Podcast Episode 5: William C. Kirby

Transcript

Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 5 with William C. Kirby

Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

(Recorded 11/04/2022)

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:06.59] LARRY BOBO: Welcome, everyone, to another edition of Upon Further Review front line conversations with Dean Bobo. I am Larry Bobo, Dean of the social sciences here at Harvard University, and it is my pleasure to be talking with William C Kirby today. He is the TM Chang Professor of China studies at Harvard and the Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, as well as a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and currently serving as chair of the Harvard China fund. We’ll be talking about his new book, Empires of Ideas, creating the modern University from Germany, to America, to China. Welcome Bill, it’s good to have you.

[00:00:50.90] BILL KIRBY: I agree. It’s great to be with you.

[00:00:53.51] LARRY BOBO: All right. So you of course come to this project, this book, with a background plainly enough is an accomplished historian with respect to the topic of how to understand the role and evolution of leading institutions of higher learning. And with considerable experience, particularly here at Harvard, as a faculty member, as a department chair, as a center director, as literally the Dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, and now one also affiliated with the business school.

[00:01:29.27] And I wonder if before leaping into the core of the material and the argument you put before us. You might reflect on how that collection of experiences and career commitments shaped the emergence of this intellectual agenda for you at this point in your career.

[00:01:49.98] BILL KIRBY: Thank you Larry. It’s a great question, and it’s one that I hadn’t thought enough about until completing this book. I was both as an undergraduate and as initially as a doctoral student, I was primarily in European history. And I actually came to Harvard to work with Franklin Ford, former Dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences. But I had a strong interest also in China at that time, and I came to work also with John Fairbank. And actually did both areas Europe and China through my graduate career, and then when I went on the job market, somebody offered me a job in the China field and that really focused the mind.

[00:02:42.33] [LAUGHTER]

[00:02:43.56] LARRY BOBO: As has employment often does.

[00:02:46.95] BILL KIRBY: It absolutely does. Part of the evolution of an intellectual interest is really the mentors you had, and I could not have had two more extraordinary, and many other extraordinary faculty, Philip Kuhn in particular, but Fairbank and Ford together were remarkable individuals both of whose career is dated back to the 1930s and 40s. And both of whom were generous of time and spirit with a young graduate student.

[00:03:18.72] The great thing about Harvard and our history department at that point in time is that, if you knew what you wanted to do more or less, nobody would stop you. We had rules and regulations, but not very many, as it turned out. And so I was able to bring these two fields together, and then it’s just one of the accidents of history that Franklin is, of course Dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences in the 1960s, and then later I become his successor as Dean. And Fairbank founded what we now know as the Fairbank Center, and years later I become director of his center as it were.

[00:03:58.89] No design to that. But it does explain in some sense that my interest, and the way I’ve approached modern Chinese history throughout my career, is to focus on the internationalization of China. How China has been shaped by and has adopted international influences shaped them to its own will, at times. But how nothing important in the history of 20th century China does not have an international dimension to it.

[00:04:35.82] When you hear President Xi Jinping talk about socialism with Chinese characteristics, there are some certain Chinese characteristics that endure from earlier periods of Chinese history. But there’s nothing in Chinese history about having a Politburo, or a standing committee. And all of this is adopted in lock, stock, and barrel. From their neighbors to the North, from the Soviet Union. And it was of course, agents of the Soviet Union that founded the Chinese Communist Party.

[00:05:08.94] All of this was central to my interests. I wrote a book, which came out of my dissertation on an earlier period of Chinese international interaction in the interwar period, and particularly the strong influence that Germany had on the regime of John Kai-Shek. From the late 1920s, through to the late 1930s, and early 1940s and then, quite frankly, with considerable influence beyond by individual advisors in Taiwan in the 1950s.

[00:05:45.12] But my interest in looking at China’s internationalization through higher education is a much more recent one. That comes from my time as Dean.

[00:05:53.73] LARRY BOBO: Yes.

[00:05:54.18] BILL KIRBY: At time, you get to know you, as a faculty member or as a student, you think your institution. But you learn a lot more when you take on a leadership role.

[00:06:06.28] LARRY BOBO: Now, this is very true, especially in a place as decentralized, as in siloed as Harvard.

[00:06:15.03] BILL KIRBY: And as Dean, you have to know your own institution. You have to, as Sun Tzu said, “Know yourself. And know your enemies.” That is to say, know the competition. And if you do that, as Sun Tzu said, “100 battles, 100 victories.” L is never that easy as a Dean. But I came to be fascinated actually with the business of higher education with the organization of higher education. And how institutions rise and fall, and how they try to stay on top.

[00:06:51.69] My largest job, I had three priorities when I was Dean. One was the refocusing of the faculty on undergraduate education, and with a renewed general education program. The second was internationalization, and completing the Center for International Studies that the CGIs. And third our deep investment in the life sciences where we had fallen far behind. And in those three areas, are central to Harvard’s and the FAS is capacity to maintain leadership in the world of American higher education. There are others as well.

