Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaboration, and Knowledge Production with David Baker

Alex Usher: Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Usher, and this is the World of Higher Education podcast.
Science makes the world go round. Even if the political world we inhabit is increasingly vibes-based rather than evidence-based, the physical world around us is becoming more driven by technology and science every day. Nowadays, science and universities are almost seen as inseparable. Two sides of the same coin. But it wasn't always that way, and there have been alternatives to this system. Go back 250 years ago, and it wasn't at all clear that universities and science were meant for each other. Laboratories, for instance, were often operated in private. And many countries have experimented — and continue to do so — with performing science mainly in institutes, rather than in organizations devoted mainly to teaching.
Today, my guest is Dr. David Baker. He's coauthor of a new book from Stanford University Press called 'Global Mega-Science: Universities, Research Collaborations, and Knowledge Production'. It's a bracing global history of how university science went from a system producing 10,000 journal articles a year in 1900 to over 3 million articles a year just over a century later. And maybe more importantly, from an enterprise undertaken by individual laboratory leaders at a handful of universities in North America and Europe, to a genuinely global and collaborative exercise that reaches every corner of the world.
David walks us through how universities became the central organizing tool of science, why the university science model conquered all comers, and why it is likely to keep besting all the alternatives for some time to come. We had a great conversation, even if I'm still not entirely persuaded that journal articles represent a stable quantum of knowledge over time, but I'll let David persuade you. Here he is.
David, your book is called Global Mega-Science. What are we talking about here? What's the difference between science and mega-science?
David Baker: Well, it's really global mega scientific research. It's really the size of science, how much capacity there is to do research in the world, the fact that science has also gotten very global. And there's really three main things about global mega-science. First, the size I said, but it, that it's subsidized by society, cross subsidized by education. We can talk about in a moment. It's also complexly collaborative. And lastly, it's becoming more and more transnational. And the idea that, there's American science, Canadian science, Chinese sciences, is really a bit — it's inaccurate. Uh, What do you call a paper where there's two Canadians, two Americans and two Peruvians on the paper? Yes, you can force it like a square peg into a hole and say, we'll give each country one— one paper, but that doesn't, that really betrays the collaborative international nature of science. And that's been a big story recently. So all of that together is global mega-science and it's really been coming since 1900. And that's what our book's about.
Alex Usher: Right. Well, you spent a fair bit of time in the opening chapters talking about how global science is underpinned by what you, quoting Talcott Parsons, and boy, it's been a while since I heard that name you know, what he called the education revolution. What is the education revolution exactly?
David Baker: Yeah. So, about 6, 6 years or more ago, I wrote a book called 'The Schooled Society' where I talked about what happens to human society when more and more people get educated for longer and longer periods. And it's a dramatic change. And as you mentioned, sociologists in the 60's and 70's, were already starting to look at this and say, wow, this is going to be a real game changer for society. Along with capitalism representative democracy, you could argue that education has become really the third pillar in the stool of what's called liberal society. That doesn't mean everybody's happy about it, and we can talk about that more later. But so the revolution, the education revolution is both more people going for longer time, that's one of the outcomes of it, but behind that is a deep ideology that this is the best way to develop humans. Whether it is or not, that's open, but people believe that, this is the best way to run societies. And increasingly, education has moved from a very special activity for the few to, to a human right for everyone.
And the world has seen dramatic increases in school attendance. It wasn't too long ago where most people in the world were illiterate. That's now vanishing rapidly. Even 50 years ago, if you said to people, well, you know, in 50 years, 40 percent of all youth will be in some post secondary, they would have thought you were crazy. That's where we are now. So this has become a major institution and it changes a lot of things. And that's what the education revolution is, broadly speaking.
Alex Usher: You talk in the book about how the education revolution led eventually to what you call the university science model. So, what is university science and how does it differ from other modes of science production?
