CIC

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An Indiana University response to ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational-ethical dilemma)’

Editors’ note: we are very pleased to mark the start of 2011 with Karen Hanson’s thought provoking response to Nigel Thrift’s ‘A question (about universities, global challenges, and an organizational-ethical dilemma)’. Karen Hanson’s response is the tenth in what is turning out to be a fascinating – and diverse – series of responses that are lined up below in reverse chronological order (from date of publication):

Karen Hanson was named Provost of the Bloomington campus and Executive Vice President of Indiana University (IU) on July 5, 2007. Prior to being appointed Provost, she served as dean of the Hutton Honors College from 2002 to 2007 and chaired the Department of Philosophy from 1997 to 2002. A faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at IU since 1976, Provost Hanson is also an adjunct faculty member of Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Gender Studies. She has won numerous campus and all-university teaching awards, along with a Lilly Fellowship and a number of research grants. She received a B.A., summa cum laude, in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1970, and her Ph.D., and A.M., in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1980. Her principal research interests are in the philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, and American philosophy. She’s published many articles and essays in these areas and is the author of The Self Imagined: Philosophical Reflections on the Social Character of Psyche and a co-editor of Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory.

Please note that we are accepting additional contributions to the ‘Question‘ series through to April 2011, a year after it was launched.

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

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The Challenge—

Nigel Thrift’s thought-provoking question, “Are universities optimally organized to address the fundamental ‘global challenges’ that exist, and at the pace these challenges deserve to be addressed?” comes at an interesting time in the history of North American universities.  Many of our best institutions have been grappling with financial problems in the wake of the worldwide economic downturn— reduced endowments, pressure to hold down tuition costs, and, in the case of public universities in the United States, dwindling state support—and so have been engaged in vigorous self-examination and, often, organizational change.   Wise decisions about organization efficacy and appropriate deployment of resources require a clear sense of core mission and best opportunities.   Some institutions facing financial challenges have claimed to find ways to do more with less, but some have begun to think they may need to do less with less, and that has added a grim urgency to the identification of core mission and crucial activities.

 

Vice-Chancellor Thrift has rightly noted that universities have by and large “taken their ethical responsibilities to the world seriously,” and the responses to his question throughout this past year have underscored that fact.  Universities understand themselves to be constitutively dedicated to good aims—education, the creation and preservation of knowledge, service to society—and yet Vice-Chancellor Thrift, and many of those who have commented on his post, take it as evident that universities are not “optimally organized” to pursue the most pressing ethical or social problems.  Vice-Chancellor Thrift notes that his question about whether the world’s universities are “really doing all they could to mitigate and even head off the risks” of global challenges (such as climate change) is merely rhetorical.  The answer, he says, is “not really.”

Optimal Organization and a Variety of Good Ends—

While I am inclined to agree with this assessment– of course universities are not doing all they could do to address the problem of, e.g., climate change— I am also inclined to think that this, by itself, does not suggest morally deficient institutional organization.  What, after all,  would it be for a university to be doing all it could to address the problem of climate change?  Would this require that all of a university’s resources—its degrees programs and research budgets– be dedicated to topics we know to be implicated in this problem?  That would be unreasonable not only because there is a positive case to be made for research and education in a variety of other areas of vital concern but also because none of us is in a position to be sure that we know all and only the topics that are implicated in this problem.

 

 

Of course, as the discussion of the original question makes plain, it is really a variety of “long emergencies” that are at stake, and we might well understand many of them—unsustainable development, educational and income inequality, pandemic disease, absolute poverty, etc.—as interrelated.  Hence, insofar as our university resources are devoted to education and research in any of these areas of concern, we could thus defend our ethical standing, even though the question of organizational effectiveness would remain open.