[00:07:35.10] LARRY BOBO: Let me ask a question here about this, because before we leap into the details of the book, but your concern both with internationalization and leadership as an institution of higher learning, as I think about the entirety of the book, I found myself regarding your project here is interweaving three emotions or commitments. The first of these in some respects was a passion about the importance of great universities to the good of society.

[00:08:10.17] The second one was certainly a concern if not a worry, about a number of trends, especially in the US today but abroad as well, that are changing the context in which universities operate and making it a much more challenging environment for them to continue to play that same role, and in particular for long standing leaders like Harvard to remain in that position. But yet also abiding faith that universities are going to adapt and serve us well in the future. I don’t know if that observation resonates with you or if I’ve misread it?

[00:08:52.65] BILL KIRBY: No. You’ve read it quite accurately, and you’ve expressed it actually better than I did in some sense. As I argued that with the birth of the modern research University in the early 19th century, it’s closely tied to national missions. And is closely tied in that case to the Prussian mission, but also then to the German mission later on. And with the sense that it’s also, to a public mission beyond that of simply the world of science, of vision craft, of creating knowledge.

[00:09:26.88] And I think this is one of the things that is happily been such a distinguishing feature of Harvard. We are a private University, although we were founded as a public institution. We were a state owned institution, you could argue in our first century and more. But today we are a private University but with an enduring sense of public purpose. And there are moments in the Harvard chapter where you can see the mobilization indeed of the Harvard faculty and students for national purposes, particularly in the case of the Second World War before, during, and after the Second World War. But this ethos remains very strong at Harvard, and really across its schools and it’s one of our distinguishing features.

[00:10:13.92] The concerns that I have, have to do with the cutting off of these threads of connectivity between University and public purpose, at least as far as many people in the public are concerned. And so you see the defunding of public higher education in the United States, in 44 out of 50 American states. And my chapter on Berkeley is the big Warning signal in this book, about what can happen to the leading public University in the United States, through chronic defunding that can lead to dysfunction.

[00:10:55.00] And this is a concern, that we can talk about this later. I think has implications also for the great private universities such as Harvard. But I do have faith in the endurance of these institutions. Universities have been around for a Millennium and more. They’ve outlasted many different forms of government. And the modern research University, again, not that old. 212 years old to be precise if you dated from the founding of the University of Oregon in 1810.

[00:11:29.16] The modern research University has been remarkably successful in Europe, in North America, now in Asia, at creating knowledge and expanding education, at expanding knowledge, bringing faculty and students together. It’s structures in which the faculty of Arts and Sciences as we call it, or what Humboldt called the philosophical faculty, remain at the center remarkably. So many decades later of the modern research University, and education in the liberal arts and Sciences is not confined to simply two liberal arts colleges, in this country but can be found in almost every major research University.

[00:12:15.39] And so, just as Harvard survived the colonial period, survived the birth of the American Republic, the Civil War, and many wars thereafter. Universities have survived enormous Sturm und Drang, as the Germans would say, over the last 200 plus years, and remain engines of innovation and engines of economic growth wherever they are strong.

[00:12:44.05] LARRY BOBO: Yeah, great. And in some respects, I envy you that great historical perspective because as the naive observer, and contemporary scholar of race that I am, I don’t have that full lens and perspective and the pessimism and anxiety of the present. Tends to loom ever large in that context. So I’m happy to hear of your faith. And indeed to read the full broad perspective you bring to this. Let me do one other opening point before really leaping into the substance of the book, some of which you’ve already laid out here.

[00:13:27.88] They’re three surprising start points to your work. One, is in effect that this is a tale that really doesn’t begin in England. With Oxford, and Cambridge, but rather in Germany. And that is in part, a choice on your part but also something with real clear intellectual foundations as to why that’s the choice. Secondly, another starting point is that Harvard itself was not always the intellectually distinguished place that we regarded as being today or for much of its history, and that there was a transformation that had to take place and a model that was drawn upon in doing that.

[00:14:15.59] And thirdly, and perhaps surprisingly there too. The path for the future may ultimately in the US belong to Duke University maybe more than it does to Harvard, and that indeed it may not be an American University that leads to the way, but one based in China. So I wonder if you could speak to those surprising starting points.

[00:14:41.59] BILL KIRBY: Well, of course. Harvard owns its life to a graduate or at least its name to a graduate of Cambridge University. And so we have deep ties of course to English institutions. And Oxford and Cambridge have been among the world’s leading universities longer than anyone else.

[00:15:04.57] LARRY BOBO: And Italy. The University of Bologna, Yes.

[00:15:08.02] BILL KIRBY: Well, no longer there, but I don’t think anyone would confuse Bologna with Oxford and Cambridge today

[00:15:12.94] LARRY BOBO: OK.

