On Amsterdam’s Plans to Establish a Third University

Editor’s note: this guest entry in GlobalHigherEd has been kindly developed by Jurjen van Rees. His entry is a backgrounder to the development of a fascinating new initiative – Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions – slated to involve both Dutch and foreign universities. This development should be viewed in the context of recent initiatives to establish new applied sciences universities and research centers in New York (most notably Cornell Tech in New York City, which I profiled in February 2012 in ‘Unsettling the University-Territory Relationship via Applied Sciences NYC‘) and Singapore (via the Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (CREATE)). For broader context on the Amsterdam city-region, see the OECD Territorial Reviews: Randstad Holland, Netherlands (2007) and OECD/IMHE Reviews of Higher Education in Regional and City Development: Amsterdam (2009).

Jurjen van Rees is co-founder of The ANT Works, an Amsterdam-based research and consultancy company that works with Fortune-500 companies and is specialized in innovation strategy and analysis of big data in intellectual property and research output through the use of bibliometrics and scientometrics. Jurjen is an expert regarding the organisation of the Dutch higher education landscape and the Amsterdam university landscape in particular. He holds a bachelor degree in History and a Master’s degree in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Amsterdam.  My thanks for his contribution today. ~ Kris Olds

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On Amsterdam’s Plans to Establish a Third University

by Jurjen van Rees

For the Netherlands, and its capital Amsterdam in particular, 2013 is promised to be a momentous year. On April 13^th the city celebrated the re-opening of its famous Rijksmuseum with the centre of attention pointed at the Rembrandt’s Nightwatch. Jubilees in the city in 2013 include the Artis zoo, the Royal Concert Gebouw, its Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and 400 years of constructing the iconic canals of Amsterdam. Adding to the festivities is the inauguration of the new king Willem Alexander who is succeeding his abdicated mother queen Beatrix on April 30th. As if these weren’t enough reasons to plan a visit to the Venice of Northern Europe, the city government is hosting a competition to start a new research university with the alluring title Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions.

The establishment of a new university in Amsterdam should first and foremost be seen in the light of supra-national policy goals set by the European Union.

It all starts in 2000 in Lisbon with the European Commission determined to transform Europe into the top-region in the world for research, innovation and educational excellence through the Lisbon Strategy. When it comes to EU policy strategies, the Dutch have a strong tendency to act accordingly to their proclaimed status of being the bravest and smartest young child in the classroom. Together with their ‘big brother’ Germany, the Netherlands holds a comparable approach when it comes to the national deficit not exceeding 3% of the gross national income on which EU member states agreed upon in 1997. The European Union pours billions of euros – 50,5 to be precise – in fundamental research through their 7^th Framework Programme up till 2013, followed by another subsidy programme Horizon 2020 with an estimated 80 billion Euros being invested in the European knowledge economy between 2014 and 2020. From a European perspective the Dutch feel they have a knowledge-intensive responsibility to live up to.

The Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions initiative is not unique in the world of higher education. Strong bastions of higher education and research have been seen incorporating increasing numbers of initiatives emphasizing their need to profile city-regions as bases for knowledge intensity and openness to innovative excellence. The Cornell-NYC initiative on Roosevelt Island in the East River is just one of many examples. Though the Amsterdam higher education landscape might be small as compared to other European peer-cities or world leaders such as New York City, the San-Francisco bay-area or Singapore, the initiative is comparable in terms of ambition and distinctive strategic goals related to the local knowledge economy.

Let’s take a look at Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions.

The initiative is designed to attract foreign universities interested in forming a consortium with Amsterdam headquarter-based and internationally operating businesses, as well as one or more Dutch research institutes or universities, all organized around a city-minded or urban research issue. This research should be executed on a PhD and Master-students level. This new research school will thus attract more students and PhD jobs to the city of Amsterdam (note that a PhD track is a paid research job in the Netherlands). The initiative originated at in city council and was adopted by the city government and its newly established Amsterdam Economic Board. The city government is determined to invest 20-50 million Euros in the winning consortium aiming for sustainable urban research solutions for 50 years to come.

Needless to say, the two existing universities in Amsterdam (the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), together with two academic hospitals, several national research institutes and two of the largest colleges (or Hogescholen) for applied sciences (a group that represents over 5.000 researchers and 108.000 students) have opinions on this development. As presented with the initial plan investigating this option by the Boston Consulting Group in April of 2012, the two universities where at the least to say not amused that the city government was planning to invest 20-50 million Euros at a time where student numbers are rising and government budgets for those same students are declining.

At the same time both city government and the two universities, together with representatives from major businesses in the Amsterdam region are represented in the formerly mentioned Amsterdam Economic Board, which acts as a senior executive discussion panel and advisory board to the city government on these and other regional economic issues. Since the 90’s the Dutch have been famous for their model of negotiating and discussing political, economic and societal issues within closed quarters thereby rarely resulting in heavy fought conflict and always bringing about pragmatic solutions where all parties can more or less agree to (the so-called “polder model”). The same holds true for this initiative, where pragmatism took over and where both city government and the two universities now see this initiative as complementary to the current stock of internationally renowned research areas.

In applying for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions initiative, every consortium should only hand in a proposal that is complementary to the existing research areas in the Amsterdam region. The Amsterdam Economic Board made sure that it is a minimum condition that the consortium seeks to collaborate and apply with a Dutch research institute, university or college and that they team up with large businesses in the region. This will probably result in several consortia where both universities in Amsterdam will take part in, thereby spreading the risk and at the same time keeping track of the disciplinary focus in which the initiative is heading.

What is next? On April 25^th a conference was organized where interested partners from the Netherlands and abroad were informed about the opportunities in the initiative. All information and data is available and published online. The city government is expected to receive somewhere between 5-10 applications on the first deadline of June 3^rd 2013 which then will be judged over the course of the coming summer. Up to five initiatives will be rewarded € 60.000 each in the second round to further investigate their plans and to hand in a sustainable business plan and project plan.

Eventually this “third university”, as it is dubbed in the Amsterdam higher education network, will become the first industry-academia-government initiative of its kind in The Netherlands to focus entirely on urbanization and metropolitan research issues. This is a needed area, and it builds links with long-standing areas of expertise and capacity in Amsterdam’s higher education institutions. This said, the larger question of whether or not Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions will contribute in its own way to the EU goal of becoming the top-region in the world for research, innovation and education excellence remains to be answered.

A New Academic Year Begins

Well, I survived the first week of the 2012-2013 academic year as new department chairperson, as well as the near doubling of student numbers in my new (as of 2011) online course (Geography 340 — World Regions in Global Context).  The experience of creating an online course from scratch has been a fascinating one; a form of ‘learning while doing’ that I highly recommend. The experience reinforced the point made in many reports and articles that it takes on average three times as much effort and money to create a new online course, and that they require a lot of ongoing effort to run if you want students to be engaged and actually learn. I’m also curious, after the last 1.5 years of working on this, how many of the ‘disruptive innovation’ propagandists have ever taught an online course, or run an online education program.  Not many, I would wager.

The prior week included a great half-day event for department chairs, center directors, deans, etc., at UW-Madison deemed the ‘Leadership Summit.’ The event kicked off when our Interim Chancellor, David Ward (and former president of the American Council on Education) gave a fantastic context-oriented talk about the past, present and future of public higher education. David Ward has a unique ability to be analytical but also identify challenges and opportunities that are tangible and can be worked with. There aren’t many people who can be critical about how we are still trapped in many “Victorian-” and “Edwardian-era” structures and assumptions (e.g., the timetable), while at the same time flag how we are making progress on a number of fronts and we have some real opportunities to keep the ‘public’ in public higher education. It’s hard for me to summarize all of the points of his talk, but suffice it to say Ward was implying educators need to be both more aware of the structural changes underway in higher education (including outside the U.S.), but at the same time we have no choice but to rely on ourselves to fashion realistic solutions to the stress-points that exist. In short, the pendulum has fallen off the pin that enabled cyclical change for decades past, and we’re shifting into a very different era; one with no explicit social compact about the ideal balance of public and private support for the U.S. higher education system. Ward is too experienced and smart to latch onto the ‘disruptive innovation’ hype circulating through U.S. universities right now, and instead advocates bottom-up forms of education innovation that we, as faculty and staff, delineate and push forward.

