Promoting collisions between disciplines to foster new approaches to biomedical problems

Throughout the 2009-2010 academic year a large number of us at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are engaging in some conversations via a Promoting Collisions dinner series.  The dinner series is primarily sponsored by the people behind the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery complex; a large new public-private structure that is emerging from the (now) frozen ground in Madison, WI.  As noted on the Wisconsin Institutes‘ website:

The institutes will build on the long tradition of interdisciplinary research at UW–Madison. Today’s problems relating to human health and welfare are more complex than one individual, one department or one institution can solve. The twin research institutes will encourage the kind of cross-pollination needed to attack these problems and the building’s Town Center will serve as a vibrant crossroads for researchers to meet, hold joint conferences and participate in collaborative events that will extend the research of the efforts at the institutes beyond the facility itself. One of the project’s key objectives is to foster new approaches to biomedical problems at the convergence of various disciplines, including the arts, business, education, humanities, law, social sciences  and more.

The Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery is also involved in sponsoring a variety of other initiatives (e.g., the symposium advertised in the poster above) on our campus prior to the opening of the building in fall of 2010.

Today’s entry is a photo-oriented one; images taken during a stroll around the building a few days ago in the -19 C weather (when my hands nearly froze).  I wonder if interdisciplinary conversations and disciplinary ‘collisions’ are enabled or constrained by cold weather?  If they are constrained, what hope does the University of Alberta have seeing that it is -45 C in Edmonton today!

More seriously, the Promoting Collisions conversations are fascinating. It is also very interesting to see the shape, in terms of design and programming, that this new ‘knowledge space’ is being formed into to facilitate hoped for breakthroughs at the intersection of disciplines like computer science or mathematics and biology.

Debates about the value and effects of ‘interdisciplinarity’ are sure to continue, as exemplified by Jerry A. Jacob’s recent piece (‘Interdisciplinary hype‘) in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yet such debates are likely to be grounded in new forms of empirical reality when complexes like the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery are completed, and strategically designed on-site ‘collisions’ begin to occur, leaving a mark of one form or another.

Kris Olds

Deliberating about bridging the gap between industry and universities in a global knowledge economy

Deliberations about the meanings and uses of higher education continue apace.  The global economic crisis has exasperated the significance of this centuries old debate, in part because of serious fiscal pressures, but also because of the perception that higher education is now becoming the ‘railroad of the 21^st century’.

Why is the ‘railroad of the 21^st century’ perception emerging, rightly or wrongly? In part because a structural transformation to a ‘knowledge-based economy’ is underway; one dependent upon related shifts, including the emergence of a ‘knowledge society’. And which institutions are critically important to producing a knowledge society? Well, many, but a key one is, undoubtedly, the university.

Now the ‘uses of higher education’ debate is taking place on many levels, only one of which (university-industry linkages) we’ll flag today.  Other debates centre on views that higher education should be considered as an ‘export-earning industry’ (and issue we have discussed in GlobalHigherEd), or the logic of opening new types of higher education institutions (e.g., KAUST and Amsterdam University College, both of which celebrated their openings last week) with unique missions. [Note: we’ll be posting coverage of both openings over the next several days]

Bridging the perceived gap between universities and industry in the UK/Europe

Given the structural pressure to create a knowledge society/economy, and the patently obvious decline of government income per student in most countries, we are witnessing drives in many countries to create and/or deepen university-industry linkages. The logic is to generate (a) more innovation within the economic development process, (b) new streams of revenue for fiscally challenged universities via the commercialization of select forms of knowledge production, and (c) more entrepreneurial students who will become the tangible drivers of the knowledge economy.  I’m being simplistic here, of course, but this is the broad tenor of the argument.

This drive is focused on, albeit unevenly across space and time, bridging the perceived gap between universities (as represented by faculty, researchers, and students) and industry. Bridging activities include patenting, licensing, spinning-off firms, consultancy, contract research, on-demand training, new forms of formal and informal advisory relationships, and so on.

Now the drive to enhance transformation of the mission of universities comes from many quarters. In some countries and city-regions it comes from within the universities themselves, while in other contexts industry is the key driver. In yet other contexts the push comes from national governments, as well as regional (e.g., the European Commission) or international organizations (e.g. the World Bank).  In all cases an ‘innovation’ agenda underlies the push.

An example of a push from ‘industry’ was clearly evident last week in the UK. The industry push came via the UK-based Confederation of British Industry (CBI), under the leadership of Richard Lambert. Lambert is the CBI’s director-general, author of the Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration (2003), and co-author (with Nick Butler) of The Future of European Universities: Renaissance or Decay? (2006). Lambert has also acted as the University of Warwick’s Chancellor since 2008.

The CBI’s Higher Education unit stirred up the debate via the release of a major report titled Stronger Together – Businesses and Universities in Turbulent Times. Let me quote, extensively, from the press release, including a lead-off quote from Sam Laidlaw, Chairman of the CBI Higher Education taskforce and CEO of Centrica:

“Effective collaboration between the higher education sector, business and government will be critical to the UK’s economic recovery and sustainable international competitiveness. Business must also make a sustained effort in supporting higher education. To this end, I am pleased that as a Task Force we have made a strong commitment to provide the support needed to help students build the employability and technical skills that are so important.”