[00:15:15.07] BILL KIRBY: So they have had a remarkable capacity for self renewal over time. But if you look at my topic, which is really the focus of the modern research University, which is a new thing in 1810. The idea that a University is devoted to the creation of knowledge, and many other aspects of a University. And to do so, with considerable institutional autonomy, to do so in an atmosphere of freedom of teaching and freedom of learning, in all of this, but particularly the concept of a research University is new in the early 19th century.

[00:15:56.95] And the Germans set global standards in the 19th century. The Americans set global standards by the end of the 20th century without question. And so a question for this book is whether the Chinese at the end of the day will do the same in the 21st century. So as great as Oxford and Cambridge are, and of course Harvard adopted many of the way in which liberal arts education has occurred in the United States owes a great deal to Oxford and Cambridge, and to British models more broadly.

[00:16:31.33] Harvard College, was for much of its first several centuries just a pale reflection of an Oxbridge college. But we became a serious research University only by emulating the German model in the latter part of the 19th century. And believe it or not, the same can be said of Oxford and Cambridge. They were great teaching institutions and they have done the remarkable thing of becoming great research universities, while maintaining a strong ethos of commitment to undergraduate education. Which is, and should be the envy of many.

[00:17:10.45] But Britain itself, and British universities did not set global models. And one that would be as compelling as that of this quite new German model in the 19th century. And if you think of Harvard to get to your second portion. Harvard is the best known because it’s the oldest American University. It’s very influential in political and cultural terms throughout its history. But if you look at the world of research universities, probably as late as 1920, if we had rankings of the kind that we have today, 8 of the top 10 universities in the world would have been German. And the other two, Oxford and Cambridge, not us.

[00:17:56.42] And even within the United States, the only early ranking that I could find of the research output of universities, Harvard ranked number one because we had more researchers than anyone else. But if you look at what University was pound for pound. The best University in the United States, it wasn’t Harvard, It wasn’t Hopkins, it wasn’t Chicago, wasn’t Berkeley, it wasn’t Stanford. It was Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, which was the Caltech of its day.

[00:18:35.63] And an interesting story of how universities can rise, and actually not continue to rise, and give ideas to others who then pilfered their faculty. So Harvard really becomes distinguished with the founding of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the 19th century, and then under the presidency of President Conant, before, during, and after the Second World War truly distinguished also in the natural and Applied Sciences.

[00:19:06.38] It is from that moment, and really the war and post-war moment, that the great evolution of a Harvard that is a worldwide brand, not just in terms of age and tradition, but as a leading research University takes off.

[00:19:25.94] LARRY BOBO: Great

[00:19:26.23] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:19:46.23] LARRY BOBO: So let’s look back for a moment and flesh out more fully the origins of that German founding of the model for a great research University, and maybe begin with asking you a bit about the role, and perspective, and agenda, of a figure like Wilhelm Devon Humboldt, and the place he occupies in the creation of the modern research University, particularly in Germany.

[00:20:17.73] BILL KIRBY: Yeah. Well, what’s interesting is that the University of Bergen, which is the mother of all of us, was founded in the aftermath of a political and military disaster. Prussia’s loss to Napoleon. So we can Thank Napoleon in some sense for this, and the King, King Frederick William III says something that I’ve never found in the words of any other politician or leader anywhere. He said, “We will replace with intellectual strength what we have lost in physical strength.”

[00:20:51.51] And he disputes Humboldt, and Humboldt finds many collaborators, to found a modern teaching institution, as it was originally called, but one that becomes quickly imbued with the research ethos to found this institution on several of the principles that I’ve set out, which are of course to be founded by the state. To be central in the education of leaders of the state, and of citizens of the state. But also, with a fundamental mission to advance knowledge wherever it goes. Even though the state is paying all the bills, with institutional autonomy from the state to a very considerable degree.

[00:21:35.52] You could choose who comes in and comes out, the faculty is chosen not exclusively, but largely by themselves, what the study is chosen by themselves. There is a unity of teaching and learning, the idea that knowledge comes as we do in our own graduate school. In the seminar format or in laboratories, by faculty and students working closely together, and critically the principles of [NON-ENGLISH], freedom to teach, and [NON-ENGLISH], the freedom to learn. Never perfect, in 19th century Germany to be sure, but articulated more clearly there than anywhere else.

[00:22:21.09] And of course it’s a model that brings, it would not have succeeded, if it did not bring most importantly, the best faculty to the University. That was one of Humboldt’s important principles. And as you know, his Dean, and as I recall as Dean, the most important thing a Dean can do, is to bring the best faculty to the University. And make sure that they actually meet students, now and again.

[00:22:48.04] And so a call to Berlin became the height of anyone’s career, particularly of course of a German scholar, but of anyone’s career in the 19th century. German PhDs became Dillinger for those who sought advancement in American higher education at the last half of the 19th century. And German models of scholarship really pervade the United States, the founding of Hopkins in Chicago as research universities and really graduate universities, and even Stanford University founded by that great but ornery philanthropist,

[00:23:30.87] LARRY BOBO: Leland, Leland Stanford.