Besides these start-of-term reflections, I also wanted to inform readers of GlobalHigherEd that my May 2012 entry titled ‘International Consortia of Universities and the Mission/Activities Question‘ has just been updated.  Representatives of several consortia that were not flagged in the original entry contacted me so I’ve added them the long list of consortia in the latter half of the entry. Debates continue in internationalization circles about the efficacy of international consortia of universities and this entry is designed to provide some food for fodder to further these debates.

Finally, I wanted to let you know that one of the OECD’s flagship reports — Education at a Glance 2012: OECD indicators — will be released this coming Tuesday and I’ve got an embargoed copy that is chock-a-block full of insights. I am working up a new entry about the 2012 report that is modeled, to a degree, on my September 2011 entry titled ‘International student mobility highlights in the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2011.’ If I can hide behind my office door for some of Monday I’ll post the new entry on Tuesday (or Wednesday at the latest).

Best wishes at the start of the new academic year (at least here in North America)!

Kris Olds

International Consortia of Universities and the Mission/Activities Question

Note: click here for a PDF of a printable version of this relatively long entry, which is also cross-posted on Inside Higher Ed.

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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 massive open online courses (MOOCs) designed to further easily accessible (and often free) lifelong learning opportunities. Completion of the courses sometimes includes the acquisition of a certificate versus a formal credit towards a degree. This model is a sharp contrast to the early online agenda of the international consortia formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. See, for example, Coursera, Course Hero, edX, Khan Academy, MITx, OpenClass, Udacity, Udemy, 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 the 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.

Global Liberal Arts Alliance Est. 2009 | 25 Members

The Global Alliance is a multilateral partnership of equals intended to strengthen education in the liberal arts and sciences. Specifically, The Global Alliance’s strength derives from expertise and experience sharing, and its emphases on the challenges and opportunities facing institutions that educate graduates for citizenship and leadership in the highly-globalized twenty-first century.

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 Research Universities Network (IRUN) Est. 2007 | 10 members

The International Research Universities Network (IRUN) is an international network of broad-based research universities. The universities participating in the Network are well known for the international quality of their research and education, and are strongly motivated to improve that quality even further.

The aim of IRUN is to further improve the quality of research and teaching at the universities involved. Within the Network, the exchange of researchers, lecturers and students will be encouraged and facilitated.

International Forum of Public Universities (IFPU) Est. 2007 | 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.

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.

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.

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.

Alliance Program Est. 2002 | 4 members

Created in the fall 2002, the Alliance Program is a non-profit transatlantic joint-venture between Columbia University and three French prestigious institutions, The École Polytechnique, Sciences Po and the Université of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne. Alliance is an innovative program whose aim is to initiate and accompany new initiatives in the fields of education cooperation, research collaboration, and policy outreach.

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.

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.

Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) – International Consortium Est. 2000 | 6 members

The Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) – International Consortium is based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California Berkeley and includes a selective group of top ranked international research universities who share the following objectives:

• Develop and administrator an on-line, census, and customized version of the SERU survey of first-degree students for international research universities, parallel to the SERU Surveys in the US.
• Conduct research on the student experience, sharing best practices via SERU meetings, symposiums, and joint-research projects intended to inform and drive institutional self-improvement in undergraduate education and broaden our understanding of the socioeconomic impact of these institutions.
• Collaborate with SERU-AAU Consortium members in the generation and sharing of institutional, comparative, and longitudinal data on the student experience, including SERU surveys of students, and based on agreed data sharing protocols.

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 | 23 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.

A Columbia University/Millennium Promise response to ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational-ethical dilemma)’

Editors’ note: today’s guest entry has been kindly developed by Dr. Lucia Rodriguez, director of the Global Master’s in Development Practice Secretariat, Columbia University. For the past 20 years Dr. Rodriguez (pictured to the right) has been involved in the field of education, including at Teachers College and the Department of Bilingual/Bicultural Education (Columbia University), and the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA). A native of Cuba, Dr. Rodriguez completed her undergraduate work at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received her Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dr. Rodriguez’s entry focuses on an innovative global educational initiative that has much potential to generate substantive, organizational, pedagogical and technological lessons. The Global Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) is a two-year graduate degree program involving the participation of 22 universities around the world. Further information about the MDP is available below, and also in ‘Some Important Lessons for Global Academic Innovation’ by John W. McArthur (Huffington Post, 17 May 2010) and ‘Needed: a New Generation of Problem Solvers‘ by John W. McArthur and Jeffrey Sachs (Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 June 2009). Our sincere thanks to Dr. Rodriquez, and John W. McArthur and Vibhuti Jain (both of Millennium Promise), for enabling the development of this entry.

This entry is the sixth response to Nigel Thrift’s ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational, ethical dilemma)‘. The first five entries were provided by the people below and can be linked to via their names:

• Peter N. Stearns (Provost, George Mason University)
• Gregor McLennan (Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bristol)
• David J. Skorton (President, Cornell University)
• Daniel I. Linzer (Provost, Northwestern University)
• Allan E. Goodman (President & CEO, Institute of International Education)

Finally, please note that we will continue to welcome proposals for responses to Nigel Thrift’s ‘A question‘ through to the end of 2010.

