Some scholars date the beginnings of globalization from the first move of people out of Africa. Some date it from the spread of world religions—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Others date it from the imperial European empires, the Napoleonic wars, or the expanded trade and migration in the second half of the Victorian era. But one thing is certain: In the last two decades, the Internet and cheaper air travel have created such closer integration and convergence that, for the first time, a single world society is within reach—and higher education, ranging beyond the nation-state, is a central driver.
The "multiversity"—the university with multiple constituencies and demands that Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California identified in the 1960s—has given way to the Global Research University, or GRU. The Global Research University is the multiversity with much more mobility, more cross-national research and learning, and more global systems and rankings.
Indeed, in almost every country, research universities are among the most globally connected of all sectors. Knowledge, the free currency of higher education, flows anywhere and everywhere, like quicksilver on a metal table. At the same time, global connections; global comparisons and rankings; and global flows of people, ideas, knowledge, and capital are transforming higher education.
In that transformation, three trends have come together:
Networking. Almost a third of the world's population now has fast Internet access. An incredible more than half—including some people identified by the World Bank as living on a dollar a day or less—use mobile phones. Those numbers are climbing fast. And the parts of society already networked are much more intensively connected than before—universities are a prime example.
Every research university is a major user of networked communications for complex data transfer and real-time collaboration. The annual Webometrics ranking traces the explosive growth of Web work, led globally by Harvard University. Second is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, driven by the traffic through its OpenCourseWare project. For researchers, offshore relations are often more compelling than local connections. Across all OECD countries, between 1988 and 2005 the proportion of scientific papers that involved international collaborations jumped from 26 percent to 46 percent. In the United States it rose from 10 percent to 27 percent of papers.
The ever-growing role of knowledge. As Kerr predicted in The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press, 2001), knowledge and research have become central to nations' economies and cultures. Governments have long been fascinated by the potential of science and technology to drive global competitiveness, but in the last decade the preoccupation with application and commercialization has been joined by a new faith in the power of state policies and support to encourage creativity itself. A main preoccupation of the emerging research nations in Asia is with fostering "creative cultures" in a range of ways—including speeding visas for foreign researchers and building new urban precincts in which innovators in the arts and sciences are brought together to cross-fertilize one another's thinking and kick-start lateral inventions.
The expanding access to education. As more nations modernize and middle classes grow, participation in higher education has grown significantly and continuously almost everywhere. According to data from Unesco, between 1991 and 2004, enrollments in higher education increased more than 8 percent annually in East Asian and Pacific countries, about 7 percent annually in Africa, and 5 percent annually in Central Europe and Latin America. As Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, has remarked, the augmentation of human capability though education is unstoppable because it meets public, industry, and private needs at the same time.
Those three trends coming together—global networking, research power, and mass participation—make higher education more crucial today than ever before. At the same time, the convergence of those trends, and the emergence of the Global Research University, has created a new set of tensions:
The tension between national perspectives and global perspectives. Governments and some institutions focus on their own agendas—which are usually local or national. But GRU's have global visions and ambitions. They see themselves, rightly so, as leading the emerging global civilization. They want to draw top-flight students and faculty membersprofessors who will position them at the peak of the international rankings. They want to cut larger figures in the world—and to be financially supported accordingly.
Here the motives of Global Research Universities are not just selfish but also altruistic. They create global public goods—the knowledge that we as a global society need to tackle climate change, water and food shortages, and epidemic diseases. Basic research to further scientific knowledge is itself a global public good.
But will GRU's be allowed to just get on with making the world a better place? Now that knowledge has become vital in so many areas, the instinct of national or state governments is to design financial support and management systems that enable them to shape the forms of research, plan research outcomes, and more closely focus how we use knowledge. The objective here, which at bottom is flawed, is not simply to reduce economic waste. It is to make research inquiry, which by its nature is a journey into the unknown, more predictable and perhaps less dangerous. The fallacy is the notion that states, using administrative processes, can control the future by controlling new knowledge. The risk is that they suppress the essential autonomy of the creator in trying to do so.