The report proposes that more businesses should work with universities to:

• Sponsor students studying subjects relevant to business, such as science and technology.
• Provide financial support to new graduates, through bonuses when they sign on with the firm.
• Offer more opportunities for internships, placements, work experience or projects.
• View working with universities as part of core innovation activity.

Richard Lambert, CBI director-general, said:

“Maintaining a world-class higher education system is vital to the UK’s future competitiveness, and we should sustain current levels of investment in teaching and research, which are low by international standards. Strong leadership is also needed to minimise the risk of long-term decline.

“Business should engage more with universities, both financially and intellectually. More firms should help design and pay for courses for the benefit of the current and future workforce, and more firms should offer students practical work experience.

“In return for this extra investment of time and money, business will want to see more emphasis given to certain subjects, such as science, technology, engineering and maths. Languages are also seen to be important, and the taskforce argues that more should be done to prepare students for the world of work, and teach them the generic skills that will help smooth their pathway into employment.”

Needless to say, this report has been both praised and criticized over the last week. Some are concerned that the UK government is turning higher education into a training unit for private firms, while others are praising the call for greater focus (the ‘do less better’ mantra) and the report’s recognition that there is a disconnect between society’s ambitions for its universities and the funding base that currently exists.

The report’s findings are likely to feed into deliberations about the new proposals (launched last week as well) regarding the UK’s proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF), which will replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

Two contrarian views in the US

The timing of this push by industry, one largely supported by the UK’s Labour Government, coincided with two broadly critical arguments regarding such a development agenda.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, published a widely read 9 September article in the New York Times about the problems with such a development agenda. In her article (‘The University’s Crisis of Purpose’), Gilpin Faust argues that:

Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about discoveries that may take — and last — decades or even centuries. Neither the abiding questions of humanistic inquiry nor the winding path of scientific research that leads ultimately to innovation and discovery can be neatly fitted within a predictable budget and timetable….Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s argument complements a full-length piece (‘Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school’) by Mark Slouka in the September 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Slouka’s article focuses on education (versus just higher education) but it reflects the tenor of debates in higher ed in the US. His article, which is worth contrasting with the CBI report noted above, reflects a concern that the linkage agenda needs to be halted for it has already gone far too far, especially with respect to the valorization of select disciplines, specific forms of knowledge, and particular ways of knowing. Thus, the sense of urgency that the CBI constructs (in the UK) is turned upside down, and effectively viewed as an attempt to finish off what has been a long running and lost (or won, from an industry perspective) battle. Slouka’s sense is that:

[I]t’s about the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value. It’s about the victory of whatever can be quantified over everything that can’t. It’s about the quiet retooling of American education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production.

Slouka’s argument is primarily situated in the American context, but resonates with debates going on in many other countries, both on university-industry linkages, but also on the challenges the Humanities are currently facing.

The contributions of both Slouka and Gilpin Faust remind me of elements of the argument of Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas in What are universities for? (League of European Research Universities, September 2008):

It is our contention that slipshod thinking about the roles that universities can play in society is leading to demands that they cannot satisfy, whilst obscuring their most important contributions to society, and, in the process, undermining their potential. It is wrong, in our view, to expect … that universities will be dynamos of growth and huge generators of wealth, leading to economic prosperity and enhanced quality of life on anything like the scale that is implicit in such language. In a European context, where governments are principal funders of universities, the assumption is that they are a lever which, when pulled, will gush forth the tangible effects of economic prosperity into which public money has been transformed. In reality, universities can only be one part of the process of producing a successful knowledge economy. The oft-quoted example of Silicon Valley and Stanford University is far more subtle and complex than a simple reading allows. It is a compound of capitalist enterprise, technical and legal services, skilled labour, a broad range of social provision in the public domain, local and state government policy, the appetites of an historically entrepreneurial culture, and maybe even climate.

Mission creep is to be expected for universities are embedded in a services-dominated knowledge economy (in the Global North, at least): it would be foolish not to expect universities to be asked to play a stronger role in the development and innovation process. But such mission creep needs to be interrogated, debated about, contextualized (as Boulton and Lucas hint at), and viewed in other than simple B&W ways. Broader factors, too, like the largesse Harvard University sits on needs to be flagged, for this multi-billion dollar endowment arguably provides Gilpin Faust with at least some of her desired latitude.

I’ll close off by noting that the UK’s CBI is being remarkably open about their objectives.  This is to be welcomed and it contrasts sharply with what happens in many other countries. The CBI (via the CBI Higher Education taskforce) seems ready for a debate, and they are systematic and strategic about their agenda. Yet the critics of the CBI agenda seem to primarily gripe from the edges, at least as perceived from my distanced perspective. We await a more formal and systematic critique to emerge in the UK; one that is equally formed, as coherently put together, and as openly circulated, as is the CBI viewpoint. The unruly process of innovation depends upon it.

