In 1932 German intellectual life was the best in the world. The country had won a third of all Nobel Prizes since 1901. Then came Hitler, and soon Einstein was at Princeton, Hannah Arendt in New York, Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood, Walter Gropius at Harvard etc. Britain is still profiting from that same exodus: the writer Judith Kerr and architect Richard Rogers were refugees from fascism, as were Lucian Freud, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Gombrich and countless others before them. Today the dominance of English helps sustain the US and UK as the two intellectual superpowers. Eight of the world’s top 10 universities in the Shanghai rankings are American; two are Oxbridge. Those ten will remain great, but broader intellectual supremacy by any country is always unstable. Good thinkers will move for money, a welcome, freedom of inquiry and the company of other minds. The US and UK are losing dominance in all those things. We’re moving into a multipolar intellectual world. British dominance has been extraordinary. This is a mid-sized, modestly well-off country with mostly mediocre schools, yet as the biologist Richard Dawkins noted in 2013: “Trinity College, Cambridge, has more Nobel Prizes than any country except USA, Britain, Germany and France.” However, extraordinary dominance tends not to last. British universities were losing pull even before Brexit: the average academic salary has fallen since 2010/11 to £40,449. Post-Brexit, British universities will struggle to keep importing excellent staff, students and funding from Europe. A friend who works at Cambridge — which relies on the EU for almost a quarter of its research funding from competitive grants — says he has to restrain himself so as not to punch Brexiters. Oxford and Cambridge will remain world-class but may become less moored to Britain, as they offshore bits of themselves to the continent to keep attracting European funds and possibly staff and students. The US is more stable, partly because its best universities pay the highest academic salaries anywhere outside Switzerland (which, other than ETH Zurich, has never quite translated money into world-beating universities). Columbia’s full professors topped the US charts with average salaries of $251,300 last year, says the American Association of University Professors. But the country’s ruling party is hostile to academia. In a Pew poll last year, 58 per cent of Republicans said colleges had a “negative effect” on the US. Even before Donald Trump became president, the financial crisis had forced big cuts at public universities, and red states have kept cutting during the upturn. Foreign student enrolment at US universities has been falling since 2016. As the FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo revealed recently, some White House officials advocated stopping visas for Chinese students— the single largest source of American brain imports. The officials were partly targeting Chinese economic spying, but Trump’s aide Stephen Miller additionally wanted to hurt anti-Trump elite universities. The US has also forfeited some freedom of inquiry. For years, American academics have watched what they say about race and gender. I experienced this first-hand at a conference at a US university in 2014, when a feminist academic blogged after an intellectual disagreement in the bar: “Everything Kuper said in that conversation was sexist, and what was particularly shitty was that he seemed not to know this.” And I’m a virtue-signalling knee-jerk liberal — though, of course, she may have been right. Last month’s sacking of Ian Buruma, editor of The New York Review of Books, for running an article by a man accused of serial sexual abuse and harassment, shows the risks of even providing a forum for debate. MeToo campaigners often rightly make the point that many white men in positions of power are prejudiced mediocrities who only got there because they are white men. But that doesn’t apply to Buruma (who, declaration of interest, is a friend). We journalists try to describe the world, and he does that better than almost anyone. He’s very astute about gender: he has written lots about how people’s sexuality shapes their world view. Buruma admitted afterwards that he may have mishandled publication of the article, but no matter: one strike and you’re out. The cultural critic Laura Kipnis said: “Self-censorship is the pragmatic move right now.” Students and thinkers have ever better options outside the US and UK. Chinese universities are rising in the sciences. Australia may have already overtaken Britain as the world’s second biggest destination for international students, according to research from University College London. Canada is surging (with help from Trump) and European universities increasingly recruit globally too. When I grew up in Leiden in the 1980s, it was a sleepy, mediocre, almost totally Dutch university town. Now it’s a mostly English-language university, ranked 74th in the world by Shanghai. After Brexit, the Netherlands will have the largest English-language university system in the EU. Long-term, the most exciting rising new intellectual capital might be the very city that lost its intelligentsia under Hitler: Berlin. German intellectuals had already been congregating in the cheap, thrilling, bohemian capital, and foreigners are starting to follow. Last month, Germany’s new academic Exzellenzstrategie made Berlin’s universities the biggest winners of a vast round of financing. Oxford university and the Wellcome Trust are going to open offices in Berlin; other leading US and British institutions are exploring it. You’ll know the city is serious when there is a world-class Berlin Review of Books (in English). They could ask Buruma to edit it.
