In an article about Yale's growth under president Rick Levin, Wall Street Journal columnist David Wessell quotes Lawrence Summers on how American universities need to continually change to stay on top of the global higher ed world:
"American universities right now are pre-eminent," says Lawrence Summers, who was deposed as Harvard's president in 2006. "They have enormous advantages in wealth, in the attractiveness of the U.S. as a place to study and teach, in their demonstrated excellence. The threat to the top universities is not imminent. But Oxford and Cambridge didn't perceive the threat as imminent. The combination of Britain's losing relative economic ground and deep complacency, lack of major investment in science and technology and governance modes that favored internal equity over external competitiveness caused them to lose their position over two generations."
Yale's Rick Levin, Wessell argues, is not as "prominent" an economist as Summers—"prominent," IMHO, being a carefully chosen word—but has been a far better university president.
Mr. Levin is less prominent an economist than Mr. Summers and less prone to penetrating insights and politically incorrect one-liners, less visionary but more politically agile at changing an organization designed to resist change. His 15-year tenure offers a case study in expanding and redirecting a venerable institution that, along with public and private peers, is vital to American prosperity.
Levin's achievements have been quiet but profound:
Mr. Levin increased the size of Yale's campus by 50% last year, buying a 136-acre tract west of New Haven from Bayer HealthCare. The tract came with 550,000 square feet of modern laboratory space.
It seems to me that this purchase, though it doesn't attract the hullabaloo of the Allston campus, is hugely significant. It's typically Levin: quiet, undramatic, but effective.
How many years decades and billions of dollars is the Allston campus from completion?
And here Yale has quietly acquired an already functioning complex that's over 50% of the size of the Allston development....
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