 

I would take a harder line, however, and insist that much of what we do in areas not obviously related to the identifiable long emergencies is morally justifiable, and it is not a defect of our institutions or their organization that we devote resources to these areas.  For example, education and research in the humanities cannot be robustly defended in terms of its likely contribution to solving the problem of global climate change or poverty, but that would not be a good reason to abandon it.  (Some research in the humanities does indeed have intriguing if somewhat more oblique applications to our global problems.  For example, a group of faculty in Indiana University’s departments of history and English, mainly medievalists, are embarked on a humanistic study of innovation, and their perspective will surely enrich the work of their colleagues in science, business, and policy studies.   And our faculty in area studies programs, by helping students and the broader society better understand the distinctive cultures of the parts of the world on which they focus, thus also help maintain a framework for understanding and addressing social problems in those areas.  But I would want equally to defend, e.g., the scholar of Romantic poetry, whose teaching and writing is directed simply, centrally, to better understanding of Romantic poetry.)  The humanities, with their focus on meaning and interpretation, are worth preserving in the university, even in the context of our long emergencies.

 

How can this claim be sustained, if we do indeed need to regard ourselves as on “a war footing” against a host of catastrophic problems?  I don’t in the least disagree with the call for universities to be more cooperative with one another and to be more fully internationalized.  Answering that call should not, however, involve neglecting all activities that do not directly contribute to solving those problems.  In particular, answering that call would not, should not require jettisoning the university’s responsibilities to sustain inquiry into questions of value and meaning, to support critical and analytical study of the human condition and of the artifacts—including literature, art, music, religion—that respond to and enrich the human condition.   Will this inquiry help avert those catastrophic problems?  Probably not.  But note that there seems to be a fairly straightforward utilitarian ethics implicit in Vice-Chancellor Thrift’s metaphor of a “war footing,” and one of the standard objections to utilitarian ethics is that it may be unlivable, because it can lead to the loss of personal agency and the loss of the possibility of projects that give an individual’s life personal meaning.  There is, after all, almost alwayssomething I could be doing that would better conduce to the greatest good for the greatest number than whatever I am at the moment engaged in, in my particular life circumstances; and utilitarianism seems to demand that I turn to this, that I seek always to maximize general welfare, rather than attend to the activities and projects that are connected to my individual interests, talents, context, and aims.  But it is a serious, perhaps fatal, objection to a scheme of ethical obligations that, in making boundless demands, it would deprive a person’s life of individual meaning.

 

If it seems that is only from a position of contemptible privilege that one would defend supporting [another] study of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” in the context where one is acknowledging that desperate conditions of absolute poverty are darkening the short lives of other human beings on this planet, it should also be acknowledged that this juxtaposition dooms as well support for scientific inquiry that is not clearly and immediately directed to the most pressing practical ends.

Moreover, it is not in fact obvious what sort of organization is best suited to address the long emergencies.  I agree with Vice-Chancellor Thrift that we should be alert to prospects for effective collaborations across state and national boundaries, but I also agree with President and Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope’s suggestion that, in general, research collaborations are built from the bottom up, from teams and groups that are already engaged and focused on identified problems.  Most crucially, the determination of the most effective political and organizational structure to deal with issues of common property and resource use is an empirical matter, not something that can be determined a priori. This is one of the lessons of Indiana University’s Workshop on Political Theory, the working group founded by Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and her husband, Vincent Ostrom.  (The Workshop is itself an example of the extraordinary effectiveness of a grass-roots, self-organizing faculty/student organization, an organization that has partnered with governments, funding agencies, academic institutions, individuals, and communities around the globe and that has in turn become a leader in theoretical and applied studies in natural resource management and sustainable development.)

 

Local Interests and the Social Compact—

I would argue as well that it should not be regarded as a matter of myopia or global neglect for a public university such as Indiana University to be sensitive to local— that is to say, state— regional, and national issues and priorities as well as global concerns.  Presumably a case does not need to be made for the value of educating the citizens of the state, as they will be among those in the next generation to face and try to solve the long emergencies.  But it may need to be said, in the context of this discussion of global engagement, that the very existence of the public university depends on a social compact recognizing the public benefits of this institution.  Now, while it’s undeniably true that addressing a problem—such as climate change– that threatens life on this planet does, to put it mildly, promise public benefits, it is entirely possible that our relevant publics, in order to provide resources to help us address this problem, require additional, more immediate reinforcements of the value of their investments.  Public support and appreciation of the value of the university, of higher education and non-commercial research, of the university’s claim to be a common good, is a fragile thing, and I don’t think we can reasonably expect it to be entirely free of local self-interest.

