University leaders offer post-pandemic visions for HE

Sixteen university presidents from 14 countries met to discuss post-pandemic and Brexit perspectives for higher education in a Zoom event organised by IE University, Spain, on 17 November.

The meeting, “Reinventing Higher Education: New realities, new visions for HE”, both reaffirmed universities’ commitment to international mobility and emphasised a raft of positives following a tumultuous year.

Santiago Iñiguez de Onzoño, president of IE University, Spain, kicked off the meeting by posing two questions: how will the pandemic influence higher education and how can universities promote the ‘movement of talented professors and students’?

The first panel, which was moderated by Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, responded to the former question with a diverse range of views.

“We are going to find our economy is in a different space post-pandemic because people have become used to Zoom meetings and working from home; so universities are going to have to identify what new skills will be needed in this context,” said Anthony C Grayling, master of New College of the Humanities, United Kingdom.

However, Frédéric Mion, president of Sciences Po, France, preferred to emphasise what will not change. “We have reinvented ourselves online but this is not our normal mode; universities are, much more than we suspected, physical spaces, and we cannot dispense with that aspect,” he said.

A completely distinct perspective was offered by Nakano Satoshi, president of Hitotsubashi University, Japan, who said: “Around 50% to 60% of our courses went online between May and July, but what we noticed was that most professors and students were investing more time than before in their work – sometimes too much – and that is a problem.”

Professors at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, had focused on very different concerns, according to Vice-Chancellor Mamokgethi Phakeng. “The pandemic in South Africa has made existing inequalities much more explicit,” she said.

Specifically, many students live in poverty, for example, and do not have access to the internet, and there are issues with student collusion especially with online maths and statistics courses, so the university successfully brought many of these students back to campus.

“The university offers a convivial space for living [and studying],” she said, “and in fact we feel that the situation, while not perfect, opened up more opportunities. It has allowed us to rethink what was not going well, and because more universities are now offering more online courses we have been reinforcing our joint degrees, and sharing more equipment – not just with European universities but also within South Africa.”

Turning to mobility, Mion pointed out that the increase in universities’ online presence had allowed Sciences Po to develop an ‘amazing global network’ and offer better joint degrees. “The question is: will universities be willing to go back to the same level of international mobility after the pandemic?”

‘Importance of personal contact’

“Perhaps universities will be issuing plane tickets with degree vouchers,” wryly suggested Grayling. “Zoom has offered a kind of super-mobility, but this lockdown has also reminded us of the importance of personal contact.”

Regarding the fall-out from Brexit, Mion argued that it is “very bad news, because we need a strong UK”.

He explained that Sciences Po has worked very hard to strengthen its relationship with UK universities; although one of the consequences of Brexit is the likelihood that his university will benefit.

“The UK may appear less attractive to students because fees may rise. We offer 70% of our courses in English,” he said, “and we have already noticed a 20% increase in applications for our masters courses.”

Conversely, Grayling explained that his university had noticed a marked drop in applications from international students.

“It is not a happy picture,” he said. “What we want is the right of residency for faculty already in posts in the UK and the same level playing field for students that they have enjoyed in the past. We aim to keep the university experience a global one.”

Regarding finance, Phakeng said that South African students have always had challenges in accessing aid, and in the context of a coming economic crisis she reflected on whether the government would continue to subsidise those from working-class backgrounds.

“In the context of people losing their jobs, the number of poor is likely to grow,” she said, “so what we will actually be looking for is an increase in funding.”

Mion agreed that Sciences Po will also be looking for more support for students, and he wondered whether fees will have to increase as a result.

Further complications could be that corporations may be less willing to invest in executive training, and that donors may be less able to give. “But we haven’t been able to gauge that so far,” he added.

Phakeng helped conclude the first session by hoping that universities remain ‘agents of destruction’, in the positive sense. “We must not become too cautious,” she said. “On issues like climate change, we need to keep shaking things up.”

Highlighting the positives

The second session involved a round table, in which university leaders each gave a three-minute presentation.

“Lebanon has had 15 years of civil war and unrest and since the onset of the pandemic we have had an economic crash and a steep devaluation of our currency,” explained Fadlo R Khuri, president of the American University of Beirut.

“But we remain committed to inclusive education. The youth both inside and outside our classrooms are our best teachers, and we need to remain flexible to respond to their emerging needs,” he said.

Federico Valdés, rector at the Universidad del Desarrollo, explained that as regards higher education in Chile, online courses offered by Google and Microsoft, for example, presented an additional challenge, but that several good things had come out of the pandemic.

“We are offering more short-term courses, for example, and we have found that companies are more willing to fund medical research than before,” he said.

Martin Paul, president of Maastricht University, the Netherlands, explained that his university had saved a lot of money on their exchange budget in 2020, and they had reduced their carbon footprint by 30%.

Additionally, Maastricht University had created a virtual campus through partnerships with 10 other universities, through which students have been offered far more choice.

Patrice Geoffron, interim president at Université Paris-Dauphine, suggested this greater availability of courses and institutions may lead to more ‘cherry picking’ by students.

Either way, said Ahmad Hasnah, president at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar, the pandemic has shown us that no single institution or country can resolve all problems, and that the only way forward is to build partnerships.

One particular area of concern in this new scenario, however, is student welfare: “We have seen the demand for our mental health support services grow…” he noted. “People are insecure.”

Better teaching habits

Carlos Montúfar, rector at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, expressed his frustration with public universities, which he said were ‘stagnant, stale and hyper-regulated’, but he hoped that the pandemic might change that, as international collaborations had grown.

“This has generated better teaching habits and that is having a contagious effect throughout the whole education system,” he said.

A difference of opinion emerged when Lucas S Grosman, rector at Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, argued that the “face-to-face versus online debate is now obsolete as the future is hybrid”, whereas Umran Inan, president of Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, feels strongly that the pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of online education.

“University education is an ‘appointment between generations’,” he said, “and that triggering of minds needs to take place in a classroom.”

Dilly Fung, pro-director for education at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argued that there is a need to radically transform higher education so that students become ‘co-creators of bachelor and masters degrees’.

“We say we do it, but we need to do more,” she said. “We also need to take greater advantage of advanced multi-media to connect with companies,” she said, “and engage more with donors to help students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.”

Peter Mathieson, vice-chancellor at the University of Edinburgh, UK, noted the negative effects of the pandemic and Brexit before providing a list of positives to close the conference.

“Universities have played a fantastic role in medical research and social science and we need to be proud of that; we adapted with incredible speed to the challenge of the pandemic; students can ‘travel without travelling’ through new technologies; inequalities, such as unequal access to computers, have been highlighted; and change has been forced upon us… but many things were ready for change anyway,” he said.