David Baker: Sure, it started out in the, at the turn of the last century in a group of German and Central European universities. The as you know, and your audience knows probably the 18th century university was not a place to do science, there really isn't one, wasn't even very much scholarship there, it was really morbid bound. But it changed over the next 50, 60, 70 years, and it changed its relationship with society, so that by 1900 in Germany, for example, there had been massive increases in the number of people going, mostly men still, but still, but starting more and more women who went from 5 percent and, like right around 1870, to 20 percent by 1920. That's that's a huge jump. And it was starting to train people for all kinds of upper positions in society. It also was a place where scholarship was done, where it was seen that scholarship, including science, would add to the teaching environment and vice versa. This is a Humboldtian idea and this then grew and the same story happened in country after country. And so the idea that faculty are both scholars, scientists, and they teach, is what we just called the university science model, and this is spread all over the world.
Now, I want to make sure your audience realize, okay, I'm a sociologist that studies history. So I look at the world from a bird's eye view. When I listen to some of your podcasts, there are a lot of great experts are getting down in the weeds and saying this happens in one country that happens in another country. So, but I'm looking for big trends and permanent kind of stable trends. And so if we're high up looking across the millions of publications this is what you see, that essentially as universities expanded as they changed their relationship with society, it became more central. The people that worked at them did scholarship and increasingly that began to support science and that really changed over time. It just increased over time and that's what's brought us to mega-science, yeah.
Alex Usher: Yeah. So, one of the basic points you make is that the education revolution, and specifically the increase in enrollments that you talk about, in effect cross subsidizes research by expanding university facilities. So, I was a bit skeptical about this because the degree and nature cross subsidization varies from place to place. And in most places, it's not as extensive as it is in North America, but you, you have some very interesting data from Germany that shows that in fact, university researchers are more productive than institute-based researchers. You know, once controlling for the amount of time that they're putting into it. Why do you think that is?
David Baker: Well, it's not that they're necessarily more productive per person. In fact the institute based scientists, the ones who aren't at universities—
Alex Usher: Ya,
David Baker: Probably publish half a paper or so more a year—
Alex Usher: Ya,
David Baker: Which is, which is substantial. But there's just so much, so many faculty scientists in Germany, that three fourths of their output I just said, you can't say a country's output, but let's say you can to some degree three fourths of it comes from universities — people, scientists in universities. So they're teaching and they're doing research and that, and they're training other scientists and it becomes a whole research conglomerate as Roger Geiger, historian, calls it, and that conglomerate works at universities. And so, even though there's variations from country to country, they all use some form of that, right? I have not heard of a country where faculty don't do any research or don't do any scholarship. They do. The German universities, actually, we were doing that analysis to prove, to try to show that the German universities, even though they're so central for the country's research, don't get a very good deal compared to the prestigious autonomous institutes like the Max Planck's. Interesting story, that idea is that all the institutes are where German science happens. No, that's not true. They're very productive and they're great places to do research, but their universities are really the engine of that country's science, as in most places.
So, there's about three to four million research publications a year, I know we're going to talk about that in a moment. Right now, 85 to 90 percent of all those papers include at least one university-based scientist, and many, the majority of those papers include only university-based scientists from all over the world. So, this is a substantial model that's driving science.
Alex Usher: We’re going to take a short break, we’ll be right back.
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David, one thing that occurred to me as I was reading your book you know, university science operates on a cross subsidy from teaching, and it's not always an explicit cross subsidy, you know. And it's strike— I, I wondered to what extent some people might view this as kind of underhanded or maybe even anti-democratic, right? Like, is this a case of elites taking money for one purpose and using it for another? Is that fair? Like, is this, might this be one of the reasons why universities are declining in democratic legitimacy in the 21st century?
