Tiverton (UK Parliament constituency)

Transcription

Minister, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Well it’s been quite a summer. Talent, hard work, creativity, competition, great values, international reach and embrace, successful organisation, self-deprecation, humour, excitement and exhilaration and also disappointment and heartache. And that’s just higher education never mind the Olympics and Paralmypics. Seriously, the United Kingdom was a great place to be in August and September and it was refreshing to see such a clear exposition of the combination of personality, values, history and celebration of diversity that makes this country so creative and challenging. Our students and graduates made up a very significant proportion of Team GB. In fact, Further and Higher Education GB would be the fifth highest nation in the medals chart with 20 Golds, 12 Silver and 10 Bronze medals. It is also interesting to see the large number and diversity of institutions from which those medallists hailed. But it isn’t just sport. I don’t need to tell anyone in this room how those self same characteristics in our staff as well as our students ensure the UK has such an outstanding higher education system in all its manifestations. David, we would also like to say how pleased we are that our Ministerial team of Vince Cable and you are continuing after the reshuffle. These are challenging times and it is great to have Ministers who understand universities and their importance in 21st century society. In you David, as our direct Minister, we know we have someone who obviously cares about universities and science, who knows deeply about them and who can prosecute their case so eloquently. Of course there will be debate about how income to universities was sustained but it certainly was sustained – it would be a very different world if we were facing cuts in income that are the average in other parts of the public sector. There are, of course, further cuts mooted and we will have to work hard with you to ensure they do not compromise the quality of our teaching and also the science budget which is so crucial to this country’s future success. However, after the highs, there are the inevitable lows – a post-ictal state as I call it is a medic, although some of you may have a different terminology. There are two acute issues for the sector at the moment. Firstly, the changes in student number controls created individual challenges for each university – probably slightly different for each one. As usual, universities responded effectively and successfully to the new challenges. What happened demonstrated very effectively that university admissions is not a stable, well ordered environment characterised by linear, deterministic outcomes. It is, in fact, unstable, non-linear and non-deterministic and thus institutions travelling across it can end in very different places even though they start in much the same place. It really was a story of unpredicted and unintended consequences. It can only be surmised that further changes in the variables will have similar outcomes and the situation will probably not stabilise until there is complete de-regulation of student numbers. That, however, is going to require some imaginative thinking about how student support is financed. Secondly, the continued uncertainties over migration issues and visas continue to challenge the sector. This summer highlighted our ambivalence over migration as a nation – even as a capital city. When Jeremy Clarkson was making the case on television for Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the greatest Briton some years ago, I read an article by a Ugandan Asian who had been forced to flee Idi Amin. In it she made three points. Firstly, when she was taught about Brunel at school in Uganda she thought he was a company not a single person because he had been so productive. Secondly that he built things that reflected the zeitgeist of the age – big, confident, robust and long-lasting. We tend to build much more emphemeral, glass based structures today and what does that say about our zeitgeist? Finally, she reminded us all that Brunel was the son of a migrant – his father fled persecution of the Huguenots in Europe – and that Brunel reminded us how much this country has gained from migration over the centuries. Simply looking at the diversity of our medal winners underlined her point. I don’t know about you but I felt immensely proud of those winners firstly simply as people. But secondly I felt proud of our country’s history as a place where individuals can come, we welcome them and they can flourish. That is a great asset and we mustn’t squander it. In particular it is a massive asset for universities and the topic of this conference is A World Without Boundaries – nobody in this room needs to be told how crucial the free international flow of human capital is to success in the modern, globalised world of higher education (of which more later). All that having been said, Minister, we acknowledge that migration is an important issue for the people of this country at the moment and that universities must be sensitive to those emotions. That means we must be fully committed to stamping out abuse, to working closely with the Government on this and we recognise our duty to keep full and up to date records on our students. However, we appear to have arrived at a situation with overseas students in which our country invites ridicule or at the very least astonishment. UUK has calculated that overseas students are a £7.6 billion annual export industry with huge potential to expand. They add intellectual, social and cultural firepower to one of the most successful sectors of the UK, universities. Finally they give our country additional global soft power for decades to come. Surveys show that students are not a prime cause for people’s anxieties over migration and finally, in our part of the sector, they have at least a 98% compliance rate and that is from the Home Office’s own study. We need a clear, single message to those potential students and their countries. I have stood with Ministers in various parts of the world whilst they have been discussing with those countries’ education ministers how to increase