Americans and people throughout the world have become increasingly dependent on America's great research universities. Yet few of us truly understand to what we owe this extraordinary excellence or what we must do to keep it. From the development of technologies like the laser, the global positioning system, the MRI, radar, and even Viagra, to predicting weather patterns, American research universities are one of our most vital sources of economic growth and social welfare. They have flourished because of a system that has invested public tax dollars in their work and, more importantly, granted substantial autonomy to funding agencies and the universities. This system is now under attack, the university's preeminence endangered by the USA PATRIOT Act and other conservative policies. This revelatory and alarming book will show how this vital institution is at risk of tragically losing its dominant status and why a threat to the university is a threat to the health and wealth of our nation. This edition is in two volumes. The first volume ISBN is 9781458774071.

Americans and people throughout the world have become increasingly dependent on America's great research universities. Yet few of us truly understand to what we owe this extraordinary excellence or what we must do to keep it. From the development of technologies like the laser, the global positioning system, the MRI, radar, and even Viagra, to predicting weather patterns, American research universities are one of our most vital sources of economic growth and social welfare. They have flourished because of a system that has invested public tax dollars in their work and, more importantly, granted substantial autonomy to funding agencies and the universities. This system is now under attack, the university's preeminence endangered by the USA PATRIOT Act and other conservative policies. This revelatory and alarming book will show how this vital institution is at risk of tragically losing its dominant status and why a threat to the university is a threat to the health and wealth of our nation.

A radical blueprint for reinventing American higher education. America’s research universities consistently dominate global rankings but may be entrenched in a model that no longer accomplishes their purposes. With their multiple roles of discovery, teaching, and public service, these institutions represent the gold standard in American higher education, but their evolution since the nineteenth century has been only incremental. The need for a new and complementary model that offers broader accessibility to an academic platform underpinned by knowledge production is critical to our well-being and economic competitiveness. Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University and an outspoken advocate for reinventing the public research university, conceived the New American University model when he moved from Columbia University to Arizona State in 2002. Following a comprehensive reconceptualization spanning more than a decade, ASU has emerged as an international academic and research powerhouse that serves as the foundational prototype for the new model. Crow has led the transformation of ASU into an egalitarian institution committed to academic excellence, inclusiveness to a broad demographic, and maximum societal impact. In Designing the New American University, Crow and coauthor William B. Dabars—a historian whose research focus is the American research university—examine the emergence of this set of institutions and the imperative for the new model, the tenets of which may be adapted by colleges and universities, both public and private. Through institutional innovation, say Crow and Dabars, universities are apt to realize unique and differentiated identities, which maximize their potential to generate the ideas, products, and processes that impact quality of life, standard of living, and national economic competitiveness. Designing the New American University will ignite a national discussion about the future evolution of the American research university.

Although America's universities have become the envy of the world for their creative energy and their production of transformative knowledge, few understand how and why they have become preeminent. This groundbreaking book traces the origins and the evolution of our great universities. It shows how they grew out of sleepy colleges at the turn of the twentieth century into powerful institutions that continue to generate new industries and advance our standard of living. Far from inevitable, this transformation was enabled by a highly competitive system that invested public tax dollars in university research and students while granting universities substantial autonomy. Today, America's universities face considerable threats. Even greater than foreign competition are the threats from within the United States. Under the Bush administration, government increasingly imposed ideological constraints on the freedom of academic inquiry. Restrictive visa policies instituted after 9/11 continue to discourage talented foreign graduate students from training in the United States. The international financial crisis, which has depleted university endowments and state investments in higher education, threatens the vitality of some of our greatest institutions of higher learning. In order to sustain and enhance the American tradition of excellence, we must nurture this powerful -- yet underappreciated -- national resource.

How elite universities are entering the world of online education Over the past decade, a small revolution has taken place at some of the world's leading universities, as they have started to provide free access to undergraduate course materials—including syllabi, assignments, and lectures—to anyone with an Internet connection. Yale offers high-quality audio and video recordings of a careful selection of popular lectures, MIT supplies digital materials for nearly all of its courses, Carnegie Mellon boasts a purpose-built interactive learning environment, and some of the most selective universities in India have created a vast body of online content in order to reach more of the country's exploding student population. Although they don't offer online credit or degrees, efforts like these are beginning to open up elite institutions—and may foreshadow significant changes in the way all universities approach teaching and learning. Unlocking the Gates is one of the first books to examine this important development. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including extensive interviews with university leaders, Taylor Walsh traces the evolution of these online courseware projects and considers the impact they may have, both inside elite universities and beyond. As economic constraints and concerns over access demand more efficient and creative teaching models, these early initiatives may lead to more substantial innovations in how education is delivered and consumed—even at the best institutions. Unlocking the Gates tells an important story about this form of online learning—and what it might mean for the future of higher education.

Arguing that higher education can play a unique role in addressing the fundamental divisions in our society and economy by supporting individuals in reaching their full potential, the authors have developed a provocative guide for higher education leaders who want to promote healthy and productive campus communities.

In Courting Science, Damon Coletta offers a novel explanation for the decline of American leadership in world affairs. Whether the American Century ends sooner rather than later may depend on America's capacity for self-reflection and, ultimately, self-restraint when it comes to science, technology, and engineering. Democracy's affinity for advanced technology has to be balanced against scientific research and progress as a global enterprise. In an era of rising challengers to America's lead in the international order and an increasingly globalized civil society, a "Scientific State" has a better chance of extending its dominance. In order to draw closer to this ideal, though, the United States will have to reconsider its grand strategy. It must have a strategy that scrutinizes how tightly it constrains, how narrowly it directs, and how far it trusts American scientists. If given the opportunity, scientists have the potential to lead a second American Century through domestic science and technology policy, international diplomacy, and transnational networks for global governance.