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

~~~~~~~~~~~

Nigel Thrift’s recent post asked the question: Are the world’s universities doing all they can to prepare their students for the complex challenges facing this interconnected and interdependent global community?  Speaking as the director of the Global Master’s in Development Practice Secretariat, I believe that, although progress has occurred, much more is needed.

We are, indeed, in an urgent situation where the role of universities needs to be clarified if they are to tackle successfully the task of preparing global citizens, workers and leaders.  This urgency to innovate, to think “outside of the box,” to do things differently is the thing for which thousands of the world’s suffering people are clamoring.

Extreme Poverty and Urgent Need

Nihima, a fictitious name that represents many of the world’s most vulnerable children, epitomizes the challenges of the many voiceless people around the world in need of extreme intervention.  Like many poor people, Nihima spends her days sprawled on a mud floor with dried leaves for a roof.  She is a 13-year-old girl who recounts, through tears of despair, her life as the oldest sister, and now main caregiver, of four brothers and sisters.  Her father left the family long ago. Her mother followed shortly after.  Both of them were swallowed by the big city with the promise of returning for the family after earning some money.  Four years later, nothing has been heard from either parent.

I met Nihima several years ago, abandoned and tired.  She shared the difficulties of being a sister-parent of four at the tender age of 13.  She does not go to school because she does not have shoes.  She spends most of the day begging for kernels of millet or dried cassava or whatever she can find to feed her brothers and sisters.  What little energy she has left she spends thinking of how to help her younger sister, a weak and sickly child.

Help did not come soon enough to Nihima’s hut.  All the help funneled into this rural village was well-intentioned, but not comprehensive enough.  Many of the people on the ground, the experts in education, health and agriculture deployed to economically depressed areas, could not go beyond offering solutions that were singularly focused and limiting, failing to address the broad challenges of sustainable development.

In her day-to-day struggles, Nihima is like many of the developing world’s destitute.  She joins more than half of the world’s population who live on less than $2 day.  She, too, is one of the millions of people who cannot read a book or sign their names.  And, if her socio-economic situation does not change soon, her brothers and sisters may join the many vulnerable children who make up the 8 million preventable disease fatalities that occur worldwide each year.

The Global Master’s in Development Practice Program

Universities have a role in training and developing the problem-solvers of the world.  In particular, we believe that practitioners, the people at the forefront of all of these global problems, need to be prepared to confront the multifaceted challenges of sustainable development.

The most disenfranchised people—the poor subsistence farmer, the urban slum dweller, the ailing HIV father and mother and their vulnerable children—need our help now.  For their survival, people like Nihima often depend on the professional knowledge, skills and attributes of development practitioners.  These professionals are often the only hope for poor, suffering people.  Although most practitioners have completed the most rigorous training in sustainable development, few are prepared for the complex challenges they will encounter in the field.  They realize that their knowledge or specialization in a particular area is not enough.  Once in the field, they understand that the interwoven challenges of sustainable development can be solved only by connecting insights from a range of disciplines.

It was this realization that more is needed and the urgency to bolster the leadership and training of development practitioners that brought eminent practitioners and academics across a range of development fields together.  Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo; global health leaders Helene Gayle, Jim Kim, and Jeffrey Koplan; former UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman; Nobel Laureate RK Pachauri; ground-breaking ecologist Virgilio Viana; prominent agronomists Freddie Kwesiga and Alice Pell; and African academic leaders Goolam Mohamedbhai and Livingstone Luboobi are some of those who collaborated.  As members of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation-supported initiative, the Commission provided the insights and recommendations that led to the development of the global Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) programs.

The Global Master’s in Development Practice is a two-year graduate degree program providing students with the skills and knowledge required to better identify and address the global challenges of sustainable development, such as poverty, population, health, conservation, and climate change.  The MDP students take core courses in health sciences, natural sciences and engineering, social sciences and management.

In addition, MDP students take the Global Classroom: Integrated Approaches to Sustainable Development Practice course. This is an information technology-based, interactive course that fosters cross-border and cross-disciplinary collaboration and allows students and professors to participate in collective assignments and learning experiences.  For instance, the first “pilot” global classroom addressed a range of core issues from health, economics, policy, and agriculture, to ethics and education.  It involved the participation of 16 universities around the world.  All course materials, including the syllabus, readings, videos, and assignments, were uploaded to a common course website.  Commission members served as guest experts and provided taped lectures for each of the weekly sessions.  Students from around the world viewed the taped lectures in advance and then joined their classmates and professors for weekly, live sessions.  The weekly sessions were conducted through web-based conferencing software that enables partner universities to log-on free of charge.  Each participating classroom is then able to activate their camera.  The “global classroom” screen becomes filled with live videos of all of the partner universities.

Furthermore, all MDP students participate in two hands-on field training and internship experiences.  Only by broadening the MDP students’ educational and practical training will these students be able to more effectively understand and address the root causes of extreme poverty and confront the challenges of sustainable development.  For more information on the MDP curriculum, please go to www.globalmdp.org.

The Global Network of Master’s in Development Practice Programs

Two years after the launch of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice report and its recommendations, the global network of MDP programs comprises 22 universities in 15 countries and five continents.  Many other academic institutions are soliciting membership into the network.  These universities are not only thinking about the question of how to address the various worldwide disparities, but are working together to address this problem.

The creation of the Master’s in Development Practice program acknowledges that addressing extreme poverty and sustainable development throughout the world requires a concerted effort by experts using a cross-disciplinary approach.  The first 22 universities in the network are:

1. BRAC Development Institute, BRAC University (Dhaka, Bangladesh)
2. CATIE (Turrialba, Costa Rica)
3. Columbia University (New York City, New York)
4. Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia)
5. James Cook University (Cairns and Townsville, Australia)
6. Sciences Po (Paris, France)
7. TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) University (New Delhi, India)
8. Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland)
9. Tsinghua University (Beijing, China)
10. Universidad de Los Andes (Bogota, Colombia)
11. Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
12. University of Botswana (Gaborone, Botswana)
13. University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, California)
14. University of California, Davis (Davis, California)
15. University of Cheikh Anta Diop, UCAD (Dakar, Senegal)
16. University of Denver (Denver, Colorado)
17. University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida)
18. University of Ibadan (Ibadan, Nigeria)
19. University of Peradeniya (Peradeniya, Sri Lanka)
20. University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
21. University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario)
22. University of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

Columbia University accepted its first cohort of students in 2009. Twelve other universities will do the same this September and the remaining in 2011. Although the core MDP curriculum integrates the four pillars of health, natural, social and management sciences, each university approaches the MDP through a highly diverse set of curricular emphasis.  The University of Winnipeg, for example, focuses on indigenous populations and the University of Botswana offers an executive education-type program for full-time professionals who wish to complete the MDP degree while still working.  To learn more about each MDP program’s curricular focus, please go to www.globalmdp.org.

We anticipate that the several hundred MDP students trained each year will not only have a broader understanding of the challenges of development, but as leaders will be able to draw on their interdisciplinary training for both policy and practice insights.  They will be the “specialists” of interdisciplinary studies in the field of sustainable development who can speak and understand the language of the various development experts often found in the field working in isolation from one another.

These MDP graduates will go on to professional trajectories within government ministries, bi-lateral and multi-lateral donor organizations, non-governmental organizations, private sector companies, foundations, or UN agencies.  As practitioners, they will be able to propose solutions to the challenges of poverty that are informed by multidisciplinary and multisectoral perspectives.

Benefits of the Global Network

Imagine a student at Sciences Po participating in the MDP field experience organized by Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro or a faculty member from the University of Ibadan teaching a course at Tsinghua University’s MDP program.   Through the global network of MDP programs, this and more will be possible.  MDP students and professors will be able to reap the benefits of a global network by participating in exchanges and field experiences offered by the various MDP programs.  In addition, it is expected that, all MDP programs will develop their own Global Classroom course on topics as varied as public health and agricultural systems, which will be offered to students at the 22 MDP programs in the global network.