numbers of students coming from those countries to the UK. Quite right, by the way. Meanwhile, simultaneously, other parts of Government are sending out messages that are damaging to our reputation of being welcoming to overseas students. I dislike talking about rights and much prefer to frame arguments around duties. We owe these overseas students, who are paying guests in our country, some significant duties. We, the country and universities, owe it to potential applicants to study in the UK to present a fair picture of what their opportunities are, how they will be given to them and how they will aid their intellectual and career development; and to ensure that we have a fair and efficient mechanism for deciding their suitability for a visa. We, the country and the universities, have a duty to ensure they are properly looked after both academically and socially. We, the universities, also owe a duty to the country that we will monitor these students in a purposeful way in order to be able to reassure our citizens that overseas students are here to study and are not bogus. We certainly did not fulfil those duties on August the 29th. Around 3000 students, of whom the overwhelming majority were bona fide students, found themselves in a foreign country far from home without a course. I have had no rational explanation of how that fulfilled our duties to them as human beings never mind as students. Everyone involved in this needs to remind themselves that families have paid for these courses and that, for these students, this is one of their major lifetime chances. Let’s all just ponder on how we would have reacted if that had happened to our sons and daughters in a foreign country. Why were their needs not given absolute primacy in all these considerations? I would argue that we all have been found wanting in our duties to these students. That even includes some of our citizens, who seem to feel they can articulate some of the most bigoted and factually incorrect comments under the cloak of anonymity in the blogosphere without any sense of responsibility over how they colour the debate. I urge that we all reconfigure the nature of our discourse about overseas students and immigration and put the human beings and our duties to them at the centre of all our discussions. While there are many informal bilateral meetings and communications, the public discourse appears mainly to be spoken through megaphones. Surely the time has come for all those involved in this to sit round a single table and try and come to some end-point about overseas students. Frankly a decision is needed – and surely it’s not beyond the wit of man or woman to broker such discussions. Meanwhile UUK and universities will continue to articulate how important international students and staff are and we will continue to lobby for overseas students to be excluded from net migration – at least for policy purposes. And so to the meat of this conference – A World Without Boundaries. The title was deliberately chosen to address how UK universities operate in a globalized environment. The first problem one encounters is that there is no single agreed definition of globalisation nor any agreement as to whether it is a phenomenon of modernity or a historical force that has been impacting on society in one way or another for centuries. I don’t intend to lead a seminar on semantics and frankly I think the title of our meeting gets it – A World Without Borders be they either technological or geographic – or linguistic or social or cultural. Against that definition, higher education with its very free movement of information and its hugely mobile staff and student population is at the very centre of the phenomenon. In fact, it is an exemplary testing ground. And true to form, when presented with the opportunity to explore and innovate, UK higher education seizes it with both hands. Over the last 15 years or so our universities have opened campuses abroad, have created international campuses in their homes, have hugely increased the percentage of international students and staff, have joined international networks, have established deep bilateral partnerships with individual universities, and have embraced distance education. And they are currently in discussion, particularly through you Minister, with the governments of huge geographical regions (India, South America, the USA) about the benefits or otherwise of more systemic, and probably multi-lateral, collaborations in higher education. I think the intriguing question is which of these will prove sustainable and which will wither on the vine. Will it be all or none? I will speculate on the shape of UK-led international HE later in this speech but first I want to address what characteristics define a “globalised” university or a “world” university if you wish. The first definition everyone uses is that the university has multiple and diverse international collaborations between academic staff. However, there are thousands of universities worldwide that have substantial and diverse international collaborations – every one of those cannot be a “global” university. So what are the extra factors that will define a “global” university? I would suggest the following: 1. Global Brand Penetration My brother has lived in Japan for over 30 years and he reminds me that, as far as the overwhelming majority of the Japanese population are concerned, there are only two universities in the United Kingdom. When I travel in North America I am constantly reminded that most of the people I meet don’t even know where Bristol is, never mind whether it has a university. Such reality begs the question as to whether any other institution in the UK can honestly claim to be global. The answer to that depends on which constituency you are addressing. I would argue that if you wish to be considered a global university it is almost a sine qua non that your peers and national policy makers should see you as that even if the person in the street doesn’t – i.e. the global Chemistry community recognises the excellence of your Chemistry Department. 