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>> or in the state legislature. you know, extraordinary important decisions were not made without his decision but i was basically running inside. >> much like a ceo? >> that's right. >> what do you do now? >> i went back to my first love which is teaching and doing

research. the trustees report enough to make the university professor, which means you can detect any school at the university. you are not limited, there's no boundaries on we can teach. if the dean of the schools will have you. i've had an opportunity to teach in schools of journalism to architecture to law school to the college of course, columbia college, and graduate of course. >> what is your field of? >> i helped develop many years ago, it seems like he was yesterday but is about 45 years ago, the field of sociology of science. when people thought science was produced by rate minds, individuals, but didn't understand that there is a social system that actually was influential on the growth of ideas and the growth of knowledge. that i should say held in great stead when i became provost because i realize it was the system that counted. >> we invite you to talk about this, your book, "the great

american university." how many great american universities are there? >> i would say they're probably about 150, 100-one and 50 great american universities. that has to be put in context of over 300 universities that offer ph.d programs and over 4000 colleges and universities in the united states. it's a relatively elite group of universities. not easy is necessary because i think they have more fun and resources to incorporate into, people without means and students without means. but they are among the top universities in the world. >> how do you define a great university? >> it has to do with the transmission and the creation of new knowledge. i think the reason why the american universities dominate the set of great universities in the world, 80% of the top 20, 70% of the top 50, 60% of the top 100, by most official counts or surveys or whatever, it's

because the research reasons they have made. few most of the public really understand or realize that they come from universities. things like laser, things like a global positioning system, the cure for childhood leukemia. all of these things have their origins at american research universities, and they are great discoveries being made every at these universities. most people think of these universities in terms of undergraduate education which is actually important, but nonetheless is not what the united states has made its reputation through but it's made its reputation out of the kind of research, the quality of the research that have come from our faculties and our great universities. and people from all over the world are interested in coming and joining these universities as students, as faculty members who want to produce paid and what we have. it probably is the only industry we have a favorable concentrate

in this country. and it is one where we still dominate that would say, a set of the great universities. and probably will for the next 20 or 25 years. what i'm working on now is trying to rekindle an ancient debate about 100 years old about what a great university also looks like, let's say 30 or 40 years from now. and despite the fact that we are at the very top of the mountain, we should really rethink the things that we are doing now and try to improve upon. >> three questions from the edge. you called it an industry. why? >> well, i think that it is, it is producing something. it is producing something that is not -- knowledge which is not deeply people. if you have it and i have it doesn't mean there is less of it for the world. we are trying to produce that knowledge in a way that everyone in the world potentially can have it. and can benefit from it.

in fact, we even -- it makes a more industrial in that regard. closer to industry, symptoms we own intellectual property which comes from the discoveries made from federal research grants. we have close links to history today, much more so than we did in the past. in short, the american, "the great american university" is no longer isolated, it's no longer closer but it's no longer what people sometimes wish it was which is go back to the 19th century into an environment that surrounds itself by people buildings and isolates itself from the rest of the were. but really is something that is embedded deeply into society and is informed by the society come influenced by the society come and in turn should be influencing it. >> number two, you said we'll be on top for another 20, 25 years spent most people are worried about foreign competition in

this realm of higher education. particularly from the chinese and from the indians and the asian countries, japan, korea. i'm not as worried about that. for so i think would be a good thing if we had more great universities. the competition would do good things for the united states. we would find more cures for disease. we might get to cure cancer more rapidly if we're competing against great chinese universities. so i don't see that as a bad thing. i think unfortunately society still is a long way to go. put in place the value system that is necessary for greatness. for example, you cannot have, i defy anyone to tell me of a great university system that doesn't have academic freedom of inquiry. that's something that i've worked with the chinese about, and they genuflected the idea of free inquiry and academic freedom. but when it comes right down to

it, if you argue against the state policies, you wind up, and second different class university. so it's not clear that they are truly in turn allies this. i think the best students understand is when they want very much to come to the united states, and to be part of this engine of innovation which the american university is today. >> you said you are not much worried about the rise of the chinese in the universities, et cetera. is there a threat then to american dominance in higher education to? >> i think there is an and very, very concerned about the interval -- to paraphrase an old part, walt kelly, his famous cartoon their pogo, who said we've seen the enemy and he is us. i think that really we are the only people who can destroy our own fuel -- own jewel in our nation's ground. we're doing a lot to do that right now. they are great friends of mine are great scientists and

