The challenge of building world class universities in the Asian region

To me, these are the most exciting, stimulating and challenging times for universities, although I know some say gloomily that universities are under pressure as never before. This certainly is a common view I have heard during the past year in Australia and on visits to Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom.

In the United States, on the other hand, research-intensive universities are riding the crest of rising support. And in The People’s Republic of China the Government not only recognises the importance of China’s university system overall, but is committed to promoting quite strategically a group of Chinese universities into the world-class league.

My conviction, the passion which inspires my colleagues and me at the University of New South Wales, is that despite current economic difficulties we have an historic opportunity in the Asian region:

• To develop universities which are unsurpassed in any part of the world;
• To use the ever-expanding frontiers of knowledge and the astonishing advances in technology to create the highest quality of research and teaching; and
• To serve our students and our national, regional and global communities at the leading edge.

So What Does World-Class Mean?

The modern university often is a large, complex organisation with multiple stakeholders, increasingly involved in a world of global competition yet, at home, the subject of much probing and public scrutiny.

In comparison with the complexity of universities, other organisations in society – a merchant bank, a construction company, or even a railroad – often seem single-cell, amoeba-like structures.

For universities, world-class standing is built on reputation and perception – often seen as subjective and uncertain – and it requires outstanding performance in many events.

At the Top of My list is Quality of Faculty

A world-class university will be widely recognised as an eminent institution, as a place where top staff will wish to congregate. Given the chance, staff from other universities will migrate to the world-class university, and top faculty attract top students. The process is auto-catalytic. This means such a university will almost certainly be a research-intensive university. It also must teach well. But first and foremost it is a place where people will want to spend time for the experience, and to associate with the fame and respect that goes with this. Absolutely fundamental to building such a climate is the quality of the staff, especially the academic faculty members.

Research Reputation is Critical

Although there is a general awareness in the wider community that university research delivers worthwhile outcomes, there is a particular need in medium-scale economies for the benefits flowing from research to be realised.

Whilst I am not in favour of closely targeting research to narrow national objectives, I note that many of the success stories at the UNSW are in areas of vital importance to Australia. For example, UNSW’s world-class research on solar photovoltaic cells and artificial membranes for water treatment address areas of immediate national importance.

Students involved in research that leads to practical outcomes gain much from the experience.

It is largely through their research performance, and how this is carried through to excite and inform the learning process for all members of the university which will most build reputational capital, and most put it at risk. But this is not a bad thing, for systems are needed which keep the pressure on those who wish to be seen as the best. A university perceived to be world class one generation may not be there in the eyes of the next generation. Mobility in reputations, as much as with staff and students, helps keep the flame alive!

Importance of a Talented Undergraduate Body

As in the past, so into the future, universities accorded the tops spots will enroll the best of the brightest into their undergraduate programs. Life will have its second chances, and people will make several, perhaps more than several, journeys in their lifetime through the universities of their choice. But the universities most sought out for that first degree, particularly in a world where choice is national and even international, will have a very big edge indeed for pushing their reputation capital. There is a special uplift effect from having thousands of really talented undergraduates on the one campus sparking off each other and keeping the rest of us, including the postgraduate students, on our toes.

A World-Class University has an International Presence

Universities have long reached beyond their national borders to recruit staff, acquire knowledge and even to enroll students. But now, for universities, the world is shrinking even further through an array of developments increasingly familiar: the globalisation of economies, the revolution in international travel, both real and virtual and, most importantly, the opening of minds to a sense of an international engagement through networks that interlace study, work, consumption and leisure activity.

I am particularly attracted to Martha Nusbaum’s argument that universities must strive to develop world citizens: "We increasingly find that we need comparative knowledge of many cultures to answer the questions we ask".

It is here that I feel the greatest opportunities for Asian universities exist. ASEAN has shown that there is much strength in regional co-operation. Australia is keen to play its part in these developments. There is a major challenge to be faced in preparing young people to take their place in tomorrow’s world where the progress of information technologies has reduced us to a global village whose leaders need the ability to tap into the world’s knowledge and to communicate across cultural barriers with sensitivity.

I want to see the students of the world-class universities in Asia spending time moving around the region, much as in the Erasmus and Socrates program in Europe. Students should spend a semester at least – ideally a whole year – studying for credit at a sister university overseas. Similarly, staff should co-operate in research projects to the point that authorship involving universities in several countries is standard practice.

Proper Resourcing is an Excellence Issue

The major public policy issue around the world is who funds higher education. In Australia, this could be answered one way when, as in the 1960’s, only 10 in every 100 high school graduates went on to university; now the answer will be different, as we pass into the new millennium, with over 40% of the high school cohort enrolling and a similar actual number entering university in later life. On top of this is a massive increase in postgraduate enrolment for coursework masters degrees.

The move to near universal higher education and its funding has changed the terrain significantly. Just how the balancing of private and public sourcing for university resourcing is handled, largely by governments, will have a profound bearing on where the world-class universities are based.

One thing is certain the title of world-class won’t come at a discount price, and without world-class funding the goal of reaching, and preserving, that high standard will be rhetoric alone.

The Leveraging Effect of Alliances and Networks

The last decade has seen a literal explosion in the signing of exchange agreements between universities in different countries, primarily to facilitate study abroad programs. Now with a new internationalism at hand and with a new competitiveness afoot, a new strategy on alliances is needed for universities pursuing the world-class goal. One such example is Universitas 21.

Founded in Melbourne last year, Universitas 21 has the University of New South Wales and the National University of Singapore among its 18 members from 6 countries. Universitas 21 is facilitating not only the normal array of student and staff exchanges, but is moving quite rapidly to:

• Mutual recognition of each member’s programs for degree progression requirements;
• Fully-integrated academic programs in pilot areas, possibly leading to joint-badged degrees;
• Extensive staff exchanges for areas such as student administration, facilities management and financial services;
• Open access to each member’s courseware, and internet program delivery as well as intellectual property alliances; and
• Informed benchmarking across an array of performance areas.