Furthermore, in order to take advantage of the global resources these 22 universities offer and to ensure that all MDP students receive a rigorous and comprehensive education, the global network of MDP programs will also benefit from the development of an open-source online resource center.  Once developed, this resource center will welcome global contributions from the MDP programs and provide academic institutions with a comprehensive repository of MDP-related educational resources and tools, including case studies, lectures, and e-journals on sustainable development practice.

The benefits of participating in the global network are numerous.  The above-mentioned are just a few.  No longer can conservationist, water specialist, agronomist, and public health specialist working to alleviate poverty depend on narrow expertise alone.  Cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge and rigorous, hands-on, field experiences are needed. Nigel Thrift can be certain that universities in the global network of MDP programs are doing all they can and more to prepare their students for the complex challenges facing this interconnected and interdependent global community.

Lucia Rodriguez

Understanding international research collaboration in the social sciences and humanities

How can we map out and make sense of the changing nature of research collaboration at a global scale? This is an issue many people and institutions are grappling with, with no easy solutions.

As noted in several previous GlobalHigherEd entries:

• From rhetoric to reality: unpacking the numbers and practices of global higher ed (5 November 2009)
• Are we witnessing a key moment in the reworking of the global higher education & research landscape? (12 October 2009)
• Higher education and collaboration in a global context: a new UK/US (Atlantic) perspective (29 June 2009)
• Europe’s new Strategic Framework for International Science and Technology Cooperation (15 November 2008)
• Globalizing research: forces, patterns, and collaborative practices (4 August 2008)

collaboration between researchers across space is clearly increasing, as well being increasingly sought after. From a sense that ‘global challenges’ like climate change demand collaboration, through to a sense that international collaboration generates higher impact (in a citation impact factor sense) output, there are signs that the pressure to facilitate collaboration will only increase.

At the same time, however, government ministries, funding councils, higher education associations, and universities themselves, are all having a challenging time making sense of the changing nature of research collaboration across space. Common questions include:

• Can this phenomenon be mapped out, and if so how and at what scales?
• Can baseline studies be created such that the effects of new international collaborative research programs can be measured?
• What happens to research practices and collaborative relations when universities join international consortia of universities?

One option is the use of bibliometric technologies to map out the changing nature of research collaboration across space. For example, the international linkages of the Australian Group of Eight (Go8) universities were mapped out (see some sample images below from the report Thomson ISI Go8 NCR dataset: Go8 International Collaborations, available via this University of Sydney website).

Other reports like Science-Metrix’s Scientific Collaboration between Canada and California: A Bibliometric Study (2008) used similar forms of data to understand collaboration between a country and a foreign state. I’ve also seen similar types of bibliometric-reliant reports while participating in discussions at Worldwide University Network (WUN) meetings, as well as on Thomson Reuters’ own website.

Another option is to take an institutionally-specific perspective, though via the acquisition and analysis of a broader array of forms of data. This type of mapping can be developed via bibliometric technologies, researcher surveys, an analysis of travel expense claim data, an analysis of media ‘expertise’ data bases maintained by universities, and so on. This is an oft-desired form of analysis; one designed to feed into central repositories of knowledge (e.g., the University of Notre Dame is developing such a site, tentatively called Global ND). Yet such an approach is challenging and resource consuming to implement.

In the end, for a range of reasons, bibliometrics are often the fallback tool to map out international collaboration. Bibliometrics have their important uses, of course, but they are not effective in capturing the research practices of all research scholars, especially those in the humanities and some arms of the social sciences.

Why? Well the main reason is different disciplines have different publishing practices, an issue funding councils like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), or European agencies (including DFG, ESRC, AHRC, NWO, ANR and ESF) have recently been exploring. See for example, this March 2010 ESF report (Towards a Bibliometric Database for the Social Sciences and Humanities – A European Scoping Project), or Bibliometric Analysis of Research Supported by SSHRC: Design Study (March 2009) – a report for SSHRC by Science-Metrix.

If we go down the mapping route and rely too heavily upon bibliometrics, do we risk of letting the limitations of Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Knowledge, or the Scopus database, slowly and subtly create understandings of international collaboration that erase from view some very important researcher-to-researcher collaborations in the humanities, as well as some of the social sciences? Perhaps so, perhaps not!

In this context I am in search of some assistance.

If you or your colleagues have developed some insightful ways to map out international research collaboration patterns and trends in the social sciences and humanities, whatever the scale, please fill me in via <kolds@wisc.edu> or via the comments section below. Or one alternative response is to reject the whole idea of mapping, bibliometrics, and so on, and its associated managerialism. In any case, following a compilation of responses, and some additional research, I’ll share the findings via a follow-up entry in late August.

Thank you!

Kris Olds

The temporal rhythm of academic life in a globalizing era

The globalization of higher education and research is associated with a wide variety of shifts and changes, many of which (e.g., branch campuses) are debated about in relatively intense fashion. Other aspects of this transition, though, receive little attention, including the temporal rhythm of academic life; a rhythm being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed.

In many ways not much has changed for we continue to follow a seasonal rhythm: the build up to term, the fall and spring cycles (punctuated by brief breaks of variable lengths), and then a longer summer ‘break’. When I was an undergraduate my summers were associated with work at fish canneries, mineral prospecting, and drill camps (throughout British Columbia and the Yukon) – the legacy of living amidst a resource-based staples economy.

Summers during graduate student life in Canada and the UK were focused on research, with some holiday time. And summers now, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US (pictured to the right, at dusk), are associated with a mix of research and writing time, university service, and holiday time with my family. But the real temporal anchor is the twin semester (or quarters for some) cycle split by a summer break.

Scaling up, the rhythm of institutional life follows aspects of this seasonal cycle, albeit with noteworthy national and institutional variations. For example, research administrators kick into higher gear in the US and UK (where I am a visiting professor) during the summer and winter breaks before important national funding council deadlines, yet even research active university libraries shut down for much of the summer in France for the annual holiday cycle. Human resources managers everywhere get busy when new faculty and staff arrive in the July/August and December/January windows of time. We all welcome and say goodbye to many of our students at key windows of time throughout the year, whilst the term/semester/quarter cycle shapes, in bracing ways, the rhythms of contract (sessional) lecturers.

In an overall sense, then, it is this year-to-year seasonal rhythm, with fuzzy edges, that continues to propel most of us forward.

The globalization of higher education and research, though, is also extending, reducing, and bracketing our senses of time, as well as the structural rhythmic context in which we (as faculty members, students, and staff) are embedded.

For example, research on key ‘global challenges’ – something a variety of contributors to GlobalHigherEd have been reflecting about, and something international consortia (e.g., the Worldwide Universities Network) are seeking to facilitate – is inevitably long-term in nature. This is in part because of the nature of the issues being addressed, but also because of the practicalities and complications associated with developing international collaborative research teams. This said, government funding councils are resolutely national in orientation — they have a very hard time matching up budgetary and review cycles across borders and tying them up to the agendas of large international collaborative teams (CERN and a few other exemplars aside). So while research agendas and relationships need to be long-term in nature, we have really yet to develop the infrastructure to support a longer-term temporal rhythm when it comes to international collaborative research on ‘global challenges’.

Long-term thinking is also evident in the strategic thinking being undertaken by the European Commission regarding the role of universities in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as well as the European Research Area (ERA), in the context of the Lisbon agenda. Related forms of long-term thinking are evident in a whole host of agencies in the US regarding ‘non-traditional’ security matters regarding issues like dependency upon foreign graduates (e.g., ‘the coming storm’), comparative ‘research footprints’, and the like.

Moving the other way, the reduction and/or bracketing of temporal rhythms is most obvious in the higher education media, as well as the for-profit world of higher education, or in the non-profit world once endowments are created, and bonds are sold.

On the media front, for example, higher education outlets like US-based Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the UK-based Times Higher Education, are all active on a daily basis now with website updates, Twitter feeds, and once- to twice-daily email updates. The unhurried rhythms of our pre-digital era are long gone, and the pick-up in pace might even intensify.

On the for-profit and ratings front, stock value and revenue is tracked with increased precision, quarterly and annual reports are issued, and university data from networks of acquired universities are bundled together, while fund managers track every move of for-profit education firms. Interesting side effects can emerge, including replicant or Agent Smith-like dynamics where multiple offerings of honorary degrees to Nelson Mandela emerge within one network of universities controlled by the for-profit Laureate International Universities.

