Blockchain Papers

Michael Spence

I have served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and as dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. As a result of these 15 years of experience in academic administration, I learned quite a lot about the history of these institutions, their competitors, and their modes of operation and financing. Urquiola's (2023) account of the origins and current industry configuration of American higher education is precise and accurate. Since it has evolved to be a very complex system, this is no small achievement. A distinctive, and I would say nearly unique, feature of the American higher education complex is the relatively large size of the private sector and the fact that it operates alongside and competes with a similarly large set of public sector institutions. In most countries, the public sector dominates, and even what is sometimes called the private sector has a much larger element of public sector funding. As a result of this unusual configuration and the fact that (excluding federal research funding) public sector institutions are largely funded at the state level, it is a highly decentralized system. Urquiola correctly makes the point that this contributes to a high degree of product differentiation across the system and probably an unusual amount of experimentation. Perhaps this is in part what Urquiola means by laissez-faire in this context. It also leads to a relatively high variation in quality. As Urquiola documents, US higher education in the early years consisted of small, mainly local, mainly religious in origin colleges with no ability or pretense to conduct research or advance scientific and technological frontiers. This changed dramatically at the end of the 19th century when a version of the German Research University model was imported and adapted to US conditions. Johns Hopkins is widely viewed as a key early adopter and leader, with others like Harvard following quickly. Leadership played a key role within and across institutions. Significant expansion of federal government funding for research was, and continues to be, an important enabler. Urquiola suggests that an increasingly technologically sophisticated set of industrial sectors may have provided additional impetus, and that may be true, though it is hard to document. It is important in this context, to emphasize that government funding is critical. Even the institutions with the largest endowments could not come close to funding research at the levels and costs that characterize the present system. The development of an American version of the research university began a process of differentiation in the entire sector. A few public institutions followed with support from their states, but not all. A group of colleges decided to remain 4-year colleges, to focus on education, not compete in the research sphere, and like the elite research university, restrict their size so they became increasingly selective over time, a process that continues to the present. This has turned out to be a highly successful segment, as Urquiola (2023) documents. There followed many dimensions of differentiation that are covered well in the paper: public and private institutions outside the research and elite teaching colleges and universities: 2-year colleges, locally publicly funded community colleges, and more recently private or non-profit versions of the same, focused on professional and skills training. Let me focus on selectivity for a moment, as it is often misunderstood. Why would not institutions move to try to satisfy the “excess demand.” There are several complimentary reasons (see Urquiola, 2023, Section 8). Learning from one's peers is one. A second is the signaling effect (a derivative of imperfect information in job markets) (Spence, 1974). Higher education certainly adds human capital to the students, to which there is a return in employment. But the signaling effect associated with degrees from highly selective institutions adds an additional return to the investment in education at that level. A third one, perhaps more important in professional schools, but still present at the undergraduate level, is the alumni network. It is an asset that creates valuable options in the future for those who are in it. Selectivity and an actively supported alumni network are important parts of the financial model. An active alumni network is a key ingredient in fund-raising. Since elite institutions are expensive places to attend, that funding permits, among other things, a scholarship system that frees the admissions process to some extent from the constraint of “ability to pay,” which in turn expands the merit pool. The development of the highly selective model led to an expansion of the target population. Early on, colleges served largely local markets. Now, the major research institutions, especially the private ones, serve a fully nationwide market with a significant additional component consisting of international students. That transition, to be able to recruit and evaluate on a national and international scale, required a major additional commitment of resources. Selectivity is highest on the private sector side of the system. It is much more difficult to justify high degrees of selectivity when one is deploying public funds. And there are continuing contentious issues about the criteria to be used in selecting. The federal research funding mechanisms are highly competitive, and generally, the screening is carried out by experts and is of high quality. This is not to say there are no biases in the direction of conventional wisdom or problems funding completely new lines of inquiry. But it is critical that the funding agencies do not directly fund universities. The funding goes to scientists who compete for funding. Provisions are made to help cover “overhead” costs that universities incur. In many countries, research funding goes to the institutions and then gets allocated to principal investigators, giving rise to additional layers in allocating resources and quality slippage. The modern version of the US system has produced many internationally recognized research universities (public and private) and important research output along with highly trained scientific human capital. Whether it has served the broader population and the country well is more complex. It is on average, for the students and their families, an expensive system. And the real costs keep rising rapidly. Student debt, in excess of the value added in some segments, is also a persistent problem. Urquiola (2023) is a valuable contribution, especially for readers whose experience is largely in state dominated systems (the normal case internationally). It very effectively captures the essential and somewhat unusual features of the US higher education sector.