[00:23:33.30] BILL KIRBY: Leland Stanford. The motto that Stanford adopts, as it turns out, is in German. Die Luft der Freiheit weht, the wind of freedom blows. Almost nobody at Stanford can pronounce this today. But once upon a time, they could.

[00:23:51.54] LARRY BOBO: No. That’s absolutely fascinating. But let me pull out a few other threads of this here. And so, another German term that captures part of what Humboldt set out to fashion, was that this was to be education pursued as building, as shaping the whole person. I’m going to get the other term wrong, [? ubong ?] or [? abong, ?] that was just narrowly focused on practical training, but it really was to be broad gauge and make that imprint on a reflective person, a thoughtful citizen.

[00:24:34.98] BILL KIRBY: That’s exactly right. In some sense, you can still see this ethos today reflected in our general education curriculum, not only at Harvard but in the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences, both in the United States and around the world. And it is a sense that the philosophical faculty, what he called the philosophical faculty, had to be at the heart of the University, what we call the faculty of Arts and Sciences. The philosophical faculty includes, what we call the arts and Sciences.

[00:25:13.29] I think it would be fair to say that he, and the most important Humboldtians around the world, later on, were not particularly excited about professional schools. In pretty brilliant times, the larger reason that individuals would go to University was to practice law, or to go into one or another of a set of prescribed and longstanding professions.

[00:25:44.76] This was to be a different form of education, and a different form of citizen to emerge from, and that of course, what’s very interesting is that, that aspect of German universities really gets lost. Particularly, if one said the wind of freedom blows as a German motto, that wind of freedom stopped blowing in Germany in the 1930s, and German universities in the postwar period paid precious little attention to this central element, of undergraduate education. But now it is being reintroduced in a variety of ways. In the best of these universities today.

[00:26:30.81] LARRY BOBO: And so that to stress a point here, that wind of freedom included not just a concern with the sciences, but a real appreciation for and commitment to a robust engagement with the humanities. So those enduring questions of the human experience, that we think of here as in the arts and humanities.

[00:26:52.64] BILL KIRBY: Absolutely. Central philosophy, history, literature, without question. And of course, Humboldt himself was a man of the Enlightenment. He was not a specialist. And in fact, his tenure in office in establishing this University was stunningly short. But his influence was profound. And then the influence of what became known as Humboldt and ideas takes on almost a life of its own over the course of the 19th century.

[00:27:28.03] LARRY BOBO: Even the German University, as you’ve already hinted in talking about the 1930s, goes through some enormous vicissitudes, and deep and profound challenges, and transformations. Partly in response to World War one, but obviously especially the Nazi era World War two and the post-war and Cold War era. And maybe I could ask you to trace some of the decline and then reconstruction of the great German research University, especially as it emerges in the more recent period, and the excellence initiative since the falling of the Berlin Wall that have made such a difference.

[00:28:24.68] BILL KIRBY: Yeah. Well, of course Nazism and communism of the Soviet sort were not great for German universities after 1933, or after 1949, with the founding of the German Democratic Republic. The universities physically destroyed during the war has to be rebuilt, and it becomes a Sovietized University, with smaller, more focused highly politicized, and it leads to the founding of an alternative type of University just in the city of Bergen. And the Freie University, Berlin. Founded to some degree, on American models. In 1948, founded by students fleeing from the old University of Bergen, which is now called the Humboldt University.

[00:29:16.94] And, you have an extraordinary tension, and implicit even during the time of the Berlin Wall competition, between these two models of universities. Now that the wall has fallen, then Berlin is unified, what’s interesting, and this is how I actually began thinking seriously about this project, is when I went to the 200th anniversary of the Humboldt University in a big conference on the original model as it was called in 2010, the president of the University welcomed us all by saying “This is in the old building in downtown Brooklyn. Nobody would take my University as a model for anything today.”

[00:30:01.04] He was very quickly no longer the president of the Humboldt University. But what was interesting that Humboldt this great University, the University of Bergen was no longer the best University in the world, and not the best University in Germany, and not even the best University in Berlin.

[00:30:17.13] And this Freie University, Berlin, through its own very interesting history with a lot of near-death experiences, has emerged as the leading one in that city, but the leading one in the all of Germany, and has reinvented itself not the least by taking advantage of this competition, this forced competition among universities to be excellent, to find new ways of defining excellence. This is the whole point of the German excellence initiative. And the effort the Freie University, has done a simply remarkable job in doing that and Humboldt not so much.

[00:31:04.68] Competition can lead to extraordinary innovation, if it’s done in the right way, and then this particular competition of the excellence initiative has had very substantial benefits to what one can consider the beginnings of a rebirth of German universities. Not that they’re going to set global standards again, but they do have ideas again that others can learn from.

[00:31:30.09] LARRY BOBO: And some of this transformation especially in the era of the excellence initiatives, was generated by what could be termed an era of disinvestment, or at least financial constraint that the universities had experienced.

