The challenge of building world class universities in the Asian region

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.