• United States
• China
• Howard W. French

Despite the institution’s formidable reputation, though, and for all of U.S. President Donald Trump’s fixation on bringing it to heel, the Harvard that the world thinks it knows is a surprisingly recent creation.

Even well into the 19th century, Harvard was a place of stultifying, rote-like instruction. As late as the mid-20th century, acceptance rates were higher than 50 percent. And though Harvard is being pilloried by the White House for its international student body and supposedly undue emphasis on diversity, it was overwhelmingly dominated by Anglo-Saxons, leery of Jewish applicants, and all but closed to African Americans for most of its history.

These details are all gleaned from Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China by William C. Kirby, a former dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and former Harvard Business School professor. At the heart of Kirby’s engrossing book is the idea that “an enduring[ly] rich country cannot have, as a rule, poor universities.” And as the book suggests, nothing about Harvard’s current preeminence—or that of the United States’ world-leading university system—is a given.

The fact that Kirby’s book was written before the full thrust of Trump’s campaign against universities only serves to heighten a precarious sense of the United States’ position in the world of higher learning. As the Trump administration escalates its efforts to exert unprecedented political control over Harvard, the question of whether the United States can sustain its national wealth and power has become an urgent one.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest outside Harvard Yard during Harvard University’s class of 2024 graduation ceremony in Cambridge on May 23, 2024. Rick Friedman/AFP via Getty Images

Europe invented the university as we know it. New institutions of learning arose first in cities such as Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, and Paris, and then spread throughout the continent before they were developed in the rest of the world. Of course, the distant roots of these universities lay in antiquity, particularly in Greece, and other parts of the globe have seen specialized centers of learning, including India, China, Persia, and the Arab world. Years ago, I visited Timbuktu, in present-day Mali, where an Islamic university flourished in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China, William C. Kirby, Belknap Press (an imprint of Harvard University Press), 512 pp., $24.95, May 2025, paperback.

What Kirby considers the modern university, however, was born in Germany, with the University of Berlin setting a standard from the early 1800s that would not be matched globally until well into the following century. What made German universities, and Berlin in particular, special was that they discarded an older tradition of catering to Brotstudium, meaning careerists, or “bread students.” The task of the university, they believed, should be the intellectual nurturing of the whole individual, rather than a narrow, purpose-shaped education. This was achieved, in part, by making the liberal arts the centerpiece of undergraduate learning.

Berlin had two other novel features. One was the marriage of research and instruction, or the requirement that faculty members not only teach, but actively generate new knowledge within their fields. Before then, most professors had taught relatively fixed curricula, requiring that students master past learning.

The other stanchion of the Berlin model, and the one with the greatest resonance in the United States today, was political freedom and academic independence. “Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach, and Lernfreiheit, the freedom to learn, became fundamentally intertwined principles,” Kirby writes. “The state’s role with regard to the university was to protect its freedom, not to impede it.”

A refractor telescope installed at the Berlin University Observatory in Babelsberg, Germany, circa 1924.Underwood Archives/Getty Images

With these pillars, Germany became home to the birth of modern scientific research in a university setting. Before the end of World War I, the country accounted for a third of Nobel Prize awards, half of those generated by the University of Berlin alone. As the late intellectual historian Christopher Lasch wrote, Germany “stood for nothing if not progress.” In that prewar period, Kirby writes, “[t]here were no comparable institutions in the United States, and access to British universities was severely restricted.”

The rest of the world, especially U.S. higher education, began taking note. At Harvard in particular, strong German influences date back to the early 19th century, when the university sent a professor to Göttingen for advanced study before hiring him. This set an illustrious pattern followed by many U.S. scholars, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who completed advanced studies in Germany before returning for their doctorates at Harvard and teaching in the United States.

Under Charles William Eliot, the university’s president from 1869 to 1909, Harvard began its transformation in earnest. At his inauguration, Eliot proclaimed a degree of ambition for Harvard that it has been associated with ever since, publicly vowing to improve the university’s academic standing across all disciplines. He largely succeeded, in part by establishing a faculty of arts and sciences, authorizing the creation of academic departments, and allowing undergraduate students to take electives—all in emulation of the German model.

As U.S. higher education rose to global preeminence in the 20th century, German universities were increasingly subsumed in a national project seeking global power, and by World War II, they came under the near-total control of the Nazi state. This set them on a path of relative decline from which they have never fully recovered. U.S. higher education, meanwhile, benefited strongly from Germany’s self-destruction, particularly the persecution of Jews. Intellectuals who fled into exile boosted American intellectual life from the sciences to the arts.

A group of Harvard University students in the 1870s.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images

In Kirby’s telling, it was James Bryant Conant, Harvard’s president from 1933 to 1953, who set the university on a path to becoming a great research institution. At his inauguration, Conant declared, “If we have in each department of the university the most distinguished faculty which it is possible to obtain, we need have little worry about the future.” Indeed. According to one study of academic rankings of graduate schools, between 1925 and 1982, no list placed Harvard lower than third-best in the country. At the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, when visitors at the U.S. pavilion were polled on where they would like to send their son to college, twice as many named Harvard over the second-most-popular choice, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Beyond fostering intellectual leadership, Conant oversaw reforms of the undergraduate curriculum that instated general education requirements and sought to forge an “understanding of the society which [students] will possess in common.” Discrimination against Jews remained, though, even as unofficial quotas limiting their enrollment were lifted under Conant’s tenure, and African American enrollment continued to be extremely low.

