https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-decline-of-the-great-american-research-university
In an article published yesterday, Richard Holmes argues that American universities are in the midst of a long-term decline. While these institutions continue to celebrate their scientific achievements and global prestige, Holmes contends that they have failed to confront decades of eroding research quality. He condemns their dependence on standardized rankings and warns that this culture of self-congratulation masks a deeper crisis: the steady loss of Western academic dominance. Holmes further highlights the rapid ascent of Chinese universities, which are increasingly outperforming their Western counterparts in both research output and impact.
I strongly disagree, however, with his dismissal of the Trump-era assaults on academia as a marginal factor. Federal funding cuts, the politicization of curricula, and sustained attacks on academic freedom severely weakened the research ecosystem. Immigration restrictions and travel bans choked the influx of international talent—students and scholars who form the lifeblood of graduate education and innovation. The relentless vilification of “liberal” universities eroded public trust and state investment. Far from being incidental, these political and cultural hostilities amplified structural weaknesses, accelerating the decline in U.S. universities’ global competitiveness.
China’s scientific output has expanded at an unprecedented pace, yet a significant portion of its work remains low-impact and is cited mostly within the country. At the same time, the rise in retractions, “paper mills,” and ethics lapses has exposed serious, systemic problems with research integrity, raising questions about the credibility of some outputs. Compounding these challenges, career and funding systems that reward short-term metrics and publication counts incentivize safe, incremental projects over bold, transformative research, slowing the pace at which Chinese science can achieve groundbreaking, globally recognized innovation.
I agree that China has emerged as a formidable and increasingly assertive competitor in the global research landscape. However, this prominence owes relatively little to its intrinsic scientific competitiveness—as evidenced by its comparatively modest performance in Nobel Prizes, a crucial context that Holmes overlooks. He fails to consider the ratio of science Nobel Awards per million inhabitants between the U.S. and China—a figure in which China ranks below countries such as Argentina, Egypt, and Tunisia. Rather than reflecting the depth of domestic innovation, China’s rise in research stature is driven largely by its exceptional ability to attract top-tier Western scientists, including Nobel laureates, as discussed in a previous post titled “The Persistent Disruption Metric, Nobel Minds, and China’s Long Game”
PS - Holmes seems to have missed Yasheng Huang’s 2023 book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST (MIT Sloan), which cuts to the heart of China’s rise—fueled by exams, autocracy, stability, and technology—while warning that these very forces could choke innovation, spark social unrest, and derail economic reforms. Chinese innovation is further threatened as young people favor government jobs over startups, while Soviet-era legacies in Chinese universities enforce rigid structures and traditional mindsets that stifle creativity and hinder entrepreneurial thinking https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/06/tech-titans-clash-america-vs-china-in.html
Update after 1 day — The highest foreign interest in this post comes from the USA (14%), Singapore (10%), and Germany (6%).
