Morrill
Act in an effort to train young people
for more skilled jobs and to improve the
quality of our agriculture and related
industries through organized research.
We knew that a better-educated citizen
had greater life chances and could potentially
contribute more to the general social welfare. In recent
decades, we have moved away from this rationale for higher
education toward one that focuses on individual payoffs rather
than on larger societal returns. That is a mistake. Our personal
and taxpayer investments in the American research university
should be seen by each of us as an investment in the public
good — in the larger welfare of the nation that will improve the
lives of all citizens. That commitment to the general good is a
fundamental part of the mission of great universities.
and can potentially fall into the wrong hands, what should our
attitude toward the advance of knowledge be When we can
use our knowledge for the welfare of others, what choices are
we faced with How and whether we decide to use our knowledge
depends on our values, and sometimes it involves making
complicated choices where both options have advantages and
disadvantages. These are issues that are usually the province
of the humanities, not the sciences, and yet they are questions
that scientists are now facing every day. This is why I insist that
the great centers of higher learning must include an emphasis
on the humanities and social sciences. Great universities cannot
ignore the contributions of any of these sources of ideas.
When we think about the contributions of the universities
to industry we naturally focus on the influence they have had
on the growth of industrial innovation and the scientific and
engineering feats involved in taking ideas and translating
them into useful products. But another kind of contribution
to the social and cultural life of the nation is derived from the
ideas, inventions, and discoveries made by scholars working
in the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities. As
with the contributions of science and technology to industry,
the contributions in the social and behavioral sciences and the
humanities are made through the influence of ideas, concepts,
and methods as well as through the people who establish and
staff organizations and businesses that depend on the training
The number of consulting firms that depend on advanced
university training, either in the form of Ph.D. or advanced professional
degrees, and that work for industry to solve marketresearch
problems, is staggering. The very idea of systematic
marketing research comes, as we shall see, from our universities.
I don’t want to dismiss the other side of the story. The great
transformation that university research has created in our lives
and society, sometimes beyond what we could have imagined
even a decade or two ago, also has produced a host of complex
new scientific, moral, and ethical problems for us to address
and solve. Our successes have spawned new dilemmas
of choice. When modern biological science allows us to create
new and potentially lethal viruses; when nanoscientists, piecing
together individual atoms, can create biological structures
that can learn from their own actions; when nuclear physics
produces the possibility of Armageddon, and creates problems
of nuclear waste disposal even when its discoveries are used
peacefully to generate power; when computer-science technology
allows us to spy on our own citizens and abridge their
privacy; when automobiles and other manufactured goods
contribute to global warming; and when we have the capacity
to clone animals and potentially human beings, we are faced
with a set of vexing and challenging problems of our own
making that are sometimes urgent and often controversial.
New social and economic costs are thus sometimes associated
with discovery. A number of questions arise that we all
must consider as the social and ethical impacts of universityrelated
research affect our world in ever more surprising ways.
When science and technology have the potential to be misused
that is provided in these fields by our best universities.
Consider in blueprint form five domains where our universities
have had an enormous impact on the direction the society
has taken over the past fifty years: (1) independent “think
tanks” that translate empirical knowledge into policy advice;
(2) consulting firms that are used by businesses and government
to solve organizational problems; (3) nongovernment
organizations around the world and other private nonprofit
foundations; (4) cultural institutions; and (5) individual social
and political advisers who work for the government. There are
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs created as well
as thousands of businesses spawned as a result of the training
and expertise gained at our universities in these fields.
There are hundreds of private think tanks, and they work
on every imaginable subject, from military preparedness to
health-care reform. Some are liberal (the Brookings Institution),
and some are highly conservative (the Heritage Foundation),
but the entire spectrum of political perspectives is represented
in the range of think tanks that exist. Though most are
independent, some are associated with universities (such as
Stanford’s Hoover Institution, the University of Chicago’s National
Opinion Research Center [NORC], and the University
of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research [ISR]). Some are extremely
large, such as the Rand Corporation, while others are
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