 

Modes of Engagement—

The upshot is that, even on a “war footing,” the domestic economy must be served, the young must be educated, and art and values beyond material measure must be sustained.  Of course, this qualification of Vice-Chancellor Thrift’s message is not meant to suggest any hesitancy about the imperatives of institutional cooperation and international engagement.

 

For more than half a century, Indiana University has supported and benefited from the consortium of Midwestern universities that is the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), and, for much longer than that, IU has been actively engaged in tackling global problems.  As we have considered and re-considered our institutional identity and our core missions, our commitment to international engagement has not faltered.  We understand this engagement to go far beyond study-abroad programs, international recruitment of faculty and students, international service-learning opportunities and area studies and language programs, important as these all are.  We understand this engagement to go beyond a variety of joint and dual degrees programs, such as those we have with Sungkyunkwan University, and institutional partnerships, such as the Bi-National Asian Studies Center, an IU partnership with Australian National University, important as they are.

IU’s contributions to the solution of major global problems have come not only from the work of individual researchers and the collaborations they have identified at other universities and research centers, but also from interdisciplinary training and research centers such as the Workshop and the Anthropological Center for Training in Global Environmental Change, which focuses on human ecology and agriculture, forestry, and fishery systems all over the world, and which, like the Workshop, is especially sensitive to the highly variable local issues that are relevant to resource management and sustainability.

 

Also crucial are interventions in the form of institution-building and technical assistance.  Just after World War II, Indiana University played a role in the founding of the Free University of Berlin, and in 1964 was one of the founding members of the Midwest Consortium for International Activity (MUICIA).  Among the MUICIA institution-building projects in which IU played a leading role were the development of the National Institute of Development Administration in Bangkok; the establishment of sixteen teacher education colleges in Thailand; the development of the National Institute of Public Administration in Indonesia; faculty and curriculum development for Kabul University’s School of Education; and a variety of faculty, curriculum, and government development projects in Bangladesh, Peru, and Ghana.  IU served as the lead institution for the Institute Teknologi MARA Cooperative Program, which for ten years provided a two-year IU undergraduate curriculum in Malaysia for more than 5000 government-sponsored students who subsequently transferred to more than 160 U.S. universities (including IU) to finish undergraduate degrees.  Khanya College, an IU distance education program funded by foundations, enabled hundreds of black South Africans to gain entry into formerly all-white South African universities.  IU helped to establish the Southeast European University in Macedonia, which has tripled the number of ethnic Albanian students enrolled in higher education in Macedonia; and, with USAID and private foundation support, IU helps sustains programs at the American University in Central Asia, thus supporting one the bulwarks of democratic education in the region.

 

The Workshop on Political Theory has, with USAID help, mounted the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program with partners in Mexico, Kenya, Bolivia, and Uganda, and with the Center for International Forestry Research and the International Food Policy Research Institute; and the Workshop is also the home of the Consortium for Self-Governance in Africa, led by Workshop Research Associate (and former Liberian president) Amos Sawyer.  IU’s Mauer School of Law also works in Liberia, through its Center for Constitutional Democracy, which has a primary focus on Myanmar, but also has projects in Central Asia as well as Africa; and the IU School of Nursing, the Center of Genomics and Informatics, and the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (now transforming into a school of public health) have formed with the University of Liberia a Partnership in the Health and Life Sciences in order to train more than 1000 new Liberian health care workers within the next six years.  The IU School of Medicine’s AIDS project (AMPATH) with Moi University in Kenya has treated over 100,000 HIV-positive patients, has protected babies by blocking mother-to-child transmission, and has prevented HIV/AIDS through educational outreach, which has also involved TB screening and the delivery of treated bed nets to prevent malaria.  The medical effort has also led to food and income security programs, skills training and micro-financing efforts, and programs of educational support for AIDS orphans.

 

Conclusion—

More examples of successful international engagement and dedication to global problems could be cited, but I hope the point is clear.  We do understand universities to have moral obligations and those obligations extend beyond our state and national boundaries and beyond our current generation of students and faculty.  But it is possible to attend to those obligations, and to find new ways to partner with others in order to address the long emergencies, and yet attend to local expectations and to the realms of knowledge, understanding, and aesthetic value not so directly tied to practical concerns.  It is possible, too, to shape local and national expectations so that our local and national constituencies understand their stake in these global issues.  That educational task, another of our institutions’ moral imperatives, may be the key to the organizational transformations that will best address the long emergencies.