Richard D. Fulton

The Long Transition: 1993-1996 Richard Fulton (bio) For at least the first three years of the 90s, Barbara Quinn Schmidt hinted with increasing urgency that she would like to pass the editorship of VPR on to someone new. She had wrought significant changes in VPR, but the publication of the journal continued to be an ad hoc venture carried on by Barbara, several supporters at SIU-Edwardsville, and students in selected classes. In those pre-desktop publishing days, setting up the publication, printing, binding, bundling, and mailing demanded a serious commitment of time from the staff she had assembled, and, as she confided to me, the fun was beginning to wear off. The crisis came for RSVP at the 1992 meeting at Manchester Polytechnic University; with no other volunteers, and faced with the reality that VPR would cease as an important critical journal without an editor, I stepped up as interim until Penny Kanner's search committee could unearth someone who could do the job justice. Barbara assured me that editing VPR would be a piece of cake, especially since I had access to key technical expertise through the faculty and resources of my community college. When I reminded her that I had no editing experience whatsoever and no Victorianists on campus to turn to for support, she pooh-poohed my concerns, saying something to the effect that anyone who could edit an institutional accreditation self-study (!) could put out four issues of VPR a year. She also told me that she had the next several issues nearly completed, and that I'd have some lead time to get started on my first issue, 26:3 (Fall 1993). Within a few weeks boxes of files, paper stock, back issues, correspondence, bills, and ledgers arrived. The spring 1993 issue carried the following notice that I had asked Barbara to insert: VPR is Moving! After 8½ years at Southern Illinois University under the editorship of Barbara Quinn Schmidt, VPR will move to Vancouver, Washington in June; [End Page 33] former RSVP President Richard Fulton will take over editorial duties for at least the next two years. Fulton will be assisted by Shirley Sackman in Vancouver. John Powell will be Book Review Editor, and Louis James and Merrill Distad will continue to act as Associate Editors for Great Britain and Canada respectively. . . . On behalf of the Society and Victorian scholars everywhere, the new editors thank Barbara Schmidt and her staff at SIUE for the heroic efforts in publishing four quality issues of VPR annually beginning 1985. It is rapidly becoming apparent to the new staff just how much is involved in getting out an issue. We hope that the members of the society will bear with us as we establish a working routine. We will be prepared to discuss future directions for VPR at the annual meeting in Ann Arbor. Please be there with helpful comments. Thanks for your confidence. As that plaintive second sentence in the second paragraph indicates, I had neither the staffing nor the time to publish the paper at Clark College. When I took the job the Board agreed that we needed an established publisher to handle subscription lists and the mechanical details of printing, binding, and mailing. John Powell contacted several presses; we finally settled on the University Press of Colorado, which at that time was engaged in an ambitious expansion program. UPC would publish and distribute our first effort, the fall 1993 issue. I sent off a mockup of that issue on a WordPerfect disk in late June. Readers familiar with VPR's early days will remember that for over twenty years the 8½ × 11 format that had been a holdover from the mimeographed newsletter era continued as the journal became a more serious critical organ. UPC were not excited about continuing the larger format, preferring instead a more standard 6 × 9 journal size. However, they agreed to print their first two issues—e.g., numbers 3 and 4 of volume 26—in the larger format to maintain continuity and to avoid alienating an army of librarians (fig. 1). In August I sent a disk for number 4, and began plugging away at what I hoped...