Ratings agencies such as Moody’s are also developing increased capacity to assess the financial health of higher education institutions, with a recent drive, for example, to “acquire liquidity data to provide a more direct and accurate gauge of the near-term liquidity standing” of each rated institution (on this issue see ‘Moody’s Probes Colleges on Cash’, Inside Higher Ed, 16 June 2010).

Or take the case of national governments, which are beginning to develop the capacity to track, analyse and communicate about international student flow vis a vis export earnings (see recent data below from Australian Education International’s Research Snapshot, May 2010).

This bracketing of time, which takes place in the Australian case on a combined monthly/annual cycle so as to enhance strategic planning and risk assessment at institutional, state, national, and international scales, has become both more thorough and more regular.

These are but a few examples of the new rhythms of our globalizing era. Assuming you agree with me that the temporal rhythm of academic life is being simultaneously maintained, extended, reduced, and bracketed, who has the capability to adjust rhythms, for what purposes, and with what effects?

I’ll explore aspects of this reworking of temporal rhythms in a subsequent entry on the global rankings of universities; a benchmarking ‘technology’ (broadly defined) that bundles together universities around the globe into annual cycles of data requests, data provision, and highly mediatized launches.

Kris Olds

Brazil’s new Latin American and global integration universities launched

As 2009 drew to a close, Brazil’s Senate granted official authorization for the establishment of a new, very different kind of university in Brazil – the Federal University for Latin America Integration, otherwise known as UNILA.

Unanimously passed on December 16^th 2009, the Bill now enables UNILA to formally announce itself as a university, instead of a fledging project under the banner of the Institute for Advanced Studies, with oversight by the University of Parana, in the Brazilian state of Parana.

UNILA is one of three regional integration universities launched by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006 to advance Brazil’s interests within the region and globally. The other two university projects are UNILAB – the Afro-Brazilian University of Integration, and UNIAM – the University of Amazonian Integration.

These Brazilian initiatives were the latest addition to a rapidly changing higher education landscape around the globe, and one that is set to continue in 2010 (as implied in a recent NY Times report about the implications of the collapse of Dubai’s overheated economy for branch campuses such as Michigan State University and Rochester Institute of Technology).

Dubai’s spectacular meltdown in December was matched by a stunning $61m launch party for Saudi Arabia’s ‘House of Wisdom’ – the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST which Kimberly Coulter covered for GlobalHigherEd.

As Kris Olds wrote in his introduction to Coulter’s entry:

KAUST is a unique experiment in how to organize an institution to facilitate innovation in scientific knowledge production, a secure and efficient compound (hence Saudi Aramco’s involvement), a defacto sovereign wealth fund, a demonstration effect for new approaches to higher education in Saudi Arabia, and many other things (depending on standpoint).

So what do these initiatives have in common? Money aside (KAUST has an endowment of around US$11bn), but like KAUST, Brazil’s three new universities reflect a shared ambition: to use international higher education networks to advance cultural, political and economic projects.

However while KAUST is aimed at developing a world class national university in Saudi Arabia via the recruitment of global talent (academics and students), state of the art buildings and cutting edge development projects, UNILA, UNILAB and UNIAM are aimed at creating a ‘supranational’, ‘global’ and ‘regional’  university respectively, drawing upon staff and students from within the wider region, or from across south-south networks (UNILAB) – though each,  as I will show below, have distinctive visions and territorial reaches with UNILAB the most global.

In August of 2009, I had the privilege of attending the official launch of UNILA.  Close to the fabulous Iguacu Falls,  in Foz, Parana, UNILA is being developed on a 43 hectare site granted by Itaipu Binacional, the bi-national energy company running the huge hydro-electric dam providing energy to Paraguay and the southern cone of Brazil.

The objectives of UNILA are to pursue inter-regional trans-disciplinary research and teaching in areas of joint interest of the MERCOSUL member countries (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay) focusing, for example, upon use of natural resources, trans-border biodiversity, social sciences and linguistic research, international relations as well as relevant disciplines for strategic development.

Unlike KAUST, however, whose model is US-oriented (in becoming the MIT of the East, the ‘Stanford by the Seashore’), UNILA’s mission and approach to knowledge is shaped by a distinctive Latin American commitment. Each course has a Patron and a Founder.

The first Patrons have been chosen for being Latin American names who have left relevant academic-scientific contributions associated to a field of knowledge , while course founders have been appointed for the high academic prestige in their respective fields of knowledge as well as renowned international competence in their specialities.

10 Professorial Chairs have been appointed to UNILA. Each Chair has a mandate to develop courses in ways that are inspired by, and advance, the intellectual legacy of the Patron. For instance, in the area of science, technology and innovation,  founding Chair, Hebe Vessuri, will draw inspiration from the patron Amilcar Herrerra (1920-1995) – an Argentinean geologist who valued inter-disciplinary knowledge and who have argued that the solution to problems lay not with science as progress, but in the interface with policy and politics.

These patrons are clearly not the organic intellectuals of the ruling classes. Many of these patrons, such as the Chilean writer Francisco Bilbao (1823-65), and Paraguay’s Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), have spent years in exile.

The target student population for UNILA is 10,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and post-graduate programmes leading to MA and PhD degrees. Entrants will be required to sit a university entry examination that will be offered in two versions: one with a Portuguese language requirement for Brazilian citizens and a Spanish Language for the foreign candidates of eligible member countries. Lectures will be offered in both Portuguese and Spanish, as it is expected that half of the teaching staff will be from the regional member countries.

By way of contrast with UNILA, UNILAB is the most global in ambition. This unilateral Portuguese-speaking Afro-Brazilian University of Integration will have  campuses in various  Portuguese speaking countries (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, Sâo Tomé and Príncipe, and East Timor). Expected to open for enrolment in the beginning of   2010, UNILAB is hailed as a political-pedagogic innovation project (see here for information on UNILAB developments).

The principal aim of UNILAB is to encourage and strengthen co-operation, partnerships, and cultural, educational and scientific exchanges between Brazil an member states of   the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) listed above. UNILAB will also focus on collaboration with the African countries of the CPLP,  aiming to contribute to these nations’ socio-economic development, including reducing ‘brain drain’ problems currently experienced by African countries.

UNILAB is intended to become an integrated multi-campus institution with campuses in all the   African member countries of the CPLP. Each of these campuses will also be integrated within the regions where they are located. Its main campus will be established in the city of Redenção in Brazil’s North-Eastern state of Ceará, approximately 60 kilometres from the city of Fortaleza. Redenção has been selected to host the main campus because it was the first municipality that had abolished slavery in Brazil, and because the region currently does not yet host a university. The main campus is also expected to function as an instrument for the strategic social-economic development of the North-East of Brazil.

In a report carried by the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education on these initiatives, Brazil’s Minister of Education, Fernando Haddad, commented:

We will not offer traditional programmes, but instead we will construct a common identity between the countries, that makes it possible to contribute to the social-economic development of each of the countries involved.

The third, more regional, initiative, Universidade Federal da Integração Amazônica, or UNIAM, will be established as a public multi-campus university, with a main campus in the Brazilian city of Santarém, and three satellite campuses in the cities Itaituba, Monte Alegre and Oriximiná, all located in Brazil’s state of Pará.

The main aim of UNIAM will be to encourage social-economic integration of the Amazon region, which includes not only parts of Brazil, but also areas of eight surrounding countries.

UNIAM’s  main campus will be established in the Brazilian city of Santarém, and three satellite campuses in the cities Itaituba, Monte Alegre and Oriximiná, all located in Brazil’s state of Pará. The aim of the new institution will be to encourage social-economic integration of the Amazon region, which includes not only parts of Brazil, but also areas of eight surrounding countries.

While it is unclear at the moment when the new university will open for enrolment, by 2013 UNIAM is expected to offer 41 programmes at Bachelor’s, Master’s and doctoral levels.  The Brazilian government will reportedly cover the US$107 million budget that will be needed to pay for the establishment and personnel costs of the new university until 2012.

Described by the Brazilian Ministry of Education as particular ‘political-pedagogic innovation projects’, these three new universities are intended to enhance national, regional and global integration, and demonstrate to the world that it may be possible to unite different countries through education.

These are fascinating initiatives likely to liven up the global higher education landscape in 2010. They reflect not only emerging regionalisms, but potential shifts in the sites and stakes of global and regional knowledge production and power.

Susan Robertson

Associations, networks, alliances, etc.: making sense of the emerging global higher education landscape

Note: this presentation, and associated discussion paper (in English), were produced for the International Association of Universities (IAU) 3rd Global Meeting of Associations of Universities (GMAIII), Guadalajara, Mexico – 20-22 April 2009. Link here for French and Spanish versions of the same discussion paper.

University associations and the enhancement of capabilities for a globalizing era

