International Consortia of Universities and the Mission/Activities Question

On May 10^th 2012 Universitas 21 heaved itself into the higher ed rankings world with “the first ranking of countries which are the ‘best’ at providing higher education. As this international consortia of universities noted:

 The Universitas 21 ranking of national higher education systems has been developed to highlight the importance of creating a strong environment for higher education institutions to contribute to economic and cultural development, provide a high-quality experience for students and help institutions compete for overseas applicants.

A screen grab of the top 24 countries, on the basis of this assessment, is pasted in to the right, and you can download a 28 page PDF of the ranking report here. Two informative commentaries on this rankings initiative were produced over the last few days by Ellen Hazelkorn and Alex Usher.

Now, methodological questions aside, it is always worth asking the questions why has a ranking been produced, and how does the ranking fit into the sponsoring organization’s mission and modus operandi. As I’ve outlined here numerous times, many world university rankings are mechanisms to extract freely provided data from universities, which is then transformed into tables, graphics, analyses, websites, etc., that generate attention, advertising, and fuel for income-generating services provided by private firms like QS and Thomson Reuters.

But the Universitas 21 ranking of national higher education systems is different. First, they are not attempting to extract data from universities as their analysis is framed at the national scale.  Second, they primarily drew upon publicly available data to produce their rankings. And third, Universitas 21 is an international consortia of 23 universities (as at 2012), a rare if not lonely bird when it comes to rankings.

My guess, and this is just a guess, is that Universitas 21 is reworking its mission, and the associated suite of objectives and activities to implement this mission.  I used to work as a faculty member at the National University of Singapore (a founding member of Universitas 21) and in the early 2000s discussions of rankings were nowhere to be seen in Universitas 21-linked meetings; it was all about human mobility, nascent discussions of generating revenue via online learning, and ways to encourage collaborative research. The sanctioning of a new ranking, taken at the May 2011 President’s Meeting of Universitas 21, highlights that it is indeed a new activity; one well suited for the ‘attention economy‘ we are situated in.

While I won’t comment here on the value of the Universitas 21 ranking of national higher education systems, or of the emergence of yet another higher ed ranking, I do think it is a timely reminder of the value of rethinking the missions and activities of international consortia (sometimes deemed networks) of universities.  As Heike Jöns and Michael Hoyler have pointed out in various talks, consortia like Universitas 21 and the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the heyday of the dot.com boom era (remember that?!), a period when universities were exploring new mechanisms to competitively further their internationalization agendas (while simultaneously being seen to be doing so). Interestingly, several of them had early hopes to capitalize on the emergence of for-credit online education as a potential revenue stream.

Smaller, younger, and more exclusive than the national (e.g., Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada), regional (e.g., Association of African Universities), postcolonial/linguistic (e.g., Agence universitaire de la Francophonie; Association of Commonwealth Universities), and global (e.g., International Association of Universities) associations of universities, these international consortia/networks of universities were formed to bring together a group of peers (or almost peers) where some put forward a view that ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link.’ The logic was to bring together like-minded universities to engender deeper and more concentrated forms of collaboration that were impossible on a bilateral 1-1 basis as well as at larger national, regional, or global scales. These consortia, as originally envisioned, were not mechanisms for capacity building (e.g., on a North-South university to university basis); instead they were mechanisms to enable the carefully selected members to become more than the sum of their parts, so to speak.

It is safe to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that such international consortia of universities have had variable levels of success since their emergence in the 1990s and 2000s. Indeed Stephen Toope, the President of the University of British Columbia (UBC), had this to say in 2011:

Inviting the world in—from brilliant hiring to attracting the top international students—cannot of itself create the critical mass of talent that’s needed to solve fundamental global problems. We need partners. We must collaborate, not only with other universities but also with community groups, civil society organizations, industry, and government.

And yet, you might be thinking, we’ve built partnerships! We’ve formed networks! We’ve been collaborating! Yes, and I would argue that so far, none of the university networks that arose at the turn of this century has fulfilled its promise. Truly successful networks typically arise in an organic fashion, from the bottom up. We can’t direct this kind of growth hierarchically. But we can, I believe, foster the conditions in which it will happen naturally. [my emphasis]

A prompt, to be sure, that international consortia like Universitas 21 and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (both of which UBC belongs to) need to have their missions and associated mechanisms for implementation debated about, while member universities also need to consider what expectations can realistically be made of the consortia they participate in.

International consortia of universities are operating in new contexts, as well, since many of them were formed “at the turn of this century.” We see, for example:

• A blossoming of international collaborative degrees, many fueled by the largesse of the European Commission, the emergence of the European Higher Education Area, and also the desire of universities in Pacific Asia, South Asia, and Latin America to partner up at North-South and South-South levels.
• The creation of free massive open online courses (MOOCs) designed to further freely provided lifelong learning and sometimes the simple acquisition of a certificate versus a credit or a degree (a sharp contrast to the early online agenda of the consortia formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s). See, for example, Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, MITx, Udacity, many of which were established in 2011 and 2012.
• The emergence of professional master degrees and “new credit programs that serve non-traditional student populations,” many of which are designed to generate retained revenue for intra-institutional units (departments and schools). These schemes, though, are often targeted at very national if not regional (e.g., state/province) audiences.
• Austerity-related budgets in many national funding councils, which has reduced the opportunity to acquire healthy large-scale research support. In such a context, ‘hitching your wagon’ via an international consortia to other universities in relatively resource rich contexts is unlikely to generate significant, if any, gains.
• The emergence of project-specific international consortia to develop both low and high profile experiments in higher education (e.g. Applied Sciences NYC, est 2012; Center for Urban Science and Progress, est 2012) as well as defacto consortia associated with buildings and programs in select cities (e.g., Singapore’s Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE)), or even universities (e.g., both Saudi Arabia’s KAUST and Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University were brought to life on the back of temporary international consortia of universities.
• The emergence of institutionalized disciplinary-specific networks (e.g., Global Network for Advanced Management, est. 2012) and deep partnerships (e.g., the Wharton-INSEAD Alliance, est. 2001).
• Deep partnerships that bring together 2-3 universities to facilitate enhanced coordination and integration of teaching, research and service functions (e.g., the Monash-Warwick Alliance, est. 2012).
• The establishment of intra-national networks or associations of universities that act as explicit or defacto ‘entry points’ for relations with foreign universities, funding councils, scholarship agencies and the like (e.g. CALDO a consortium of the Universities of Alberta, Laval, Dalhousie and Ottawa).
• An emerging debate about the nature and value system underlying dominant forms of internationalization, including a concern that internationalization is a process “bringing commodification, increasing the brain drain and potentially diminishing diversity in higher education” (see ‘Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action‘). This debate links into internal consortia discussions (that go back to Day 1, really) about the tensions between a member-only peer-to-peer approach vs the idea of more inclusive and diverse institutional membership structures, with more heterogeneous global geographies.

This is an interesting time for international consortia of universities. The consortia structure brings with it strengths and weaknesses.  For example, it is large enough to enable the drawing in of complementary resources, people, skill sets, networks, etc.  The scale of these consortia and the emphasis on peer-based membership structures also facilitates collaborative action on a number of levels. However, international consortia are also too large, in some ways, to facilitate rapid responses to opportunities. There is also a sense of equality in peer-based membership structures and this can preclude deeper partnerships between 2-3 members of a larger consortia. Add in the challenge of how to engender international research collaboration, as alluded to by Stephen Toope above, where you try to “foster the conditions in which it will happen naturally,” international teaching collaboration, and the collective provision of some forms of infrastructure, and you begin to see a rather complicated array of forces, dynamics, and actors to manage: all more reason for regular and open critical engagement about the purpose and value-added of international consortia and associations.

To facilitate further discussions about mission/activities question, I have pasted in (see below) the missions of the international consortia, networks, and associations that I know of.  I’ve listed this information in reverse chronological order, in part to see what the newest consortia, networks and associations have decided to focus upon.  If you know of any others that I have missed, please email me <kolds@wisc.edu> and I’ll add them here. Please keep it in mind, though, that some of these missions are evolving as I write, and the websites I link to are variable in quality and how up-to-date they are.

Kris Olds

ps: my sincere thanks to a large number of people (too many to mention here) who provided very helpful leads and insights about this topic.

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Mission Statements of International Associations, Consortia and Networks of Universities

Note: these are listed in reverse chronological order from date of formation. I’ve had to make a few editorial decisions about some text as there are varying understandings about what a ‘mission statement’ is. Link through to the organizations’ sites if you need information about associated objectives and activities. Please send any necessary updates or notifications about errors below to me at <kolds@wisc.edu>

University Global Partnership Network (UGPN) Est. 2011 | 3 members & 2 partners

The mission of the UGPN is to develop sustainable world-class research, education and knowledge transfer through an active international network of selected Universities collaborating in research, learning and teaching to benefit global society.

Matariki Network of Universities (MNU)  Est. 2010 | 7 members

The MNU has been established to enable the universities to enhance diversity, to share ideas and expertise, and to learn international best practice from each other, recognising the shared commitment to an ethos of excellence in research, scholarship and rounded education.

WC2 University Network Est. 2010 | 12 members

The WC2 University Network has been developed with the goal of bringing together top universities located in the heart of major world cities in order to address cultural, environmental and political issues of common interest to world cities and their universities.

By promoting closer interaction between universities, local government and business communities, WC2 will help to create a forum where universities can be more responsive to the needs of their stakeholders in the context of world cities.

Network of Networks (NNs)  Est. 2008 | 26 members

The Network of Networks (NNs) is the idea of comprehensive network linking existing networks of universities and research institutions, which enables cooperation that will more effectively utilize the respective strengths of its members. By increasing opportunities for high-level joint research projects and student exchanges among members of existing networks, the NNs aims to provide a framework for the development of a new, integrated base of scientific knowledge leading to solutions to complex global challenges.

International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) Est. 2006 | 10 members

IARU members are leading research universities that share a global vision, similar values and a commitment to educating future world leaders.  On 14 January 2006, IARU members signed a memorandum of understanding to engage in various activities including summer internships, research collaborations, benchmarking best practices, and identifying shared or common positions on key public issues.  As the Alliance is small in nature, the members share a close-knit relationship.

International Forum of Public Universities (IFPU) Est. 2006, 21 members

On October 11th, 2007, a new International Forum of Public Universities (IFPU) was created. Limited to some twenty-five establishments, the Forum brings together public universities covering a vast array of contemporary knowledge, establishments that are recognized within their country for the importance they afford to research and their close ties to the development of society. The founding universities members are from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and North America. The office of the general secretariat of the Forum is located at Université de Montréal.

The IFPU answers a need that is not being met by any existing university group. The Forum promotes the expression of values that underlie the mission of public universities in an era of internationalization. The Forum will assist in the creation of new models of cooperation in education, teaching and research. According to common themes reflecting the issues faced by public universities, the Forum will promote education and research actions between establishments by calling upon the professor-researchers of member establishments and their post-graduate students. Some twenty highly reputed public universities from four continents teaming up in the discovery and transmission of new knowledge is certainly timely responsible.

Talloires Network  Est. 2005 | 236 members

The Talloires Network is an international association of institutions committed to strengthening the civic roles and social responsibilities of higher education. We work together to implement the recommendations of the Talloires Declaration and build a global movement of engaged universities.

Note: in 2010 the Asia-Talloires Network of Industry and Community Engaged Universities (ATNEU) was established with the aim of bringing “together key regional stakeholders from universities, industries, NGOs, communities, and governments to catalyze sustainable partnerships that identify and address the social, economic and environmental challenges and ultimately improve the quality of life for communities in the region.”

Global U8 Consortium  Est. 2003 | 7 members

Globalization of research and education activities requires that higher education itself becomes a global knowledge-based enterprise, seeking to build bridges across boundaries of diverse cultures and academic disciplines. Universities must ally with one another to create innovative research and educational advantages.