Kris Olds

More debates about foreign technology workers (many of whom were foreign students) in the USA

Further to our 6 April entry ‘Debating the possible decline of the USA’s attractiveness to foreign students and highly skilled foreign professionals‘, the New York Times sponsored a related debate (‘Do We Need Foreign Technology Workers?‘) on 8 April.  The six contributors (and the titles of their statements) are:

• Vivek Wadhwa, Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University (‘Our Real Problem Is the Brain Drain’)
• Norman Matloff, computer science professor, U.C. Davis (‘Suppressing Wages With Younger Workers’)
• Guillermina Jasso, sociology professor, N.Y.U. (‘A Work Force in Motion’)
• Ron Hira, public policy professor, Rochester Institute of Technology (‘Training Your Own Replacement’)
• Mark Heesen, National Venture Capital Association (‘Why Reject Entrepreneurial Spirit?’)
• John Miano, lawyer and computer programmer (‘Low Salaries, Low Skill’)

The debate has generated nearly 400 comments within day 1, and many (well some…) are worth reading to acquire a sense of the complexity of the issue and the often divergent viewpoints that exist.  Recall that the outcome of such debates have huge implications for graduate education in US universities, as well as the associated processes of ‘brain circulation’, ‘brain drain’, ‘brain gain’, etc.

I should add that the New York Times has a truly excellent group of cartographers on staff (I am biased here…some have UW-Madison ties).  The team has developed an associated interactive map (‘Immigration and Jobs: Where U.S. Workers Come From‘), and one of the many maps they produced is pasted in below.

Kris Olds

Debating the possible decline of the USA’s attractiveness to foreign students and highly skilled foreign professionals

The USA’s experience with the ongoing economic crisis has been generating some illuminating debates about the possible tightening of post-graduation options for foreign students (including in the STEM disciplines, as well as in Business).  Today’s Washington Post, for example, includes an article titled ‘U.S. visa limits hit Indian workers: job offers rescinded or hard to come by‘. The article includes these two segments:

As the U.S. economy slows, highly skilled foreign professionals seeking work under various visa programs are finding it harder to get jobs. President Obama’s stimulus package stops U.S. companies, largely in banking and financial services, that take federal bailout money from hiring H-1B visa holders for two years if they have laid off American workers in the previous six months. The administration has vowed to tighten restrictions and step up oversight of all work visa applications.

The H-1B program brings in about 85,000 skilled foreign workers every year, ostensibly to fill jobs that U.S. workers cannot or will not do. But some companies in the science and technology fields, afraid of a backlash over hiring foreign professionals rather than American ones, are rescinding job offers. Analysts say it is part of a wave of mounting anger in the United States over work visas, especially at a time when more than half a million Americans are being laid off every month.

“Hiring H-1B visa holders has become as toxic as giving out corporate bonuses,” said Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University professor and Harvard University research fellow.

….

During the past several months, the largest banks in the United States have announced 100,000 job cuts, [Bernard] Sanders said. Those same banks, which are receiving $150 billion in a taxpayer-funded bailout package, requested visas for more than 21,800 foreign workers over the past six years for positions such as senior vice presidents, corporate lawyers and human resources specialists, Sanders said, citing an Associated Press review of visa applications that the banks filed with the Labor Department.

As the economy worsened last year and employees were laid off, the number of visas sought by the dozen banks in the AP analysis increased by nearly a third, from 3,258 in fiscal 2007 to 4,163 in fiscal 2008.

More than 5 million jobs have been lost since the U.S. economy fell into recession more than a year ago, according to the Labor Department.

But many immigration experts say shutting out the talent from abroad will only hurt U.S. competitiveness in the long run. “It’s really unfortunate because we will lose an entire generation of wonderful minds as a by-product,” Wadhwa said. “The next Google or Silicon Valley will be in Bangalore or Beijing.”

Nations such as Canada, Singapore and Australia have created “fast-track” immigration policies and incentives to attract foreign professionals.

A 1 April 2009 article (‘A rush for work visas even as demand dips‘) in the New York Times covers similar terrain.

This debate is being entered from a variety of perspectives.  One that is particularly relevant to GlobalHigherEd was put forward by AnnaLee Saxenian in the Financial Times on 29 March 2009 in a piece titled ‘Soapbox: Cold welcome in the US‘. Saxenian, author of some key books on regional development (Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128) as well as skilled migration (The New Argonauts), links the tightening of borders to the possible emergence of challenges to US universities to recruit the best and the brightest foreign students.  She frames the issue this way:

As policymakers in Europe and Asia create incentives to attract talented immigrants, there is growing resentment towards foreign workers in the US, based on the mistaken view that they displace native-born workers. In fact, foreign-born scientists have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, billions of dollars of revenue and substantial wealth in the US, primarily in high-technology sectors.

It is natural that many immigrants wish to return home. And economies benefit from “brain circulation” and the global ties that highly skilled immigrants build with their home country counterparts. These “new Argonauts” have contributed to the emergence of dynamic new centres of entrepreneurship and innovation in developing regions from Taiwan and Israel to Bangalore and Shanghai.

But circulation is a two-way street. The survey suggests the US is losing the openness that made it a magnet for the most talented immigrants. The health of US universities depends on the economy. In coming years, even the greatest universities will be challenged as developing economies invest their own systems of higher education.

Saxenian’s article draws from collaborative work being supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (see a recent report cover above).

