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Similar questions have been asked about the efforts of some publicly funded schools to justify their existence by trying to fulfill immediate community needs. The University of New Hampshire has been able to squeeze additional funds from New Hampshire's traditionally tight-fisted legislature by polishing its public image with projects like developing a non-toxic bacterium that virtually eliminated black flies, which plagued some of the state's tourist resorts. But the university's president, Dale Nitzschke, allows that catering to the lawmakers' whims is a high-risk proposition. "We don't enjoy a separation anymore between the university and the political system," he says. "It is critical that we don't become pawns of the government, the legislature or business and industry. If we lose our autonomy, we've lost the ball game."
During the great expansion that took place after World War II, American colleges and universities sought to be all things to all people. In the new age of austerity, schools are being forced to rethink their missions, decide what they can do best and -- in a form of academic triage -- abandon certain fields of learning to others. Rice University in Houston has often been called "the Harvard of the South" (although these days the motto should be reversed, claims its president, George Rupp). Rice has flourished by trying to recruit National Merit scholars, who constitute 40% of the class of 1995, and by developing a national reputation for superb teaching in the sciences and social sciences.
It is fairly common these days for neighboring colleges to share talents and facilities, particularly in arcane specialties. For example, one-third of the graduate students in a cognitive-psychology class at Carnegie-Mellon University are actually enrolled at the nearby University of Pittsburgh. Many experts believe that much more can be done to eliminate overlap. "Worcester County in Massachusetts has at least five colleges," says Arnold Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Corp. and a member of that state's Higher Education Coordinating Council. "If one has an outstanding physics department, it would make sense for the other four to phase out physics and build their own strengths."
What if three schools in Maine decided to offer more courses on Eastern Europe? Harvard sociologist David Riesman has a proposal: "I can imagine Colby, Bates and Bowdoin, for example, deciding that one would concentrate on Romania, one on Bulgaria and one on Czechoslovakia. They could have interchangeable programs that all students could use for semesters abroad."
But institutions need not always be neighbors to collaborate fruitfully. Last month American University signed an agreement with Japan's Ritseumeikan University to offer a joint master's degree in international relations from both schools. "Students would spend one year in Washington, D.C., and one year in Kyoto," explains A.U. president Joseph Duffey, who wants to set up a similar program in business administration.