The Global U8 Consortium is an alliance of universities from around the world whose objective is a dynamic and distinctive collaboration, building innovative curricula and research programs. The GU8 Consortium focuses principally
on four related academic disciplines: Marine Affairs, Global Logistics, Business Administration, and Advanced Technologies. All GU8 members strive to advance worldwide knowledge in these areas of common expertise. We pursue excellence, focus on sustainability and responsible leadership, and impart these values through our students, researchers and partners.

League of European Research Universities (LERU)  Est. 2002 | 20 members

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) was founded in 2002 as an association of research-intensive universities sharing the values of high-quality teaching in an environment of internationally competitive research.

LERU is committed to:

• education through an awareness of the frontiers of human understanding;
• the creation of new knowledge through basic research, which is the ultimate source of innovation in society;
• the promotion of research across a broad front, which creates a unique capacity to reconfigure activities in response to new opportunities and problems.

The purpose of the League is to advocate these values, to influence policy in Europe and to develop best practice through mutual exchange of experience.

Academic Consortium 21 (AC21)  Est. 2002 | 20 members

The vision of AC21 is the promoting of cooperation in education and research between members, the bridging between different societies in the world and the delivering of wisdom to all people to mutually understand and share values, knowledge and cultures necessary to improve quality of life and to foster co-existence beyond national and regional boundaries in the 21st century.

European University Association (EUA) Est. 2001 | 850 members

As a centre of expertise in higher education and research, EUA supports universities by:

• Promoting policies to enable universities and other higher education institutions to respond to growing expectations regarding their contribution to the future development of a knowledge society for Europe

• Advocating these policies to decision makers at different levels and ensuring that the voice of universities is heard

• Informing members of policy debates which will impact on their development

• Developing its knowledge and expertise through projects that involve and benefit individual institutions while also underpinning policy development

• Strengthening the governance, leadership and management of institutions through a range of activities targeted at mutual learning, exchange of experience and the transfer of best practices

• Developing partnerships in higher education and research between Europe and the rest of the word in order to strengthen the position of European universities in a global context.

Worldwide Universities Network (WUN)  Est. 2000 | 19 members

The Worldwide Universities Network comprises 19 research-intensive institutions spanning 6 continents. Our mission is to be one of the leading international Higher Education networks, collaborating to accelerate the creation of knowledge and to develop leaders who will be prepared to address the significant challenges, and opportunities, of our rapidly changing world.

Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi)  Est. 1999 | 214 members

At the beginning of this century there was a strong need to establish new bases for a sustainable global society, taking into account environmental limits, re-examining the dynamics of global economic, political, human, social and cultural models, as well as their local manifestations. In fact we are currently experiencing a crisis of civilization, in which we must facilitate the transition towards a paradigm shift aimed at rebuilding society, with the collective desire and responsibility of attaining a better world for future generations.

This is significant enough to warrant a discussion on what the role of higher education and its social contract should be in this new era, to reinvent an innovative and socially committed response that anticipates and adds value to the process of social transformations. These changes are mostly related to the review of the educative purpose, the role of knowledge in society to address major global issues, local needs in a global context and the need to prepare people to be global actors of positive transformation of societies.

This requires reconsidering what the social contribution of higher education should be. GUNi encourages higher education institutions to redefine their role, embrace this process of transformation and strengthen their critical stance within society.

To face these challenges, the mission of GUNi is to strengthen higher education’s role in society and contributing to the renewal of the visions, missions and policies of higher education’s main issues across the world under a vision of public service, relevance and social responsibility.

IDEA League  Est. 1999 | 5 members

The IDEA League, founded in 1999, is a network of five leading universities of technology and science. Our joint activities in education, research and quality assurance, as well as our joint participation in EU programmes and initiatives make us a model of European cooperation. Together, we create added value by pooling resources for collaborative and complementary programmes for our students, researchers and staff.

Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe (UNICA)  Est. 1999 | 43 members

To achieve its aims UNICA articulates the views of member universities to European institutions and to national, regional and municipal governments. It provides members with information on European initiatives and programmes, and supports them in co-operative projects. It also provides a forum in which universities can reflect on the demands of strategic change in university research, education and administration.

Association of Arab & European Universities (AEUA)  Est. 1998 | 67 members

The Association of Arab and European Universities (AEUA) was initiated in 1998 by the Lutfia Rabbani Foundation in The Netherlands. Its prime objective is to facilitate and to stimulate collaboration between universities in European and Arab countries at an institutional, departmental and faculty level. Ultimate goal is to develop human resources and promote understanding between cultures and exchanges between the civil societies involved.

Universitas 21  Est. 1997 | 21 members

The leading global network of research-intensive universities, working together to foster global citizenship and institutional innovation through research-inspired teaching and learning, student mobility, connecting our students and staff, and wider advocacy for internationalisation.

Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU)  Est. 1997 | 42 members

APRU aims to promote scientific, educational and cultural collaboration among Pacific Rim economies. In both its objectives and guiding principles, APRU embodies a commitment to global academic and research standards.

APRU recognizes that its activities can be powerful catalysts for expanding educational, economic and technological cooperation among Pacific Rim economies. The association seeks to promote dialogue and collaboration between academic institutions in the Pacific Rim so that they can become effective players in today’s global knowledge economy.

Association of East Asian Research Universities (AEARU)  Est. 1996 | 17 members

The Association of East Asian Research Universities (AEARU) is a regional organization founded in January 1996, with the goals of forming a forum for the presidents of leading research-oriented universities in East Asia and of carrying out mutual exchanges between the major universities in the region. Expectations are that this regional union, on the basis of common academic and cultural backgrounds among the member universities, will contribute not only to the development of higher education and research but also to the opening up of a new era leading to cultural, economic and social progress in the East Asian region.

ASEAN University Network (AUN)  Est. 1995 | 26 members

The general objective of the AUN is to strengthen the existing network of cooperation among universities in ASEAN by promoting collaborative study and research programmes on the priority areas identified by ASEAN. The specific objective is to promote cooperation and solidarity among scientists and scholars in ASEAN Member Countries; to develop academic and human resources in the region; and to produce and transmit scientific and scholarly knowledge and information to achieve ASEAN goals.

Consortium for North American Higher Education (CONAHEC)  Est. 1994 | 162 members

The Consortium for North American Higher Education (CONAHEC)’s primary mission is to foster academic collaboration among institutions, organizations and agencies of higher education in Canada, Mexico and the United States. CONAHEC also promotes linkages between North America and higher education entities around the world.

Compostela Group of Universities (CGU)  Est. 1993 | 70 members

The Compostela Group of Universities (CGU) is a large, prominent, open and inclusive network of universities whose overarching goal is to facilitate and promote cooperation in the higher education sector. It achieves this by acting as a platform to foster and support projects among its members as well as by participating in activities as an entity in its own right.

Asociación de Universidades de América Latina y el Caribe para la Integración (AUALCPI)  Est. 1993 | 70 members

AUALCPI primary purpose is to promote cooperation between universities in the region with the aim of promoting the integration of the Commonwealth of Latin America and the Caribbean through collaborative activities and construction of a permanent space for discussion on integration and its relationship to education.

Santander Group (SG)  Est. 1992 | 34 members

The Santander Group is a European Universities Network comprising almost 40 members from 16 European countries cooperating closely to strengthen their individual potential as they strive for excellence in university governance, teaching and research approaches.

The Santander Group is based on mutual trust, understanding, and respect for cultural diversity, which makes the network an open forum for exchange of experience and best practices in the strategic areas for the higher education system in Europe such as quality assurance and academic mobility. Thus, the Network plays an essential role in realisation of the Bologna Process objectives.

The association also encourages contacts between universities and their surrounding communities on matters related to social and technological improvements, which makes it a reliable and strong partner for regional development.

Asociación de Universidades “Grupo Montevideo” (AUGM)  Est.  1991 | 27 Members

The Asociación de Universidades “Grupo Montevideo” (AUGM) is a network of public universities, autonomous and self-governing, of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. It is a civil non-governmental non-profit organization whose main purpose to promote the integration process via scientific, technological, educational and cultural cooperation between all its members.

European Association for University Lifelong Learning (EUCEN)  Est. 1991 | 222 members

To contribute to the economic and cultural life of Europe through the promotion and advancement of lifelong learning within higher education institutions in Europe and elsewhere;

To foster universities’ influence in the development of lifelong learning knowledge and policies throughout Europe.

Consortium Linking Universities of Science and Technology for Education and Research (CLUSTER)  Est. 1990 | 12 members

The VISION for CLUSTER is to become:

• The leading university network in technology for Research, Education and Innovation in Europe
• A central player in the development of Knowledge & Innovation Communities in Europe.
• The prime partner for Industry cooperation at the European level

Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF)  Est. 1989 | 779 members

The Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) is one of the most important higher education and research associations in the world. The AUF has also been La Francophonie’s operating agency for higher education and research since 1989. This Francophone project aims to establish a French-language international academic community that produces and transmits knowledge.

Columbus Association (CA)  Est. 1987 | 47 members

Columbus is a non-profit organization, founded by the European University Association (EUA) and the Association of Latin American Universities (AULA). Since 1987, Columbus has promoted cooperation between universities in Europe and Latin America. Its consolidated network of higher education institutions and university administrations allows directors to identify and implement institutional strategies to respond to new challenges.

Hispanic Association of Colleges & Universities (HACU)  Est. 1986 | 400+ members

To Champion Hispanic Success in Higher Education

HACU fulfills its mission by:

• promoting the development of member colleges and universities;
• improving access to and the quality of post-secondary educational opportunities for Hispanic students; and
• meeting the needs of business, industry and government through the development and sharing of resources, information and expertise.

Coimbra Group  Est. 1985 | 40 members

Founded in 1985 and formally constituted by Charter in 1987, the Coimbra Group is an association of long-established European comprehensive, multidisciplinary universities of high international standard committed to creating special academic and cultural ties in order to promote, for the benefit of its members, internationalization, academic collaboration, excellence in learning and research, and service to society. It is also the purpose of the Group to influence European education and research policy and to develop best practice through the mutual exchange of experience.

Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE)  Est. 1980 | 300+ members

Founded in 1980, the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education (IOHE) was created to respond to the needs of developing international relations, improving the quality of information, and promoting academic collaboration among Higher Education Institutes (HEI) in the Americas. The IOHE is the only university organization that spans the entire continent of the Americas.

The IOHE is a not-for-profit organization whose objectives are primarily educational. This is achieved by: establishing collaboration among universities of the Americas; promoting understanding and mutual support; contributing to the sustainable development of the peoples of the Americas and respecting the free discussion of ideas.

Association of Arab Universities (AAU)  Est. 1969 | 270 members

Assisting and coordinating the efforts of Arab Universities to prepare capable persons who can serve their Arab communities and preserve its unified culture and civilization, as well as to assist in developing its natural resources.

Association of African Universities (AAU)  Est. 1967 | 270 members

The Association of African Universities is an international non governmental organization set up by universities in Africa to promote cooperation among themselves and between them and the international Academic community.

International Association of Universities (IAU)  Est. 1950 | 604 members & 27 member organizations

IAU: Building a Worldwide Higher Education Community.

IAU, founded in 1950, is the UNESCO-based worldwide association of higher education institutions. It brings together institutions and organisations from some 120 countries for reflection and action on common concerns and collaborates with various international, regional and national bodies active in higher education. Its services are available on the priority basis to Members but also to organisations, institutions and authorities concerned with higher education, as well as to individual policy and decision-makers, specialists, administrators, teachers, researchers and students.