humanists here fear for the future of american universities because for a lack of understanding what they do and how they contribute to the welfare of our society. for example, lets take the state of california which is perhaps the best example of the state university system that is probably the greatest just in the public higher learning, the world has ever known. and it is being strangled. it is being come its budget is being cut by 20, 25% a year. if that continues they will lose their greatness. they will not be able to attract great faculty members. they will not be able to attract great students. the research grants won't be producing the kinds of discoveries that they have in the past. there will be a silicon valley associate with university of california or stanford. so i much more worried i should about a public university systems which now produce majority of our ph.d's, the

majority of our undergraduates degrees, and that are literally being starved to death by the states who don't realize that it's much easier to maintain and sustain greatness and it is to re-create it. and if they fail to sustain this greatness, they are going to find it extremely difficult. >> professor cole, what about the student loan issue? is that a threat to the fact that there's a trillion dollars out there in student loans, is that a threat to the system to? >> i think it's a mixed story. i mean, ironically the wealthiest universities with the most prestigious students who come out of their experiences with the lowest student loans. the average graduate of harvard now, i think graduates with about $7000 in loans. but if you go to a private university or even a public university without that kind of endowment, you are very likely

to have $100,000 or $150,000 worth of loans. and the whole cost structure of higher education has to be rethought it seems to me. that will be part of the next book that i actually am writing at the moment. so i do think that the cost and the loans problem is difficult. it is particularly difficult for those small enterprises that are living off of federal loans. we're the likelihood of this loans being repaid is very, very low. and that is very, very unfortunate because these institutions are taking vantage of the availability of pell grants and the like for students who are very likely unable to repay those loans. >> third question from your previous answer. you are looking at how a university should look in 40, 50, 100 years from now. out is that, right now speak as i want to press this -- i want

to preface that by saying i don't think social science is particularly good at prognosticating what will exist. but what should exist i i have some ideas about. first of all, let's look at the cost structure and quality of these universities. i would like to in one of my chapters in my book is about creating academic leagues rather than sports leagues. why can't we have, you know, universities with strengths doing de facto merges with each other, with departments and programs, to cross boundaries and borders, artificial borders. and allow them to work together and allow the students to move from one place to another can whether graduate students or future undergraduates will be able to get a tremendous amount of the education over the internet. and what they were really do more in class will be problem-solving. it's in the version of what we have seen in the last 100 years.

the lectures will be all done by great lecturers who will be on tape, and the classroom session, the problem-solving will be done with the help of instructors inside the classrooms. so there are many things that we have to rethink equipped to rethink the whole admissions process. it seems to me even the best universities in the world, the ivy league institutions and some of the of the state universities are truly great are trying to maximize the talent on one credible, on one type. and we've come to know, the work by others, but there are multiple types. we bring multiple types of intelligence together, we actually get better problems solved, get a more exciting environment and we can't get quirky in a system. if we get only the kind of intelligence that leads to the best law firms in new york, or the best financial institution

in the country, these quick problem-solving types, which are real, then we have duller classes and we are go classes in the best schools or the worst, it doesn't matter fix i think we have to we think what we did in admissions, how we define success in the admissions process. so i'd guess what i'm saying is there is a paradox and a bit of an irony. where at the top of the met with the best universities in the world, and yet we think if things are so good why do we feel so bad? why do we feel that we are in a state of crisis or new crisis? and i think that calls for rethinking, but not understanding of the great universities, but he rethink of the way in which they organize, their values, their structures, and the way we actually build them as we shall, even in physical spaces will be greatly different 30 or 40 years from now from what they are today.