[00:31:52.10] BILL KIRBY: Yeah. I was a student at the Freie University of Bergen, after college. I had what was called through the German academic exchange service. I had what was called a,

[00:32:03.05] [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

[00:32:05.12] An air lift Thank you grant, from the city of Bergen. I reckoned the airlift of 1948. And when I was there, this place was total chaos. Creative chaos, very leftist, founded as a pro-American University to some degree, now very anti-American during the latter part of the Vietnam War, very difficult to govern. I took a seminar on Marx, I think there were 15 students in the class, and there were six different communist parties.

[00:32:38.39] LARRY BOBO: [LAUGHTER] Yes.

[00:32:40.25] BILL KIRBY: Very exciting. And then the University massive in the 70s and 80s bangoons, to nearly 60,000 students. It was only 18,000 or 16,000 or so when I was there. Now, it has gotten smaller and better. Financial constraint, leading to real hard, but on the whole excellent decision making in the free universities. Bigger is not always better. And sometimes, it’s a question that I ask really for Chinese universities later on in the book, but it’s worth asking for the Germans and the Americans. The question is not how good you are when the money keeps flowing in, is how good you are when it stops. And it really did stop after the fall of the wall, Berlin didn’t have the money to support three large research universities as it inherited, and change had to happen, and the have who did it better, faster, more intelligently than anybody else.

[00:33:47.81] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:34:10.82] LARRY BOBO: There was an early thread in your discussion of the era when Humboldt was pioneering this modern research University, and it had to do with the role of students, and student demands, and social protest from students, which again, I think I naively did not take as a standard occurrence throughout history in the experience of colleges and universities. But clearly it is.

[00:34:40.85] BILL KIRBY: Absolutely. You’re just seeing it firsthand. You’re saying that.

[00:34:44.24] LARRY BOBO: Yeah. Now I’m seeing it firsthand. But this was striking just to see how routine, that process and in many ways often positive transformation coming out of those demands and– not always as we’ll get to in a bit here, but that it has been a distinctive, recurrent feature of what the interaction between a professoriate and young, inquisitive, ambitious, rambunctious students tend to produce.

[00:35:17.55] BILL KIRBY: Absolutely right. You’re giving it every day [INAUDIBLE].

[00:35:21.55] [LAUGHTER]

[00:35:22.71] LARRY BOBO: This is so true, so true. I guess maybe this is the point to think about connecting this to when Harvard, a major American private institution begins to move toward the German model. And in particular, to think about I guess the presidency of Elliot, who seemingly is the one who really ushers in the foundation of this new golden era, if you will, for Harvard. And so what does President Elliot bring to Harvard that moves it so decisively?

[00:36:05.68] BILL KIRBY: Well he was not again. And it’s an interesting thing about our modern history. But having said many of the standards of American higher education, Harvard was not a first mover at that time. And indeed he initially resisted the idea of adopting a German model of education. And he never really did for undergraduate education which is probably to some degree to our benefit. But he did at least because he had a wholly elective system, as you may remember. But it’s the obvious success of alternatives.

[00:36:47.23] If you see what’s happening at Hopkins in Chicago, and the sense of his own faculty, on their own going to Germany for Advanced Study not always for doctorates, but sometimes for doctorates. And the idea that graduate education in the arts and Sciences is going to be the most powerful way forward for a research institution, for research oriented institution to make its mark in the world and on society. This leads to the founding of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, now almost exactly if I’m not mistaken 150 years this year.

[00:37:32.62] As great as Harvard College was, and is. And is distinguished as our early professional schools, the medical school, law school, Divinity School, and as great as our more recent professional schools: business school, head school, Kennedy School, Public Health, have all been. It is the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences that has defined Harvard as a leading research University.

[00:38:01.84] And its graduates, the ones that then go out and populate the faculty of American, European, and now East Asian universities. This is the source of the most enduring influence of our institution. I think when Eliot started it, who knew how powerful this would be. But it really is at the heart of Harvard’s rise to global prominence. As a University, as opposed to as a teaching college or a series of excellent professional schools.

[00:38:40.45] LARRY BOBO: Which is not to say that Eliot or his successors got everything right in this area. As you say Harvard was often following suit from other leaders here, but this was certainly still a period when women really had no place at Harvard. Underrepresented minorities as well, just not featured in the thinking of who belonged or and likewise the quotas on Jewish enrollment in those areas.

[00:39:15.50] BILL KIRBY: Well, certainly we had, as I put in the book, at least Harvard itself. Now we have to recognize the importance of Radcliffe as a separate institution and a regarded institution, where made a run there was. And extraordinary scholars did get doctorates at Radcliffe. But that aside, because we’re older, we have the longest tradition of discrimination against women than any University in the United States.

[00:39:50.11] A famous era of discrimination against Jews, Blacks, and many others, particularly actually Eliot is more open minded than his successor Lowell.

[00:40:02.74] LARRY BOBO: His successor Lowell, Yes.