The Association aims at giving expression to the obligation of universities and other higher education institutions as social institutions to promote, through teaching, research and services, the principles of freedom and justice, of human dignity and solidarity, and contributes, through international cooperation, to the development of material and moral assistance for the strengthening of higher education generally.

As stated in its Founding Charter IAU’s mission is based on the fundamental principles for which every university should stand:

• The right to pursue knowledge for its own sake and to follow wherever the search for truth may lead;
• The tolerance of divergent opinion and freedom from political interference.

Union de Universidades de America Latina y el Caribe  Est. 1949 | 177 members

Promoting regional integration, defending the autonomy of universities, boosting the quality and social relevance of higher education.

Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU)  Est. 1913 | 500+ members

Working with our members to promote and contribute to the provision of excellent higher education for the benefit of all people throughout the Commonwealth.

New Report: Measuring and Assessing Internationalization

Some new reading on the complex, surprisingly little understood, and much debated topic of ‘internationalization’ was published today by NAFSA. To access a PDF of this free 26 pp. report, written by Madeleine F. Green,  click on the cover page image below. A summary of the report is also available here on the NAFSA website. Madeleine F. Green is former vice president at American Council on Education (ACE), and current senior fellow at NAFSA and at the International Association of Universities (IAU). My thanks to Madeleine Green, as well as Bob Stableski of NAFSA, for permission to post a link to the report here.  Kris Olds

Heavy Lifting vs Spectral Presence in Global Higher Ed

As I shuffled through the morning paper today, supping a much needed cup of coffee, I came across a story about the innovative architect Thom Mayne (of Morphosis) being selected to design the first building of Cornell University’s Applied Sciences NYC campus. This unique development initiative, outlined in detail here (‘Unsettling the university-territory relationship via Applied Sciences NYC’), is rolling forward with considerable speed.

Since Cornell (with Israel’s Technion) won the competition in December 2011, a Cornell/Technion leadership team was appointed in February 2012, and Andrew C. Winters (formerly of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Office) was appointed to “lead the physical development process.”

Taken together, the involvement of a skilled and high-powered leadership team from both Cornell & Technion, along with a NY power broker (Winters), and highly qualified designers like Morphis as well as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (for the master plan), imply that this project is serious business.

CornellNYC Tech, “home of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute,” is really just the start of a broader development agenda, which includes the right to bring in other partner universities (and indeed non-university actors) from the US and abroad to their Roosevelt Island campus.

What is interesting about this project, in comparison to one associated with another Ivy League school (Yale, which is working with the National University of Singapore to develop Yale-NUS College), is that the Cornell-led development process reflects a significantly deeper level of commitment to being grounded in the host city of the new campus. What do I mean by being ‘grounded’ and why might it matter?

Being grounded means establishing commercial, legal, material (including human), and discursive presence in the host city. It means being present such that one is entangled in the regulatory, socio-cultural, physical, political, and institutional landscape of the city. It is a form of presence that leads to being drawn upon, and drawing upon, others also present in that city. It means being knitted into development processes where traded and untraded interdependencies (that “take the form of conventions, informal rules, and habits that coordinate economic actors under conditions of uncertainty”) help bring the city-region development process to life.

In the Cornell process, their mission and objectives have led them to control and be fully responsible for all stages (apart from coordinating the bid and review process, which was guided by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) of the development process including:

• The campus planning and design process
• The physical development process
• The research-led knowledge production process
• The teaching and learning process (in classrooms, labs, etc.).

The process of publicly bidding to develop Applied Sciences NYC (see my summary of the bid process here), then getting deeply involved in campus and building design process, the actual development process, and academic planning for the complex, effectively sutures Cornell’s identity, and its future, to the global city of New York.

Given this stance to the development process, a large number of Cornell and Technion faculty and administrators will be present in NYC, which will lead them to form deep social relations with key actors in the city. Some of these social relations will be sought out, though many will be accidental, subject to the unruly laws of serendipity in the metropolis. Physical co-presence matters to the socio-economic development process in cities, and the lead university (Cornell) behind Applied Sciences NYC seems to recognize this, as did Technion and Mayor Bloomberg.

In the Yale-NUS College case, Yale’s mission and objectives have led them to gift their brand (‘Yale’) for a fee, while providing input to a NUS-controlled:

• Campus planning and design process
• Physical development process
• Teaching and learning process (in classrooms, labs, etc.).

Of course the newly hired faculty will have business cards that say ‘Yale-NUS College’ on them, and promotional materials flag the Yale name everywhere (a point made in this insightful article by Karin Fischer), but this is really a Singaporean project. Two proxy measures of this are that (a) that the newly hired faculty will receive Singaporean contracts, and (b) graduates only receive a degree from the National University of Singapore (not even a dual degree, a now common option in global higher ed). Of course a few administrators will be seconded from Yale, but they will inevitably retain their tenured jobs back in New Haven, CT.

Yale is thus the equivalent of Wharton when it helped provide much of the intellectual and organizational guidance to develop Singapore Management University (est. 2000), except for the fact that Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania did not sell the Wharton/Penn brand, nor did they play up their role in the SMU development process.

There are pros and cons to each model, of course, but I can’t help but wonder what the direct and indirect implications will be of Cornell’s higher level of material and non-material commitment to their new global city venture versus that being undertaken by Yale (at least in a spectral sense) in its newly adopted global city. Being present while being absent provides some latitude of freedom to reduce risk, and cost, but as INSEAD’s presence in Singapore demonstrates, and as Cornell and Technion’s presence in New York indicates, there are a myriad of rewards to being present – to be seen to be contributing, to be seen to be sharing the costs, to being on the ground, and to be demonstrating a medium- to long-term level of confidence in risky experiments in global higher education/global city development.

Kris Olds

Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action

I’m delighted to post the statement below, which is a contribution to a long needed debate about the underlying and often submerged values and ideologies associated with the ‘internationalization’ of higher education.  My thanks to Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary General, International Association of Universities (IAU), for sending it to GlobalHigherEd. See this page for the IAU’s general page on internationalization and this page for more information on their ‘rethinking’ initiative.  Kris Olds

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There are few higher education institutions that would report a disinterest in becoming more internationally connected, more open to international students or being able to offer more international research opportunities to their faculty.  Research undertaken by the International Association of Universities (IAU) has shown that internationalization of higher education is definitely an important policy and strategy for most universities worldwide.

Few higher education institutions though would admit that some of the rationales for ‘going international’ are founded equally if not more so in the need to find new sources of funding, in the pressure to keep climbing the prestige ladder and in the race for global talent on which rests their nation’s competitiveness.  Pursuit of these goals too is today associated with the internationalization process.

The multiplicity of rationales, approaches and strategies has been growing over the past decades, making the concept of higher education internationalization take on many faces and many meanings.  It has also led to confusion, negative reactions and criticism of the process, particularly in developing nations whose higher education institutions feel less able to set the agenda.

This growing sense of unease stemming from, on the one side, a strong commitment to the ideals of internationalization for improving academic quality, for international understanding and to reap the benefits from a multitude of perspectives and cultural traditions and, on the other side, the increasingly vocal criticism of internationalization as a process bringing commodification, increasing the brain drain and potentially diminishing diversity in higher education, has led the IAU to launch and coordinate an initiative called Re-Thinking Internationalization.  Together with a fairly large international Ad Hoc Expert Group, IAU drafted a document entitled Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education (pasted in below as well) which shines a light on these and other challenges while also outlining how institutions can re-center the process of internationalization around the academic fundamentals.

Elaborating the Call took several months but putting it into action will, we hope begin immediately.  Comments, reactions, suggestion for how to turn the principles of the Call into actions and offers of endorsement for the Call can be sent to: iau@iau-aiu.net with subject line stating ‘the Call’.

Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary General, International Association of Universities

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April 2012

Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action

Purpose

This document acknowledges the substantial benefits of the internationalization of higher education but also draws attention to potentially adverse unintended consequences, with a view to alerting higher education institutions to the need to act to ensure that the outcomes of internationalization are positive and of reciprocal benefit to the higher education institutions and the countries concerned.

Internationalization – An evolving concept

1. The internationalization of higher education is a dynamic process, continuously shaped and reshaped by the international context in which it occurs. As this context changes, so do the purpose, goals, meanings, and strategies of internationalization. Over the past half century, the world has changed dramatically as a result of the demise of colonial hegemonies, the end of the Cold War, the rise of new economic powers, and new regional alliances.

2. Globalisation is now the most important contextual factor shaping the internationalization of higher education. Globalisation is characterized by interdependence among nations and manifested in the economic, political, social, cultural, and knowledge spheres. Central to globalization are the increased mobility of goods, services, and people and the accelerating use of information and communication technologies to bridge time and space in unprecedented ways and at continually decreasing costs.

3. Globalization gives an international dimension to all aspects of our lives, communities, and professions. In higher education, it has led to intensified mobility of ideas, students and academic staff and to expanded possibilities for collaboration and global dissemination of knowledge. It has also introduced new aims, activities and actors engaged in internationalization.

4. Institutions, countries and regions in different parts of the world and at different times pursue a variety of goals and participate in diverse ways in the higher education internationalization process. Examples, such as Africa under colonial rule, where access to higher education meant travelling abroad to attend one of the universities of the colonial power, or more recently the Bologna Process, which is radically changing the higher education landscape in Europe through internationally coordinated reforms, illustrate how internationalization fulfils different purposes and brings different rewards and challenges.

5. The goals of internationalization are continuously evolving, ranging from educating global citizens, building capacity for research, to generating income from international student tuition fees and the quest to enhance institutional prestige. New forms of internationalization such as branch campuses abroad, distance learning programs with a global reach, international educational hubs and networks now complement traditional initiatives such as student and staff mobility, curriculum change and international institutional linkages for teaching and research. New institutional players, in particular new private sector providers, have entered the scene.

6. Although the risk of brain drain remains a serious concern in some parts of the world, some countries are using international student mobility to expand their higher education capacity and capabilities. Governments and institutions are creating formal links with academic talent with their own Diasporas to promote brain circulation. And although uneven global flows of talent will remain an issue of consequence, in the long run, some of its worst impacts can be attenuated as a wider array of nations develop capacity and opportunity at home. Higher education internationalization can play a major role in developing such capacities and opportunities broadly throughout the world.

7. In short, internationalization today is remarkably different from what it was in the first half of the 20th century, in the 1960s or 1980s. A widening of drivers of higher education internationalization has had the effect of making internationalization more of an institutional imperative. The balancing of multiple intended outcomes while preserving essential institutional core values and missions is both a challenge and an opportunity. Internationalization is taking place in a radically new, complex, differentiated, and globalized context. The resulting changes in goals, activities, and actors have led to a re-examination of terminology, conceptual frameworks and previous understandings and, more importantly, to an increased but healthy questioning of internationalization’s values, purposes, goals and means.

The changing nature of internationalization in the context of globalization

8. Irrespective of contextual differences within and between countries, nearly all higher education institutions worldwide are engaged in international activities and are seeking to expand them. Engaging with the world is now considered part of the very definition of quality in education and research.

9. The many enduring academic benefits of internationalization are widely recognized as fundamental. The most noteworthy include, among many others:

• Improved quality of teaching and learning as well as research.
• Deeper engagement with national, regional, and global issues and stakeholders.
• Better preparation of students as national and global citizens and as productive members of the workforce.
• Access for students to programs that are unavailable or scarce in their home countries.
• Enhanced opportunities for faculty improvement and, through mobility, decreased risk of academic ‘inbreeding’.
• Possibility to participate in international networks to conduct research on pressing issues at home and abroad and benefit from the expertise and perspectives of researchers from many parts of the world.
• Opportunity to situate institutional performance within the context of international good practice.
• Improved institutional policy-making, governance, student services, outreach, and quality assurance through sharing of experiences across national borders.