Karen Hanson

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Associations of universities and the deep internationalization agenda: beyond the status quo?

Do our associations of universities have the adequate capabilities, including infrastructures, to support the well-spring of ‘internationalization’ that is emerging in member universities in virtually all countries? On some levels yes, but on other levels perhaps not.

One of the interesting aspects of the enhanced significance of internationalization in the higher education and research world is to reflect upon who takes up the agenda, and what do they really do with it.  In a variety of contexts I’ve been hearing more and more dissatisfaction with the status quo regarding internationalization, which in most universities simply means more study abroad, more foreign students, more Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs). To be sure some universities have gone very far along these paths, but these are well worn paths, and arguably not reflective of the development and implementation of internationalization strategies that create new paths, new models, deep connections, and visible yet also successful ‘signature’ projects. They are also reflective of a centralization (import) logic, and an unease about unsettling existing ways of doing things (despite the assertive rhetoric).

There are signs this situation is changing, though, with the development of branch campuses, the establishment of a range of international collaborative degrees (an issue I’ll be writing about soon), regularized co-advising and co-teaching via the systemic provision of distance learning technology, the knitting together of institutional architectures via the creation of research units within other universities, and the like. Examples of these types of initiatives are thin on the ground for the most part, though.

Scaling up, associations of universities in many countries have also been building up their internationalization agenda. Typical activities include lobbying relevant authorities about policy matters (everything from immigration and visa matters through to GATS),  the coordination of capacity building programs and projects in other countries, and member university capacity building (usually via best practices sharing, fellowships, or secondments). Some associations also provide user-pay support services for members – a trend emerging in association with the ‘cost-recovery’ agenda.

For example, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) in the United States works on this front via its Commission on International Programs which has “four Standing Committees: 1) International Exchange 2) International Development 3) Academic Affairs and 4) Federal, State Private Sector Relations.” Or take the case of the Midwestern  Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) which convenes regular meetings of “Senior International Officers” (usually deans, directors, vice-provosts), while also acting as a conduit for relationship building between its member universities and individual universities (e.g., my colleagues from the University of Birmingham will be visiting this coming week) or groups of universities (e.g., Australia’s Group of Eight) from other countries.

These associations, and their cousins in other countries and regions, have shown themselves to be adroit and supportive on an increasing number of levels despite constrained resources. This said, it seems to me that there is a growing disjuncture between well-intended associations of universities and the defacto (and often not expressed) needs of their membership bases, especially with respect to the deep internationalization agenda.  Members are grappling (or not, which should be a concern!) with complex challenges and topics like:

  • How is the global higher education landscape changing, and how might we be effected by it, or take advantage of aspects of it?
  • How do we map out our university’s international connections?
  • How do we really internationalize – the process, the plan, the implementation, and the iterative process of update and revision?
  • How to we effectively plan for risk?
  • How do we frame, define, and establish governance pathways, for international collaborative degrees and internships?
  • How do we create and support (financially, and administratively) overseas units that need some legal and physical presence?
  • How do we establish and control costs, and ensure security, with respect to communications infrastructure?
  • How do we negotiate with representatives of other systems that have very different understandings of the role of higher education and research in the development process, state of the art pedagogy, academic freedom, incentives and desirable outcomes, and quality assurance and accreditation? What should the key non-negotiables be?
  • Should we, and if so how do we, engage with major transnational corporations like Thomson Reuters and Google?
  • What should we demand, and expect, of our new partners?
  • Where do we get quick and effective legal advice (most university legal affairs offices lack internationally experienced staff)?
  • How might our strategies contribute to emerging tendencies of exclusion and/or inclusion with respect to the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge?
  • Etc.

Clearly some universities have this all worked out, but they tend to be the well-resourced and capable ones like Yale or NYU. The majority of universities in the Global North and the Global South are grappling with many of these issues, and many more, yet they tend to operate on (as makes sense in many ways) an institutional and bilateral level; reaching out, making connections, formalizing relations, and engaging. They are inventing anew and while this is logical it is highly inefficient and not always risk-free given the differential capabilities of universities that are partnering up, but also the differential capabilities between universities and new players (including foreign governments and the state more generally).