Moreover, many national governments are less than fully sympathetic toward the global research agenda. The outcomes of basic research in the scientific literature are open to all. But as the national policy maker sees it, "These global public-knowledge goods are all very well, but what's in it for us? Why should we pay for everyone's free benefits?" Or "What's the use of us paying for basic research if the resulting innovations are all captured by foreign companies and the national economy gets zip?" That mentality is short-sighted and self-centered, but nations are still the site of higher-education policy and will remain so for a good time to come. Political and financial support for universities nearly all comes from within national boundaries, except for foreign-student fees and some research money.
Universities must now operate in all three dimensions at the same time: global, national, local. They must become smarter about managing the balance between those three dimensions and, where possible, work them in synergy, not conflict. For example, universities successful in global research can increase the gravitational pull of the cities and nations in which they are housed by attracting creative talent and industry investment from around the world—providing they are effectively engaged at the local level.
The tension between elite research and mass teaching. Some Global Research Universities, such as the University of Toronto, with close to 75,000 students, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, with more than 300,000, are both elite research institutions and mass teaching institutions. Other universities focus primarily on research, are highly selective in whom they enroll, and steer clear of mass teaching. Only some countries seem to manage a workable division of labor. Others unduly dilute research or weaken the resources given to mass education, or both. Both kinds of institution can work. What matters is the balance of functions within a national system.
The tension between sameness and diversity. Global comparisons, systems, and the Anglo-American model are making universities more similar—and penalizing those that are not, including nonresearch institutions, and all universities using languages other than English. But global convergence also brings us in touch with all manner of diversity. Already there are 12 languages with 100-million speakers or more in the world: English, Mandarin, Hindu-Urdu, Spanish-Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Indonesian, Japanese, French, and German. As the list of top research universities becomes pluralistic, perhaps other languages will join English as global languages. We might also see the emergence of more-pluralist global rankings, with separate tables for the different kinds of institutions: GRU's, vocational-technical, mass providers, small and specialist colleges, and so on.
The tension within the hierarchy of the most-competitive global universities. America dominates Shanghai Jiao Tong University's 2009 international rankings of top-100 research universities. The United Kingdom is No. 2, and Australia, Canada, Japan, and Western European countries occupy the other places in the top 10. English-speaking countries make up 73 percent of the top 100. We are at the historic high point of the Anglo-American university.
But not for long. As everyone knows, the East is rising—in particular, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and especially China. Perhaps India will become a major world player, as well, if the government carries out a new wave of national investment in a coherent fashion.
In China, government support has been crucial to the amazing growth of research and participation in higher education. Between 1995 and 2007, the average annual growth of science papers in English, according to U.S. National Science FoundationBoard data, was 16.5 percent in China, 14.1 percent in South Korea, and 10.5 percent in Singapore. That compares with just 0.7 percent in the United States and 0.3 percent in the United Kingdom—perhaps not surprising, given public investment in America and the United Kingdom has been relatively flat or declining.
The ascendency of Asian higher education, of course, worries some people in the Anglo-American world, especially as Western European universities are strengthening too. But it is a boon to those of us in the Asia-Pacific and indeed for everyone. The growth of research anywhere generates common benefits via the flows of knowledge, innovations, and people—and it broadens and deepens the reach of intellectual culture, while adding to the conversation distinctive new voices. It also expands the potential for global agreement.
The tension between those inside the hierarchy and those outside it. As Manuel Castells, professor of communication at the University of Southern California, points out, networks are always incomplete in coverage unless prolonged efforts are made to bring everyone in. Many nations, especially in Africa, have no Global Research Universities at all. Research programs at their higher-education institutions are rudimentary. Institutions are underfinanced or unstable. Student participation rates are low—in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it is only 5 percent. Long lines of people are waiting for opportunities that those in developed and emerging Asian countries now take for granted. Many millions of lives are being blighted by the global knowledge gap.
A major public role that leading Global Research Universities in developed countries should play is to form long-term partnerships with institutions in emerging higher-education systems. Those partnerships should be designed to build capacity, especially research capacity.
There are strong examples of such partnerships. For example, several departments of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in fields of science and business education, are working with their counterparts at Vietnam National University to overhaul the curriculum, with due regard for both academic standards and the Vietnamese context. The work involves short courses of training and program development in both countries. It is fostering new teaching methods, encouraging research publishing, and transforming the academic program in Vietnam.