2. Comprehensive excellence in research, teaching, academic staff, administration, facilities, leadership and governance This is a minimum set of characteristics. In the UK there are number of institutions where quality of research, teaching and academic staff is certainly high enough to qualify them as global players. We have many universities with excellent facilities, especially following recent investments. It is essential that a global university is independent, has good governance and is well led. The institution’s head and administration must be committed to the “globalisation” and be prepared to persuade staff that it is a good way forward. 3. Innovative Global Research The pursuit of innovative global research is a very significant characteristic. What is clear is that global research is not just more “connectivity” i.e. putting people together in different ways, maximising effective use of logistics, video seminar series and summer institutes. All these are good in themselves and may lead to new ways of thinking and collaborating but they are not “global” characteristics. The global part of this comes in the marshalling of these universities’ huge intellectual and logistical resources to address global problems and questions in new ways. The size of the endeavour, the size and centrality of the questions, and the multiplicity of partners are the crucial factors here. This means asking academic staff to think in new ways; to ask them to look out of the rut and see different horizons. This is not intellectually easy; most of us are much more comfortable with reductionist science. It is fiercely difficult to identify, never mind pose, the central integrating question. The “connectivity” benefits that I have described will be an essential mechanism for identifying and posing these questions but it is essential that that “connectivity” is identified for that purpose and not just seen as a good in its own right. 4. An International Curriculum A global university will have an undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum that will explicitly take into account that its students will be going out into a globalised world. This doesn’t mean a wholesale subversion of an academic curriculum but it does mean it should be framed against that paradigm. I don’t believe that global distribution of its educational material and programs is a necessary variable although many institutions will do this. 5. Strong and diverse international student and staff demand – many international visitors A colleague recently said that he had worked at three universities and what differentiated one from the others – and it was an acknowledged global player – was the frequency and diversity of other academics from outside the UK visiting the department and the university. In other words, you have what other people in the rest of the world want to see. The academic staff must include natives of other countries who have recognised the opportunities your university offers – this is not just returning Brits who want to be nearer their family. Finally, it is essential there is a diverse, international student body. 6. Impacting on global issues, policy formulation and professional practice Academic staff of a global university will be advising global institutions on policy formulation around global issues, for example advising the United Nations about solutions to global poverty or the WHO about AIDS and its management in the Third World. 7. Close interactions with global business Chief executives and senior managers in global businesses will naturally interact and collaborate with organisations that they consider to be punching at the same weight as they are. There are a number of UK institutions that have all or nearly all of these characteristics in part but none which has all of them in full. Comparison with US universities is very sobering especially with regard to facilities – we still have a way to go before we can confidently say we have a number of global universities. Will we be able to say that more confidently in 20 years’ time? And that, I consider, is the interesting question. What will our universities’ borderless activity look like in 20 years’ time? At one end of the spectrum you can foresee an amplified picture of what is currently happening. The academics will continue with their international links which I’m sure will be the case. Our universities will have extended all those activities I described earlier. In fact some of them will look like international corporations with branches all over the world providing undergraduate and postgraduate education. Some will be just delivering their own provision but in a different location, while others will have differentiated their content and pedagogy to take account of the society and culture of that geography and those degrees will be very different from the ones taught back home. Others may have extensive online and distance provision. The students and staff of all universities will be much more internationalised. I, however, have some difficulty seeing every university having such comprehensive global activities. As I say, I’m sure academic to academic links will grow and I’m also pretty sure that there will be increasing diversity of staff and students on the main campus. I accept that there will be huge unmet demand for higher education globally over the next 20 years but I’m pretty sure that some realities of competition and simple financial or logistical failure will mean that some universities will have decided to retreat from global provision and have returned to educational provision solely from their home base. Maybe a Darwinian struggle will have occurred with some universities winning in the global provision stakes and others deciding it’s not worth the effort. And maybe that’s not such a bad outcome. No global success is worth domestic failure. I well remember having dinner with some very senior alumni in Hong Kong discussing whether Bristol should consider off shore provision in China in one shape or other and one of them saying “Whatever you do, get it right back home Eric, get it right back home.” Inside that comment are some important truths. Universities might have to be businesslike but they certainly aren’t just businesses. This is not just about setting up a global chain of retail outlets where the product is education. Many universities are defined to some degree or other