America’s leading research universities have been in the news a lot lately. But do Americans understand what research universities actually do to make their lives better?
You may have seen a headline or two about America’s leading research universities. Some of those headlines, like some recent public polling about higher education more broadly, suggest that many Americans harbor some misperceptions about what research universities actually are. But at AAU, we know well how our members work every day not only to educate students and prepare them for the real world, but to make scientific breakthroughs; cure deadly diseases; and benefit the economies of towns, states, and our entire country.
America’s research universities remain the envy of the rest of the world, and they continue to attract the globe’s best and brightest students and researchers by the tens of thousands every year. That prompts me to ask: are Americans aware of what their research universities actually do day to day to improve their lives?
An umbrella organization for our international peer associations (the Global Research-Intensive Universities Network, or GRIUN), recently chose to address the question, “What is a research university?” head-on. At a meeting this summer, representatives of the leading research universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, Japan, and Australia drafted a statement that attempts to capture the essence of what research universities do.
It turns out America’s leading research universities are very good at the most important responsibilities that our global peers identified: conducting cutting-edge research that leads to new innovations and discoveries, and educating the workers and citizens our country needs to compete in the global economy.
Let’s look at research first; after all, what distinguishes research universities from other types of higher education institutions is the enormous quantity of groundbreaking research that takes place every day on our member campuses. This research has led not only to new cures and treatments for disease and advances in technology that fuel entire U.S. industries, but also techniques that help farmers improve their crop yields, insights that can help stop famines and protect people from the effects of extreme weather, and cutting-edge technologies that help our military servicemembers safeguard our national security.
An additional benefit of research universities is the integration of research and teaching. This provides students – including undergraduates – access to world-class experts in the disciplines and fields of study they want to pursue. They have opportunities to work in labs led by top scientists and even to conduct their own independent research. Students in the humanities and the arts also benefit from opportunities to work as research assistants on major scholarly projects and from being taught and mentored by leading scholars in their fields.
This brings me to our institutions’ second major responsibility: research universities are educating the workforce of the future. This is particularly important in an era where, for example, the emergence of artificial intelligence promises to be as transformative as the Industrial Revolution was in its time. AAU member universities are among the world’s leaders not only in conducting groundbreaking AI research, but also in teaching undergraduates about AI and AI-related skills that will benefit them in their future workplaces. The same goes for U.S. work in other new critical areas like quantum materials, quantum computing, synthetic biology, and more.
While educating students to be successful in their careers is integral to what we do, research universities provide an additional – and critical – public service: by serving as forums for free speech and fostering respectful, although sometimes difficult, dialogues. Research universities draw their students and faculty from a wide array of backgrounds and perspectives; they offer both the community spaces and the expertise necessary to bring these diverse individuals together for respectful and informed conversations. Although some headlines over the last year have highlighted conflicts over speech on campus, the press too often overlooked the countless positive stories of campuses rising to the moment by intentionally holding hard conversations without acrimony or conflict and supporting their students as they exchanged differing ideas and perspectives.
America’s leading research universities are living, breathing, diverse communities where world-changing research, transformative learning, and democracy-fostering conversations take place every day. We at AAU will continue to work to help people get past the headlines and understand the important work research universities do every day to help individual Americans and the nation as a whole.