William C. Rice

The death knell is sounding for the National Endowment for the Arts. The agen- cy's federal appropriation last year fell by one-third, from about $150 mil- lion to about $100 million, and its appropriation may be cut again or even eliminated in the current session of Congress. The NEA is not only anathema to cultural conservatives, libertarians, evangelical Christians, and even a good number of artists. It is also likely to lose key political support as Presi- dent Clinton and other Democrats resolve to keep moving toward a balanced fed- eral budget without compromising Medicare, Medicaid, education, or the environment. But the end of the agency's federal funding need not prove cataclysmic for the arts in America. Artists, arts organizations, and their supporters have many strategies at their disposal for maintaining the vitality of the arts in a post-NEA era. And in any case, the importance of federal grantmaking to the arts has been greatly exaggerated. The NEA currently contributes to the arts in two ways: direct funding and less tangible, indirect services. Nowadays direct funding consists almost entirely of cash awards to arts organizations and event sponsors. (As of 1996, grants to individual artists were eliminated, except for creative writers, jazz greats, and masters of folk crafts.) NEA-financed music ensembles, dance festivals, museum exhibitions, and the like undoubtedly face a period of sacrifice and uncertainty, and there will be some casualties. But their prospects are far from hopeless. The NEA also renders indirect, noncash benefits and services through its peer-review panels. Their judgments can stimulate funding from other sources and identify certain artists and organizations as more deserving than others. In this realm of power-by-imprimatur, the judgment process would, in fact, probably work better if it were decentralized and used to spur greater involvement by funders. Making up the Shortfall To understand the reasons for optimism, it is necessary to assess the true nature of NEA spending priorities. The NEA's largesse regularly benefits the great established urban institutions and smaller local organizations of long-standing reputation. The NEA has also funded, less dependably, dozens of marginal artistic groups, some of which claim to depend on NEA funding for their survival. As a rule, the larger institutions will overcome the NEA's decline easily, but the smaller ones need not suffer if they heed certain examples set around the country. One might not know it from the political controversies that have attracted public attention, but the NEA has always favored the most venerable -- and richest -- cultural establishments over the esoteric, the shocking, and the avant-garde. A survey of funding patterns in 1985, 1990, and 1995 clearly reveals this preference. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City has been the single largest recipient of NEA funds, with annual grants between $800,000 and $900,000. Typical grants for other high-profile beneficiaries range from $200,000 to $350,000, awarded year after year and now incorporated into annual budgets. In theater, by far the biggest ongoing grants go to the major presenters and training centers, such as the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts ($305,000, on average, in 1985, 1990, and 1995), the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles ($251,000), the Guthrie Theater in Min- neapolis ($274,000), and the Yale Repertory Theatre ($167,000). In the museum world, the consistent winners are big-city institutions: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco. In dance as well, the NEA has heavily favored the most established organizations. The Dance Theatre of Harlem, for example, averaged $303,000. Nearly all other troupes with six-figure grants bear the names of modern American legends: Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp. This preference for elite establishments should not be surprising, since it is usually the larger, wealthier institutions that have the staff and resources to put together winning grant proposals. …

Bruce Miroff, Michael Turner

During the telephone conversation in which he was offered the vice-presidency, Nelson A. Rockefeller recalled Gerald R. Ford saying: I want you on the domestic and Henry [Kissinger] on the foreign side and then we can move on these things (p. 52). At that time, Kissinger was both the secretary of state and the national security adviser. With this model in mind, Rockefeller, who had twice previously declined the vice-presidential nomination when he was governor of New York, accepted Ford's offer. He hoped that during the period of post-Watergate healing he could assume a domestic policymaking role in that office that would transcend the vice-presidency's traditional inconsequentiality. In the end, Michael Turner concludes, Rockefeller failed. There was ambiguity in Ford's initial commitment, ambiguity Rockefeller failed to clarify because it opened the door to one last slim shot at his lifetime ambition, the presidency. However, the long delay caused by the vice-presidential confirmation hearings kept Rockefeller from the scene while Ford's domestic White House was being structured in a decentralized way and while roles were being carved out by key aides. In addition, as New York's former four-term governor and a serious presidential contender for a decade and a half, Rockefeller as vicepresident could not function on a level of equality with other advisers. Such a role was uncomfortable for him and for the others around President Ford, especially Donald Rumsfeld, who himself harbored presidential ambitions. Two major attempts by Rockefeller to have an impact on Ford's domestic policy were his effort, after being appointed as vice chairman of the Domestic Policy Council, to define a comprehensive framework for the administration's 1976 legislative agenda and his proposal to meet energy financing needs through the creation of the proposed massive Energy Research and Finance Corporation (ERFCO). The first of these was shortcircuited when Ford announced a spending ceiling in October 1975 of $395 billion, thus severely limiting resources for any new domestic programs. The second survived major intra-administration infighting, only to languish in a Congress that knew the measure's prime mover, Rockefeller, was a lame duck vice-president, and suspected that the administration was not wholeheartedly behind it. Turner's treatment, based on a large number of interviews with high-level presidential and vice-presidential aides of the Ford era, offers excellent insight into peak executive decision-making processes. The author's understanding of Rockefeller's role would have been enhanced, however, by greater familiarity with his record as governor of New York. No one knowledgeable about that era, for example, can read of the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) proposal without thinking of its similarity in scope and concept to the numerous public authorities created by Rockefeller in the state. Such issues as the effect on the ERDA proposal of the fact that it was offered in the midst of the New York fiscal crisis (which was triggered by the default of one of these authorities, the Urban Development Corporation) are given insufficient attention by the author. The Rockefeller experience demonstrated that the vice-president is likely to be more effective as a minister without portfolio than as an on-line policy adviser. It also demonstrated, once again, that the vice-presidency can be only what the president wished it to