I recently returned from Prague, where I attended the 5th annual conference of the European University Association (EUA).  It was very well run by the EUA, professionally hosted by Charles University (Universitas Carolina), and the settings (Charles University, Municipal Hall, Prague Castle) were breathtaking.

My role was to contribute to EUA deliberations on the theme of Global Outreach – Europe’s Interaction with the Wider World.  I’ll develop a summary version of my presentation for GlobalHigherEd in the next week once I catch up on some duties here in Madison.

Some aspects of the meeting discussions complemented some recent news items (see below), as well as our 9 March entry ‘Collapsing branch campuses: time for some collective action?’ The thread that ties them all together is capability.

At a broad regional scale, the EUA, and its many partners, have had the capability to bring the 46 country European Higher Education Area (EHEA) into being. Of course the development process is very uneven, but the sweep of change over the last decade, brought to life from the bottom (i.e. the university-level) up, is really quite astonishing, regardless of whether you agree with the aims or not.

Now, capabilities in the case of the EHEA, relates to the capacity of universities, respective national ministries, the EU, and select stakeholders to work towards crafting an “overarching structure”, with associated qualifications frameworks, that incorporates these elements:

• Three Degree Cycle
• The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS)
• The Diploma Supplement
• Quality Assurance
• Recognition [of qualifications]
• Joint Degrees

Ambitious, yes, but the distributed capabilities have clearly existed to create the EHEA, as will become abundantly clear next month when the Ministerial Conference is held at Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium.

Capabilities have also been evident this week in the case of Columbia University, which just announced that it was opening up a network of “Global Centers”, with the first two located in Beijing and Amman. As the press release puts it:

While some U.S. universities have built new branch campuses and degree-granting schools abroad, Columbia is taking a different path. Columbia Global Centers will provide flexible regional hubs for a wide range of activities and resources intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the University and around the world. The goal is to establish a network of regional centers in international capitals to collaboratively address complex global challenges by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields.

“When social challenges are global in their consequences, the intellectual firepower of the world’s great universities must be global in its reach,” said Kenneth Prewitt, vice president of Columbia Global Centers and Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs. “Columbia’s network of Global Centers will bring together some of the world’s finest scholars to address some of the world’s most pressing problems.”

And in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Prewitt had this to say:

“We’re trying to figure out how to go from a series of very strong bilateral relationships and take that to the next phase, not replace it,” said Kenneth Prewitt, director of Columbia’s Office of Global Centers.

As the world becomes more interconnected, many of the most pressing issues of the day are best approached not within a bilateral framework, but by groups of scholars and researchers from diverse backgrounds bringing their expertise to bear in novel ways, Mr. Prewitt said.

See a brief slideshow on the Amman center here, and download the inaugural program launch poster here

The Columbia story is worth being viewed in conjunction with our previous entry on ‘Collapsing branch campuses’ (an indicator of limited capability), ‘NYU Abu Dhabi: realizing the global university?’ (an indicator of strong capability, albeit enabled by the oil-induced largesse of Abu Dhabi), and a series of illuminating entries by Lloyd Armstrong in Changing Higher Education on the Columbia story and some associated entries on ‘modularity’ in higher education and research:

• Columbia goes global following a different track
• Modularity in higher education: Research
• Modularity in university higher education

As Armstrong notes:

“Modularity” is an ill-defined concept as used in discussing globalization of the modern corporation, in that it may mean very different things to different organizations at different times.  Generally, however, it has to do with breaking a process into separable blocks (modules) that have sufficiently well defined inputs and outputs that the blocks can later be fit together and  recombined into a complete process. “Globalization” then has to do with accessing resources world-wide to produce those modules in the most effective and efficient manner.

Now, in some future entries we will be exploring the uses and limitations of concepts like scale, networks, chains, modularity, and so on.  But what I’d like to do now, is think in a n-1 way, and beg the question: do universities have the capability to think beyond their comfort zones (e.g., about modularity; about academic freedom in distant territories; about the strategic management of multi-sited operations; about the latest advances in technology for capacity building abroad or international collaborative teaching; about double and joint degrees; about the implications of regionalism and interregionalism in higher education and research), especially when their resources are constrained and ‘mission creep’ is becoming a serious problem?

Most universities, I would argue, do not. Columbia clearly does, as does NYU, but few universities have the material, political, and relational (as in social and cultural capital) resources that these elite private universities do.

Perhaps the EHEA phenomenon, the role of the EUA in shaping it, can generate some lessons about the critically important dimension of capability, especially when universities are not resourced like a Columbia.

The framing and implementation of ambitious university visions to internationalize, to globalize, at a university scale, arguably needs to be better linked to the resources and viewpoints provided by associations and consortia, at least the better staffed and well run ones. There are other options, of course, including private consultants, ad-hoc thematic expert groups, and so on, but the enhancement of capabilities is evident in the case of the EUA, especially with respect to the construction of the EHEA on behalf of its constituent members, the creation of fora for the sharing of best practices, and the creation of new institutions (e.g., the EUA Council for Doctoral Education). It might be worth noting, too, that the EUA clearly benefits from having the European Commission‘s backing on regarding a variety of initiatives, and that the Commission is a key stakeholder in the Bologna Process.

The other side of this equation is, though, the need for universities to actually engage with, support, feed, draw in, and respect their associations. Given the denationalization process, associations and consortia are also being stretched. Some are having to cope with resource limitations vis a vis mission creep, and the uneven involvement of certain types of member universities. I might be wrong, but it seems as if some sub-national, national and regional associations around the world have a challenging time drawing in, and therefore representing, their better off universities.  This is a problematic situation for it has the potential to generate ‘middling zone’ outcomes at a collective level.

Yet, is it not in the interest of higher education systems to have very strong, effective, and powerful associations of universities? And if the elite universities in any system do not look out for their system, versus take the university view, or a segmented view (e.g., a selective association or consortia), the broader context in which elite universities operate may become less conducive to operate within.

The globalization of higher education and research is generating unprecedented challenges for universities, and higher education systems, around the world. This means we need think through the evolving higher education landscape, and the role of associations and consortia in it, for the vast majority of universities simply cannot act like Columbia University.

If capabilities are limited, then associations and consortia have the capacity to enable reflective thinking, and broader and more powerful university voices to emerge.  Indeed, it might also be worth thinking through how all of the world’s associations and consortia relate (or not) to each other, and what might be done to transform what is really a national/international architecture into a more global architecture; one associated with strategic inter-association and inter-consortia dialogue and sustained collective action.

And in a future entry, I’ll explore how some universities are seeking to enhance capabilities via the creation of new joint centers and experimental laboratories with distant universities and non-university stakeholders. While this process has to be managed carefully, the bringing together of complementary resources (e.g., human and otherwise) on campuses can unsettle, though with positive effects, and thereby build capabilities.

But for now, I’ll close off by highlighting the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) 3rd Global Meeting of Associations of Universities (GMAIII) in Guadalajara, Mexico, 20-22 April 2009. This event is shaping up to provide plenty of food for fodder regarding the capabilities issue, as well as many other topics. University associations are being tasked, and are tasking themselves, to enhance capabilities for a globalizing era. Yet, for many, this is relatively uncharted terrain.

Kris Olds

Collaboration among research universities: a model from the US Midwest

Editor’s note: this guest entry has been kindly prepared by Barbara McFadden Allen. Ms. McFadden Allen has served as director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) since 1999. The CIC is a consortium of 12 research universities (University of Chicago; University of Illinois; Indiana University; University of Iowa; University of Michigan; Michigan State University; University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; Ohio State University; Pennsylvania State University; Purdue University; University of Wisconsin-Madison) located in the U.S. Midwest. Prior to that, she served as Director of the CIC Center for Library Initiatives. She is Vice President of the National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education (NCCI), a board member of the Association of Consortial Leadership, and a member of the Global Resources Committee of the Center for Research Libraries (US). She holds an MLS from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

This entry should be viewed in the context of debates about the role of consortia and associations in enabling universities to achieve their evolving development objectives (e.g., see Lily Kong’s entry ‘The rise, rhetoric, and reality of international university consortia‘).  Given the nature of GlobalHigherEd, we are also interested in highlighting how many associations and consortia are involved in the process of forging global relations on behalf of their members, engaging with new actors in the global higher education landscape (e.g., Google, or international consortia like the Worldwide Universities Network), and acting as collaborative spaces for the sharing of ‘best practices’. We’ve also noted that consortia and associations like the CIC serve as logical ‘entry points’ into the US for stakeholders in other countries, or international organizations, who are grappling with the complexity of the US higher education system (systems, really). Given these emerging functions, it is important to understand the origins, core mission, and nature of effective intra-national actors like the CIC.