But we need more such efforts. The goal should be to establish top GRU's everywhere, to extend knowledge-based cooperation across the whole world—moving beyond the limits of nation-states toward a more inclusive global society.
The tensions that I've described are endemic to GRUs but are not impossible contradictions. Not all tension is destructive. Throughout its history, the university has combined differing and even opposing missions and forces. The secret of its long historical continuity is that from time to time it finds new ways of reinventing itself. It devises new combinatory models and strategies, changes its inner culture, and renovates its external mission. Thus we moved from the liberal academy of J.H. Newman to the scientific and professional university to Clark Kerr's multiversity and now to the Global Research University.
The GRU must resolve the tensions running through it, harnessing the energy of paradox as a creative force. If it can do so, it will meet its key challenges: to be locally and globally effective at the same time. To move forward on both elite research and democratic education, whether within the same institutions or by bringing different institutions into conjunction. To devise common systems and methods of standardization which broaden creativity rather than narrowing it. And to further lift the stellar universities, while spreading the research function across the whole of higher education, contributing to the knowledge economy throughout the world.
Comments
1. intered - June 01, 2010 at 04:33 pm
This is a solid article, full of implications. One cannot help but note the absence of interest on the part of faculty (I'm posting this June 1, 4:30 PM EDT). When the Chronicle runs an article on faculty pay or the possibility that faculties might have to be accountable, the complaints, many of them strident, number in the dozens. The last time a I saw a "we don't care about this" article, the topic was how faculties might improve the quality of teaching.
2. arrive2__net - June 01, 2010 at 05:44 pm
A great article. Sometimes tensions in organizations and systems are necessary and productive, so they don't necessarily have to be "resolved", rather they are harnessed to drive effort and productivity. One central tension mentioned in the article is between teaching and research. Most people think of a university as a type of school, with research in the background. Although teaching may be the essence of the university, research is where they most clearly compete, and it therefore comes to the forefront in that context. I think online education has also played a significant role in the emergence of the "GRU", at least in term of causing the teaching side of the university to begin to think of itself as going beyond the university's conventional geographical borders.
Bernard Schuster
Arrive2.net
3. 11122741 - June 01, 2010 at 08:18 pm
I've worked at 2 "global universities" in the US and attended 2 outside as a graduate student. Global universities like the global economy are sonner or later going to crash and burn; they are not sustainable and the wings of a buttefly in China is going to bring your department down in Montana. There are cycles to it just like any business. Also few states and alumnae are going to support large numbers of non-contributing and taking non-local students and researchers very long; as Tip O'Neal say, "All [real life] is local" and it is local bills that must be paid for local services and life quality: don't fool or delude yourself. As knolwedge becomes more and more of a commodity as well as the means to deliver it and education the place where old knowledge goes to die (Whitehead) but make pennies on the dollar profit, it will be the "publishers" and "repackagers" who are going to make the sustainable profits out of global education. The Gobal University is being England in the 18-th century: discover and invent everything and particularly everything associated with the first green revolution and go bankrupt while America fronts none of the cost but applies it all and grows super rich. There are many "America" out there. Universities will fill up there chairs and consulting contract revenues and make some big bucks on this for awhile and then it will hit the fan. The Global University like the Global economy is greed and a liscence to steal at a much larger scale but one where the proponents never think about or work out acts 4 and 5. When it's a dust bowl we'll see which monasteries survive how. And if governments start providing government developed and approved online courses free and to complete with the cheap repackagers (Aaah, I think it's called Moore's Law), then what with all of that non-local revenue??
4. generally_academic - June 02, 2010 at 05:46 pm
Judaism is a world religion? Perhaps only because its followers were forced out of their homeland by their enemies. Certainly not because they do not in general proselytize for converts. I hope its not because the author believes they control the world's banks, or some other vicious lie. What did he mean by that?
5. jffoster - June 03, 2010 at 10:47 pm
Since I have rather strongly disagreed with Generally_academic over another matter, it seems only fair that I should chime in here where I think she's right (5). I noticed that odd claim of Judaism as a "world relgion" too.