Will the economic problems facing US university budgets also be matched by a decline in interest in coming to US universities given (a) concern about the lack of opportunity to acquire employment in the US after graduation, and (b) the emergence of more tantalizing and/or accessible higher education opportunities in other countries?

And what is being done to indirectly open up higher education systems, and post-graduation employment opportunities, in non-US countries such that they can take advantage of the political and economic challenges being faced in the US? Take note, for example, of the service sector impact figures I just reported on in Australia (see ‘Making sense of the economic contribution of international students in Australia (up to 2008)‘) that undeniably play a role in advocacy and lobbying to keep Australian borders open to foreign students, especially from countries like China and India (that have historically streamed towards the US).

The possible decline of the US as a key student migration destination, and subsequent place of employment, might be good or bad depending on which perspective one adopts, yet it is clearly worth thinking about given the unsettling effects it would have upon the global higher education landscape.

Kris Olds

Update: link here for the 31 March 2009 NAFSA Statement: H-1B Visas, which includes this segment:

As America and the world fall deeper into recession, it is important to break free of the rhetoric of the political debate and refocus on the fundamentals. One fundamental is that talent is always a scarce resource. There is not enough of it to go around, and every country needs more of it. Talent is also, in today’s world, highly mobile. Our economy is part of a global economy, and our job market is part of a global job market. In such a market, employers look for the talent they need wherever they can find it, and students and skilled workers look for the places to study and work that offer them the most opportunity.

To turn away individuals with skills that we need, who want to live and work in America, under the illusion that by doing so we are protecting our economy, is to deny ourselves a resource that we need to help pull us out of the recession and put our economy on a sound footing for the future. It will cost jobs, not save them.

Finland’s Aalto University (est. 2010): institutionalizing interdisciplinary thinking for innovation in the knowledge economy

Yesterday’s Financial Times included an informative story (‘Merger with innovation at its heart‘) on the development process of Aalto University in Finland.  Aalto University is being created through the merger of three existing institutions – the Helsinki School of Economics, the University of Art and Design Helsinki and the Helsinki University of Technology – and will formally open in January 2010.

As the FT puts it:

Across the world, business people, creative types and technology geeks struggle to understand each other. Their education and training, even much of their work, is carried out in separ­ate silos, with exciting collaborations the exception rather than the rule.

Now Helsinki’s business school, art college and technology school have come up with a radical plan: a three-way merger to create what they claim will be a unique, integrated seedbed for innovation. The new institution, Aalto University, will offer joint courses later this year and will be open fully at the beginning of 2010 as the flagship project in a national shake-up of higher education.

The government, academics and Finland’s business community, which is strongly represented on Aalto’s board, are hoping to capitalise on the country’s record in industrial and product design and to create an internationally competitive, business-focused institution that takes inter-disciplinary working to an extreme not seen anywhere else in the world.

The website for Aalto University (named after Alvar Aalto) suggests that the new university will have (based on aggregate statistics from 2007) 19,200 students (1,140 of them foreign) and 4,150 staff (53% in teaching and research), with an annual budget of EUR 296 million (61% from the Ministry of Education, 39% from external financiers). The first president will be Professor Tuula Teeri (pictured here), currently Vice President, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.

This approach to higher education formalizes and institutionalizes (at a scaled up level) what some programs or schools are currently attempting to do in many countries (see, for example, Susan Robertson’s entry ‘A creative combination: adding MBAs and art schools together to increase innovation‘). Yet there are also historical precedents: one of my European Commission colleagues noted, for example, the similarity of Aalto University’s development agenda to the origin ideas behind the MIT Media Lab.  And I can’t help but think that the merge will also reposition these universities (or, university) in the European and global rankings exercises…while not the reason to ever do anything as bold as a merger, the rankings factor is unlikely to be irrelevant.

While the development process for Aalto University will probably not be as seamless as the FT article implies, despite being guided by a well thought through “Transformation Organisation“:

Aalto University is shaping up to be a fascinating experiment; one well worth examining, and also comparing to smaller scale initiatives in other contexts, or different foci initiatives such as the new (built from scratch) King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Finally, see below for a 22 page slide show produced by Aalto University, which is available here in PDF format.

Kris Olds

The role of the university in city/regional development: a view from a Vice-Chancellor in Bristol

The entry has been kindly prepared for us by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol.  Professor Thomas has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol since 2001.  Prior to that he was  Head of the School of Medicine, and later Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Biological Sciences, University of Southampton.  Professor Thomas is currently a member of the Board of the South-West Regional Development Agency. He is Chair of the Research Policy Committee of Universities UK and a member of its Board.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The United Kingdom is the classic high added-value, knowledge economy. We don’t dig anything out of the ground anymore and we don’t make anything in any great quantity anymore. Our economic success depends upon us providing high intellectual and creative skills, and on technological and service innovation.

Universities are at the heart of that in both providing the intellectual workforce and in technological innovation. It is said that in medieval times villages and towns were built around the manor house, in the Victorian era they were built around the factories and that, if we were building new towns and villages now, they would be built around universities. Certainly when the UK Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) put out a call for locations without higher education to apply for a new facility,  the 35 who applied would support the thesis.

