GLOBAL: Challenges and threats to top institutions

The Third International Conference on World-Class Universities was held in Shanghai last week. Among the speakers was PHIL BATY, deputy editor of the Times Higher Education magazine and editor of the magazine's annual world university rankings. The following is an edited version of his address.



Last year, the Times Higher Education magazine asked the heads of some of the world's top ranked universities: "What makes your university a world leader?" The answers were illuminating and often inspiring.

Heather Munroe-Blum, Principal of McGill University in Canada, boasted that her institution was Canada's "most international university". Munroe-Blum said: "Our 200,000 alumni live in 180 countries worldwide, and our students currently hail from 160 countries".

She said that McGill's long tradition of collaboration also allowed McGill to "make an outstanding contribution in our rapidly changing world - one in which the most exciting breakthroughs are being made across disciplines and where strong global networks are key to success".

Tan Chorh Chuan, President of the National University of Singapore, said his institution boasted a community that was "truly diverse and multidisciplinary". He stressed that his faculty was engaged in a wide range of research activity - from engineering to life sciences and the social sciences.

Michael Spence, Vice chancellor of the University of Sydney, said his university's excellence had been built up by "investing heavily in attracting high-calibre researchers to the university". He celebrated the broad range of disciplines at a university which boasted 16 faculties. "This breadth of activity means that our intellectual life is unusually rich," Spence said.

Stephen J Toope, Vice-chancellor of the University of British Columbia, said his institution, which was just over 100 years old, had benefited from a strategic injection of funding from the federal government which was specifically designed to "amplify the country's voice in the global economy".

But Toope added that the success was earned "through our researchers attracting funding and enabling us to retain and attract scholars of international repute".

There are a number of obvious themes in these statements.

Most institutions at the top of the rankings clearly value a truly international student community, bringing together people with a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures to create a rich learning environment.

Most are obviously keen to recruit the best staff no matter where in the world they are from and to ensure, through the right collaborations and partnerships, their top researchers work closely with the best researchers in their field whichever country or continent they happen to be based.

Most of the university heads we spoke to also thought it was important to foster a wide range of disciplines, so their research staff could interact with colleagues across traditional subject boundaries and their work could develop into much more than the sum of its individual parts.

I believe that it is only through these sorts of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary activities that some of the world's most pressing problems - global warming, ensuring lifelong health and wellbeing - can be tackled.

These elements - the international profile of students and staff, and research impact - are reflected in the measures taken to benchmark institution's international standing. And it is clear that those universities keen to maintain or gain world-class status are working hard in these areas, often with strong government support.

It is apparent that many institutions are widening the pool from which they recruit their staff through aggressive international recruitment strategies. City University of Hong Kong, for example, highly rated in Asia, used the pages of Times Higher Education in September to launch a "worldwide search for talent" - announcing to the international academic community that it aimed to recruit 200 more scholars, across a wide range of disciplines, many at the professorial level.

The University of Manchester has made significant steps in its quest to attract global superstars, reflected in its strong performance in rankings, and there are many more examples.

The market for international students is ever more competitive as world-class universities seek to build a global student community. Even in the US - already the world's largest recruiter of international students - moves are afoot to end the historical aversion to using recruitment agents to attract students. So competition for overseas is set to intensify further.

Research collaboration is also high on the agenda in many countries. In Scotland, the university funding council has been encouraging the formation of research 'clusters' where the best in each field, across different universities, forget traditional rivalries and collaborate. The results were shown in improved research ratings in the UK's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, and higher research citations.

Many institutions are also reorganising their research around core broad themes to ensure their staff work across disciplinary boundaries. Over the globe, universities are forging more strategic partnerships to share research expertise and improve their citation and impact figures.

But of course, there's another key ingredient for a world-leading institution - money: most of the institutions in the world's top 200 are from the developed world - Harvard University, consistently at the top of the rankings, enjoys a multi-billion pound endowment which still yields millions of dollars a year despite terrible losses during the global financial crisis.

Yale University, another always at the top of the league, enjoys an endowment second only to Harvard's in size. In the UK, the Russell Group of 20 large research-led institutions, whose members number among the world's best, receive 60% of the £1.7 billion (US$2.8 billion) in research funding allocated each year by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and they are currently lobbying for a bigger share of that funding pot.

There is no doubt that you need money - and lots of it - to build the infrastructure, to provide the expensive laboratory, to create the conditions and, of course, to pay the ever higher salaries and benefits needed to attract and retain the research superstars.

In the UK, and increasingly internationally, there are complaints that a football-style transfer market is in effect, with ever-increasing salaries for the top professors. And it is money - or the lack of it - that presents the biggest potential threat to today's world leaders and that has the most potential to shake up the global status quo.

There is no doubt that the historical world leaders in higher education are at serious risk of losing their place at the top table in a rapidly changing world, and much of that comes down to money.