10. At the same time, the new world of higher education is characterized by competition for prestige, talent and resources on both national and global scales. National and international rankings are driving some universities to prioritize policies and practices that help them rise in the rankings. At many institutions, internationalization is now part of a strategy to enhance prestige, global competitiveness and revenue. As higher education has in some respects become a global ‘industry’, so has internationalization of higher education become, in some quarters, a competition in which commercial and other interests sometimes overshadow higher education’s fundamental academic mission and values. Competition is in danger of displacing collaboration as the foundation for internationalization.

Possible adverse consequences of internationalization

11. As internationalization of higher education evolves and grows in importance, a number of potentially adverse consequences of the process have begun to appear. These include particular risks for some institutions, uneven benefits, and asymmetrical power relations. Frequently noted are the following concerns:

• The prevalence of English, though driven by the advantages of having a common medium of communication, has the potential to diminish the diversity of languages studied or used to deliver higher education. The widespread use of English may thus lead to cultural homogenization and finding solutions for these adverse impacts, even though recognized, is difficult.
• Global competition may diminish the diversity of institutional models of what constitutes quality higher education. The pursuit of a single model of excellence embodied in the notion of a “world-class university,” usually narrowly defined as excellence in research, may result in the concentration of scarce national resources in a few or a single institution to the detriment of a diverse national system of higher education institutions, fit for diverse national purposes. This risk is potentially present everywhere, but is particularly acute for developing countries.
• Brain drain may continue or even accelerate, undermining the capacity of developing countries and their institutions to retain the talent needed for their prosperity, cultural advancement, and social well-being.
• Large-scale international student recruitment, at times using questionable and even unethical practices, may cause a variety of problems, such as brain drain. Also, the presence of large numbers of international students may result in misconceptions about decreased opportunities for domestic students or inadvertently feed prejudice about foreigners. This can overshadow the highly positive intellectual and intercultural benefits that international students bring to the classroom, campus, and communities in which they study and live.
• The growth of transnational programs and creation of branch campuses raises a number of questions including how these enhance the educational capacity of host nations over the long-term, and how able they are to deliver on the promise of an education comparable to that delivered by the sponsoring institution in its home country. A foreign educational presence, with its perceived prestige, has the potential to disadvantage local higher education institutions striving to respond to national needs. Some host nations experience difficulty regulating the presence, activity and quality of foreign programs.
• As the pursuit of institutional reputation, stimulated by rankings, gains in importance among the goals of internationalization, the selection of international partners may be driven more by the desire to gain prestige by association than by actual interest in cooperation. Such a trend carries the risk of exclusion for many important and high quality institutions from international partnerships.
• The asymmetry of relations between institutions, based on access to resources for the development and implementation of internationalization strategies, can lead to the pursuit of goals that advantage the better –resourced institutions and can result in unevenly shared benefits.

In noting these adverse consequences, the inherent value of internationalization of higher education is not being called into question. On the contrary, the goal of raising awareness of these potential risks among the institutions of higher education is to ensure that action is taken to avoid them.

Affirming values underpinning internationalization: A call to higher education institutions

12. The benefits of internationalization are clear. In pursuing internationalization, however, it is incumbent on institutions of higher education everywhere to make every effort to avoid or at least mitigate its potential adverse consequences.

13. The prevailing context for higher education internationalization described in this document requires all institutions to revisit and affirm internationalization’s underlying values, principles and goals, including but not limited to: intercultural learning; inter-institutional cooperation; mutual benefit; solidarity; mutual respect; and fair partnership. Internationalization also requires an active, concerted effort to ensure that institutional practices and programs successfully balance academic, financial, prestige and other goals. It requires institutions everywhere to act as responsible global citizens, committed to help shape a global system of higher education that values academic integrity, quality, equitable access, and reciprocity.

14. In designing and implementing their internationalization strategies, higher education institutions are called upon to embrace and implement the following values and principles:

• Commitment to promote academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and social responsibility.
• Pursuit of socially responsible practices locally and internationally, such as equity in access and success, and non-discrimination.
• Adherence to accepted standards of scientific integrity and research ethics.
• Placement of academic goals such as student learning, the advancement of research, engagement with the community, and addressing global problems at the centre of their internationalization efforts.
• Pursuit of the internationalization of the curriculum as well as extra curricula activities so that non-mobile students, still the overwhelming majority, can also benefit from internationalization and gain the global competences they will need.
• Engagement in the unprecedented opportunity to create international communities of research, learning, and practice to solve pressing global problems.
• Affirmation of reciprocal benefit, respect, and fairness as the basis for partnership.
• Treatment of international students and scholars ethically and respectfully in all aspects of their relationship with the institution.
• Pursuit of innovative forms of collaboration that address resource differences and enhance human and institutional capacity across nations.
• Safeguarding and promotion of cultural and linguistic diversity and respecting local concerns and practices when working outside one’s own nation.
• Continuous assessment of the impacts – intended and unintended, positive and negative – of internationalization activities on other institutions.
• Responding to new internationalization challenges through international dialogue that combines consideration of fundamental values with the search for practical solutions to facilitate interaction between higher education institutions across borders and cultures while respecting and promoting diversity.

15. These values are neither slogans nor vague abstractions. They should be applied in very concrete ways to institutional policy and practice. As institutions develop their internationalization strategies, they should be clear and transparent about why they are undertaking a particular initiative, how it relates to their academic mission and values, and what mechanisms can be put in place to avoid possible negative consequences. Open discussion, within and across institutions and associations and with governments, should keep fundamental academic goals and principles in the foreground, in the context of rapid change, complex realities, and ever-mounting pressures of competition and limited resources.

Next steps

16. This Call to Higher Education Institutions is but a first step in IAU’s engagement to collaborate with its Member Organizations and other international education associations and partners to provide institutional guidance and examples of good practice in internationalization. IAU will now turn to helping institutions translate these principles and values into everyday practice.

The Business Side of World University Rankings

Over the last two years I’ve made the point numerous times here that world university rankings have become normalized on an annual cycle, and function as data acquisition mechanisms to drill deep into universities but in a way that encourages (seduces?) universities to provide the data for free. In reality, the data is provided at a cost given that the staff time allocated to produce the data needs to be paid for, and allocating staff time this way generates opportunity costs.

See below for the latest indicator of the business side of world university rankings. Interestingly today’s press release from Thomson Reuters (reprinted in full) makes no mention of world university rankings, nor Times Higher Education, the media outlet owned by TSL Education, which was itself acquired by Charterhouse Capital Partners in 2007. Recall that it was that Times Higher Education began working with Thomson Reuters in 2010.

The Institutional Profiles™ that are being marketed here derive data from “a combination of citation metrics from Web of KnowledgeSM, biographical information provided by institutions, and reputational data collected by Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey,” all of which (apart form the citation metrics) come to the firm via the ‘Times Higher Education World University Rankings (powered by Thomson Reuters).’

Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with providing services (for a charge) to enhance the management of universities, but would most universities (and their funding agencies) agree, from the start, to the establishment of a relationship where all data is provided for free to a centralized private authority headquartered in the US and UK, and then have this data both managed and monetized by the private authority? I’m not so sure.

This is arguably another case of universities thinking for themselves and not looking at the bigger picture. We have a nearly complete absence of collective action on this kind of developmental dynamic; one worthy of greater attention, debate, and oversight if not formal governance.

Kris Olds

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12 Apr 2012

Thomson Reuters Improves Measurement of Universities’ Performance with New Data on Faculty Size, Reputation, Funding and Citation Measures

Comprehensive data now available in Institutional Profiles for universities such as Princeton, McGill, Nanyang Technological, University of Hong Kong and others

Philadelphia, PA, April 12, 2012 – The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced the availability of 138 percent more performance indicators and nearly 20 percent more university data within Institutional Profiles™, the company’s online resource covering more than 500 of the world’s leading academic research institutions. This new data enables administrators and policy makers to reliably measure their institution’s performance and make international comparisons.

Using a combination of citation metrics from Web of KnowledgeSM, biographical information provided by institutions, and reputational data collected by Thomson Reuters Academic Reputation Survey, Institutional Profiles provides details on faculty size, student body, reputation, funding, and publication and citation data.

Two new performance indicators were also added to Institutional Profiles: International Diversity and Teaching Performance. These measure the global composition of staff and students, international co-authorship, and education input/output metrics, such as the ratio of students enrolled to degrees awarded in the same area. The indicators now cover 100 different areas, ensuring faculty and administrators have the most complete institutional data possible.

All of the data included in the tool has been vetted and normalized for accuracy. The latest update also includes several enhancements to existing performance indicators, such as Normalized Citation Impact. This allows for equally weighted comparisons between subject groups that have varying levels of citations.

“Institutional Profiles continues to provide answers to the questions that keep administrators up at night: ‘Beyond citation impact or mission statement, which institutions are the best collaboration partners for us to pursue? How can I understand the indicators and data that inform global rankings?’,” said Keith MacGregor, executive vice president at Thomson Reuters. “With this update, the tool provides the resources to reliably measure and compare academic and research performance in new and more complete ways, empowering strategic decision-making based on each institution’s unique needs.”

Institutional Profiles, a module within the InCites™ platform, is part of the research analytics suite of solutions provided by Thomson Reuters that supports strategic decision making and the evaluation and management of research. In addition to InCites, this suite of solutions includes consulting services, custom studies and reports, and Research in View™.

For more information, go to:
http://researchanalytics.thomsonreuters.com/institutionalprofiles/

About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial and risk, legal, tax and accounting, intellectual property and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs approximately 60,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

Contacts

Alyssa Velekei
Public Relations Specialist
Tel: +1 215 823 1894

Advocacy vs Analysis and the Case for Learning While Doing

Spring Recess as it is called here is coming to a close, alas. My highlight was camping for three days on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Wisconsin & Mississippi rivers — the scenery was spectacular, the company wonderful, and it was a true pleasure to be disconnected from ‘the grid’ for a while.

Since coming back to Madison I discovered that Yale faculty passed a rather bizarre, in my view, resolution about politics in Singapore. Really, come on folks, if your core concern is with how Yale governs the implementation of its internationalization strategy, how Yale is led, and the nature of Yale’s overseas engagements, then surely it makes more sense to focus the resolution on Yale (your university) vs the country of Singapore!

While I was away I also learned, via the various mechanisms I use to track links, RTs (via Twitter), and repostings, that Dr. Michael Montesana’s recent entry (‘Is Yale a Reliable Partner for the National University of Singapore?’) generated a large volume of traffic on both the WordPress.com and Inside Higher Ed sites that GlobalHigherEd is hosted on. A variety of people from around the world also emailed me about it.

A noteworthy aspect of the feedback I received was that readers (including many Singaporeans) were appreciative of Dr. Montesano’s concentrated focus on Yale versus Singapore, and the broader histories and networks that intersect with the Yale-NUS College formation process. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his style of argumentation, and final recommendations, Montesano’s entry was flagged as providing a relatively novel and wide window (not the window, of course) on the Yale side of the development process, especially by someone who knows and cares about both Yale and Singapore.

Now, let’s stand back and reflect on this situation.

First, there is an abundance of advocacy-oriented representations that are required to legitimize such global higher ed ventures, but there is remarkably little concurrent (and autonomous) analysis of the key related issues. And while Montesano’s entry is an opinion piece, it is framed in an analytical way, seeking to identify the complicated forces, contradictions, currents of thought, and networks, that led Yale’s leaders to seek a link (via Yale-NUS College) to this unique Southeast Asian city-state.

Second, let’s think about audience. Montesano’s entry is about a higher education phenomenon, and people associated with universities have a thirst for knowledge about what is really going on regarding the plethora of objectives, the complicated politics, and the ever evolving constellation of social relations, that bring an endeavor like Yale-NUS College to life. This thirst for more nuanced and lengthy forms of argumentation drew people to his entry for he is making a sustained argument that is designed to be engaged with, debated about, agreed or disagreed with.

