Princeton’s rhetoric suggests that cosmopolitanism is one of the University’s distinctive qualities. In fact, we share it with sister institutions around the world. Living in a dorm in Trinity College, Cambridge, last spring, I was surrounded by young men and women of East and South Asian descent. Even if I hadn’t seen them, I would have sensed their presence every day — at least from the wonderful smells of the foods they whipped up in the kitchens on every floor as I trudged over to Hall to eat spotted dick. (I didn’t make that up, but don’t ask: Some things even cosmopolitanism can’t excuse.) Not every Oxbridge college is as open as Trinity to talents and energy from around the world, but the London universities are even more so, as are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT and Caltech.
Cosmopolitanism matters, in a big way. Americans inhabit a narrower world than they used to. Travel is cheap and easy nowadays: We go everywhere, as natives regularly complain. But in the 19th century, middle-class Americans stayed at home, sang German lieder, memorized Dante in Italian and read long articles about politics and letters in the Revue des Deux Mondes. During the 1930s and 1940s, Americans by the tens of thousands read John Gunther’s detailed surveys of the world scene, continent by continent: “Inside Europe,” “Inside Latin America,” “Inside Asia,” “Inside Africa” and the rest.
Millions read Time and Newsweek, at a time when they offered vastly more information about the rest of the world than any American periodical does now. Even those who stuck with the local paper in Cleveland and Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles learned about China and Europe and Russia from reports filed by their papers’ many foreign bureaus. Americans on both sides of big issues — the success or failure of the Soviet Union, the justice of the Spanish Republican cause, the danger posed to America by the Nazis — drew on imperfect but rich resources to support their arguments.
This summer I was working in London, but watching and listening to American public comments about the British National Health Service (NHS), about health care in Europe, about Stephen Hawking. The ignorance shown, not just on one side, embarrassed me deeply. The debate appalled Hawking himself — as well as less famous friends of ours who work for the NHS — and who not only do their best to save Grandma, but also devise new surgical techniques, equipment and drugs, rather like their counterparts in the United States. (Did I mention that we had our first child in the United Kingdom, in a superb NHS hospital in London whose staff saved him when he became seriously ill?)
Our media environment is immensely rich: global in coverage and swift to respond to real or apparent crises. But our individual media are mostly thin, from my beloved but shrunken New York Times, which looks like the Bloom Beacon nowadays, through the wizened news magazines, to the glitzy, formulaic bestsellers in airport bookshops, written by people who seem to have interviewed cab drivers in every country in the world. When a real debate erupts, active participants’ knowledge of the globe is often as flat and inauthentic as the cuisine in “global” restaurants.
I’m not arguing for the merits of a single-payer system. Economics professor Uwe Reinhart needs no help from a mere historian. The debate on health care is one instance of a wider problem, one that comes up every time we confront an issue that involves the rest of the world — as most issues seem to these days. An information gap has opened. It separates universities, consulting firms, international corporations and a range of other institutions that, like Princeton, connect to the wider world, from a wider public that doesn’t. And it leads to the impoverishment of public discourse. What’s the responsibility of scholars, and of universities, in this situation? We inform ourselves, and our students, in some ways better than ever. But surely there are ways in which we could better inform the public without politicizing our work.
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.
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