I often compare the City of Bristol in 1961 with the City today. In 1961 Bristol was dominated by heavy engineering and manufacturing industry. The aerospace industry employed tens of thousands of people as did both tobacco and Fry’s chocolate. At that time, the University of Bristol had about 3000 students and 300 academic staff. It was a small consideration in the economy of Bristol and could exist, almost as an ivory tower, up the hill in Clifton and unengaged with the ambitions of the city.

If you now fast forward to 2009, all that industry except aerospace has gone. And yet, the University of Bristol is the largest independent employer in the city, responsible for 5500 jobs and a further 4500 from indirect employment. A study some years ago in the South West Region reported the economic impact of a university as 1.74 times turnover. A more recent study of London South Bank University by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which took into account the economic impact of the added value from the graduates through their lifetime, concluded that the impact was approximately six times turnover. Viewed like this, it would make the University of Bristol’s impact on the local and national economy in excess of £2 billion per year and higher education in general in the UK in the order of £100 billion per year or over 8% of GDP.

Of course, such figures will provoke dispute. However the general message of the importance of higher education to the local and national economies is now, I would argue, beyond question. How, therefore, does a university like Bristol respond to such a role which is relatively new?

The first important action is to ensure that working with the city is right at the center of your current public strategy. This is so for the current University Strategy, and will be strengthened in our Plan for 2009–2016.

Secondly the head of the institution must articulate that ambition clearly and become personally engaged with the city and region. For example, I am a member of the Partnership Board for the Bristol City Council which advises the Leader and Chief Executive. For six years I was a member of the Board of the South-West Regional Development Agency. I have been a trustee of an important local charity. Perhaps most importantly I assiduously attend all city social events and network with the other key players in the city and always articulate our desire to assist the city-region. I have also opened up the university for the use of many partners and organizations in the city.

More practically, we have a large Research and Enterprise Directorate which works closely with local businesses. Their aim is to ensure the most rapid transfer of knowledge and technology generated in the university and the easiest access possible for businesses to our skills and technical expertise. This is not only for big businesses. We have set up the Bristol Enterprise Network to assist knowledge transfer among the high tech, high growth SMEs in the Bristol sub-region. This currently has 1500 members. This not only provides networking opportunities but also news and information and training in business skills.

We need to work with key partners in the city particularly the National Health Service. The university provides nearly 200 medical staff for health care in the city and must work very closely with local health trusts, not only to ensure the best health care but also the best teaching and research opportunities for our professionals.

The university also provides most of the local teacher training and thus a very important set of professionals for the future of Bristol. Over a period of ten years or so, the University will have invested over £500 million in infrastructure which has knock-on effects in the local planning, architectural, building and legal services, to name but a few.

However it is not only in business that the university works with the city. Many of our staff are school governors or trustees of charities. We are working very closely on the development of a new school which opened in 2008,  Merchants’  Academy Withywood, in South Bristol. We have enormous numbers of cultural events and lectures which are open to the public. It is often overlooked that our academics travel all over the world. The people most commonly putting up Powerpoint presentations with the word ‘Bristol‘ in the title are the staff of the University.

Furthermore, our staff are massively networked internationally not only with other academics but also business and government. I get at least four “Google Alerts” a day about the University of Bristol from press all over the world. Stories about the University carry the name Bristol to all parts of the globe and all that PR and advertising comes free.

To some observers, the pressure on universities to increasingly be more global in ambition comes at a price.  However, I do not see any essential or intrinsic conflict,  between being an international, outward facing organization, and working to ensure that the local society gains as much as possible from its university. The two ambitions can be made to be completely compatible, though as I have argued above, both need to be championed and advanced together.

However, I would say that the role of the university in its local city and sub-region is one of the most enjoyable parts of leading a great university in 2009.

Eric Thomas

Do young ‘innovators’ flourish in universities?

After nearly a year in existence, one of the regular themes we have been profiling in GlobalHigherEd is the relative weight, or presence, of universities in the global research landscape. See, for example, the 4 August entry ‘Globalizing research: forces, patterns, and collaborative practices‘. Of course universities matter – as they should and always will – but the broad trend that we have noted is that firms, think tanks, NGOs, multilateral organizations, topic-specific expert groups, and so on, are playing an increasingly important role in the production of knowledge, of innovation, of creative impulses.

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting story (‘Fewer University-Based Researchers Appear on 2008 List of Young Innovators‘) which highlights the fact the Technology Review (published by MIT) only lists 17 out of 35 “Young Innovators Under 35” with affiliations to universities.  This number is down from 22 out of 25 in 2007. The other 18 “young innovators” in 2008 are based in firms including Drupal, ICx Technologies, Thatgamecompany, and Twitter. The Technology Review article includes video interviews with other winners as well.

Now, it is easy to be be critical or suspicious regarding this pattern, and even more so as this is but one US-based technology-focused magazine (as proxy measure). Yet universities are becoming, according to increasing numbers of analysts (e.g., Arjun Appadurai), merely one of many sites of knowledge production; a diversification trend that begs the question why?

Is it because of relatively low pay, or rigid institutional structures and lack of opportunity for career progression? Or is it because of ever increasing demands on faculty as mission mandates widen? Or is it due to morale challenges in the context of limited (or declining) levels of state funding? My own university, for example acquires a mere 18% of its budget from the State of Wisconsin despite being a public university with significant state-focused responsibilities.