[00:40:04.99] BILL KIRBY: Who was a notorious anti-Semite. But through all this, I would say it’s fair to say and it’s still true today that we don’t discriminate. And as our lawsuit is going forward, I am quite convinced that we do not discriminate in our undergraduate education and against any particular group, although we are more biased, toward people who are American citizens, if you look at the enrollments.

[00:40:38.14] We probably have certain degree of affirmative action for men. Otherwise how do you end up at 50/50 undergraduate enrolments. You do have to have a football team after all.

[00:40:50.64] LARRY BOBO: But we’re not alone.

[00:40:52.71] BILL KIRBY: But GSIs, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, admitted by departments. Your department is the most meritocratic part of Harvard and of any University, and we admit people simply on the basis of merit wherever they are from. And that has been a powerful push forward for our world as a research University.

[00:41:18.99] LARRY BOBO: Absolutely. Now, Eliot’s successors each in a fashion introduce some lasting and more often leading change. So Lowell creating the house system, and the establishment of concentrations, or majors and miners becoming a more lasting imprint of the major research University. And even more rigorous consideration of faculty tenuring processes. So that happens there. But then, it’s really the Conant era that weds Harvard even more intensively to a sense of US National mission, especially around the World War II era. And then even more consequentially with the GI Bill and its consequences for higher education and learning. But then maybe I should skip ahead to Pusey, because that may be one of the lasting transformations of the modern research University, is the need for a University President to be fundraiser in chief.

[00:42:38.97] BILL KIRBY: Yes.

[00:42:40.05] LARRY BOBO: If that isn’t something that has now become a hallmark of at least how these universities survive, and thrive, if not so much the guiding philosophy of the institution and its practices.

[00:42:54.47] BILL KIRBY: Right. And under Pusey of course, the position of Dean of FAZ becomes a much stronger position than it’s ever been before. Really begins under Conant, who is so consumed and is often in Washington during the war. But in Pusey, you also have the, not the beginning of, because it’s there in embryo, but as Harvard grows in size and as the professional schools grow in size and in reputation, the growing decentralization of the University. The every tab on its own bottom, financial model, and so on, really take off in a way that is one of the distinguishing and not always positively a distinguishing features of Harvard today.

[00:43:39.95] And Pusey’s, since he spans two eras, the first one as in Conant’s, at least with the holdover from of a sense of connection to a national mission, tested in part by the unease about the Korean War, but then blown apart by the divisions of the Vietnam War. And it is, of course, both faculty and student, but particularly student protest over the Vietnam War that is a major rupture.

[00:44:17.22] And you think about it, we just take one example, Franklin Ford, one of my mentors, was like so much of the Harvard history department during World War two, seconded into OSS, to help the government research the world in which we were then fighting. And the predecessor of the CIA, which is OSS.

[00:44:40.82] And then, Ford decades later is Dean of the faculty of Arts and Sciences, and dragged out of University Hall, in the occupation of University Hall by students in 1969. Suffers a stroke, resigns from Pusey’s presidency is over. That is the moment of rupture really at the Harvard scene, between national mission, and educational mission.

[00:45:12.41] That connection of course still exists, otherwise you wouldn’t have such extraordinary federal funding of research at Harvard today, and many Harvard faculty members serving happily and successfully in government. But that sense of institutional, that the alignment between the purposes of the institution and the policies of the country, are closely aligned. That has never really recovered. Not just at Harvard, but in many universities. From the turmoil of the Vietnam War era, which of course ended Pusey’s presidency.

[00:45:55.37] LARRY BOBO: Yeah. I’m conscious of our time together here, and maybe this era of protest, and connection of universities to a sense of national mission. Maybe the point to think about the role of our major public research universities, and in particular the University of California, the Berkeley case. And certainly once, and arguably still today, the most highly ranked and leading of the public research universities in the US. But one now facing very serious challenges. In part, I guess due to a confluence of something you’ve already spoken to a bit, the public disinvestment in higher education. But in part also to other social trends, including some elements of its own design, the nature of its governance, which is something we haven’t talked about quite as much yet.

[00:47:00.47] BILL KIRBY: Yeah. Every University has its own form of governance. Some of the more successful than others. Sometimes in the case of Harvard, it depends on the individuals leading the corporation and of course can depend on the individuals in the presidency, or in different dean-ships. Certainly from the free speech movement of the 1960s onward, Berkeley has, but it really has, almost from the beginning in the 19th century, a robust culture of protest. Very robust culture of protest and a robust culture of forms of Democratic governance on the part of the faculty through an Academic Senate, the Berkeley branch of the UC Academic Senate, in which all faculty members, including a Maritime can take part.

[00:47:58.89] It doesn’t have a board of its own. We have two boards at Harvard: the corporation, and the Board of Overseers. But Berkeley has no board of its own that is an official fiduciary board, it’s subject to the State Board of Regents. And of course, part of this great system of the University of California itself. On the positive side, and I’m sitting here in Berkeley as we speak. Right near this gorgeous campus, in this beautiful state which would not be the rich, extraordinarily prosperous place that it is today without the University of California.