The case for learning while doing

One of the lessons I am starting to take away about debates about Yale-NUS, as well as other forms of higher education experiments (e.g., the European Higher Education Area), is that it is not enough for the key stakeholders to advocate while only providing basic background information. Why is this so? Well, the stakes in these ventures are too high, there is a thirst for knowledge about the emerging, and most people associated with higher education have a critical-analytical instinct guiding their thinking (as must be the case).

Given the above, I would argue that much more needs to be done to engender concurrent research and deliberative fora about the transformative initiatives universities are considering, being drawn into, and are developing (often with foreign partners). This is a point my Europe-based colleagues (esp., Anne Corbett, Roger Dale, and Susan Robertson) have been making for some time about the Bologna Process, where there is an abundance of advocacy, and contract-derived research, but a paucity of ‘intellectually autonomous’ analysis about the deeper meanings, histories, and implications of the Bologna Process. See, for example, ‘From where I sit – We’re scholars, not politicians‘ (Times Higher Education, 3 November 2011), as well as ‘Time for blue skies thinking about the future of higher education in Europe,’ University World News, 8 April 2012).

What to do about the paucity of research and analysis about emerging experiments in globalizing higher ed? Well, remember that we (the experimenting universities) are higher education institutions with significant in-house research capabilities! Using our own resources, and our connections to relevant funding councils, we could easily do some or all of the following:

• Upper level undergraduates, and graduate students, could be funded to assist in the development process, effectively ensuring that they engage in intensive forms of participant observation. Their experiences could generate the data for honor’s theses, MA and PhD projects, and/or research-based publications and related websites. Collaboration between students in partner universities would likely build bridges, and generate enhanced understandings of the development process.

• Active universities, perhaps working in conjunction with key funding councils and foundations, could fund basic (blue skies) research about a wide array of relevant issues, debates, and phenomenon. This would likely have to take a ‘special initiatives’ format given that this kind of phenomenon has a unique life-cycle, at least with respect to the development process.

• Relevant business and law schools, as well as science and technology studies programs, could develop detailed case studies stretching from the formative phases of negotiations through all stages of the implementation process, the launch of a new venture, and the first few years of its existence.

• Archives of all key correspondence, minutes of meetings, curricula in various stages of development, contracts and agreements, etc., could be systematically preserved for internal and external researchers, current and future. Open access sites of documentation could be easily established and incrementally added to while simultaneously moving through all stages of the implementation process. This type of information could also be drawn upon by the higher education media, with one obvious benefit being less risk of error of interpretation.

There are likely many other ideas along these lines, though as Anne Corbett implies, they would have to be organized in a manner that respects “academic values and intellectual autonomy.”

In closing, there is strong desire for more information, transparency, and especially nuanced analysis about the emerging landscape of global higher education and research. If we just ‘do’ then we miss opportunities to learn along the way, and help educated ourselves and interested others. And apart from learning, even critical ‘blue skies’ research can feed back into the development process and engender more informed and nuanced debate on the complex realities of such endeavors.

Sounds like a win-win proposition to me.

Kris Olds

Is Yale a Reliable Partner for the National University of Singapore?

Editor’s note: one of the more interesting aspects of the globalization of higher education is the emergence of new universities (e.g., Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST), as well as some experiments in the establishment of 21st century liberal arts colleges (LACs); LACs that both reflect, and simultaneously attempt to shape, currents of thoughts about the future of global higher education.  For example, I recall, very clearly, the contested emergence of Quest University Canada in a local context relatively hostile to private higher education institutions (HEIs), even HEIs that are (as Quest is) non-profit and genuinely student centered. More recently, Amsterdam University College (est. 2009) was established in the context of experiments in higher education reform in the Netherlands, as well as in the Amsterdam city-region. By most accounts Amsterdam University College (AUC) has been an early success re. enhanced student learning outcomes, while uniquely reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Amsterdam. We’ve also seen the establishment of branch campuses such as NYU Abu Dhabi, similar to AUC in some ways, but reflective of more geographically diverse currents of thoughts, resources, ideologies, and institutional impulses. The same goes with respect to Yale-NUS College, currently in the development phase on the edges of the National University of Singapore (NUS) campus.

One of the important aspects of the development of higher education institutions such as NYU Abu Dhabi, Duke Kunshan University, and Yale-NUS College, is that they are branded and usually shaped by an established elite university, but they require state largesse (from the host city/nation-state) to exist. These are spectacular initiatives, in some ways, but in so requiring state largesse, including from non-liberal (often authoritarian) political regimes, they require the assemblage of elements of geographically separate institutional infrastructures, curricula, brands, modi operandi, etc.  In the context of bringing all of these material and non-material aspects of the development process together, all sorts of debates can emerge for the articulation process is never easy. Moreover, the typical planning process is relatively complicated, with different agendas, assumptions as to what a ‘non-negotiable’ is, and variable temporal expectations regarding desired outcomes. Add some intra-institutional dynamics into the mix, including different understandings of the governance pathways that should be utilized for these often high risk endeavors, not to mention variable senses of the value of transparency when governing, and some intense debates are sure to emerge!

Dr. Michael Montesano’s guest entry below (‘Is Yale a Reliable Partner for the National University of Singapore?’), also available in PDF format, needs to be situated in the context of deliberations about the nature of the formal and informal governance pathways that are utilized for high risk global higher ed initiatives. Dr. Michael Montesano is a long-time resident of Singapore, a Southeast Asia specialist, and a member of the Yale College Class of 1983. He taught in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the National University of Singapore from 1999-2008 and was an inaugural recipient of the NUS Alumni Advisory Board’s Inspiring Mentor Award (in 2009).

Kris Olds

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Is Yale a Reliable Partner for the National University of Singapore?

by Dr. Michael Montesano (3 April 2012)

Yale University’s approach to its partnership with the National University of Singapore (NUS) to establish an undergraduate liberal arts college in the country is flawed and ill-conceived in ways that call into question Yale’s ability to be a responsible long-term partner for Singapore and its national university.  Yale’s current leadership has pursued the project in so personalistic a fashion as to build no solid institutional foundation for it at Yale.  That leadership continues to demonstrate no effective understanding of Singapore, even as it has alienated the distinguished specialists on Southeast Asia on Yale’s faculty who could offer guidance.  That leadership appears to censor itself and to pursue a wider regime of self-censorship at Yale in matters relating to the proposed Yale-NUS college.  This regime cannot last; the dissatisfaction that it arouses will come to undermine Yale’s ability to serve as NUS’s partner.  Efforts on the part of Yale’s leadership to address concerns at Yale about academic freedom in Singapore have remained vague and evasive.  That leadership has never explained clearly the role of a “national university” in a “late”-developing country like Singapore or the instrumental nature of academic freedom at such a university.  Other aspects of that role suggest additional challenges that an effective partnership between Yale and NUS will face.  The proposed partnership between Singapore and NUS has now caused a deep, bitter crisis of governance at Yale.  The university now faces two choices: to withdraw from its partnership with NUS or radically to restructure its plans for participation in the proposed Yale-NUS college in Singapore.

I. A poorly informed, reckless, and “sultanistic” commitment.

Last August, during one of the current Yale president’s eerily McNamara-esque flying visits from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States to a Southeast Asian country of whose history and day-to-day life he lacks all comprehension, I attended a reception in his honor for Yale alumni living in Singapore.   The event began with some informal remarks from the president, heralding the great promise of the liberal arts college that Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) government had hired Yale to help create on the Kent Ridge campus of the National University of Singapore. Early in those remarks, the president noted his regret that some of what had been said about this plan in New Haven might have caused “embarrassment” in Singapore.  With breezy contempt, he indicated that criticism of the plan reflected the views of only a small minority at Yale and that newspapers and their coverage need not be taken too seriously.

Already opposed to the plan for a “Yale-NUS College,” I nevertheless found in these remarks two further causes for real concern about the scheme.

First, I asked myself, did Yale’s president really understand Singapore so poorly as not to know that its PAP government has long brushed aside comments from weak and woolly Western liberals on all but two or three very specific aspects of its system of government?  Could he really think that anyone in authority in Singapore had been embarrassed by the rather predictable criticisms voiced by members of the Yale faculty or printed in The Yale Daily News?

Second, I had to wonder, could Yale’s president, travelling with a number of members of the Yale faculty, honestly believe that his sneering reference to a free press would not get back to New Haven?  Did he not understand that, when it did, his offer to enlist Yale as one more regiment of educational Hessians in the service of the PAP government would only face even sharper criticism?

NUS and the Singapore government had, I then realized, had the bad luck to tie themselves to a partner who was both exceedingly poorly informed and terribly reckless.

But the evening only grew more worrying.  As Yale’s vice-president-cum-University-Secretary and I spoke by the buffet table some twenty minutes after the president finished his remarks, he walked over, and the vice president took the opportunity to introduce us.  I told Yale’s president that I believed that his failure, as in his remarks that evening, to articulate any understanding of the Singaporean and Southeast Asian contexts in which Yale would help found this new college meant that what he said about the college and its promise to bring liberal arts education to “Asia” had no credibility.  He replied, as the vice president listened, that having and articulating such an understanding were not his job.  To my comment that he was in that case in way over his head in Singapore, he told me to “come back in five years” and see what the new college would by then have accomplished.  My reply, one that mirrored the sentiments of various senior members of the Yale faculty with whom I had spoken over the course of the preceding year, was that it was likely to be a pretty mediocre operation.  Now the president grew openly angry.  Snarling that he had been involved in many undertakings in his life and that not one had been mediocre, he abruptly turned his back on me and strode off.

Unpleasant as this brutal display of  the Yale president’s self-regard was, it was also quite useful.  For it alerted me to a third cause for concern about the planned Yale-NUS college.  Yale’s current president clearly had so much of his ego tied up in the scheme that he was beyond having a serious, rational discussion about it with an informed critic.  And, having served in his post since 1993, he could only be considered a short-timer.  How could NUS and Singapore possibly count on Yale’s next president to share its incumbent president’s commitment to the new college, when that commitment had such an unmistakably personal rather than institutional nature?  Perhaps Yale’s Singaporean partners ought to bone up on the eminent Yale political scientist and sociologist Juan J. Linz’s work on “sultanism” as they prepare to treat further with Yale and its current president.  Perhaps, too, they ought to contemplate Professor Linz’s theorizing on the aftermath of the demise of “sultanistic regimes” and its implications for the future of the Yale-NUS college.

II. Singapore: In Southeast Asia, or just  “Asia”?

In September 2010, when Yale first formally announced that it was exploring the establishment of a liberal arts college at NUS, the Yale Office of International Affairs issued a five-page document entitled, “Yale and Singapore: Other Projects and Facts.”   In addition to listing internships, the number of Yale alumni in Singapore and of Singaporeans at Yale, workshops, summer courses, and various other connections between Yale and Singapore, the document noted that “Yale established its Southeast Asia Studies Program in 1947 – the first area studies program in the United States to embark on the study of Southeast Asia in all disciplines.”    Today, that program takes the form of a Council on Southeast Asia Studies, bringing together faculty from a range of departments.

Among the half-dozen most important Southeast Asianists to teach at Yale in the past sixty-five years was a Sudetenland-born Jew whose family saved him from the Holocaust by securing him a post in the Netherlands East Indies, today’s Indonesia, in 1939.  Following internment on Java by the Japanese, arrival in New Zealand as a refugee, and a Cornell doctorate, Harry J. Benda joined Yale’s history department in 1959.  Professor Benda died, too young, in 1971.  His journal articles, collected in a Yale Southeast Asia Studies publication by the late, great Yale historian Robin Winks, remain to this day influential in shaping understandings of the interplay of past and present in this region.