now we have a chemistry building which is chemistry on the front of it, or we have an intimate building that says engineering on the front of it. there will be no borders like that in the future. we're going to universities without borders, both within universities and between and among universities. and i believe we will create leagues of greatness, as it were, in the future. >> is a liberal arts education important, and a few? >> i think it's tremendously important and undervalued. i think we tend to overestimate the value of specializing in her factionalization early on, but i can tell you, i can go anywhere in the country and i identify columbia college students by the core curriculum and the way they received the liberal arts education, really primary in the first two years. if read wisely they have become analytic thinkers. we try to ensue in them a sense of skepticism about what is a

fact, what is not a fact. what is dished out to them as being a fact, and i think holds, you would understand with and that you wouldn't business eventually, whether or not you're in medicine or whether not you're an academic. it doesn't really matter. so i think teaching people how to think very clearly, very well with a high level of skepticism about what is a fact or what is truth, something that comes with a liberal arts tradition, and particularly with humanities as well. which are necessary for greatness. and which are being overlooked at many universities. >> we're talking with jonathan cole, former provost here at columbia university, and author of this book, "the great america"the greatamerican univee to preeminence, its indispensable national role, why it must be protected." what level of dependence or support do these 150 or so great universities have on the federal

government? >> enormous dependence. it's a misnomer to call private universities truly private today. when 600, 700, 800 million, even when billion dollars in budgets come from federal grants and contracts. so the creation of the nsf, national science foundation, the existence of the national institute of health, which came after the second world war and were acts of policy genius, in my opinion, have catapulted the growth of these universities. we couldn't do the work, we couldn't make the discoveries that we make without that government influence. as well as the support of various loans programs for students and fellowships for graduate students. so one of the great brilliant documents of the 20th century was a little book produced by vannevar bush, no relation to the latter-day bushes, which was

called science, the endless drudgery. of jesus and what we are to do is outsource the production of new knowledge but we ought to do that at universities and colleges. we ought to link education and research very closely in those colleges. we got to give them more autonomy from the state and we have to give them the resources that they need to fulfill their part of the compact, which is to produce new knowledge, new discoveries, become the engines of innovation in our society. but also to advance the possibilities for young students reaching their full potential and social mobility in this country, and it was an enormous step forward which was never achieved in europe incidentally. it was not achieved in france. it was not achieved in germany. and it's never been achieved elsewhere in the world. >> what is columbia's annual budget?

how many students? some of the basic facts. >> i been away from the budget for a while but i think it's now getting close to $4 billion a year. we have about 23,000 students. we have a faculty, or student to faculty ratio of about one in six or seven. so it's a very petite type of education which is one of the reasons why it's highly priced. it also i think, what people don't look for is the discount rate awful that tuition. >> what is the list price? >> the list price when undergraduate is probably toast about $50,000 a year, which is enormous, but if you come from a family without any means, you can go for free basically because -- that's a great story and it's a great part of american education. but very few universities can support that kind of financially program. we have to have a government, i think the federal government,

which 150 years ago cast during the civil war one of the great acts of congress, which was the moral act to open up land grant colleges and state universities. to get back into business of trying to create great k-12 institutions, and the numbers of students who come into these universities helps support them for the national welfare. it's not a matter of individual maximization. it has now become an matter of the national welfare to think of education and investment in education. that's not part of the discretionary budget in the trendy, but part of the mandatory budget of the united states. and i hope that president obama, whether it is him in his second term are somebody else, will take that to our can really begin to think of those investments as having enormous payoffs. >> what is the downside of having the federal government as a partner? >> the downside is that they

don't give autonomy to the universities. that they entered into the business and the politicized the university. they tried to interfere with the peer review system, which is an attempt to give the best people, the money for doing research, and they try to influence the curriculum of the places, as well as, after sometimes, if they will make actually try to curtail public education of important research that is not politically correct in terms of the administrative point of view, like the global climate change, during the period of 2000-2008. so that is, that's the great risk and that's the great trust that has to exist between the universities and state. that is if we carry you on our side of the bargain you will grant us enormous autonomy.