[00:48:37.79] LARRY BOBO: Right. Absolutely.

[00:48:39.62] BILL KIRBY: And yet that system is under enormous stress. The state paid nearly 100% of UC and particularly Berkeley’s costs through the 1970s, it now pays a little bit more than 10% of those costs. And that is true in many states around the country, but Berkeley was particularly slow in part because a culture of dependency on the state which led to, in my view, lack entrepreneurial wisdom on the part of the University, and also a culture in which faculty would complain about funding cuts but really not participate in finding solutions to them easily.

[00:49:35.44] The University became more and more difficult to govern. Not a surprise, the more impoverished it became. And the greatest blow was really after the Great Recession of 2008. This had come and gone in many earlier periods, but I witnessed then as somebody who was doing what we would call a visiting committee for one segment of the Berkeley faculty then, a real sudden decline in the spirit of collaboration, and the optimism that had always defined Berkeley faculty.

[00:50:11.29] I’ve always found when I was Dean. Berkeley faculty were among the most difficult to recruit. Stanford, also problematic. And it wasn’t just the weather, it was their sense of commitment to the public mission of the University. That really has changed to some degree. The university had to expand considerably its undergraduate body in order to pay the Bills, it has had to do a great deal other things, but its leadership capacity in public higher education is absolutely at risk.

[00:50:53.59] And as I say in this book, if places like Berkeley, or Michigan, or the University of Washington in Seattle, if the great public universities in this country decline, and they will, with this level of public distrust of them and defunding of them, then Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, we will all decline. Because we compete for the same faculty, and the same graduate students. And competition is at the heart of excellence in our industry as in any other.

[00:51:26.43] LARRY BOBO: And, let’s think about the role that the Duke example plays here. And I guess maybe their readiness to establish international ties, as something that has figured in their. Rise and success, or what is the ingredients to their success in the more recent era?

[00:51:50.22] BILL KIRBY: Yeah. So in this book, just as your listeners know. I describe Duke as the one of the case studies and it’s the most rapidly rising research University in the United States. And how does it do it? It gets this enormous gift from James B. Duke in the 1920s and 30s to build this beautiful neo-gothic campus in Durham, North Carolina.

[00:52:17.02] It looks like a great University. It even has steps to its chapel that are designed, that are curved, from the beginning. Curved as if worn by generations of scholars. Even though it’s brand new. But they knew they weren’t a great University. It’s a parochial place in a segregated South. That University, that beautiful structure, of the neo-gothic campus was designed by an African-American architect from Philadelphia, who in that era of segregation never saw his creation.

[00:52:53.40] LARRY BOBO: Oh. Wow. Yeah.

[00:52:56.70] BILL KIRBY: So in the 1950s, they understand that they look great and they know they aren’t. How are they going to become a good University? And they begin a set, it becomes part of their DNA of planning for the future. What are they going to stop doing? What are they going to continue to do? How do they measure success in an era before formal rankings? How do they see themselves in comparison say with regional public universities, then later on with Ivy League universities, and other large research universities?

[00:53:29.28] They do so relentlessly but also openly on the campus. So they have a culture of being very open with themselves about what they’re not good at and what they can be good at, and they have a planning process, which is much more participatory, much more open. Harvard’s academic prints by and large seem to happen only in the context of fundraising campaigns. And that’s not the case in the Duke operation. And Harvard has strong academic planning in the different schools of the University.

[00:54:10.50] But I don’t believe that the one academic plan that is University wide, which was a very strong one under Neil Rubenstein also happened in the context of a University campaign. But it was at least based on the academic goals that emerged from that planning. So they have this culture of planning, and this is an area in which we, because of our radical decentralization at Harvard, we are extraordinarily undistinguished to put it mildly in this regard.

[00:54:48.87] And the example that I give, that Harvard, this is our Austin campus. Just compare MIT and its neighborhood in Kendall Square in 1966 and Harvard and its neighborhood in Allston in 1966, with those same places today. Only one of them looks the same.

[00:55:16.62] LARRY BOBO: Although it is now beginning to transform.

[00:55:20.43] BILL KIRBY: It’s beginning. And so I give huge credit to Mary Backhouse optimism, and determination to take this to another level. But it is really quite a remarkable thing that 25 years, a quarter century after we acquired all that land that we’ve managed to build one building.

[00:55:43.91] LARRY BOBO: Yes. Absolutely true.

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[00:56:08.58] LARRY BOBO: Let’s fold in the China piece of the story more, explicitly here and you focus really on Singapore University, Nanjing, and the University of Hong Kong. And of course they begin their March down, I guess one could say the new Silk Road. Very much with the Harvard brand in mind. I think there’s this wonderful anecdote about when Harvard opened its Shanghai offices, that originally it couldn’t be labeled Harvard because so many other places had already tried to copyright the name in China.