And, while the staff of the Yale Office of International Affairs seems to have been unaware of it when they compiled the September 2010 document, it was in the career of Professor Benda that the most significant previous academic connection between Yale and Singapore came.  In 1968 the father of the Singaporean technocracy, Dr Goh Keng Swee, selected Professor Benda to serve as the inaugural director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) while on leave from Yale for a year. At the time of its foundation, ISEAS embodied then newly independent Singapore’s realization of the need to understand its neighbors.  Dr Goh’s appointment of Professor Benda, his confidence in Professor Benda’s suitability for the post, was no casual matter; little about the PAP state’s approach to government or institution-building is ever a casual matter.

Today, Harry J. Benda’s portrait hangs in a place of honor in the ISEAS library, in the Institute’s building adjacent to NUS’s Kent Ridge campus.  The Association for Asian Studies annually presents a prize named in Benda’s memory for the best “first book” on Southeast Asia.[1]  But neither Yale’s current president nor any of those at Yale willing to work with him in creating the Yale-NUS college would appear ever to have publicly alluded to his place in Yale’s history of academic relations with Singapore or to his relationship with Dr Goh, yet alone cited his invaluable work or durable insights on Southeast Asia, even as they plunge into a long-term involvement with this region.

Neither is it the case that Yale’s leadership show any sign of drawing instead on the work of other serious scholars of Southeast Asia in an effort to understand Singapore and its region.  Instead, as in a now notorious episode, Yale’s president has displayed more familiarity with the much advertised Singapore Airlines than with scholarship that might help him understand in an intellectually credible way the historical, social, political, and economic contexts in which the Yale-NUS college will operate.[2]

At times, in fact, it has seemed that Yale’s leadership remains in denial of the reality that Singapore is in fact in Southeast Asia.  Yale’s president appears to conceive of a place called “Asia,” to which he will deliver the blessings of a liberal arts education in the form of a college sited in Singapore.  Scholars in attendance at the Yale-NUS college reception during the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago this past January cringed as Yale’s president witnessed his missionary impulse to bring education to this “Asia,” as he slighted the calibre of NUS’s extant offerings in the humanities and social sciences and its University Scholars Programme honors program, and as he repeatedly invoked “Asians.”  One of those present e-mailed me to say that it all sounded like something out of Kipling, that Yale’s president could not possibly appreciate how foolish he sounded to the Asianists in the room, Singaporean and non-Singaporean alike.

Can NUS and Yale’s new employers in the PAP government possibly deem reliable a partner that, so many months into their partnership, remained both so uncomprehending and so uninterested in their country and its region?  Hard to imagine.  But the situation is still worse.  For, in addition to this lack of comprehension and interest, one must note the alienation from the Yale administration’s decision to sell Yale’s services to Singapore of the members of Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies, of the Yale faculty who have actually devoted their lives to understanding the region and might bring their understanding to a Yale initiative in Southeast Asia.

Last August, Yale and NUS convened in New Haven a curriculum-planning event.  NUS’s president and vice-chancellor Tan Chorh Chuan attended, along with Yale’s president.  So did Southeast Asianists from Cornell and Berkeley, but not from Yale.  It is impossible to know whether President Tan remembered Yale’s boast of eleven months before about its legacy of and strength in the study of Southeast Asia and thus wondered why his new partners could not produce Yale’s Southeast Asianists at this event.  In fact, the members of Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies only learned about the event afterward.  Their participation would have introduced a decidedly unwelcome element of dissent into the event.  But Singapore has a duty to ask itself, how dependable a partner can Yale be, if its leadership cannot count on the assistance of the members of its faculty best prepared to guide it as it seeks to navigate the region?

III.  The rot of self-censorship.

Liberally inclined Singaporeans have long viewed self-censorship as the scourge of the political system that has resulted from uninterrupted PAP rule since before their country’s independence in 1965.  Willingly or not, most Singaporeans and many foreigners resident in Singapore rely on internalized self-censorship as they go about their daily lives.  This is a choice that they make.  It is also a reality that may change as the history of this country unfolds.

As the Yale president’s remarks on the press here last August suggest, however, the real concern raised by Yale’s engagement with the PAP government and with NUS involves self-censorship at Yale rather than in Singapore.

In fact, a Yale news release of May 2011 led many Yale alumni in Singapore—both Americans and Singaporeans—to conclude that Yale was already practicing artful self-censorship.[3]  The release announced that a member of the Yale College Class of 1980, Charles W. (“Chip”) Goodyear, would join the governing Yale Corporation as a Successor Trustee.  It detailed Mr Goodyear’s record of generous and meaningful support for Yale and his career in finance and mining.  It omitted, however, any mention of Mr Goodyear’s relationship with Singapore.  In early 2009 it was announced with great fanfare here that Mr Goodyear had been named CEO-Designate of Temasek Holdings, one of the PAP government’s two well endowed sovereign wealth funds.  He was due to take the reins at Temasek in October of that year.  In July 2009, however, it was announced that an inability to agree on questions of corporate strategy had led Temasek and Mr Goodyear to the mutual decision to call this plan off and to part ways.  The scale and prominence of Temasek meant that, in Singaporean, Asian, and indeed global financial circles, this was big news.  It represented an undeniable loss of face for the PAP government, which has long taken pride in succession planning.  And the omission of any mention of Mr Goodyear’s brief employment with Temasek in Yale’s May 2011 release led alumni here to chuckle knowingly and to remark to one another how quickly Yale’s leadership had assimilated Singaporean norms of self-censorship.

Today, faculty at Yale report nervousness in the ranks about opposing plans for the Yale-NUS college openly, for fear of retribution.  When, a year ago, I raised my own objection with one of Yale’s recent “star hires” in the social sciences, he told me curtly that all to whom he had spoken had told him that this was a train that had already left the station.  Translation: he was not commenting, and our conversation should move on to another topic.

Yale undergraduates have not been spared the pressure to censor themselves either.  On one occasion in early 2011, Yale’s president placed a call to The Yale Daily News to advise the author of an op-ed piece critical of his plans for Singapore to consider other perspectives on those plans in the future.

The problem, of course, is that the routinization at Yale of self-censorship on matters relating to Singapore will require substantial disruption of the intellectual life of the university.  Over time, Yale faculty and students will find the need to censor themselves when writing of Singapore or of the Yale-NUS college impossible to abide.  And there is another angle to all this, for, in its zeal to pursue its own version of the internationalization of the university, Yale’s current leadership overlooks just how “international” Yale’s intellectual life has long been.  Recent developments in Singapore and their relationship to Yale are illustrative.

Singapore held polls for the country’s largely ceremonial presidency last August.  In the course of the unusually heated campaign, there was discussion of the arrest of more than twenty social activists and labor organizers, including many affiliated with the Catholic Church, in 1987 under the country’s Internal Security Act (ISA).  Typically referred to, following the PAP government’s description of it, as “the Marxist conspiracy” but also sometimes called, following apparent Internal Security Department nomenclature, “Operation Spectrum,” this episode is not often talked about in Singapore.  But it remains controversial, and its impact on the Church here has been profound.  Until the recent publication of the detention memoir of the now retired lawyer Teo Soh Lung, perhaps the most important book on the episode was Francis Seow’s To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison, published in 1994 in Yale’s own Southeast Asia publications series.  The question that must be asked is whether, if in future such a manuscript comes to Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies, its leadership will either feel obliged to or come under subtle pressure to decline to publish it, in order not to cause Singapore “embarrassment.”  A pair of indicators suggest that such an outcome is not so far-fetched as it might appear.

First, just before Thanksgiving 2010, I contacted Yale’s much admired and loved Catholic chaplain, the head of the university’s long influential St Thomas More Catholic Center, by phone.  My purpose was to suggest that, sooner or later in Yale’s relationship with NUS, Operation Spectrum and its difficult legacy would come to the attention of Yale Catholics and that it would be good to expose the community to it first.  The chaplain listened to me carefully.  He even asked whether Vincent Cheng, the seminarian-turned-social-worker who became the most high-profile detainee in the operation, was able to travel.[4] I followed up by sending further information to the chaplain.  But—puzzlingly? troublingly?—I heard no more from him until I contacted him a year later.  At that time, following a brief response to an e-mail message, he again went silent. More recently, another Singaporean former seminarian who worked as a labor organizer here before deciding that it was best to leave the country reached out to the same Yale chaplain.  He never heard back either.  And it would seem that most Yale Catholics remain unaware of “the Marxist conspiracy” in Singapore.

Second, and chillingly, in early 2006 Yale’s current president caved in to pressure from the government of Thailand to allow representatives of the Thai monarchy, whose supporters would just months later mount a coup d’état in Bangkok, pre-publication review (just “for accuracy,” but they always say that, don’t they?) of a biography of the Thai king already in the process of publication by Yale University Press.[5] While the late Yale law professor Alexander Bickel turned over in his grave, publication of the book was thus delayed long enough so that the world’s media had no access to it as they reported on the gala celebrations marking sixty years of the king’s reign in June 2006.  This episode leaves little doubt about the impact, on Yale itself, of the current Yale president’s weak commitment to academic freedom where Southeast Asia is concerned.   Its implications for Yale scholarship relating to Singapore are clear and ominous.  After all, Yale was not even employed by the government of Thailand when the episode occurred.

That this Thai episode elicited so little protest from Yale faculty was hard to understand.  Nonetheless, it was in itself a one-time event.  Should such episodes, or even the suspicion of them, become routine in matters concerning Singapore, however, the resultant regime of self-censorship in New Haven would surely prove unsustainable.  It would poison both the relations of many of Yale’s humanists and social scientists with Yale’s leadership and the intellectual climate at the university.  It would thus also undercut the ability of Yale, especially under the leadership of future Yale presidents, to serve as an effective partner of the PAP government and NUS.

There are two deep ironies here.  The first is that, as I noted at the outset, Singapore’s PAP government pays no heed to most criticisms levelled against it, whether by scholars at Singaporean or foreign institutions.  It has long since concluded that only criticism of very particular kinds can do it damage.  And it simply does not take most scholars in the humanities and social sciences seriously in any case; too many of them are liberals.  Second, Singapore’s regime of self-censorship is enforced through unspecified “OB markers” (with “OB” meaning “out of bounds”).  Never knowing how far one can safely go in expressing oneself, Singaporeans learn to remain carefully short of where they think the line might be.  They thus avoid even criticisms for which they would face no retribution.  Yale’s president and others at the university seem very quickly to have learned the same behaviour.

IV.  Not how Singapore is different, but why it is.

Yale’s current leadership has been maddeningly, even irresponsibly, vague in the case that it has made for both the merits of “a new model of residentially-based liberal education to serve all of Asia” (as Yale’s president and provost put it in their September 2010 “Prospectus for a Liberal Arts College in Singapore”—a college that will, incidentally, enrol mostly Singaporeans) and for the merits of selling Yale’s services to the PAP government.  And it has also been difficult for many at Yale—troubled by this vagueness but far away from Singapore, unfamiliar with its history and politics, and lacking workaday experience of its universities—to translate a general, justified, and deep sense of unease about this undertaking into specific and effective criticism.  They have focused on concern over the degree of academic freedom that faculty and students at the Yale-NUS college will enjoy.  But they have thus overlooked a more fundamental issue, an issue that casts serious doubt on the sustainability of any partnership between Yale on the one side and the PAP government and NUS on the other.

In 1994, Foreign Affairs published what has become a famous interview with Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew, conducted by Fareed Zakaria.  A member of the Yale College Class of 1986, Dr Zakaria is now a Successor Trustee of the Yale Corporation and an influential voice in deliberations on the “internationalization” of the university.  Zakaria concludes the interview with “A Coda on Culture,” the last lines of which read,

At the close of the interview, Lee handed me three pages.  This was, he explained, to emphasize how alien Confucian culture is to the West. The pages were from the book East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, by John Fairbank, an American scholar.