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Academic isolation has long been impractical; in today’s world, it is impossible. At a time when yesterday’s bright new fact becomes today’s doubt and tomorrow’s myth, no single institution has the resources in faculty or facilities to go it alone. A university must do more than just stand guard over the nation’s heritage, it must illuminate the present and help shape the future. This demands cooperation – not a diversity of weaknesses, but a union of strengths.

Herman B. Wells (1902-2000). President of Indiana University 1938-1962. Leader behind the establishment of the CIC.

Throughout its 50-year history, the consortium of prominent research universities in the American Midwest known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) has sought to create a “union of strengths” as envisioned by the Presidents of the member universities back in 1958. With the recent launch of several large-scale, high-profile initiatives (a shared fiber-optic network; an agreement with Google to digitize 10 million library volumes; and a shared digital repository called HathiTrust), the CIC has demonstrated its understanding that in today’s networked world, no university can expect to achieve greatness while standing alone. The experience of the CIC may also be instructive for those wishing to develop meaningful and productive partnerships across international boundaries. It could also be argued that the deep experience of CIC universities with collaboration gives them a competitive advantage as attractive and sophisticated partners in emerging international research collaborations.

A half century ago, CIC leaders began building this model of open, productive collaboration that has helped our member schools navigate such complex issues as how best to preserve and provide open digital content in a virtual environment, how universities can hone core competencies while sharing collective assets, and how they can foster outside partnerships to accomplish even the most complex and costly shared goals.

The framework established for this collaboration has remained remarkably stable: The Provosts (chief academic officers) govern and fund the enterprise; top academic leaders on the campuses identify opportunities and engage their faculty and staff to implement the efforts; and a central staff enables the collaboration by providing administrative support that minimizes the ‘friction’ in collaborative efforts.

Along the way, we learned hard lessons about the challenges to inter-institutional collaboration. The independent nature of scholarship and the inherent competition across higher education exist as natural hurdles to sharing assets and accomplishments. We compete with one another for students, for researchers and teachers, for federal funds and private partners. When our interests do converge, we do not always share the same priorities, timelines, or strategic vision.

Within the CIC, each collaborative agreement is unique, and necessarily builds upon the trust established through earlier efforts. Through the steady development of this inter-connected web of increasingly more sophisticated arrangements, we can point to some factors for our success that might be relevant for other universities seeking to develop international partnerships:

• The peer nature of our universities allows partners to come in with similar needs and expectations at the outset;]
• The long-standing commitments to the partnership at the very highest levels of university administration;
• A focus on projects that clearly leverage efforts, thereby creating more value through aggregation or coordination;
• A flexible, lightweight framework with an equal commitment in the basic infrastructure and governance, but with varying levels of participation in any one activity;
• Leadership for efforts arises from (or is nurtured in) the member universities, thereby ensuring that only the highest priority initiatives are launched & sustained.
• A willingness to be patient and a tolerance for some failure.

The success of many CIC projects and programs (some dating back 40 years or more), illustrate how the persistent, patient approach of the CIC offers both hope and guidance. Few of the most consequential agreements were easily reached. Many were the result of years, even decades, of revisiting common issues, assessing new technologies, and respecting the basic factors that make change difficult within any organization – spectacularly so when working across institutions. But we have made steady progress.

Certainly other like-minded enterprises have made similar efforts to pool resources. But the CIC stands as one of the very few that have both stood the test of time and that continues to innovate in the pursuit of our core mission – that of leveraging and aggregating the vast resources of our member universities for the common good.

Virtually every research university in the world is striving to identify their place in the broader, global context. And here it might be argued that it is virtually impossible to engage globally without partnerships (be they with other institutions of higher learning, or with communities, or governmental agencies). Our work in the CIC suggests that it is not just possible – but desirable – to invest institutional energy in the establishment and continued development of partnerships. There is a better and more meaningful way to launch and sustain efforts rather than the traditional ‘memorandum of agreement’ with which we are all familiar (and which are too often signed and forgotten). This requires an initial investment in the selection of the right partners, the identification of clear objectives that map to strengths among the participating institutions; and multi-level support from administrators, faculty and scholars.

There are many attractive and compelling opportunities for collaborating internationally. From building shared digital repositories that aggregate scholarly works, to co-investments in very large scale scientific equipment or laboratories that can be shared, to the shared development of courses and scholarly resources among scholars across the globe. Our experience in the CIC suggests that it is possible to realize the golden opportunities before us. To harness the great scholarly resources that universities command worldwide will require thoughtful, engaged, and collaborative leadership, and a recognition of the need for sophisticated mechanisms to manage, measure and sustain such efforts.

Barbara McFadden Allen

Technology, international consortia, and geographically dispersed research teams

The Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) is one of several international consortia that have been created, since the late 1990s, to deepen linkages between universities. I’ve been involved with two of them (the WUN and Universitas 21) while working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National University of Singapore.

As Lily Kong (Vice-President, Global Relations, National University of Singapore) noted in her 7 October 2007 entry (‘The rise, rhetoric, and reality of international university consortia’):

[o]ne of the challenges of making such university alliances work is the lack of clarity of intention, and the lack of a clear articulation of how such alliances, often formed from the top by senior university administrators, can achieve the stated objectives. In almost every new alliance, establishing research partnerships and collaboration among member universities is said to be a priority. Are alliances really an effective way to develop research collaboration though? Member universities that are chosen to be part of an alliance are often chosen for political reasons (”political” in the most expansive of its meanings). They may be chosen because they are thought to be “research powerhouses”. But different universities have different areas of research strength, and university administrators sitting together to decide an area/s among their universities for research collaboration can be quite artificial. Such alliances can then at best facilitate meetings and workshops among researchers, but the collaborative sparks must come from the ground. Throwing a group of people together once or twice and asking that they produce huge grant applications to support collaborative research is not likely to happen. Those with the responsibility of developing alliances, however, will be anxious to show results, and sometimes, just the act of bringing researchers together is hardly sufficient result.

Given these challenges, some of us have been trying to think through ways to use the international consortia framework as a vehicle to deepen regular connections between geographically dispersed researchers. In doing so, though, we’ve been faced with debates about the costs of facilitating relatively frequent human mobility between member universities, not to mention which types of people (Graduate students? Faculty? Staff?) to target with available support. To be sure there is nothing quite like face-to-face engagement: intense sessions in meetings, workshops, summer institutes, and in situ collaborative research. However, these face-to-face moments, which can never be replaced, need to be supplemented by regular virtual gatherings. Furthermore, the ongoing financial crisis is now generating troublesome ripple effects in research networks where bodily movement across space is the ideal.

In the course of thinking about the development of UW-Madison’s WUN website, we have been considering the establishment of some web-based resources for researchers who seek to collaborate virtually, including via sound and video in synchronous (ie concurrent/real time) fashion. We have used a variety of such technologies – Skype, video-conferencing, Access Grid Node – before, though we have not formally identified, at UW-Madison’s Division of International Studies (the host unit of WUN staff), the full array of options, which ones are best for what activities, what the full cost (if any) of using each of them are, and how researchers can access them (if they need to be booked). Yet a search for a model website via an associated consortia (the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) failed to identify examples of one.

Given the above, we met with the Division of Information Technology (DOIT) a few days ago. DOIT’s savvy staff ended up having more questions for us – very simple yet telling questions – than we had for them.  They wisely helped us think through the forms of collaboration being undertaken via WUN-funded initiatives, and what types and level of resources we had to enable such collaboration to occur.