Or is it because the carrots associated with firms and NGOs, for example, are all too obvious to young researchers? I recently returned from a year in Paris, for example, and was shocked at the lack of opportunity for genuinely brilliant young PhDs. Why wait 10-15 years, if one is lucky, to get the position and space to be somewhat independently creative, when this space is on offer, right now, outside of academe? The creation of an attractive and conducive context, especially for young researchers, is a challenge right now in numerous higher ed systems.

The position of the university as a significant space of knowledge production is not to be taken for granted.

Kris Olds

Science and the US university: video lecture series by editor-in-chief of Science and former (1980-92) Stanford University president

The Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the more active centres of its type in North America. They sponsor an excellent working paper series (e.g., see ‘Universities, the US High Tech Advantage, and the Process of Globalization’ by John Aubrey Douglass. CSHE.8.2008 (May 2008)), workshops, seminars, and so on.

This newly posted lecture series, that the CSHE organized, should be of interest to GlobalHigherEd‘s audience. The speaker is Donald Kennedy (pictured to the left), the current editor-in-chief of Science, and former president (1980-1992) of Stanford University, amongst many other titles and responsibilities. The Clark Kerr Lecture Series on the Role of Higher Education in Society has been running since 2001.

I will paste in the CSHE summary of the Kennedy lectures below. The first two lectures were given in November 2007, while the third (and final) lecture was given in March 2008. If you click on any of the three titles you will be brought through to the UCTV site where the recorded videos can be accessed. Kris Olds

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Clark Kerr Lecture Series on the Role of Higher Education in Society sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and the Center for Studies in Higher Education

Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, Science Magazine

Science and the University: An Evolutionary Tale, Part 1: The Endless Frontier

In which President Roosevelt asks Vannevar Bush and others,-including may helpers and some revisionists, to transplant the federal governments apparatus for wartime science into the infrastructure for growth of research in the nation’s universities. The result is not what Bush originally hopes — a single Foundation responsible for all of the nation’s science — but it ushers in a period of extraordinary growth and transformation. Universities deal with the challenges of allocating and rebalancing new resources of unexpected scope, but the twenty days after war’s end resource growth flattens and new challenges appear: federal support brings more control, and a new generation has new questions about the value of science.

Science and the University: An Evolutionary Tale, Part 2: Bayh-Dole and Enclosing the Frontier

In which universities, having been partly weaned from federal support, are recognizing new sources of help. Their quest is assisted by a new concern from the government: the money being spent on basic research is producing more prizes then patents. Congress finds a solution: in the Bayh-Dole Amendments of 1980 it forswears collection on intellectual property rights resulting from university research it supports. The result is a dramatic growth in academic centers devoted to patenting and licensing faculty inventions. This brings in new money, accompanied by new challenges: should the university go into business with its faculty? Can it retain equity of treatment across disciplines. Perhaps most significant, had the enclosure of the Endless Frontier created economic property rights that will change the character not only of science but of academic life?

Science and the University: An Evolutionary Tale, Part 3: Science, Security, and Control

In which science and its university proprietors confront a new set of questions. Whether in the later phases of the Cold War or in the early phases of the Terror War, universities find themselves witnessing a replay of the old battle between science, which would prefer to have everything open, and security, which would like to have some of it secret. Struggles in the early 1980’s regarding application of arms control regulations to basic data resulted in some solutions that some hoped would be permanent. But after 9/11 a host of new issues surfaced. Not limited to arms control considerations, the new concerns included the publication of data or methods that might fall into the wrong hands. At the same time, science was confronting a different kind of security problem: instead of being employed to decide policy, science was being manipulated or kept secure in order to justify preferred policy outcomes.

Cisco, KAUST, and Microsoft: hybrid offerings for global higher ed

The globalization of higher education has been going hand in hand with novel experiments in the provision of education services, as well as in the production of knowledge via R&D. These experiments have been enabled by the broad but highly uneven liberalization of regulatory systems, and spurred on by the perception (and sometimes reality) of inadequate levels of state support for higher education and research. A myriad of policies, programs and projects, of an increasingly sophisticated nature, are now bringing many of these experiments to life.

Experimentation is also being facilitated on some traditional public university campuses, with hybrid units in development (e.g., see the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance), offers to select foreign universities to establish a formal presence on another campus (e.g., see this entry regarding the University of Warwick), and even private ‘campuses’ under construction by firms that lease space to mobile higher education service providers (e.g., see this entry on Chaska’s ‘Field of Dreams’).

Over the last few weeks a variety of examples of such institutional experimentation have bubbled up.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

First, the San Jose-based firm, Cisco Systems, Inc., announced that its Networking Academy, which has been in operation since 1997:

has achieved a key milestone with a record 47 percent increase in the total number of students enrolled in Morocco in the past 12 months. Since the program’s inception, this brings the total number of Networking Academy students over 7,500. Each student undergoes a comprehensive technology-based training curriculum that can provide them with skills which they can utilize in their future professional careers.

