[lg policy] Why French Scholars Love U.S. Colleges

[Harold Schiffman]

Why French Scholars Love U.S. Colleges

More money, more freedom, more competitive energy -- what drives the
academic global marketplace?
.This Highway Runs Both Ways
Updated December 1, 2010, 12:24 PM

Peter Baldwin is a professor of history at University of California,
Los Angeles, and the author, most recently, of “The Narcissism of
Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike.” Steady now,
let’s resist being overwhelmed by smugness. Brain drains to U.S.
universities are nothing new. The globalization of universities means
there is intellectual motion in many directions, most recently toward
China..The French have been coming for a long time: Michel Foucault,
who did stints at U.C. Berkeley in the 80's, Jacques Derrida, who
pontificated at U.C. Irvine for years before his death, and Olivier
Zunz, firmly ensconced at Virginia for decades.

But it goes the other way too. Berkeley has just lost the Nobel
prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot to Paris; my brother, an
eminent biochemist, is at Jena; Lorraine Daston, a historian of
science, runs an institute in Berlin; Peter Mandler – erstwhile
Californian – is at Cambridge. Richard Sennett decamped from New York
to London. And within Europe, British universities have long been
soaking up all the talented, English-proficient, but domestically
unemployable products of German universities. The faculty of the ETH
Zurich (Europe’s M.I.T.) is well over half foreign-born, while only 5
percent of Stanford’s is. So let’s not exaggerate the direction of the
flows.

But it is not just a question of brain drain, in whatever direction –
a kind of great sucking noise emitted by the chattering classes. What
is going on here is the increasing globalization of the universities.
We are used to it already in the corporate world: careers start in
Delft and end in Delhi without anyone blinking an eye.

But in the meantime, the university world too has developed to the
point where the nationalist and protectionist instincts of yore have
broken down. Above all, the rise of English as the lingua franca -- in
both research and teaching -- means that scholars can go anywhere
without being burdened by the need to retool linguistically, or
forever be Dr. Strangeloves professing in heavy accents.

The Scandinavian universities – otherwise cursed by obscure languages
– function in large measure in English at all levels, at least in
those fields that are not wholly Scando-centric. British historians
write books on German history that are best-sellers in the country of
their focus.

And, of course, Chinese scientists are for the first time returning to
their own country in massive numbers, giving up even cushy jobs in the
U.S. for the chance to run huge institutes with gargantuan budgets and
national importance. Reciprocity is the key concept here, a kind of
intellectual Brownian motion across the globe, rather than any
unidirectional draining away.


http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11/28/why-french-scholars-love-us-colleges/the-academic-highway-runs-both-ways

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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