by the place in which they are situated. Oxford and Cambridge would be classic examples of that in the UK. But they are not the only ones. For most of us, our home town is part of our brand – the city of Bristol is a huge part of people’s perception of the university. I have no doubt that it is a big part of what attracts people to study and work there. How far can that be diluted without the very definition of Bristol University being changed completely? Furthermore academic staff, in particular, want to be where the action is. I am on the Global Advisory Board for the University of Chicago Booth School of Business which has a very successful campus in London. However, it is not staffed residentially – rather the US staff come over regularly for short periods of time. That is so because they want to be located in Hyde Park in Chicago sitting in the same building and in the same coffee shop as the big academic players, their Nobel Prize winners. If you have difficulty asking staff to relocate to London, with all its attractions, what will it be like for less attractive parts of the world? The answer lies in using local staff but then there is real danger of the kind of dilution of the brand that I discussed earlier. I am not saying that there won’t be universities that successfully deliver offshore education whilst maintaining their reputation and keeping the home offer intact. I am saying it won’t be every university and that some, either as a result of prestige or of practicality, will decide to limit themselves to their home base and location. Both will be successful. Research will offer borderless opportunities. However, if we are to go beyond academic to academic interactions and have the kind of purposeful, multi-disciplinary, multi-partner projects addressing major issues facing society that I discussed earlier then our research leaders and funders are going to have to think and plan in a different way. It is almost 12 years since I attended my first Worldwide University Network meeting in Washington DC where one of our guests was the then Director of the NSF, Rita Caldwell. She was very enthusiastic that we were setting up an international research based university network – she was quite clear that this was the future. I then spent the next five years flogging around governmental research funding agencies in Washington and London and always getting the same response: “Yes this is a great idea but it doesn’t work within our organisational structure, or we would have to have it peer reviewed by a large number of panels, or it would have to be peer reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic”. I even remember pitching a 22 partner, $20 million project to investigate the geology, geochemistry and biology of the deep seas affected by the black smokers of the East Chile trench to a very senior member of NSF. I was simply told that funding this would not be possible because it wouldn’t be fair to others not in the consortium – i.e. that we were running an anti-competitive trust. 12 years later we are closer to being able to get these large projects together and I exemplify that with the very successful UKIERI project. However, UKIERI is not funding the scale of project that I am considering and I believe the funding for them will come from organisations similar to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation who can operate way beyond international and administrative and organisational boundaries. Still a long way to go. One final thought addresses the issue of who will partner with us in the future and how. At the moment our paradigm of globalisation is to export our product either by attracting individuals here or by the various means I described earlier – co-provision, overseas campuses, franchising. Our partners have mainly been other universities or local or national governments. Somehow I doubt that will be the shape of things to come. It is already proving difficult to get foreign provider status in some geographies due to the slow progress of bills through parliament. In many countries the way to develop may well be on the back of private finance, which will create new challenges. Some of you will be aware of the initiative in Macedonia where a university campus is being built with private finance from outside Macedonia. The campus is planned to provide the infrastructure for any university to provide its courses in that location to fee-paying Macedonian students, overseas students and even home students who would locate to Macedonia. Rest assured I’m not here to sell that initiative but its mixture of private and public support in a new country to provide a very flexible educational offering may exemplify what the future may bring. Literally as I wrote this speech an email arrived in my inbox from a private company offering to put University of Bristol courses on-line. I went to the website where there were courses from professors at very well established universities such as NYU, Johns Hopkins and McGill, in such areas as Engineering and Entrepreneurial Finance. These courses are free, so don’t ask me how the business plan works. I’m simply telling you about this because I believe that one of the least predictable futures is how on-line and e-learning will develop and who will finance it. One thing our WUN experience with distributed on-line teaching taught me is that it is not a sport for the managerially faint-hearted nor the financially shallow. As all of you know there is no more inaccurate science than futurology. 20 years hence will inevitably be a very different world than the ones I have been describing. What borderless will mean may have totally changed. We are already in a world where you can study your subject with a handset on a beach. Will technology have delivered new forms of communication that will create a paradigm shift? I started at the University of Southampton 21 years ago. Since then a lot has changed but also a lot of our fundamental work remains the same and is delivered in the same way. Will there be an evolutionary leap in the next 20 years? I don’t know. I have no doubt, however, that then, as it is now, our universities will still be at the very centre of a successful globalised, borderless, world. Thank you