Associations of universities are obvious candidates to build up the capacity of their members but they too are seeing enhanced obligations and mission creep as the denationalization process unfolds. Such associations are also grappling with fiscal constraints for they tend to reply upon membership fees as a main if not majority source of revenue. Thus there is an emerging disjuncture – universities have more on their plate, while associations have more on their plate, but the membership fee revenue foundation has intractable constraints and structural contradictions associated with it.

Perhaps it is time for some innovative experiments in forging innovations to support deep internationalization? Four of many examples would be the creation and financing of:

  • ‘Living’ (ie virtual) manuals to guide all aspects of establishing international partnerships (one model is the Internationalisation of European Higher Education – A New handbook, jointly edited by the European University Association and the Academic Cooperation Association). Virtual manuals could include model as well as sample MoUs and legal agreements for these are rarely shared, as well as relevant geovisualizations that map out the terrain and nature of relations between universities around the world.
  • Retainers for on-demand services with select law firms to assist in shaping select aspects of the internationalization process, including in the late stages of negotiations and agreement drafting. Aspects of this assistance could be knitted into the virtual manuals idea noted above where reports (e.g., see International partnerships: a legal guide for universities) are available for review.
  • Risk assessment review manuals, with templates for both process and final reports.
  • Shared infrastructure development. [which I’ll focus in on now]

As my colleague Ann Hill Duin (Associate VP/Associate CIO, Office of Information Technology, University of Minnesota) put it to me at last week’s APLU conference (where I was speaking), why should universities establish their own IT systems in global higher education hubs when they could collaborate much more closely and reduce costs? Or why should universities from one country work on an individual basis to establish foreign presence via leased space in select city-regions when they could collaborate, via an associational or inter-associational relations, and build a purpose built structure.

Imagine, for example, a structure modeled on the wonderful Alliance Française de Singapour building (pictured throughout this entry) in Mumbai or Beijing or Shanghai or New York or Boston or Paris or Abu Dhabi or Lagos. It could include a small hotel, cinema, lecture space, marketing space, meeting space, a range of video conferencing technologies, etc. It could be of much use to member universities, and could also be leased out to local institutions, or other non-member institutions. One could imply I am recommending a foreign compound but this is not at all what I am suggesting; rather, this would be a space of transaction, a space to enable faster, quicker, more efficient and more conducive network relations, and in an aesthetically pleasing setting that is less open to the vagaries of market fluctuations in leasing prices. It would also send a tangible and visible message of commitment to host nations/cities.

In any case, this is but one of many ways we have yet to many of our associations of universities move forward individually, in partnership with other same-country associations, or else in partnership with organizations like the International Association of Universities (IAU). But these types of initiative cannot be just layered on for it they are dependent upon new streams of direct and in-kind resources from government agencies, alumni, philanthropists, member universities, and so on. New models are needed or else we have to accept a status quo that defacto penalizes universities with fewer internal resources.

In closing, I’d like to flag one forthcoming opportunity to discuss the issue of how associations of universities can better navigate the emerging global higher education and research landscape. The International Association of Universities (IAU) is organizing the fourth IAU Global Meeting of Associations (GMA IV) in New Delhi, India, 11-12 April 2011. This particular meeting is being organized in partnership with the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) and the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT). The purpose of the Global Meeting of Associations is to bring together associations of universities (not individual universities) and grapple with challenging issues facing associations and their member universities. This year’s theme is the Internationalization of Higher Education: New Players, New Approaches. I’ll paste in the background information flyer below, and you can register here, download background information here, and download the preliminary programme here. Further details are available via i.devylder@iau-aiu.net or r.hudson@iau-aiu.net. I participated in the 2009 meeting in Mexico and was truly impressed by the richness of the discussions, and the opportunities that emerged for enhanced cooperation at a range of scales, and on a range of issues.

Kris Olds

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Collaboration among research universities: a model from the US Midwest

barb20081Editor’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.

block_logocmykThe 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