No. That’s not our secret advantage. This is our secret advantage:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/america...> By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.
> A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.[fn1]
> ...
> My own perspective is still colored by that year in Davis. Originally the agricultural extension of the University of California, precariously perched amid the rice paddies of the Sacramento River delta—halfway between San Francisco and nowhere in particular—UC Davis now boasts 3.3 million volumes, a world-class research faculty, and the country’s leading green energy program. Some of the most interesting colleagues I know have spent their lives in Davis. At the time, however, this was a mystery to me: the year completed, I retreated cautiously to the Olde English familiarity of Cambridge. But nothing was quite the same. Cambridge itself felt somehow reduced and constricting: the pancake-flat Fenland as remote as any rice paddy. Everywhere is somewhere else’s nowhere.
> [fn1]: By way of comparison, the University Library in Cambridge, England, boasts just seven million volumes; the University of Vienna (founded in 1365) just 6.6 million.