“Culture”—“Confucian” or “Asian” or other—does not explain the markedly different institutional and academic context, with its very different norms, to that of New Haven, Connecticut, in which the Yale-NUS college will operate.  History and of course politics do.  But of particular value to any understanding of that context is the work of one of one of the Yale president’s fellow economists, the late Oddessa-born, Austrian-educated Harvard professor Alexander Gerschenkron.

To be an American in Singapore is to encounter a familiar exceptionalism.  Of course, neither the United States nor Singapore is as exceptional as its citizens might think.  And PAP Singapore conforms in all salient respects to some of the generalizations that Professor Gerschenkron made about “late”-developing economies and the ways in which they differed systematically from early developers—above all from the master-case of the first industrializer of them all, liberal England. Three of these generalizations have particular relevance in the present context.  First, late developers make use of “the backlog of technological innovations” that they can borrow from earlier developers.  Second, they apply “institutional instruments for which there is little or no counterpart” in earlier developers. Third, they feature a markedly different “intellectual climate.”

Professor Gerschenkron was concerned above all with industrialization.  But his generalizations apply equally to other sectors. They shed light on the entire trajectory of Singapore’s astonishing economic growth under People’s Action Party rule since 1959.  And they explain the PAP government’s general interest in and approach to the education sector and particular interest in and approach to the establishment of a liberal arts college on this island.  This point merits brief elaboration.

The Yale-NUS college has been criticized on the grounds that it is not organic to Singapore or to Asia.[6] But this criticism reveals a failure to understand how the late developer achieves rapid development, by adopting and adapting innovations and ways of doing things from earlier developers.  The PAP government’s determination to fill out its “educational portfolio” through the creation out of whole cloth of a liberal arts college here is classically Gershenkronian.  But one must understand it in the context of Professor Gershenkron’s other generalizations about late developers, too.

PAP Singapore has achieved what it has achieved through the use of institutional forms alien to liberal economic climates: the Housing and Development Board, which has built the flats in which some eighty percent of the country’s population lives; the Jurong Town Corporation, which created to turn-key facilities on this island for foreign investors in the industrial sector; the National Trades Union Congress, whose leader sits in the PAP cabinet and which functions to keep the country strike-free; the Development Bank of Singapore, which originally served to channel finance into sectors of the economy deemed crucial to national progress; a range of state firms across numerous sectors, now corporatized and called “government-linked corporations”; the People’s Action Party, a vanguard party with a small cadre membership whose secretary-general serves as prime minister; the People’s Association, devoted to the promotion of “racial harmony and social cohesion” in Singapore; Temasek Holdings and the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore, two sovereign wealth funds; and many, many other institutions that Professor Gerschenkron would have found so predictable . . . including the National University of Singapore.[7]

Professor Edwin Lee’s history of “nation-building” in Singapore devotes a number of valuable chapters to the tertiary education sector.  (Professor Lee is a former head of the NUS history department and a student of the late O. W. Wolters, yet another thinker with whose perspectives on Southeast Yale’s current leadership and those members of the Yale faculty who have joined it in advancing its Singapore plans would do very well to acquaint themselves.)  His book makes clear that, from soon after Singapore’s independence in 1965, the PAP government viewed the University of Singapore—as NUS was called until the Chinese-medium Nanyang University was merged into it in 1980—as an arm of a state focused on national development.  Little illustrates this reality so starkly as the government’s decision to send then Deputy Prime Minister Dr Toh Chin Chye to serve as the university’s vice chancellor during 1968-1975.  While no longer serving as deputy prime minister during this period, Dr Toh did remain a member of the cabinet and chairman of the PAP.  Both before and during Dr Toh’s tenure as vice chancellor of the University of Singapore, leading lights of the PAP government (including then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew himself) and of the university’s faculty debated the bases of academic freedom at a national university and the degree of autonomy deserved by such a university with a sophistication sadly missing from current debates on the issue.

What the course of these debates made clear was that PAP Singapore’s national university was not to be a university in the way that the term has ever been understood at Yale.  Here it is useful to recall Professor Gerchenkron’s point about late developers’ adoption of “institutional instruments for which there is little or no counterpart” in the liberal settings of the early developers.  Neither has NUS’s situation changed significantly since the early years of Singapore’s independence.  Professor Lee notes the continued status of NUS as “a university geared to the brain-power needs of the nation . . . in the knowledge and information driven economy of the present” and “the close nexus between the university and the government.”  It is in this light that one must appreciate NUS’s emphasis on the same sorts of quantitative measures—publications in “top” journals, university rankings—that one might associate with the measurement of economic growth.  And so one must also understand the focus of its Asia Research Institute on migration and the family, urbanism, science and society, and religion and globalization—all concerns of the PAP government.  Similarly, and as the University of Wisconsin geographer and specialist on the globalization of higher education Professor Kris Olds has written, the emergence of Singapore as a “global schoolhouse” or as the “Boston of the East” is a PAP government undertaking, one reflective of planning about the next stage in Singapore’s national development.[8]  The proposed Yale-NUS college can only be understood with reference to Professor Olds’s writings on this subject.

For institutions of the sort that PAP Singapore developed in order to achieve its astonishing record of economic growth to function as they have done, Professor Gerschenkron’s third generalization needed to obtain.  The “intellectual climate” of Singapore, like that of virtually every successful “late” developer before it, has been illiberal.  So, too, have its political, social, and intellectual orders.  When the chairman of the governing board of the proposed Yale-NUS college recently declined to label the education that it would offer “liberal,” some Yale alumni were nonplussed.[9]  But the chairman’s remarks reflected a canny understanding of the context in which the college was to operate.  “Liberal” is a term of derision in the official lexicon of PAP Singapore.  This derision has its roots in a conviction that liberals were too weak to lead Singapore through the challenges of its early history, that they remain too weak to take the hard decisions necessary to ensure the country’s continued prosperity.

On one level, there is nothing objectionable to all this. Singapore and Singaporeans have charted the course of their own history.  It is not for foreigners to intervene in their affairs.  What is objectionable is the failure of Yale’s current leadership perhaps to understand and certainly to be frank and honest about what it has got Yale involved in. Yale’s leadership can talk, breezily and foolishly, about bringing a new model of the liberal arts college to “Asia” all that it wants.  But to be credible, it must acknowledge that Yale has sold its services—and, some would emphasize, its name—to a PAP Singapore focused on further developing its economy by becoming an education hub.  The Yale-NUS college is one component of this effort, and to see it in any other light is to betray a sorry failure to understand Singapore.

Yale and NUS are both “universities.”  But they are not institutions of a “counterpart” nature.  For all of the surface similarities between Yale and NUS, the term “university” has two fundamentally different meanings as applied to the two institutions. Recognition of this reality, and of the import and purpose of the Yale-NUS college in late-developing Singapore, has at least four direct implications, implications that Yale’s current leadership and its fast-dwindling band of allies on the Yale faculty should long since have made explicit.

The first of these relates to the question of academic freedom, which has caused so much concern at Yale.  In a sense, this question has been misspecified from the start.  Stake-holders in liberal institutions view academic freedom as an unquestioned value, as a central feature of the enterprise.  But in the illiberal institutional context of the late developer, freedom—academic or otherwise—has a purely instrumental function.  Scholars in this illiberal context may range freely within their disciplines, as the advancement of those disciplines and the publication of work in those disciplines contribute to the purpose of that which is called “the university” and thus to national development.  But that freedom has no value in its own right, and disciplines and expertise may be demarcated in ways that restrict scholars to what is in effect a spacious and exceedingly well appointed academic pen.  Research and publication within the confines of this pen will rarely require any direct intervention to curtail freedom of expression.  But confines are nevertheless confines, and those in question are not necessarily determined with reference to the concerns of scholarship.

Second, individuals charged with building and leading institutions in the illiberal context of late development know what they want, and they play to win.  The embarrassingly long interval between September 2010 and March 2011 during which Yale and the PAP government worked to hammer out an agreement on the planned college made these truths manifest.  While a close confidant of its president lamented that Yale had “no leverage” in its negotiations with Singapore, there was at the same time exasperation among NUS administrators over Yale’s failure to understand Singapore, its needs, and its constraints.  The Singapore side knew, that is, what it was after.  The Yale side could not be sure what it itself wanted.  One senior faculty member at Yale remarked, “Rick [as Yale’s president is commonly called] wants to do something big internationally, but he does not have the money.”  So he would have Singapore pay for this “something big” before concluding his long, long presidency of Yale.  Others felt that the president was bored with New Haven and sought ways to have his job take him elsewhere.  Perceptive observers in Singapore and elsewhere wondered whether Yale feared being left behind in an Asia-centric twenty-first century if it remained focused on New Haven and whether it saw tying up with NUS as a ready-made answer to those fears.  Neither is it clear that, in the period since March 2011, Yale has put behind it what the rugged men and women of a late developer would view as the weak and indecisive conduct of the liberal.  In the humanities and social sciences, Yale’s approach to faculty recruitment for the planned college has left the distinct impression that it has very little idea what it is doing.

Third, there are some areas in which squaring the circle in any partnership between Yale and a national university conceived of as is NUS will prove simply impossible.  These areas include legislation infringing on the rights of homosexuals in Singapore, its PAP government’s regime of labor control, and the state’s prerogative to monitor the activities of societies, including those operating on university campuses. Neither Yale’s incumbent president nor any of the successors to whom he bequeaths such an unsustainable partnership will be in any position to ask Singapore to take that legislation off its books, to introduce a legally enforceable minimum wage or the right of collective bargaining for the foreign workers and elderly Singaporeans who will clean the precincts of the Yale-NUS college, or to promise that student societies affiliated with the college will not be monitored by outside authorities.  Yet Yale’s current leadership and its successors will find their relations with Yale’s gay faculty and students, with faculty and students who respect gay rights, with Yale’s unions, and with student organizations in New Haven that seek out relationships with societies organized under the auspices of the Yale-NUS college difficult if not impossible.  (One notes with some surprise that one voice not yet heard in the debate over Yale’s plans for Singapore is that of the Yale College alumnus and legendary New Haven labor leader John Wilhelm.)

Finally, in 1994 the Singaporean novelist and intellectual Catherine Lim wrote that “a great affective divide” existed between Singapore’s People’s Action Party and the people of Singapore.  Rebuked by the prime minister of the day for involving herself in politics without running for office, she had nevertheless put her finger on an important aspect of the institutions of late developers.  The PAP, ever focused on renewal, has since that time sought to bridge the divide that Ms Lim recognized.  Yale is, however, moving in the opposite direction as a result of its bungling and poorly explained effort to work with an institution of a fundamentally different nature to Yale’s.  Its leadership has opened a great affective divide between many members of the Yale faculty and their former colleague who happens now to be the university’s president and between the supporters of his Singapore plan and the sceptics.  In recent weeks, efforts on the part of Yale’s current leadership and its supporters to overcome these sceptics have taken on a particularly poisonous character.

VI.  Yale’s Great Singapore Folly: What is to be done?

Yale’s Great Singapore Folly raises a fundamental question in the realm of university governance: ought institutions of higher education be held to the same standards of intellectual seriousness to which their faculty hold both one another and their students as these institutions venture out into the world?   If the answer to this question is “yes,” then Yale and its current leadership have failed to meet any reasonable standard.  In fact, that leadership seems not even to have tried.  It seems to believe, that is, that the answer to this question is “no.”  Too, its irresponsible attitude appears to have seeped downward to the Yale administrators and faculty assisting Yale’s leadership in this project.  Others, thankfully, believe that the answer to this question is indeed “yes.”  This group includes not merely members of the Yale faculty, but also Yale alumni with international experience, not least in various parts of Asia, who have begun to fear a deep leadership crisis at Yale.  This includes moneyed alumni.