Most OECD countries face spending cuts to claw back national deficits and the UK and US will be among those hardest hit, with Ireland and Spain also facing very painful times. The pain of the US top institutions was illustrated starkly by recent figures showing that the value of Harvard's and Yale's endowments fell by almost $18 billion last year.

The OECD's analysis suggested that Canada, France, Germany and Japan would cope better, thanks to more modest debts, while Nordic countries, Switzerland and Korea will be largely unaffected.

Don Olcott, Head of the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education, has spoken of what he calls the "new global regionalism", warning that new regional powers are emerging to challenge the Anglo-American dominance of the student recruitment market.
"Are we really naive enough to think that China, India, Malaysia, South Korea, the Gulf states and others do not want to build long-term, high-quality, sustainable university systems in their countries and regions to serve their students?" Olcott said.

In the UK, a probable new Conservative government is frank about the need for brutal public spending cuts and it is likely higher education will be high on the list of targets.

Some UK vice chancellors have been making contingency plans for losing up to 20% of their public funding while any increase in student tuition fees is unlikely to come into force until 2013.

A report due to be published next year by the Russell Group makes a strong case for the limited public funding available to be highly concentrated on a small elite, to enable it to stay competitive. The Russell Group report lists a series of initiatives by governments around the world in this area that threaten the UK's standing in research.

The French government has established its Operation Campus programme, directing funding to alliances of leading universities to form 'super campuses' in order to boost the country's international standing.

Germany has in place an Excellence Initiative which concentrates funding on clusters of excellence - and it recently topped up its EUR1.9 billion (US$2.8 billion) funding commitment to the initiative with an additional EUR2.7 billion.

South Korea's world-class university project provides about £4 billion in funding to 18 universities. And, as we know, China has been intensively developing its policy to build world-class universities for the last decade, with resources concentrated on its elite institutions.

As Angel Gurria, OECD Secretary General, said in September: "Education has always been a critical investment for the future, for individuals, for economies and for society at large. In today's economic environment, the incentives for individuals to invest time and money in education are higher than ever."

But a lack of money and growing competition are not the only serious challenges to world-class universities. Another key message emerged is the importance of academic freedom.

As Amy Gutmann, President of the University of Pennsylvania, said: "We cherish our non-sectarian and egalitarian mission and remain dedicated to founder Benjamin Franklin's vision of an education balancing the unfettered pursuit of knowledge with its practical application."

Toshio Yokoyama, Vice-president of the University of Kyoto, said his institution was "the campus where eccentrics thrive" while Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London, said it was his university's "willingness to take risks and push the boundaries of academic endeavour" that helped made it so strong.

Robert Zimmer, University of Chicago President, said: "The University of Chicago is driven by a singular focus on the value of open, rigorous and intense inquiry. Everything about the university that we recognise as distinctive flows from this: our belief that argumentation rather than deference is the route to clarity; our insistence that arguments stand or fall on their merits; our organisation that fosters rigorous analysis of complex problems from multiple perspectives; our education that embeds learning in a culture of inquiry and analysis, thereby offering the most empowering education to students irrespective of the path they may ultimately take; our commitment to attract the most original faculty and students, who can most benefit from, and contribute to, our environment; our recognition that our contributions to society rest on the power of our ideas and the openness of our environment to developing and testing ideas."

In a nutshell: universities must be free to pursue knowledge for its own sake.

But here too there are threats. There are countless alarming examples of the suppression of academics around the globe but there are also more implicit, less dramatic and more subtle threats that nevertheless are still causes for concern.

In the UK, for example, there is a fierce debate raging over the government's drive to ensure clearer and stronger economic impact from the research it funds. Of course, taxpayers are rightly entitled to see results from the research that they pay for, and it is right to promote universities as essential drivers of the economy. But too narrow a focus on short-term financial impact, and too much government scrutiny, can inhibit free inquiry and there is strong resistance to the idea in the UK.

I'll leave it to Sir Alec Jeffreys, creator of DNA profiling, to explain the concerns. He said that his world-changing discovery came as a result of his team simply "following their noses", that it had "absolutely no idea" of the applications that would follow.

"I have never approached an experiment with a desire to solve a practical problem," Jeffreys said. "The technology comes first and then suggests the applications, not the other way round. It is blue skies research that is the ultimate driver - delivering the new techniques, concepts and tools that we need to progress.

"I am in a department [at the University of Leicester] rooted in intellectual curiosity and academic freedom and I took to this place like a duck to water."

He called for "minimum top-down control and maximum intellectual freedom to follow your nose, in the full realisation that a lot of this will not result in anything of any great significance - but there will be the occasional jackpot to make it all worthwhile."

I would second that.

Comment:
Truly enjoyed reading this article. I certainly second the need to have a balance between products based research and blue-sky research. It is when the mind is free that important discoveries are made. Just look up serendipitious discoveries and you will know what I mean.

Prof. Dr. Yang Farina Abdul Aziz