During the Conant years, Harvard also threw itself enthusiastically into the U.S. war effort against Germany and Japan. Kirby writes that the university “came to be identified ever more closely with the American national mission.”

For all of Conant’s achievements, Kirby credits a much more recent president, Neil Rudenstine, with transforming Harvard into the seemingly omnipresent force in American society that it is today. During Rudenstine’s tenure in the 1990s, Harvard quadrupled its endowment, which reached $19.2 billion by the decade’s end. The university leveraged this financial might to expand into areas neighboring Cambridge, Massachusetts, such as Allston, where it built new campuses and cutting-edge research facilities.

Toward the end of his tenure, Rudenstine visited China, where Harvard has long been revered with special fervor. This was brought home to me years ago in Shanghai, when a teenager approached me on the street and asked what I did for a living. When I said I taught at Columbia University, she replied cuttingly, “Oh, Columbia is no Harvard.”

While every president of Harvard since Rudenstine has visited China, and at least one has met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the institution has followed its own path in navigating relations with the country. While some other leading U.S. universities have set up campuses in China, including Duke and New York University, Harvard has been content to cultivate a strong contingent of Chinese students in Cambridge, or what Kirby calls a “bottom-up” strategy.

Today, however, Harvard’s fortunes, both at home and abroad, seem more imperiled than ever. Since his second term began, Trump has cut federal funding from Harvard and other universities, threatened institutions’ accreditation, and attacked academic independence and foreign enrollment, particularly of Chinese students. His administration has hinted at other radical measures to come, including taxing endowments at high rates.

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The Trump administration’s justification for many of these measures has been its claim that U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of antisemitism since the spread of protests after Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, brought on by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Yet, as I noted in a previous column, many critics believe that the White House is wielding claims of antisemitism to advance a much broader conservative, or even authoritarian, political agenda. The same can be said of Trump’s frequent invocation of diversity policies as a social ill that must be rooted out.

These threats assail higher education from multiple directions. As large as some U.S. university endowments may seem, the vast majority of these funds can only be used for donor-specified purposes, whether that is building a new lab or paying for an endowed chair in a niche field. Unspecified or general funds are often used for tuition relief.

Even in Harvard’s case, its endowment is woefully inadequate to replace federal research grants, which are fundamental to its world-leading work in science and medicine and its ability to recruit and retain sought-after faculty. Meanwhile, Trump’s efforts to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students weaken the university’s ability to draw from among the best applicants in the world. Harvard may win battles against the White House on the legal front, but nothing is likely to prevent a vengeful Trump from continuing a campaign of harassing the university.

A demonstrator holds a sign after a rally in Harvard Square in Cambridge on April 17.Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images

A further question arises that has received far too little public discussion: Isn’t it the United States that benefits most by not just leading in education, but having its ideas and ideals spread around the world by people who were fundamentally shaped by its universities?

The picture that Kirby paints of China’s educational goals should give pause to those who wish to restrict funding to U.S. universities or otherwise clip their wings. Beijing is investing in higher education with a sense of purpose and on a scale and pace that exceed any crash program of national development ever seen before.

As Kirby states outright, in the 21st century, “it is China that has the greatest ambitions for higher education.” From 1978 to 2020, China’s university enrollment soared from roughly 800,000 students to more than 40 million. In 1999, only 3 percent of Chinese people attended university; today, that figure has risen to more than 50 percent. Meanwhile, more international students have started flocking to China. From 2013 to 2018—the year with the most recently available statistics—the number of individuals from African countries studying in China more than doubled, reaching 81,000. This growth is reflected in students from other regions as well.

China’s ambitions don’t end with quantity. In 2008, according to one international ranking, no Chinese institution was among the world’s top 200 universities. Just 10 years later, three made the top 100. Two of them, Tsinghua and Peking universities, placed in the top 25 in 2021, with Tsinghua outranking all but two Ivy League schools. Beijing has assessed that 42 Chinese universities are “well on their way” to becoming or “have the potential” to become world-class universities.

The Chinese government speaks openly of education being the “cornerstone of national rejuvenation.” And for the most part, Kirby writes, its model has been the U.S. university system, which succeeded Germany’s a century ago as the world’s greatest. Still, Chinese universities are under far more direct control of the government than U.S. and other Western universities. This influences which topics can be researched and discussed, as well as the questions that can be asked and how they must be answered.

Given this, it remains an open question whether China can fully succeed without providing its universities much more academic freedom and becoming a true center of global learning, one open to the world and its ideas. Regardless, the United States seems to be stumbling in the other direction, openly plotting the destruction of what has been a key source of its vitality for the past century.