World-Class Universities Embrace Many Disciplines

A world-class university will accommodate a large number of disciplines and areas of study, to ensure cross-fertilisation of ideas and that frissance which comes from the gathering together of bright, higher-energy people from a variety of backgrounds and traditions. Some universities with a specific disciplinary focus such as in engineering or pharmacy or accountancy or even technology in a wider sense will draw international acclaim. But to cover a good part of the spectrum of scholarly enquiry in my view adds that extra dimension to the university.

To accommodate multiple disciplines is not, however, to commit to preserving all disciplines once accommodated. As we have found at UNSW, limited budgets mean strategy choices must be made, often painfully.

World-Class Universities will be Technologically Smart

Universities, primarily, are about the discovery and transmission of new knowledge, with students present. The cost of research equipment is now a major budget item – electron microscopes, NMRs, mass spectrometers, nano-structure fabrication facilities and facilities for amino acid and genome analysis – all these require planning and special funding. Similarly, the technology of communications is a budget as much as it is a pedagogic issue, and no university of world class will hold that position simply by treading water.

World-Class Universities will Practice the Art of Good Management

It goes without saying that a truly eminent university will excel in teaching and research. But paralleling and supporting those core activities will be an excellence in management driving first-rate administrative systems.

With continuing pressures on resources, every dollar reasonably saved is a dollar to be strategically spent. Beyond the need for such basic efficiency there is the imperative to invest funds to maximise returns, to manage financial and student data for timely and accurate information to teachers and researchers, to market imaginatively, to build and renovate campus facilities, particularly when pressures are strong for expenditure of a more recurrent kind and to do well all those prosaic things which teachers and researchers could take for granted in simpler, better-funded and less competitive times.

Good management should not be a pejorative term, but it often is when caught up in the tension now quite widespread in universities in a number of countries, over the perceived divide between collegiality and managerialism.

Part of the questioning so important in university life must be embraced by academics themselves about the nature of the modern university and to the effect that if we wish to build and pass on to subsequent generations, universities of world-class stature in the Asian Region, we will need to be quite strategic in how we go about our business.

University leaders around the world have a duty to carry the message of change, and I say this in full awareness that messengers can get shot, figuratively speaking of course.

Let me go on to say a little more about two areas of special importance in my view - the challenge of the virtual university and the nature of the new internationalism.

The Virtual Challenge

Many in traditional universities view the "virtual university" phenomenon with some degree of anxiety, and that is not entirely an unreasonable position to take. One reason is that it throws open to all comers, both client and provider, the "knowledge economy". For better or for worse, knowledge is now bought and sold as a commodity. Research institutes, think tanks and consulting firms are all new competitors to universities in this knowledge economy.

Our traditional universities already have virtual features with information technology networks, distance delivery, internet and e-mail access, websites and computerised research facilities. Even for a traditional university, methods of communication, administrative processes, managing campus facilities and the actual process of research, teaching and learning can all be made virtual to some extent. What we are working through is to arrive at the right balance between the physical and the virtual presence.

The virtual attributes, managed carefully, can breathe life into strategic alliances, can help bring institutions otherwise isolated beyond the critical mass to compete in the larger league. Comparative classes in politics and law can be taught jointly by universities in different countries. Students can even be linked to scientific expeditions occurring far from the university campus and be involved in the collection and analysis of data as it happens. The possibilities are endless.

So it really all depends on how it is done – on the nature of the strategic choices exercised. And this brings me to the central point, which is that there are choices to be made, and strategies to be set, and while it once took centuries to build reputation as a university of renown, the timeline on this has been collapsed.

The New Internationalism

Universities have long looked beyond national borders for the best qualified staff and the latest knowledge. But now the reach, the diversity and the intensity of international engagement is taking us to a new level which universities aspiring to world-class recognition must heed. The new internationalism will entail:

• The greatly increased international movement of students in both international enrolment study abroad programs.
• The training of educators to work effectively in a multi-cultural framework.
• Employment contracts for new academic staff requiring offshore as well as onshore deployment as the need arises.
• The marketing of education services on an international scale, and university budgets becoming more and more locked into this.
• Joint degrees and double badging of testamurs between like-minded institutions.
• The adaptation of the teaching/learning framework to an international context.
• Graduates regularly taking their university qualifications beyond national borders, as professional labour markets become truly internationalised.

But there are several cautions to be raised.

My first caution relates to that of the internationalisation of degree programs. While the UNSW programs will be international in the sense that they are at the cutting edge of world knowledge, they are also located in the Australian context.

International students come to Australian universities to experience the Australian dimension. So, even though universities are becoming more globally connected, internationalisation must not mean we give up our distinctive cultural frameworks and surrender to the homogeneity of the international degree. International standardisation may be acceptable for the McDonald’s hamburger, but the university is a different story.

A second word of caution on the new internationalism is that the great opportunity for universities to see their graduates moving back and forward across national borders should not be hobbled by national registration requirements. This would be a latter day version of tariff protection, which is not a happy thought to ponder.

Indeed we need to go beyond simply accepting that national borders should be open to professional qualification recognition and actively promote the idea of international mobility of university graduates.

There are choices to be made, and strategies to be set, and while it once took centuries to build reputation as a university of renown, the timeline on this has collapsed, imploded if you will. Because the discovery and transmission of knowledge is so accelerated, and because there is a whole new game plan for collaboration and co-operation, as well as competition, universities of world-class can emerge in a matter of decades.