Can the great American universities take root in Asia?
Harry Lewis says the expansion of America's liberal universities into Asia has raised questions of financial feasibility and they may soon have to confront a possible clash of values
The news that Chicago Booth Business School's executive MBA programme would relocate from Singapore was greeted in Hong Kong with as much enthusiasm as the acquisition of a star athlete. Education Secretary Eddie Ng Hak-kim trumpeted that the move would "enhance Hong Kong's position as a regional education hub, nurture talent to support the growth of our economy, and strengthen Hong Kong's competitiveness".
He could have been Hong Kong's cricket coach welcoming Mark Chapman from New Zealand only a week earlier: "We have a very good opportunity of playing in a World Cup for the first time and with the line-up we have, I think we can do it."
But the ongoing changes in higher education are more like biological evolution than a cricket match. Extinction too is part of evolution—and several other American outposts in Singapore, including New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the hotel school of University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), are pulling out of the city state with uncertain future plans.
Asia is trying to shortcut a process that took centuries to create the great American universities. And American universities seem to think that an intellectual Bering land bridge has opened. Suddenly they see huge areas with no natural competitors, a promising ecosystem for invasive species.
For a university ... giving up the right to political expression means giving up the pursuit of the truth
This is vanity on both sides, I expect. I wonder how we will think about today's higher education innovations a few decades from now. Perhaps some of the new institutions will prove to be failed experiments, mutations that proved not to fit the environmental niche. The Singapore government was unwilling to keep subsidising UNLV, for example, and a joint Singaporean venture with New York University School of Law is closing after spending down its sizeable government subsidy.
All is guesswork and experimentation. Will any of these American transplants survive for even a decade? And if they survive for the century, will they and their venerable American cousins have become strangers to each other, like the snapping shrimp that no longer recognise each other as relatives because the rising Isthmus of Panama separated them into Caribbean and Pacific species?