In 1932 German intellectual life was the best in the world. The country had won a third of all Nobel Prizes since 1901. Then came Hitler, and soon Einstein was at Princeton, Hannah Arendt in New York, Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood, Walter Gropius at Harvard etc. Britain is still profiting from that same exodus: the writer Judith Kerr and architect Richard Rogers were refugees from fascism, as were Lucian Freud, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Gombrich and countless others before them. Today the dominance of English helps sustain the US and UK as the two intellectual superpowers. Eight of the world’s top 10 universities in the Shanghai rankings are American; two are Oxbridge. Those ten will remain great, but broader intellectual supremacy by any country is always unstable. Good thinkers will move for money, a welcome, freedom of inquiry and the company of other minds. The US and UK are losing dominance in all those things. We’re moving into a multipolar intellectual world. British dominance has been extraordinary. This is a mid-sized, modestly well-off country with mostly mediocre schools, yet as the biologist Richard Dawkins noted in 2013: “Trinity College, Cambridge, has more Nobel Prizes than any country except USA, Britain, Germany and France.” However, extraordinary dominance tends not to last. British universities were losing pull even before Brexit: the average academic salary has fallen since 2010/11 to £40,449. Post-Brexit, British universities will struggle to keep importing excellent staff, students and funding from Europe. A friend who works at Cambridge — which relies on the EU for almost a quarter of its research funding from competitive grants — says he has to restrain himself so as not to punch Brexiters. Oxford and Cambridge will remain world-class but may become less moored to Britain, as they offshore bits of themselves to the continent to keep attracting European funds and possibly staff and students. The US is more stable, partly because its best universities pay the highest academic salaries anywhere outside Switzerland (which, other than ETH Zurich, has never quite translated money into world-beating universities). Columbia’s full professors topped the US charts with average salaries of $251,300 last year, says the American Association of University Professors. But the country’s ruling party is hostile to academia. In a Pew poll last year, 58 per cent of Republicans said colleges had a “negative effect” on the US. Even before Donald Trump became president, the financial crisis had forced big cuts at public universities, and red states have kept cutting during the upturn. Foreign student enrolment at US universities has been falling since 2016. As the FT’s Demetri Sevastopulo revealed recently, some White House officials advocated stopping visas for Chinese students— the single largest source of American brain imports. The officials were partly targeting Chinese economic spying, but Trump’s aide Stephen Miller additionally wanted to hurt anti-Trump elite universities. The US has also forfeited some freedom of inquiry. For years, American academics have watched what they say about race and gender. I experienced this first-hand at a conference at a US university in 2014, when a feminist academic blogged after an intellectual disagreement in the bar: “Everything Kuper said in that conversation was sexist, and what was particularly shitty was that he seemed not to know this.” And I’m a virtue-signalling knee-jerk liberal — though, of course, she may have been right. Last month’s sacking of Ian Buruma, editor of The New York Review of Books, for running an article by a man accused of serial sexual abuse and harassment, shows the risks of even providing a forum for debate. MeToo campaigners often rightly make the point that many white men in positions of power are prejudiced mediocrities who only got there because they are white men. But that doesn’t apply to Buruma (who, declaration of interest, is a friend). We journalists try to describe the world, and he does that better than almost anyone. He’s very astute about gender: he has written lots about how people’s sexuality shapes their world view. Buruma admitted afterwards that he may have mishandled publication of the article, but no matter: one strike and you’re out. The cultural critic Laura Kipnis said: “Self-censorship is the pragmatic move right now.” Students and thinkers have ever better options outside the US and UK. Chinese universities are rising in the sciences. Australia may have already overtaken Britain as the world’s second biggest destination for international students, according to research from University College London. Canada is surging (with help from Trump) and European universities increasingly recruit globally too. When I grew up in Leiden in the 1980s, it was a sleepy, mediocre, almost totally Dutch university town. Now it’s a mostly English-language university, ranked 74th in the world by Shanghai. After Brexit, the Netherlands will have the largest English-language university system in the EU. Long-term, the most exciting rising new intellectual capital might be the very city that lost its intelligentsia under Hitler: Berlin. German intellectuals had already been congregating in the cheap, thrilling, bohemian capital, and foreigners are starting to follow. Last month, Germany’s new academic Exzellenzstrategie made Berlin’s universities the biggest winners of a vast round of financing. Oxford university and the Wellcome Trust are going to open offices in Berlin; other leading US and British institutions are exploring it. You’ll know the city is serious when there is a world-class Berlin Review of Books (in English). They could ask Buruma to edit it.
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