David Baker: Great question. I think uh, we're so invaded by populist rhetoric we do it ourselves. You know, this crude idea first of all, this actually has democratized science. There's far more people involved in science, students involved, scientists, people from all over the world who want to do science. So, if anything it's made science much more open. Science also helps to legitimate the university, and to improve its teaching, that's been shown. And so it's really not underhanded in any way. Now people may argue about that. I think a better way to think about the overall reaction towards universities at the moment is actually, because the of the education revolution, education has become such a dominant institution. When institutions are dominant, they're always a bit oppressive. There are winners and losers. You can look at any institution over society historically. The powerful ones, the most legitimate ones take a lot of criticism because they're in that position. And I think that universities are very easy targets for that kind of thing.
But if you really look at it, yes, at the very, the fact that say faculty member in Canada or the US who is very research involved might teach just two classes two courses a semester, yes, that's part of the expense, that's true. But also then the world gets an incredible amount of science out of that. And a lot of people are involved. And a lot of students get a lot of involvement in science as well. So I don't think it, I don't think you can make that elitist argument very well at all.
Alex Usher: Okay. One thing that seems to be potentially contestable in your work is the use of the peer reviewed journal article as the unit of output, right? I mean, you're like, look at this great output, but yeah, I mean, you're, it's absolutely true. The, there has been a huge growth. I think you've got like a 300-fold increase in the number of STEM articles in the last hundred years. But what if a paper isn't what it used to be, right? I mean, there has been a critique, and it's come from Nicholas Bloom and a few others writing in the American Economic Review. It was a very influential article called, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find. And it suggested the research productivity, in the sense of things that turn into long term economic growth, has fallen off quite a bit in the last couple of decades, despite the number of papers. How would you incorporate that kind of critique into your analysis of the situation?
David Baker: Sure. Yeah. Alex, those are actually two questions, sort of like how, how much can we believe papers to tell us about science? And then analysis of these, are they showing that somehow science is becoming more vacuous? And let me do the, let me do the second one first. No, new ideas are not becoming harder. They're becoming more standard. When you have a very heated up capacity to do research, you find something, next day, my team goes home, Alex is on to something, let's move, let's do this, right? And we're actually doing some technical analysis that shows that, right? A lot of the operationalization of these large first studies came away with these very exciting negative ideas that science was getting more vacuous, but when you stop and think about it the institution itself has gotten larger. The number of areas it is mammoth. I mean, how can something get larger and vacuous? It really doesn't make sense. It's much more that the size of the institution has changed the pace and the dimension of discovery. And I think we're going to show, and others will show that the idea that it's getting vacuous it's just not true.
The idea now, are papers good indicators? Well, they're a breath of fresh air. They saved the study of science because up until we've had this kind of what's called bibliometric data, we were in the dark with R& D expenditure, number of sciences you know, all that. And it really wasn't very accurate indicators. Papers now are extremely good that way. And so we should celebrate that for a moment. Okay. But then after that celebration, you say, well, well, is this really the same thing from 1900 till now, right? Is a paper, right? Most of the data suggests that the paper has become so standard and such a symbolic process that in many ways, yes, it's valid across time to look at that. Are there more papers that just have mundane discoveries? Sure. Yeah, there's a lot more mundane discoveries. Absolutely. Not every paper is by Einstein, right? And so, I think it's a very reasonable, indicator. It's not the only one. And I think we're gonna get more sophisticated in the way we do it use those things, but it's really opened up a lot of ability to test hypotheses that people couldn't do before.
The dark side of that is going to be the universities increasingly use that. We're all going to have our, the number of our papers that we're publishing tattooed on our forehead particularly younger scientists. There's a lot of issues now about plagiarism. These are all reflected of the centrality and the symbolic meaning of papers. So, so it's a really, it's a real game changer, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens.
Alex Usher: So, one of the things that you highlight as a feature of global mega-science is its globalness, right? I mean, it's we've seen the expansion of universities and science production in places like China, India, Indonesia, Iran, lots of places around the world and you talk a lot about cooperation and how it's not just that it's happening in more places, it's that there's collaboration across these sites, but your data ends in 2010 or thereabouts in this book. And that was right around the time that Xi Jinping came to power in, in China. And there's been a change in the atmosphere around international cooperation in science it's mainly between China and the U.S., and, you know, obviously Russia has been a deal in the last couple of years. How big a threat is this to global mega-science? Is this a temporary irritant or is it a long-term danger?
