Innovative universities deserve both attention and support

Most of the innovations we see in higher education are incremental, merely small alterations to the standard. True innovations are quite rare. Whole institutions that operate on a different model and dedicate themselves to showing that there is another way to be a university are almost a trick of nature.

There are several reasons for this. For one, higher education is simply too old as an industry. Too many approaches have been already tried and discarded for being too expensive, too radical or too politically blasé.

Of course, as Paul Sterzel, the managing director of University College Freiburg, puts it, “reinventing is part of inventing”. But the graveyard of failed universities is quite packed, and higher education has become wary.

Secondly, universities have to sell themselves to the public, their governments, funding agencies, individual donors, industry, students … the list goes on. Playing it safe by copying best practices is the most reliable selling strategy. This way, a university offers recognisable formats and is more likely to perform well in rankings.

Finally, policy-makers (like churches before them) like to regulate education, because education is important, expensive and can be used to manipulate and mould a large number of people. This is how Socrates got into trouble in his day. Ultimately, higher education institutions are left with little room to manoeuvre.

And yet, despite all this, innovative universities do appear. If they operate for long enough and manage to break away from survival mode, they can do a lot of good.

By tackling higher education differently, and especially when their approaches appear to have better outcomes, they challenge the way other universities think about teaching, research, knowledge transfer or governance. They might even change how we think about what a university is in the first place.

African Leadership University’s self-identification as a leadership institution, not an academic one and having students choose missions, not majors, can give one pause: maybe this is what we have been looking for?

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology is a highly internationalised and organisationally flat addition to Japan’s still largely Japan-focused and hierarchical higher education system.

University College Freiburg and Constructor University Bremen quietly diversify German higher education by offering a more multidisciplinary and student-centred take on undergraduate education.

On a larger scale, innovative universities send the message to the global community: higher education is not what you think. It has space for imagination.

A gallery of imaginative universities

This is why we have decided to create a gallery showcasing higher education institutions that think more boldly, more creatively, or just differently from others.

To create this collection, we are hosting a bi-weekly webinar each featuring one innovative higher education institution. The webinar is an hour-long conversation where a university representative presents the case, and then we discuss what makes it innovative, what keeps it afloat, and, finally, ask for advice for other changemakers.

For the webinar, we have looked into all world regions, mapping innovative cases with the help of our steering committee. So far, we have had 19 discussions, featuring six higher education institutions from the Americas, four from Europe, two from Eurasia, two from South Asia, three from Asia-Pacific, one from Sub-Saharan Africa and one from the Middle East and North Africa region.

We have seen that innovations can be found anywhere and in any form, provided there is bravery and luck. One has to be brave enough to pursue an alternative and to make it happen. As for luck, an innovative university must appear at the right place at the right time.

Freedom and accountability

Organisationally, innovative universities can be public or private. However, being innovative is often easier for private institutions because they have fewer regulations and less public accountability to deal with.

While transparency is usually a positive thing, a certain degree of freedom and flexibility of action aids experimentation. For instance, it is unlikely that the University of Central Asia would be able to realise all of its alternative education ambitions had it functioned under the line-item public budget typical for Central Asian states.

On the other hand, private universities typically secure their own funding and have to be careful: doing something too radical may alienate donors or students. Germany’s Constructor University caters to a very specific audience of students who prefer English-language instruction and a significant degree of curricular freedom. It cannot afford to scare away families of students with a drastic departure from the established model.

Unlike private institutions, state universities, if properly supported, can have access to much more significant resources without the need to generate a return on investment in the short term.

Unique manifestations

Different political, economic, cultural and even climatic contexts stimulate higher education to find unique manifestations. For example, Anadolu University in Türkiye became one of the largest universities in the world and created unique online scaling solutions to cater to its home country’s significant rural population.

The African Leadership University chose to open its campuses in Rwanda and Mauritius out of all African states because they provide the best conditions for start-ups.

Asian University for Women and the University of Central Asia serve communities so impoverished that their issues require a set of solutions that the majority of universities in the Global North would never need, and therefore never be able to conceive of.