The flawed, ill-conceived, and “sultanistic” approach taken by Yale’s incumbent president in putting Yale in the employ of Singapore’s PAP government to establish a liberal arts college in partnership with the National University of Singapore means that Yale cannot be a reliable partner for NUS on a sustained basis.  This much is manifest.  Before it sinks even deeper into its quagmire on Kent Ridge, with consequences destructive to Yale and unfair both to its Singaporean paymasters and to NUS, Yale has two alternatives.

The first alternative is for the Yale Corporation to meet, to examine the university’s contract with the PAP government, to consult its lawyers, and to terminate its partnership with NUS before the mess that Yale’s current leadership has made does any more damage to Yale.  In the short run, this decision will cause Yale considerable embarrassment, but folly has its price.  Giving Yale’s incumbent president a Kissingerian “decent interval” at Yale’s helm, the Corporation can hand effective management of Yale over to others and launch a search for Yale’s nineteenth president.  A central goal of that search will be to select an intellectual committed to liberal values and to sincere collegiality and marked by the perspective and judgement to conceive of and forge responsible, durable, and fruitful academic partnerships around the globe for Yale.  (Monoglots need not apply.)  These will have to be partnerships whose terms are consonant with principles of sound university governance and whose rationales can stand up to the scrutiny of a community of scholars.  This decision will leave in the lurch many in Singapore who have worked faithfully and hard on the Yale-NUS college.  But late developers are tough and resourceful.  PAP Singapore has overcome set-backs before.  It will, before long, put this set-back behind it in like manner.

The second alternative is more complicated.  Its purpose is, in essence, to “save” Yale’s relationship with Singapore by taking a range of concrete steps to enable Yale to be a reliable partner to the PAP government and to NUS over the long run.  These steps must include, but are not limited to, the following.

1.  A figure in Yale leadership must deliver a major public address at Yale on Yale and Singapore.  This address must offer a compelling, credible, and serious vision of Singapore and Southeast Asia, of their histories, and of the complex and dynamic societies in this part of the world with which Yale will now engage. It must transcend the defensiveness that has marked Yale’s stated justifications of the Yale-NUS college to present a detailed, intellectually substantive case for establishing a liberal arts college in Southeast Asia, siting that college in Singapore, and allowing a foreign government to finance it.  This address must honor liberal principles and demonstrate the respect for the intelligence of stake-holders—Yale faculty, Yale alumni, and, not least, Yale’s prospective partners in the PAP government and at NUS and the wider tax-paying Singapore public—that has all too often been missing in Yale’s public statements on the Yale-NUS college.  In his treatment of the Yale faculty and in his prolonged failure to articulate a serious rationale for the Yale-NUS college, Yale’s president has long since disqualified himself from giving any such address. Perhaps Yale’s much respected provost, the dean of Yale College, or a member of the Yale Corporation can be tasked to prepare and deliver this address on Yale’s behalf.

2.  Yale must make public the documents setting out all terms agreed upon by Yale and the PAP government, any of its ministries and departments, statutory boards, NUS, sovereign wealth funds, or government-linked corporations.  This includes not only terms relating to academic freedom at the planned college but also terms relating to governance of the college, to the funding of the college, and to compensation to be paid to Yale, to its Officers, or to any of its other personnel.

3.  In order to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest at Yale, Yale must make public the full record of all payments for consulting and other services, all research funding, and any complimentary plane tickets and hotel accommodation rendered to any Officer of Yale University or member of the Yale Corporation during the past fifteen years by any Singaporean government ministry or department, statutory board, university, sovereign wealth fund, government-linked corporation, or putatively independent organization financed primarily by the PAP government.  The tardy statement, clearly drafted with excruciatingly hair-splitting care by Yale’s lawyers, on the financial ties of three current or former fellows of the Yale Corporation released by the university on 1 April—which must have been a pretty panicky Sunday—is not adequate.[10]

4.  Yale must replace four of its appointees to the ten-member Yale-NUS College Governing Board.[11]  Members to be replaced are Yale’s president; Vassar College president Catherine Bond Hill, a Yale-trained economist whose significant international experience was in Zambia (a reality that has left many Singaporeans made aware of it both dumb-founded and offended); and Roland Betts and George W. Bush’s ambassador to China Clark Randt, two plutocratic alumni of Yale College with no record of involvement in Southeast Asia or in education in this region.

Already a member of the governing board, Yale’s University Secretary and vice president—a real listener who is exceptionally well informed in the field of international education—can easily shoulder its president’s duties as a member of the board.  The loss of Messrs Betts and Randt may have an impact on the governing board’s ability to raise funds for the new college, but early indications are that NUS can do so quite effectively with Yale’s name alone.

The replacements for these four Yale appointees to the Yale-NUS College Governing Board ought to include, first, two members of the Yale College faculty chosen for fixed terms through a transparent process and, second, two individuals with Yale affiliations and demonstrated understandings of Singapore and Southeast Asia and their educational contexts.  And—what a thought!—these appointees might even include a Singaporean or two not selected by the PAP government or by NUS.  It is not clear, in fact, why Yale has filled none of its slots on the proposed college’s governing board with Singaporeans or other Southeast Asians. Lack of imagination or of effort offers one likely explanation.  Ignorance of Singapore and Southeast Asia among Yale’s leadership may have left it unaware that the university counts among its alumni, for example,

• A Singaporean on the faculty of a major American business school, who also earned a degree at Cambridge, taught at America’s finest liberal arts college (Swarthmore), pioneered the study of Singapore’s industrialization strategy, is a leading scholar of Southeast Asian business, and in 2004 co-authored the opinion piece in The Straits Times that originally advocated the establishment of a liberal arts college in this country;
• A former Philippine Secretary of Education, former university president, former head of the secretariat of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization, doctoral student of Harry Benda’s, and visionary advocate of accessible tertiary education in Southeast Asia who studied five decades ago at the Ateneo de Manila University when it already offered an undergraduate program in liberal arts in Asia;
• An influential Malaysian alumnus of Yale College who has served as the United Nations’ first Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, taught briefly at Yale and for many years at NUS’s sister institution the University of Malaya, and has published and edited dozens of books in the field of political economy;
• And Singapore’s leading legal and constitutional historian, holder of a Yale Law JSD, author of a landmark biography of Singapore’s first, liberal chief minister, and hugely active and effective former president of the Singapore Heritage Society.

These are but four possibilities for appointment to the governing board of the proposed Yale-NUS college.  There are many, many others. The point, simply, is to see Yale represented on the board of the Yale-NUS college by men and women who understand the context in which the college will operate and who know what they are doing.  Only thus can Yale be a reliable partner for NUS.

5.  Yale must establish on a site as close as feasible to NUS’s Kent Ridge campus a completely Yale-funded (no PAP-government-subsidized rent, either) research center with a director drawn from the Yale faculty on a two- or three-year term.  This director will serve during his or her term as a member of the faculty of the Yale-NUS college with a reduced course-load, but Yale will pay her or his salary.  The center will coordinate the activities and research of Yale faculty and graduate or professional students from all schools of the university, and of Yale College undergraduates, relating to Southeast Asia and to the region’s place in the broader Asian and global contexts.  It will serve as an outpost of genuine Yale in the region and an always open window on the Yale-NUS college.  It will serve as an arena for contact between Yale faculty and students on the one hand and Singaporean and Southeast Asian scholars and intellectuals not introduced to Yale by NUS administrators on the other.  Finally, this research center will help give Yale and its faculty the stake in Singapore and Southeast Asia without which the university cannot be NUS’s reliable partner over the long term.  As for its funding, well, rather than raising money for the Yale-NUS college, Messrs Betts and Randt can devote themselves to fund-raising on this new center’s behalf and to recruiting other Yale alumni to helping them.   Perhaps the new center could be named for one of the eminent Southeast Asianists whose tenure at Yale have epitomized its historical seriousness about the region.

Michael Montesano (3 April 2012)

Selected References

Barr, Michael D.  “Marxists in Singapore?” Critical Asian Studies XLII, 3 (2010): 335-362.

Benda, Harry J. Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia.  New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Series No. 18, 1972.

Fairbank, John K., Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig.  East Asia: Tradition and Transformation.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Gerschenkron, Alexander.  Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.

Goh Keng Swee. The Economics of Modernization.  Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2004.

Goh Keng Swee.  The Practice of Economic Growth.  Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2004.

Goh Keng Swee.  The Wealth of East Asian Nations. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2004.

Gomez, James.  Self-Censorship: Singapore’s Shame.  With a foreword by Philip Jeyaretnam. Singapore: THINK Centre, 2000.

David Halberstam.  The Making of a Quagmire.  New York: Random House, 1965.

Handley, Paul M.  The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006.

Lee, Edwin.  Singapore: The Unexpected Nation.  Singapore: ISEAS, 2008.

Linz, Juan J., and H. E. Chehabi, eds.  Sultanistic Regimes. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Seow, Francis T.  To Catch a Tartar: A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew’s Prison. New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Series No. 42, 1994.

______.  Beyond Suspicion? The Singapore Judiciary.  New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Series No. 55,

2006.

Teo Soh Lung. Beyond the Blue Gate. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Centre, 2010.

Wolters, O. W.  History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives.  Revised edition. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999.

Zakaria, Fareed and Lee Kuan Yew. “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew.” Foreign Affairs LXXII, 2 (1994):  109-126.

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[1] See http://www.asian-studies.org/publications/book-prizes-benda.htm.

[2] See  http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/why-is-yale-outsourcing-a-campus-to-singapore/247463/# .

[3] See  http://news.yale.edu/2011/05/10/two-alumni-appointed-successor-trustees-yale-corporation .

[4] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8ohOwc79Sc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37pv4rRWD7o&feature=watch_response .

[5] See http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2006_09/l_v.html.

[6] See http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/why-is-yale-outsourcing-a-campus-to-singapore/247463/# .

[7]Even a cursory reading of the collected speeches and writings—many touching on higher education—of the brilliant and inexhaustible Dr Goh Keng Swee, the creator of many of the institutions central to PAP Singapore’s success as a “late” developer, immerses one in a thoroughly Gerschenkronian world.

[8] See, most recently, http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/deterritorializing-academic-freedom/ .

[9] See http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/blog/?p=12260.

[10] It needs to be acknowledged that this requirement will in all likelihood force Mr Charles Goodyear to resign from the Yale Corporation, as his ability to reveal the financial terms under which he left Temasek Holdings may well be constrained.  Mr Goodyear was for some years a senior executive of the holding company for Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold, a firm with historic ties to Yale alumni that was closely associated with the late General Suharto’s New Order dictatorship in Indonesia.  He is, thus, perhaps the only individual in a leadership position at Yale who understands how the rough, serious Southeast Asian game is played.  He is a focused, bright, personable man who also, that is, knows where the bodies are buried in this part of the world.  For Yale, his resignation from the Corporation would be a real blow.  For Yale’s president Richard C. Levin, however, it would bring a certain poetic justice, for he has acknowledged that his project in Singapore is very much related to fundamental issues of university governance; see http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/feb/20/cancelled-faculty-meeting-reinstated-following/.  (It should also be noted that, a week or so ago, I tested this need for transparency regarding previous financial ties to Singaporean entities with two Singaporeans whose sharp critical faculties testify to their fine educations in NUS’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.  Their understanding of Singapore Inc. led them to consider the need obvious and logical.)

[11]See http://news.yale.edu/2011/11/21/yale-nus-college-announces-governing-board and http://news.yale.edu/2011/11/21/yale-nus-college-governing-board-biographies .