Daedalus articles from September 1993

Daedalus archives from September 1993

Balancing acts: dilemmas of choice facing research universities.
September 22, 1993... PROGNOSTICATIONS OF THE DECLINE of American higher education, and particularly of our research universities, are not infrequent. Analyses of the "current crisis" by critics and friends surface only somewhat less frequently than the seven year...

The politics of ambivalence: diversity in the research universities.
September 22, 1993... DEBATES OVER CULTURAL DIVERSITY, MULTICULTURALISM, and the integrity of the community are perennial in American history. They extend back at least to colonial times, when religious heterogeneity posed major social and political problems for...

Rationality and realism, what is at stake? (ongoing 'debate' over the objectives of higher education curriculum, academic requirements and enhancement of western culture)
September 22, 1993... DEBATES ABOUT THE NATURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION have been going on in American research universities for decades. There is nothing new about passionate controversies over the curriculum, over academic requirements, and even over the aims of higher...

America's research universities under public scrutiny.
September 22, 1993... ARGUMENTS ABOUT WHAT TO TEACH, TO WHOM, and by whom are standard fare in the history of higher education, but today they are being pressed with an urgency and uncertainty not experienced since the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the...

The mission of the research university.
September 22, 1993... UNIVERSITY FACULTIES AND ADMINISTRATORS are notoriously dubious about mission statements. How can something as pluralistic, as multifaceted, as wondrously complex as a modern university have a clear-cut mission? The term is redolent of narrower...

Making choices in the research university.
September 22, 1993... UNIVERSITIES, LIKE OTHER ORGANIZATIONS, must make choices, and now the choices are becoming painful. On the one hand, the business of the research university is the expanding universe of knowledge, so the domain of opportunity is huge -- and...

Competition and the research universities. (resistance to competition among institutions of higher education)
September 22, 1993... Competition is not a goal: it is a means of organizing activity to achieve a goal.(1) IN BUSINESS, COMPETITION PROMOTES EFFICIENCY, low prices, and diversity of product. In sports, competition encourages the development of skill and the...

The appropriate scale of the health sciences enterprise. (role of these studies in the American research university)
September 22, 1993... ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS ONCE ASKED how long a man's legs should be. "Long enough to reach the ground," he said. It is possible to answer the question posed by the title of this essay in a similarly straightforward way. The appropriate scale of the...

Federal science policy and universities: consequences of success. (the impact of federal sponsorship on American university research)
September 22, 1993... THE US RESEARCH UNIVERSITY IS VIBRANT and conflicted. In laboratories, research buzzes around the clock. Investigators pursue with elan, and mostly with federal funding, the underlying mechanisms of life and disease, the origins and evolution...

Knowledge without borders? Internationalization of the research universities.
September 22, 1993... THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT FOR THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES AMERICA'S RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES PLAY a major role in the nation's affairs, perhaps a larger role within American society than institutions of higher education in other countries....