According to Cisco, its Networking Academy provides educational services in more than 160 countries, reaching 600,000 students per year. The Network Academy topics (e.g., LANs, IT networks, network infrastructure essentials) can be standardized in a relatively easy manner, which enables Cisco to offer the same “high-quality education, supported by online content and assessments, performance tracking, hands-on labs, and interactive learning tools”, across all 160 countries.

And growth is rapid: in Morocco, for example:

The first Networking Academy in Morocco started in Ain Bordja in February 2001, long before Cisco’s office in Morocco was established. Today, the total number of Networking Academies has grown to 39 throughout the entire Kingdom with many more new Academies across Morocco to be announced in the very near future.

Cisco’s growth in providing these education services partly reflects problems in the Moroccan higher education system (see, for example, the World Bank’s 2008 report The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa). It is noteworthy that nearly 1/3 of the students are female; a level of enrollment perceived my most analysts of the region to be significant and positive.

Further information on the Networking Academy is available in this short video clip. This initiative is akin to the Oracle Corporation‘s Oracle Academy, which has “partnered with more than 3,400 institutions and supported 397,000 students across 83 countries“. Today, coincidentally, marks the official opening of the Oracle Academy of the Hanoi University and Hanoi University of Commerce in Vietnam.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Second, over the last week the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), an institution we have profiled several times (see here and here), announced a series of major funding initiatives that will support other universities, around the world, to develop major R&D initiatives. The logic is to kick-start the creation of KAUST’s global networks (recalling that the KAUST campus is only now being built from scratch, as one of many photographs from the KAUST website, conveys).

KAUST’s Global Research Partnership (GRP) will be funding:

• Cornell University’s KAUST Center for Research and Education
  
• University of Oxford’s Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics
• Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics
• Texas A&M University’s Institute for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (IAMCS)

So three American universities, and one UK university. Further information on these centers can be found here.

KAUST also announced that its Center-in-Development scheme (note the in development moniker) will be funding one Saudi, one Asian and one European university in the form of:

• King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals’ (KFUPM) Transformative Research in Petrochemicals and Polymers
• National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Solar Energy Research Center (SERC)
• Utrecht University’s Center for Soil, Water and Coastal Resources (SOWACOR)

Further information on these initiatives can be located here.

Thus we have a Saudi institution, which is really an instantaneously endowed foundation (to the tune of $10 billion), projecting itself out via funded programs, and translating institutional and researcher agendas in key centres of scientific calculation (to use some Latourian phrases), so as to enable itself to morph into a globally recognized, respected, and highly networked science and technology university within five years. Moreover, KAUST is forging ties with other types of knowledge-related institutions, including the US Library of Congress, so as to:

complement its academic and research programs in cutting-edge science and engineering with research and outreach programs aimed at giving students and faculty an appreciation of the rich history of scientific inquiry and discovery in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

Microsoft & Cisco

Finally, my own university, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has embarked upon two initiatives that splice together the institutional fabrics of a major public university, and select private sector firms (in software and the life sciences), with both initiatives facilitated by the alumni effect (another topic we have recently written about).

In the first, Seattle-based Microsoft is contributing substantial support to help UW-Madison open the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, which will focus on the advanced development of database systems. As the formal UW-Madison press release notes, this lab is:

helping expand on a highly productive 20-year research and alumni relationship between the company and the University of Wisconsin-Madison computer sciences department.

The Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, named in honor of the Microsoft executive who was a founding father of the database industry, will open in downtown Madison under the direction of UW-Madison emeritus computer sciences professor, and Microsoft Technical Fellow, David DeWitt, one of the world leaders in database research.

“Microsoft is here because we are doing some of the best database work in the world and we have produced scores of graduates who have gone on to successful careers in the industry,” says DeWitt. “Our focus will be on continuing the production of talented graduate students and taking on some of the great challenges in database systems.”

David DeWitt (pictured above) was the John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences, though he has now taken up emeritus status to focus on this initiative. Further information on DeWitt and this scheme is available here.

And returning to the Cisco theme, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) sponsored a ground breaking ceremony last Friday for the development of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WID), a $150 million project we briefly profiled here. WID is being developed with funding and other forms of support from UW-Madison, WARF, John and Tashia Morgridge (he is the former CEO of Cisco, while she is a former special education teacher), and the State of Wisconsin.

WID will open in 2010, though it is already in action via the efforts of WID’s interim director Marsha Mailick Selzer, and pioneer stem cell researcher, James Thomson. It is worth noting, though, that even the private component of WID (the Morgridge Institute for Research) is not-for-profit. This said the competitive impulse was loud and clear at the opening ceremony, according to the local newspaper reporter that covered the event:

The building will house an ambitious effort by the state to capture what Doyle hopes to be 10 percent of the market in regenerative medicine and stem cell technologies by 2015. The building is the centerpiece of a $750 million inititiave to develop stem cell research and biotechnology in Wisconsin.

So experiments aplenty. Fortunately, from the perspective of 7,500 Moroccan students, and UW-Madison’s researchers, Cisco Kid was a friend of mine (it’s bad, I know :)).

Kris Olds

‘Malaysia Education’: strategic branding leads to growth in international student numbers 2006-8?