think that as really an extraordinary thing. i mean, giving billions of dollars over to an institution and sing when the going to any control over your, we will let you use it as you see fit, with some definite accountability about what you actually produced, but we're not going to interfere with what you do. we will not tell you what to do. that's a rare phenomenon, and one that we benefited greatly from over the last 60 years. the question is whether we will continue to do that in the future. >> and this is booktv and c-span2 and we are in columbia university this week, talking with jonathan cole, former provost at columbia university and the author of this book, "the great american university: its rise to preeminence, its indispensable national role, why it must be protected." public affairs published this book. >> is there a nonfiction author a book you would like to see

featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> and here at book expo america, which is book publishing industry's annual convention in new york city we are joined by drake mcfeely as chairman and president of the norton country. mr. mcfeely, we wanted to ask about some of the books that norton has coming out this fall, 2012. i want to start with this one right behind this year. >> this book, spillover, a very scary book about a very important subject. this is what happens. humans are moving deeper and deeper into the hinterlands, and as they do so we're getting a lot more animal diseases that are being transported over to the human population. it's not just aids, ebola and czars anymore and for it to the disease you haven't heard of. he has been outstanding around the world, bats, monkeys,

gorillas. is a wonderful writer. i don't know if you know his book, song of the dodo which did spectacularly well, this'll be a very exciting book force this fall. >> is this also happening in the u.s. or other nations mainly? >> this is worldwide. but with the transit of people around the world now, you, diseases move very quickly. >> also want to ask you about the last refuge, another book that is coming out by gregory johnson. >> if you want to understand terrorism, you probably need to understand yemen. if you want to understand yemen, greg johnson is a terrific guy. lived there for a long time on the ground, speaks the language. he has trained our ambassadors going over the yemen. this is a poor country that, as most people know, is a very big source for al qaeda and for terrorism. it's a country you want to know about. >> david coleman.

>> david cohen has done a book called the 14th day. we're publishing the into an anniversary, october 2012. it would be an anniversary for -- 50th anniversary for the cuban missile crisis. everybody knows the book, the 13th day, the movie, the 13th day. david's question is how about the 14th day, how about the day of the cuban missile crisis? this is a book built mainly from the presidential? project that the university of virginia's miller center, transcripts from the kennedy white house, about how kennedy sort of managed the outcome for making sure that the missiles really were removed from cuba, to managing congress and the result of the crisis. >> what is mr. coleman's backroom? >> he is at the university of virginia, both history department and the village -- the miller center. >> how long have you been with norton and how long have you been chairman and president?

>> okay, 36 years at norton. i started at norton right out of the calls but i can rent a place for the last 18 years and i've been chairman since 2000. >> when it comes to e-books and real books, what's the breakdown revenue wise? >> so, on our trade sales last year, we just finished up, we're talking about 21% e-books to print books. which is about industry average. some genre publishers are seeing much higher figures in terms of percentage, and certainly would look at our fiction sales on an individual title, on one occasion of over 50% e-books sales to print book sales the mact do you redict in the next couple years e-books will take 50% or more? >> i think we'll plateau and it could very well be in the 50% range but i think the interesting thing to me is that we will plateau. i'm not looking ahead to the death of the printed book. i'm looking ahead to the world were a lot of people into reading their books on e-book readers, and other people still

enjoy reading them inc. on paper and we'll be ready for both of them. >> drake mcfeely, what is another trend in publishing that we should be looking for in the next couple of years? >> that's interesting. i would say, you know, i watched the growth of the huge conglomerate but also watch what's happening with independent publishing houses. i like the fact that there's more access to the marketplace these days and i think that will be a very healthy thing. not only for norton which is an independent publishing house, but for lots of smaller independents that are growing. >> who was w. w. norton? >> w. w. norton founded the firm in 1923 where 839 years old at this point. he had been in the import export business tier key and his wife, he was deeply involved in the founding of the firm, had a passion for books. it began as an abdication. he was still in the import export business by day, started to publish books by nick.

three years later he was doing it full-time and the rest is history. >> you just revived in 1920s in print, having just because we had. very excited about an initiati initiative. we have owned that in print since the early 1970s. they are the publishers of e.e. cummings, first publishers of faulkner, first publishers in the united states of ernest hemingway. the list goes on and on of the creative -- the firm went bankrupt in the early '30s, but wound up as a set in the 1970s in norton's hands to the wonderful energy of my colleague, robert while. we're now reside the imprint. we publish wilson's new book, two of the very first books on the revived list. >> you are watching the tv on c-span2 big we are in new york haty at book expo america and we