I’ve enjoyed blogging this past month for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Working and being associated with a great university is a privilege, but taking the mission of the university seriously also brings with it obligations. There is a natural tendency in times of local or national economic distress to become inwardly focused. It’s a basic instinct and a form of human survival.

The problem is that this instinct leads to behaviors that work at cross purposes to the needs of the current global economy. At the moment, economic nationalism is politically expedient, but we need an architecture for global education that works against the chauvinism that comes with many “wrap-ourselves-in-the-flag” economic policies.

In my last blog entry, I argued that we now have an educational economy that makes information abundant confronting an educational delivery system built for a time in which information was scarce. Although I don’t consider myself a technological determinist, I think a number of immutable forces will result in more and more open educational resources. Over a relatively short period of time — through fabrics of trust and various forms of peer review — those open resources will improve in quality.

Will we simply substitute open resources for the largely proprietary learning economy that exists now? I think it would be unfortunate if that proves to be the limit of our aspirations.

The long-term health of our great universities is intimately linked to the health of the cities within which we work and study. Ours is, as we are now finding out, a fragile ecosystem. Cities around the world are links in a chain of value which creates knowledge, economical and political product, and different forms of community.

Technology, open educational resources, and the education community are the key drivers and enablers of an arc of human activity that can lead us to learn and appreciate more about one another and about ourselves at the very moment when the forces of economic nationalism are pulling us in a very different direction. I think the stakes are that high. I hope universities will issue a clarion call urging us to take action to avoid repeating the lessons of history.

Cities like Cleveland have dozens of sister cities around the world. Here in Cleveland, for instance, we have 20 sister cities as diverse as Taipei, Bangalore, Gdansk, and Alexandria. What if we began a 10-year project (lets call it Partnership 2020) to design and develop a university-led “connected cities” project? We could invite different communities within our cities (children, schools, professionals, unions, educators, artists, elected officials, and so forth) to communicate with others in this new connected Web.

They might share oral histories and multimedia presentations about their communities with one another. Or they might participate in formal educational and research exchanges. Scientists could discuss research on sustainability, for instance, in ways that connect to high-school students seeking to learn about ecology and the economics of recycling. We can and we should leverage our universities’ ability to create powerful networks of technology and learners to create binding partnerships that matter.

The oceans that once separated us are now made smaller by the technology that we have helped invent and deploy. Deepening the linkages within and between our communities and across our cities is a 21st challenge worthy of great universities.—Lev Gonick

Lev Gonick, this month’s guest blogger, is CIO at Case Western Reserve University.

Categories: Leadership