Several months back in our round-up of the global higher education student mobility market, we reported that Malaysia might be viewed as an emerging contender with 2% of the world market in 2006 (this was using the Observatory for Borderless Higher Education figures which reports only on the higher education sector).

Last week, Malaysia’s leading newspaper The Star reported that figures had increased between 2006 and 2008 by 30%, bringing the overall numbers of international students in Malaysian international schools and higher education institutions to 65,000. According to the following calculations by industry analyst (see pamjitsingh.ppt) the Malaysian government is well on target to realise its 2010 goal of 100,000 international students.

Taking into account the forecast in world demand by 2010, the Malaysian government estimates that their market share would need to grow from its current world share of international students (schools and higher education) of 3.9% in 2004 to 6.6% in 2010. In comparison to the global average annual growth rate of international students which is around 7.4% p.a, the Malaysian target growth rate would need to be in the order of 24.0% per annum to achieve the 2010 target.

In order to realize this goal, a new Higher Education Ministry Marketing and International Education Division was created.

Dr Mohamed Nasser Mohamed Noor took on the post of Division Director in January 2006. According to Dr. Nasser, the success of this rapid increase can be attributed to Malaysia’s ‘branding’ of its education sector – ‘Malaysia Education’. It would seem that Malaysia is not far off course to realize their 2010 target if they maintain their current progress of 30% increase over two years (2006-2008).

Branding has emerged as an important strategy for governments seeking to strategically develop their higher education markets. Nick Lewis’s entry on Brand New Zealand carried on GlobalHigherEd late last year illustrates how cultural re/sources, such as ‘clean’, ‘safe’, ‘green’ New Zealand, are being drawn upon to realise value and to reposition New Zealand in a highly competitive market.

Similarly Europe (see this report destination-europe.pdf) has been casting around for an identifiable ‘brand’ to market itself as a significant player with an identifiable ‘product’ in the global higher education market. This means finding a combination of distinctive elements that enable the country or region to position themselves in relation to the competition.

The ‘Malaysian Education’ brand draws on deep cultural, religious and political resonances to promote its product – one that emphasizes lifestyle, culture and quality of education. This includes the value to be gained from its unique multicultural population of Malay, Indian and Chinese; its Islamic religion; and its experience of colonialism. Despite the contradictions inherent in this new form of neo-colonialism, these cultural values and symbols are being (effectively?) mobilized to open up the African, Arab, Chinese and Indonesian markets.

Malaysia’s story demonstrates the high level of fluidity in globalising the higher education market. It requires players to be highly competitive, constantly utilize intelligence, be attentive to strategies as to how to open new markets, and have a way of representing the sector as an attractive and unique brand.

Will Malaysia leave behind its ’emerging contender’ crown and don the mantle of a major player in the region? Much depends clearly on what the other players in the region do – Singapore, China and Australia. Let’s see what 2010 reveals.

Susan Robertson

Splicing hedge funds to universities to funnel ‘brain power’

Today’s Financial Times has a follow-up story to the one we profiled in our About page when GlobalHigherEd was first set up last September. The story, ‘A fierce battle for brain power’, examines the intense competition between hedge fund firms for highly skilled workers with advanced degrees.

As the story notes, firms like Renaissance Technologies in Long Island New York are quantitative hothouses, loaded up as they are with PhDs in mathematics and theoretical physics: a veritable brain trust on a densely wired floorplate. Across the Atlantic, hedge funds such as AHL, Winton Capital, Aspect Capital and BlueCrest’s BlueTrend – all based in London – have sought to create a unique space for knowledge production; part university, part firm, part clubhouse. They’ve done this to create a conducive context for the highly sought after people who create and manage complex financial instruments. This is not surprising in many ways, but the FT story is also worth reading as it explains how hedge funds are now splicing their DNA to select higher education institutions where the best and brightest of these PhDs are trained up.

The splicing process is happening via the establishment of joint ventures with universities such as Oxford (the Oxford Man Institute for Quantitative Finance; the Nomura Centre for Mathematical Finance), and to a lesser degree via endowed chairs (e.g., the Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, Cambridge University).

From the perspective of firms the main logic of deepening linkages with select universities is to enhance their capacity to survey and then court high quality graduate students. Joint venture institutes, in particular, raise the “profile” of these hedge funds while simultaneously enabling them to acquire information about prospective employees. The insertion of parts of a hedge fund’s institutional infrastructure within a university, and the consequent blurring of institutional boundaries, places it three steps ahead of other hedge funds who have weaker ties with professors and contract researchers, and who typically advertise via word of mouth, recruitment fairs at universities, in the FT, or in relevant magazines like Chess Monthly.

Needless to say there are few universities that will turn down this type of arrangement given the prospects for the injection of external resources. Yet it is really only select universities that appear on this highly capitalized joint venture map. Prospective universities typically need to be within the orbit of global cities, the interdependent skein of the world-economy. And they obviously need to be universities that offer a high quality advanced education, while simultaneously providing appropriate social and cultural capital. And, of course, alumni dynamics often come into play. If such conditions exist the hedge funds move in in search of human resources, their lifeblood. As Tim Wong, head of the Man Group‘s AHL, puts it in the story: “People are the key…. That’s why we have done the Oxford institute, because we need the people for the future.”

Kris Olds