The world religions are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. They deliberately seek conferts and are catholic in intent, for the whole Earth. Such religions as Judaism, Hinduism, and Shinto, and my apologies to any I've left out, one might fall "Great" or "Major" (I like that better.) religions. Converts are accepted to varying extents but are not sought.
6. graemeharper - June 04, 2010 at 03:22 am
This is an excellent piece. Thank you. The one thing I'd query, and did so at our recent global "University of the Future" event, is the implied notion of "hub and spoke" behind some of the spatial suggestions. That is, "to establish top GRU's everywhere, to extend knowledge-based cooperation across the whole world" needs to be seen in 21st Century terms, noting as you rightly due the now extensive internet structure - something like 16mil internet accessees in 1995 and 2bil. now. Thus, we need to think 'digitally' (though even this word is now outmoded, suffering as it does from a sense of dissolution - ie. dots joined), rather than aggregation, which is possible (and needed) in our emerging motech world. In this, the GRU should be not a hub but a point, and each point aggregates to a stronger whole. To do this, we need more globally entailed thinking - not 'global' in the sense it was used in the 1970s, but global in the sense it can be acted upon in the second decade of the 21st Century. In that too we'll see potential, rather than perceived threat, in the growing strength of universities in all locations in the world. Until we think and act this was, the notion of the GRU remains in a pre-21st Century mode, much of which relates to compartments constructed in a a 20th Century obsessed with knowledge as commodity concentration rather than knowledge as human exchange.
7. supertatie - June 08, 2010 at 10:24 am
I disagree with those who claim that Judaism is not a "world religion." It most certainly is, not only because its adherents are scattered throughout the globe, but because of its history, its widespread impact on thought in religion generally (belief in a single deity, the early codification of basic morality in the Ten Commandments, etc.) and its role as the parent faith of Christianity (Jesus Christ was a practicing Jew). And this is without even mentioning the astonishing contributions of Jews themselves in science, the arts, and the humanities throughout human history.
To ignore all of this simply because the internal tenets of the Jewish faith do not explicitly call for the conversion of others strikes me as absurdly limited. This is made doubly obvious, I would argue, by the fact that Jewish history, tradition, documentation and belief maintain that the Jews are God's "Chosen People." If that does not merit consideration as a "world religion," I fail to see what would.
8. edreader - June 11, 2010 at 10:25 pm
I'd like to point out, in the light of jffoster's comment, that Buddhism is not a religion that tries to convert people. In fact this idea is against the very nature of Buddhism and aganist its core philosophy! Buddhism, outside the neo-ritualistic tarditions that were introduced by others through incorrect interpretations, is fundamentally based on a mind path that 'liberates' one's self from the physical and spiritual worlds. With that as its foundation, why would true Buddhists want to attract people to a 'religion' when they themselves don't believe in any shape and form of attachment and strive to free their own selves? Buddhism is a deep phiosophy, not an organized institution of a religion. This may sound untrue looking at the present day popularity of it and how certain sects interpret the philosophy. But when one peels that onion called the buddhist religion, there's nothing in the core - and that 'nothingness' is what Buddha very intelligently explained to the world.
9. richardtaborgreene - June 14, 2010 at 09:26 am
Trappings of, visits to and from, exchanges with---faculty thusly made "global" are better than nothing but not enough. Students who do the same are more excusable---young, not rich, free of entanglements. But experience never was education and ability to act on experience. Experience always had to be turned into models, representations of what the experience "meant" and it was those models that enabled a person to be anew, a new self to his/her old self, and see things new, not there before, in home environments, taking action alternatives no one local sees or imagines. That vast surprising expansion of repertoire is one of the nine powers of culture I like to measure and publish on. It amazes, wins Nobel Prizes, and Field's medals, and binds the world across culture---the first scientific society---"I am now a citizen of science, loyal first to truth, and only later to nation, religions, family, ..."
The struggle of students, mixed absurdly across nation and religion, to find common ground has its Perry, relativization of values, profits. If only we had faculty who had done a professionally long and deep version of that same transformation, rather than the visits, views, exchanges stuff.