[00:56:50.31] BILL KIRBY: Well, this is our great advantage in the world. The Harvard brand is known better than any across the world. There was already a Harvard University, it just wasn’t us, in Shanghai.

[00:57:01.77] [LAUGHTER]

[00:57:04.47] Right now, there’s a best selling Harvard SUV, by a major automobile maker. There’s even a company that’s called the Harvard exam centers. People are actually from Harvard who will take your exams for you. So we’re the most famous brand in China, the most highly respected University without question in China, and we’ve been active in China for more than a century. Harvard Medical School had a campus in Shanghai, in the 19 teens, the Harvard Yanjing Institute dates from the late 1920s. There’s an extraordinary intersection between Harvard and China over the years, and it’s very strong.

[00:57:51.10] And one of the important things to remember is, the great strength of Chinese universities today. And they are truly extraordinary institutions. This great strength has its foundations in the pre-communist era. And the building of institutions, public and then also private, Chinese as well as foreign, that built a small but powerful set of institutions in higher education. That is the baseline from which these institutions could grow after the madness of the Maoist period ended, and that they could restart again. And they know that history.

[00:58:34.44] And that’s one in which we have intersection. So my teacher in Chinese history John Fairbank, learned his Chinese history at Tsinghua University in the [? 1930s, ?] and we had strong academic contacts with Turner. We are stronger as a University today, and this is why we have this center in Shanghai that you just referred to. Because we, as a research University need to intersect with the fastest growing sector of higher education in the world in quality, as well as quantity, which is China.

[00:59:12.12] And so many of our faculty have joint research projects, or other initiatives that they wish to have with Chinese colleagues. And one thing I will say right now, is that the current political environment threatens this very considerably. And anything that threatens the free flow of ideas, or of research across national borders, threatens us and every other research University in the world.

[00:59:47.27] Fairbank once told me that one of his biggest regrets, was the cutting off, not that he could stop it, the cutting off of academic ties between China and the US from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. It wasn’t good for either country. And self-isolation, or pressures of self-isolation are growing in both of our countries.

[01:00:12.12] LARRY BOBO: That’s what i was going to say. I was going to say was going to ask you that in effect that pressure, there are internal pressures in both nations in that direction, and once your part of your diagnosis is clearly is that that’s problematic for both. But what prospects do you see for the way out of that?

[01:00:34.81] BILL KIRBY: I think this is actually something very back up. President Baca was extraordinarily articulate in speaking, we had a meeting with Xi Jinping in the year before COVID. And Mary not only gave an extraordinary speech at Peking University on quoting their iconic chancellor Taiwan Pei from the early 20th century, on the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of learning, freedom of teaching.

[01:01:06.61] We also talked with President Xi, about our wish that universities are given the capacity to do things sometimes that governments cannot. And that we need to pursue our work irrespective of tensions between national governments. He made it clear, President Xi did, that he wished to send more, not fewer Chinese students to the United States. And he told us that he had told President Trump that, “If you Trump, limit Chinese students going to the United States, you are giving a great gift to Europe.” He’s not limiting Chinese who go abroad, but we have been the only ones committing that in our own growing parochialism.

[01:01:58.50] LARRY HOBO: Well, absolutely. And hopefully we don’t turn back on that in any way, in the near term, but there are pressures. And of course Xi Jinping’s power and control has only grown since that era, and that is it.

[01:02:16.50] BILL KIRBY: That is true. Well, I don’t I don’t think our visit is political. Let me just say one thing on this. Is that we are committed now. Coming out of COVID, and coming out as we will I hope in a few months time out of China’s zero COVID policy. We are determined. So those of us helping to shape Harvard’s China policy, that we will not only return in strength to China, we’ve had for now 12 years this wonderful center in Shanghai, but to expand our footprint and to deepen our engagement with China.

[01:02:55.28] Because actually this is our job as a research University. To collaborate, and work with great scholars, the world over. And I know our Chinese counterparts want this to happen as well. And we have to work with them directly, to make this happen. Because as I wrote in a recent editorial in the journal Science, a self isolating China is a danger to itself, and a loss to the world, and the same exact thing is true of the United States.

[01:03:28.13] LARRY BOBO: Exactly. Thank you so much, Bill. I think this has been for me, an enormous education. I’m delighted to have read the book.

[01:03:39.71] BILL KIRBY: Thank you for reading it.

[01:03:40.64] LARRY BOBO: I commend it to everyone. Empires of ideas, creating the modern University from Germany, to America, to China. It’s just a fascinating and highly engaging read for anyone interested in, and committed to life in the modern research University. It gives you a deep appreciation for the ideas that came out of Devon Humboldt, and Germany, and how it shaped the evolution of the institutions that we now inhabit and hope to pass on to future generations. So thank you for this remarkable piece of scholarship Bill.

[01:04:18.32] Thank you Larry for the opportunity to talk with you about it. It’s a real pleasure.

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