One would think that regions that need innovations the most would have the largest number of experimental universities. However, that is not the case. The universities mentioned above and the University of Campinas in Brazil loom so brightly precisely because they are among the very few bold innovations in the regions that desperately need them.

Problem-solvers and dreamers

Our speakers are usually university leaders. Thus, we have had a chance to explore not only the workings of innovative universities, but also the psychology of those who run them. Roughly speaking, two types of leaders can be identified: problem-solvers and dreamers.

Problem-solvers respond to a pressing issue in a specific place. Before getting to problem-solving, they engage in problem-setting. They look into the face of the problem, making it their own by naming and operationalising it, and then laser-focus on it.

To this effect, Veda Sunnassee, the CEO of African Leadership University and decidedly a problem-solver, said: “Be very clear on what you are solving for. Remember the need, remember the problem that you’re trying to fix … I know some people would say, know your vision, your mission, yeah, but too often the vision and the mission can also be tied to a solution. Remember the problem you’re trying to solve and stay true to that problem.”

Tom Bachem looked for a higher education institution in Germany to learn applied software engineering but failed to find it. So he co-founded CODE University instead.

Marcelo Knobel of the University of Campinas solved an issue of access via a specialised pre-undergraduate through undergraduate programme.

The founders of the University of Central Asia set out to bridge the gap between remote mountain communities and economically relevant higher education, and Southern University of Science and Technology was meant to connect Shenzhen’s booming tech industry and skills needs.

Dreamers also solve problems, but their problem-setting is more visionary in its nature. They look at wider issues and imagine the reality where a higher education institution could operate in such a way as to make these issues obsolete.

Richard Miller, the founding president of Olin College of Engineering, imagined what Oliners used to call “a Renaissance engineer”. The new pedagogy would transcend the ailments of engineering training in the US and prepare graduates who think more widely, consider consequences and are able to speak with a wide array of professionals about the engineering task at hand.

Ben Nelson of Minerva University suggested the whole complex of ideas for a modern university uniting active learning, global thinking and local focus.

Shai Reshef of the University of the People formulated his dream as all universities doing away with exclusivity and opening their gates for wider access.

We classify the four attempts to develop liberal arts education outside the US that we looked at (University College Maastricht, Amsterdam University College, University College Freiburg, and Yale-NUS) as dreamers’ innovations as well.

Leaders of liberal arts colleges (‘university colleges’ in European Union-speak) dream of a modern global intellectual: deep specialisation is purposefully left for the masters level. That might be old news for the US, but it still seems freshly revived for the majority of the world.

There is something that unites the majority of innovative university leaders as well. They cannot wait until the natural progression of higher education improves the situation. We got a sense of urgency from them. They want to bring about a different world today – or, at least, in this decade.

A global search

As you see, innovative universities, while rare, still exist. And new ones appear now and then, too. They need attention and support.

Operating under an alternative model often means that standard rules, such as globally accepted metrics, a typical lifecycle, a tried and true governance model and so on do not apply. For example, Zhaoyuan Ma from SUSTech (Southern University of Science and Technology) mentioned that the rankings might not be the best way to measure the university’s value for Shenzhen’s industry.

Even specialised innovative universities rankings are either limited to one country or a small range of innovation types.

The lifecycle of an innovative university often includes a period of survival – unless, of course, it is born as a mainstream university and is later transformed into an innovative one, like Arizona State University.

Even institutions like India’s OP Jindal Global University, supported by national policy initiatives, have to prove their right to be different. This lifecycle specificity makes them vulnerable to both external and internal forces.

This is why we think it is so important to collect different ways that innovative universities can succeed. We have just started doing this, but we will keep looking everywhere for cases to feature. If you know of an innovative university we should feature, please drop us a note.

Isak Frumin is the head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations and can be reached at ifrumin@constructor.university. Dara Melnyk is a consultant and a writer and can be reached at dara.melnyk.personal@gmail.com. The views expressed are the authors’ own and not of their employers. Special thanks to Aleksandra Martynczuk and Daniel Kontowski.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.