Aant Elzinga, Einstein's Nobel Prize: A Glimpse behind Closed Doors. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications/USA, 2006. Pp xii+128. ISBN 0-88135-283-7. $39.95 (hardback) (original) (raw)
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This chapter explores the trajectories of higher education expansion and its political and social conditions in seven countries, namely China, Japan, Germany, Qatar, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States of America. The analysis relies on longitudinal and cross-sectional data gleaned from the World Higher Education Database, UNESCO, and the OECD. The countries have seen remarkable higher education expansion in the 20th century in terms of enrollments and the foundings of universities, with particularly strong growth in the immediate post-World War II period and since 1990. For the particular case of STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), the chapter shows that in those higher education systems in which growth took off relatively late, universities oriented towards the STEM fields are more dominant than in those with a longer history. Countries with a more recent HE system stress technological development more than those that look back on multiple centuries of HE expansion with their canonical legacies. Comparing these highly dissimilar countries nevertheless reveals important common patterns, and the variable paces of higher education expansion can be explained by national social and political factors driving the institutionalization of higher education and research.
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In The Century of Science — edited by Justin J.W. Powell, David P. Baker, and Frank Fernandez — a multicultural, international team of authors examines the global rise of scholarly research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEM+) fields. At the beginning of the 20th century, the global center-point of scientific productivity was about half way between Western Europe and the U.S., in the North Atlantic. Then, the center moved steadily westward and slightly southward—reflecting the burgeoning science capacity of the U.S. supported by America’s thriving public and private universities, technological innovation, and overall economic growth. After WWII, this began to change as the course of the world’s scientific center of gravity turned and for the next 70 years traveled eastward, the direction it still travels, especially due to the rise of China and other prolific East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Europe continues to be the center of global science. Focusing on these developments, this volume provides historical and sociological understandings of the ways that higher education has become an institution that, more than ever before, shapes science and society. Case studies, supported by the most historically and spatially extensive database on STEM+ publications available, of selected countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and the Middle East, emphasize recurring themes: the institutionalization and differentiation of higher education systems to the proliferation of university-based scientific research fostered by research policies that support continued university expansion leading to the knowledge society. Growing worldwide, research universities appear to be the most legitimate sites for knowledge production. Countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan began the 20th century with prerequisites in place to realize the emerging model of university-based research. Over the past several decades, China, South Korea, and Taiwan, with different historical legacies and conflicts in education and research policy, have witnessed explosive growth, sustained by public and private funds. Qatar recently embarked on an ambitious government-driven effort to develop a world-class university sector and cultivate academic STEM+ research from scratch. These more recent entrants to the global scientific enterprise pose the question whether it is possible to leapfrog across decades, or even centuries, of cultivating university systems, to compete globally. Simultaneously with international and regional competition, world-leading science increasingly implies collaboration across cultural and political borders as global scientific production and networking continue to rise exponentially. This volume’s case studies offer new insights into how countries develop the university-based knowledge thought fundamental to meeting social needs and economic demands. Despite repeated warnings that universities would lose in relevance to other organizational forms in the production of knowledge, our findings demonstrate incontrovertibly that universities have become more—not less—important actors in the world of knowledge. The past hundred years have seen the global triumph of the research university.
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The series Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science was conceived in the broadest framework of interdisciplinary and international concerns. Natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists and philosophers have contributed to the series, as have historians and sociologists of science, linguists, psychologists, physicians, and literary critics. The series has been able to include works by authors from many other countries around the world. The editors believe that the history and philosophy of science should itself be scientific, self-consciously critical, humane as well as rational, sceptical and undogmatic while also receptive to discussion of first principles. One of the aims of Boston Studies, therefore, is to develop collaboration among scientists, historians and philosophers. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science looks into and reflects on interactions between epistemological and historical dimensions in an effort to understand the scientific enterprise from every viewpoint More information about this series at
Keith Tribe The nature and purpose of university education in Britain is much misunderstood. The current prevailing evaluation of universities as machines for the production of human capital is a relatively new one, inapplicable to the quite recent past, as the recent writings of Stefan Collini have sought to emphasise. 1 But given the rapidity of changes to British higher education since the later 1980s, not all directly related to the 1992 Act, it is very difficult to form a clear picture of the development of the British university system during the second half of the twentieth century, especially since there has always been so little informed discussion. In addition, while it might be assumed that well-found reform must necessarily be based upon a sound understanding of the object of reform -the historical reasons for the existence of the object in a particular given form -in the sphere of British higher education this amounts to a quite novel and radical idea. This essay seeks to address the problem in a limited and particular way: by considering the history of the post-war New Universities, the green-field campus universities mostly associated with the 1960s, but initiated in 1950 with the opening of Keele University. The primary purpose of these new foundations was not to provide capacity for an overstretched system; their purpose was experimental, to provide scope for innovation in teaching and learning. By considering some of these initiatives we can perhaps broaden our understanding of the possibilities of university education, what it might offer to students, and also importantly, the scope it offers to teachers for innovation. As it happens, none of these early experiments have lasted: patterns of teaching and learning in all of the New Universities are now similar to anywhere else. And so the trajectory that these institutions have followed is also instructive of the fate of reform. I present here some case studies in the economy of reform, 2 so that we might better understand why it is that the aspirations attached to university institutions find fulfilment in the management rhetoric of "academic excellence" instead of the real experience of students. I will begin with some general remarks on education and educational achievement in post-war Britain, followed by some more specific comments on the evolution of the university as an institution. My discussion of the New University foundations will be related to those institutions in which I have spent most of my academic career: Essex, Keele and Sussex. This somewhat personal view is moderated by my extensive research on the development of the modern research university since the later nineteenth century, in particular, the formation and development of the economics discipline, which is itself a creature of the twentieth-century university.