Another cultural issue is our isolationism. Many Americans are suspicious of foreigners, yet unaware that foreigners are helping to keep our lights on so to speak. In the hard sciences at a graduate level, more than half of the graduate students are typically foreign born – at an aggregate level of all disciplines, they account for a third of doctoral students. Foreign-born citizens have in fact founded many institutions that are seen as profoundly American: Google, Sun Microsystems just to name a few. If you were to walk around the cafeteria at Google on any given day, you’d see a collection of people that looked more like a meeting of the UN than a corporate headquarters. A consequence of this isolation, especially after 9-11 has been that many foreigners will arrive to earn their degrees here, and then leave (if they attend school here at all). While we do of course have to balance openness with security, it cannot be done at the expense of turning away the best minds.
As much as these three broad categories are separate issues, if the issue is to be solved it must be looked at as a cohesive whole. It is the interactions between these three disparate entities that led us to the situation we find ourselves in today. The type of change needed definitely falls within the realm of organizational development – the entire educational system needs to reinvent itself, as fundamentally as the factory paradigm we’ve lived in for the past 100 years, or the changes since the NSF in ’64. The policy makers want to make decisions that are appealing to our culture, which in turn affects our expectations of our educators and their culture. These interactions are complex, and serve to create the basis of the system – the organizational process model I referred to – that determines how the complete organization behaves.
By working on the interactions between these three interests, perhaps a solution can be found. In order to influence the culture, the educational and political implications need to be worked out first – for it is our educational system that helps to define the direction our culture moves in. As the policy makers control the funds, it is there that the change needs to be made first. Without changing the policy makers themselves, I do not see change happening quickly. Until our politicians are aware of the need for broad reforms in science and understand what value it brings to our society, we stand no chance to influence them to pass the needed laws.
Perhaps there is another way forward.
More to follow...