Since the United States became a world power around the turn of the 20th century, it has never had a rival capable of challenging it militarily, economically, and scientifically, but China is now challenging our nation on all fronts. Many political leaders are concerned about this strategic competition, as they should be. Yet some of these same leaders are also attacking American universities as hotbeds of radicalism, even calling them “the enemy.”
This is a blatant contradiction. Military might, geopolitical influence, and economic dominance all largely depend on technological superiority. Without strong research universities and the scientific and technological advances they discover and invent, the United States could not possibly keep up with China. The most important emerging technologies for US national and economic security — including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and CRISPR gene editing — were all pioneered in American university laboratories.
Punishing universities financially for their failings — real and imagined — would be counterproductive. If anything, the China challenge demands that universities do more than they are already doing — and that they have the resources to do so.
Despite China’s escalating investments in science, the United States still outstrips every other nation in the conduct of curiosity-driven basic research, with universities by far the largest performer of such research. This is one reason why so many groundbreaking innovations originate here. The federal government, the largest supporter of such research, should be devoting more funds to curiosity-driven explorations.
In addition, universities can and should conduct much more use-inspired basic research. This is research at the very frontiers of science, yet targeted at overcoming specific technical problems. One classic example is the effort at Bell Labs in the 1940s to replace the bulky vacuum tubes used in telephone systems, which led to the invention of the semiconductor transistor and a Nobel Prize in Physics.
The heyday of Bell Labs has long since ended, but universities can take on its role. Thanks partly to the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, the National Science Foundation now has a new directorate to support university-based, use-inspired research. Unfortunately, however, Congress has not yet followed through on its promise to fund it adequately.
The United States should also reap the benefits of homegrown inventions. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology about a decade ago, we became concerned that some of the most groundbreaking science-based inventions emerging from our laboratories were not advancing to commercialization. In fields as important as clean energy and regenerative medicine, the timeline to market for risky new technologies was simply too long for most private investors.
This led MIT to create a combination technology accelerator and venture capital fund for such “tough tech,” called The Engine. But this is just one investment organization in just one place. The United States needs many more. The CHIPS and Science Act authorizes NSF to help launch similar organizations, and it is time for Congress to fund this endeavor. The danger of ignoring the limited availability of patient capital — funds invested with no expectation of short-term returns — is that entire fields may stall out or, worse yet, end up being developed first in competing nations.
Universities clearly have a crucial role in educating the young people who enable the United States to lead in emerging fields, and top universities use their endowments to ensure that talented students from lower-income backgrounds are among them. We also experiment with new educational approaches to ensure that the country has the talent it needs to compete globally. MIT, for example, has created majors and courses that incorporate artificial intelligence into many fields so students can use and develop AI tools in their discipline of choice. The idea is to make students “computing bilinguals,” which should be a nationwide effort.
Thanks to US universities, our country attracts the most brilliant international talent, who study alongside our brilliant domestic talent. And most foreign students receiving advanced degrees in STEM from US universities remain in the country. This is a “brain gain” we should be celebrating with more welcoming policies for international students.
Our current era of competition with China — the Sputnik moment of our time — requires the same all-hands-on-deck approach the United States took in the late 1950s and early 1960s when competing with the Soviet Union. It led to a flowering of US science, from elementary schools to university research labs to NASA and the first human steps on the moon.
While it is entirely understandable that US citizens left behind in recent decades by globalization and automation feel betrayed, political leaders who channel that pain into attacks on universities are neither addressing the problem nor pointing the way to a better future. The best way to compete with China — and to generate good jobs for our citizens — is to invent new technologies for the nation’s economic and national security, and develop and manufacture them here.
Universities play a central role in any such future. We can debate how to improve them, but treating them like the enemy — and weakening them in the process — is a recipe for national decline.
L. Rafael Reif is president emeritus and the Ray and Maria Stata professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
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Publish date : 2024-08-25 19:59:00
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