Now, the vast majority of WUN-related research collaboration does not involve the transmission and analysis of large-scale data sets – the type dependent upon the Internet2 cyberinfrastructure and collaborative platforms like HUBzero.  Rather, it tends to involve formal and informal dialogue within and between research teams, fora such as workshops and conferences, virtual (video-conference) courses for students in multiple sites, and formal and informal graduate student advising. Given this, DOIT’s staff recommended that we explore, more intensively, options for web-conferencing. There are, of course, many other options but we settled on web-conferencing as the likely best option.

Web-conferencing is a form of collaboration that enables geographically dispersed research teams to connect via computer desktops, while allowing engagement throughout the link-up process. Deliberative engagement, versus ‘passive learning’, is important for research teams typically do not want to sit quietly while someone they know is speaking.

Typical features of web-conferencing include:

• Slide show presentations – where PowerPoint or Keynote slides are presented to the audience and markup tools and a remote mouse pointer are used to engage the audience while the presenter discusses slide content.
• Live or Streaming video – where full motion webcam, digital video camera or multi-media files are pushed to the audience.
• VoIP (Real time audio communication through the computer via use of headphones and speakers)
• Web tours – where URLs, data from forms, cookies, scripts and session data can be pushed to other participants enabling them to be pushed though web based logons, clicks, etc. This type of feature works well when demonstrating websites where users themselves can also participate.
• Meeting Recording – where presentation activity is recorded on a PC, MAC or server side for later viewing and/or distribution.
• Whiteboard with annotation (allowing the presenter and/or attendees to highlight or mark items on the slide presentation. Or, simply make notes on a blank whiteboard.)
• Text chat – For live question and answer sessions, limited to the people connected to the meeting. Text chat may be public (echo’ed to all participants) or private (between 2 participants).
• Polls and surveys (allows the presenter to conduct questions with multiple choice answers directed to the audience)
• Screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing (where participants can view anything the presenter currently has shown on their screen. Some screen sharing applications allow for remote desktop control, allowing participants to manipulate the presenters screen, although this is not widely used.)

Note, though, that this is not a new technology: web-conferencing has been heavily used in some disciplines (e.g., Chemistry), and of course the business world, for some time. It has also moved through a number of development phases, and is increasingly affordable and simpler to use.

There are, as you might expect, plenty of platform options for web-conferencing. I’ll cut to the chase and state, given our needs and the evolving discussion, that Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro software emerged as the most likely option for enabling the type of engagement that we are seeing in the vast majority of WUN-supported projects. Link here for information about other platform options including the relatively popular Elluminate and WebEx. See a brief YouTube summary of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro below.

We’ll be testing out this platform in the near future and will report back. We’ll also be comparing notes with WUN staff who have been using Marratech, a platform bought up by Google in 2007. But from what I can detect, this type of web-conferencing software, in conjunction with weblogs and wikis (to aggregate research group output, and enable the joint development of papers, presentations, and so on; see a brief YouTube summary of what a wiki is below), should satisfy the majority of our needs given the dispersed nature of WUN-sponsored research networks.

Synchronous communication technologies, that operate via computer desktops, are increasingly important when working to deepen network relations between members of small-scale yet geographically dispersed research communities. This said, such technologies can never create nor determine; they simply enable. Yet the enabling process is hindered by lack of knowledge about the technological options at hand, and how they mesh with the nature of the research communities (and cultures) associated with the creative process. It is at this level – that of the textures of practice – through which international networks are brought to life, and international consortia show their worth, or not.

Kris Olds

PS: please let me know if your institution has developed a single portal/website that outlines (and ideally evaluates) the wide array of technological options that enable geographically dispersed small-scale research teams to function. I’ll post the links that come through below, assuming such sites exist!

Engaging globally through joint and double degree programmes: a view from Singapore

Editor’s note: further to Kavita Pandit’s entry yesterday (‘Engaging globally through dual degree programs: SUNY in Turkey‘), Lily Kong‘s entry here also focuses on joint and double degree programmes, at the undergraduate level, though from the perspective of a senior administrator and scholar of cultural change who is based in Singapore. Lily Kong is Vice-President (University and Global Relations) for the National University of Singapore (NUS), and also Director of the Asia Research Institute. One of her previous entries in GlobalHigherEd focused on international consortia of universities. Both entries reflect NUS’ role as a relatively global university, partly spurred on by the nature of higher education policy in this Southeast Asian city-state, and partly by the forces underlying Singapore’s development process.

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International agendas for many universities today almost invariably include a student exchange/study abroad component. In fact, for some, setting and reaching a self-imposed target to send a certain proportion of each cohort on such programmes can become a consuming affair, never mind the quality of the actual experience.

Another common expression of the international ambitions of many universities is the facilitation of education tourism (perhaps described in more exalted ways). In many cases, students travel together under the care of a lecturer, learn about another country, but stay in their “environmental bubble”, remaining part of the large group from their home university and within a safe comfort zone.

There are other expressions yet of global ambitions among universities and while they are fraught with a range of difficulties, there are of course also many positive ways in which such programmes have been implemented, and from which students learn much.

In Singapore, not only do universities roll out programmes such as these, so too are secondary schools and junior colleges actively involved in promoting and facilitating such overseas experiences. In a country where overseas private travel for leisure is common and has been on the rise (any flight is a flight out of the country), the question that needs to be asked is how local HEIs can provide for stimulating and meaningful international experiences when many young people have literally been there and done that.

In the last three to four years, the National University of Singapore has negotiated joint and double degrees with overseas partners for undergraduate courses of study (preceding these by quite some years were graduate level joint/double degrees). They offer that qualitatively (and quantitatively) different experience for students, so they present a value proposition to many who had in their earlier years of education already gone on a short exchange to Australia or visited Shakespeare-land in a school group.

What a joint degree means and how it is different from a double/dual degree is not as common knowledge as I had previously assumed. When approaching other universities with the concept and proposal to explore possibilities, I have been surprised by how some with very explicit global/international rhetoric have never thought about these options.

The versions I am familiar with are as follows. A joint degree student spends the same amount of time obtaining the degree as a single degree student, and about half the period of candidature is spent in a partner institution. He/she obtains a single degree with two university imprimaturs upon graduation. A double/dual degree student usually spends more time than required for a single degree but less time required for two separate degrees and obtains two degrees upon graduation. The time saved comes from “double-counting” some courses. Again, about half the total period of candidature is spent in the partner institution.

These joint and double degree programmes have been attractive for a variety of reasons for students at NUS. For those desirous of an overseas education/degree but for whom that is not possible (e.g. financial constraints, familial conditions), the shortened period overseas becomes a nice middle-ground. For those tentative but curious about a full overseas education, this too provides a comfortable combination. Others have recognized the advantages of two sets of educational, social and cultural experiences, and developing two sets of friendships and networks. And of course, the value of two degrees in less time or one degree from two prestigious institutions is a draw in itself. Indeed, this has become a significant part of NUS’ strategy to attract some of the brightest students in Singapore to study at NUS, and early indications are that it is working.

NUS now has joint undergraduate degrees with Australia National University (in physics, chemistry, mathematics, economics/actuarial studies, history, philosophy, English literature), the University of Melbourne (civil engineering), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (in geography, political science, history, English literature, and economics).

The challenges of setting up these arrangements are not trivial. Often, the transaction costs are very high. Setting up the joint undergraduate degrees named above, for example, entailed many rounds of careful discussions and many levels of approvals at both institutions. The discussions and agreements have to penetrate to individual faculty in departments, whose curriculum and perhaps even pedagogies have to be modified. This is one of the first challenges, when university or college administrators wish for a variety of reasons to embark on these arrangements but need to have colleagues at the coalface who will be persuaded by their merits enough to work on them.

Setting up the structures and programmes is one thing. Encouraging and identifying appropriate students to sign up for these programmes is another. For Singapore, this has not been a problem. Students have for the most part been enthusiastic about the experience and opportunities that this affords, as mentioned above. But students in Australia and in the U.S. have seemed to need much more encouragement. The pastoral care dimension of students who move across state, social and cultural boundaries also needs careful attention.

Overall, the opportunities have been welcome by students at NUS, and this has been cited by a small, growing number to be the reason for coming to NUS.

Lily Kong