David Baker: I would say temporary irritant. I know that science and university watchers make a big deal about this, and it's certainly important, to think about. But again, from a bird's eye view, and a long historical view, the transnational nature of science is like a wave that just has gathered more and more power.
Universities also are very good at operating with other universities, right? Now, I know there's some extreme cases say, Putin's current Russia where things have been shut down. But I would like, I want to see the evidence. I bet you the collaboration between Chinese and American scientists across all science — maybe not in certain areas — just proceeds. Iranians collaborate with Americans, Poles collaborate with Germans you name it. And what we've seen is a growth in super hubs of universities, first in the United States, then in Europe by the way, well before China, everybody makes a big deal about China, but it was really Europe, U.S., Europe, then Southeast Asia over the century. There's much more parity across regions now in paper production as paper. The overall pie of paper expands incredibly as you mentioned. So I don't think this is going to, to stop what we call the collaboration dividend. It's too embedded and it would be too difficult to just to stop it. I think there can be threats to it. I think certain areas, I think a lot of the populist kind of rhetoric in the U.S. and elsewhere just lend itself to talking about that. But I, the scientists I talked to, and looking at papers, I have not seen any kind of dent in international collaboration. Now, I know you had some guests on that talk about some specific things, which I'm sure can happen. But in general, I don't see it as a huge change right now.
Alex Usher: So, you start the book by pointing out that, you know, people were calling big science a bubble 50 years ago. And you sort of gently point out why they were wrong and how the expansion of science has gone on since then. But you end the book acknowledging that the S curve has to kick in sometime, right? So, when do you think the production of scientific articles does level out? And even if you can't give me a year, what are the factors that eventually are going to put a limit on scientific production?
David Baker: Well, as your podcast show, the factors are in higher ed, it's people, money and political will, right? If this model is going to continue, and the reason this model has escaped the laws of sort of stable growth is that it has been a model that brought a lot of resources. So right now, about 40 percent of the world's youth are in higher education. All right. That's glass not even half full yet. All right. Money is a continued issue as more and more people go. It becomes to post secondary, the more it gets expensive. Science has expanded to all kinds of post secondary institutions. Okay, so, faculty at two year schools in the United States and in places where research wasn't usually done at, all now do research and it starts to be built into their job and they want it.
So, so these kinds of things are are contrasting forces, political will you know, I think in the, in, in the end while science is not always not not every discovery has some wonderful app that's going to change everybody's life, that's a big fantasy about science, but generally it's been positive. And people I think realize that. So I'm not so sure that this model will end anytime soon, but a lot of the development is going to have to happen in the global South. And the, in terms of all 3 of those factors, and that's kind of a open question. How far that'll go. Korea, for example, is running out of people to go to higher education, they're shutting universities that changes their science now collaboration, international collaboration can offset that for a long time, but eventually there's going to be some reckoning.
So, yeah, I can't give you a year or even a decade, but there are some challenges. And I think that, I think the bigger message is, for science policy people, is that they need to realize that education development policy is completely married to science, right? It's not just that scientists do some work at universities. No, universities are the research centers for the world's scientists, right? And they have to start to think about that together.
Alex Usher: David Baker is the coauthor along with Justin Powell of Global Mega-Science. It's out from Stanford University Press. David, thanks so much for being with us.
David Baker: Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany McLennan and Sam Pufek and you, the listener for tuning in. If you have any questions or comments about this week's episode, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. And also, sign up at our YouTube channel. Never miss an episode of the World of Higher Education podcast. Next week is a break week for us, but we'll be back on October 31st when we'll be speaking to Miles Taylor of Humboldt University in Berlin, talking to him about a co-edited book of essays called 'Utopian Universities: A Global History of the New Campuses of the 1960s’. Bye for now.