Reaching out: World-Class Education in an Era of Globalisation
Speech delivered at St Xavier's College, Mumbai on March 20 2012
Introduction
It is a distinct honour and pleasure to be here with you this afternoon, on this landmark campus in the heart of this great global city. I would particularly like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Dr Roy Pereira, who is like me a chemist, and who warmly extended to us an invitation to come, and also handled the dozens of logistical details involved in pulling off an event like this. Dr Pereira also came to speak at Oxford last year, so I’m delighted to be part of an ongoing trade in speeches between our two campuses.
This afternoon I want to discuss globalisation in higher education. Globalisation is one of those topics so often invoked that it has come to mean very different things to different people, so let me be more precise. I mean the process by which universities become increasingly interconnected with people and institutions across the world. Globalisation has several faces: student and staff mobility; international research collaborations and funding; the establishment of new offices, study-abroad sites and campuses abroad; and the increasing number of globally outstanding universities outside their traditional concentrations in the United States and Britain. In few places are these trends as advanced as they are here in India, so there is no better place to have this conversation. Indian students are going to university abroad in record numbers; Indian academics are collaborating on hundreds of projects with colleagues abroad; the Indian government is working on a highly anticipated proposal to allow foreign universities to open campuses here; and India’s best universities and colleges, like this one, are operating at very high international standards. At Oxford, we have seen India’s rise firsthand. It is a wonderful thing for India, and a wonderful thing for Oxford. It is why we are here.
The light and the heat generated by globalisation
Books and no small number of headlines have been written about the rapid pace of globalisation in higher education. Indeed, I fear that some of us involved in higher education - university leaders, academics, students and parents, commentators - have got excited about the globalisation of higher education simply because everyone else is excited about it. So it is worth bearing in mind that globalisation wasn’t born in universities yesterday.
Indeed, the world’s leading universities have been highly international for almost their entire history. Take Indian students at Oxford, for instance. In 1871, the first student came to Oxford from these shores. And since then, there has been a steady flow of outstanding young minds back and forth between India and Oxford. The famous Rhodes Scholarships have been a major component: 186 Indian students have come to Oxford as Rhodes Scholars since 1947.
Globalisation and the core functions of a university
On the one hand, this is a natural, even predictable, topic for me to take up today. My very presence here, as a university leader speaking to a university audience halfway around the world, is a part of the pattern of globalisation I have been describing. On the other hand, it is other universities, not Oxford, that have grabbed the biggest headlines for their global activities in recent years. As I have said, globalisation in higher education has many faces - and as I will argue, Oxford is among the most international of universities - but the main story that gets reported is Western universities opening new campuses overseas. NYU opened a campus in Abu Dhabi two years ago to great fanfare, and then announced a new campus to open in Shanghai in 2013; the University of Nottingham has campuses in Ningbo and Malaysia; Yale and the National University of Singapore are rushing to open a joint new liberal arts college in Singapore next year. The total number of branch campuses around the world is nearing 200, almost three times as many as there were as recently as 2006.
For reasons that I will briefly turn to at the end of my talk, Oxford has not announced any new campuses. But do not take this as a measure of our engagement with the world. Internationalism is in Oxford’s blood; it is so fundamental to the way we operate that, like English drizzle, many of us have become desensitised to its presence. This international character is integral to the way we believe higher education should be conducted, not an add-on designed to help us market the university more effectively. Why is that? What benefits does a university, its students and researchers, get from international links?
Here, then, is my central argument: the most important benefit of globalisation to a university is not the chance to do something fundamentally new or different, but the chance to do better the things it has always done, the things that are core to its mission.
Let us step back and consider what a university exists to do. Each university has its own set of objectives - and mine is no exception - but I would submit that it begins with three core functions. The first is research: to generate new knowledge. The second is education: to attract excellent students, and to teach them ideas and ways of thinking that enable them to become successful as professionals and people. The third function, which ought to support and emerge organically from the first two, lacks an elegant descriptor. Let’s call it impact: to make significant contributions outside the classroom and laboratory. Each university finds its own way of doing this, in accordance with its values and assets; it can include contributing to economic prosperity or policy development, promoting social mobility, acting as a centre for artistic or athletic achievement, or making available its people and knowledge to the public more widely. In the world we inhabit in the early 21st century, all three of these core functions - research, education, and impact - can be fulfilled much more effectively in a university with broad and deep international engagement. That is good for the university because it is good for its students and academics. I will consider research, education, and impact in turn.
The benefits of going global: research
Let’s begin with research. Increasing human knowledge is the special mission of a university. Globalisation can advance research by bringing academics together in two important ways. The first is through international hiring, which brings together scholars from different countries at the same institution. One of my favourite stories of internationalism at Oxford, more than half a century old, concerns the development of penicillin, a wonder drug developed at Oxford by the Australian Nobel laureate Howard Walter Florey together with the German Nobel laureate Ernst Chain and the English biochemist Norman Heatley.
I have been an academic wanderer myself: I was an undergraduate in the UK, I did a master’s degree in Canada, returned to the UK for my PhD, spent two years in France as a postdoctoral student, went to the US for my first academic position, and spent three months early in my career in Japan. And I have benefitted enormously from the ideas of international colleagues - not only because many were brilliant scholars - but also because the different perspectives they brought, informed by the different intellectual cultures they came from, gave me new ways of looking at old problems.
The second way that globalisation brings scholars together is through research links between institutions. These links too are growing at a rapid pace. A recent report for the Royal Society co-authored by Oxford Professor Angela McLean found that the proportion of academic papers with co-authors from more than one country increased from about 26% to about 36% from 1996 to 2008. Sometimes these links work because of the collaborators’ similarities - because they have specialised expertise in the same field. Oxford and Indian colleagues in physics have been working together for years on this basis. The Oxford-India Theoretical Physics Network brings together researchers at Oxford and top institutes across India, including the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research here in Mumbai, to work on problems of shared interest. Oxford Professor Subir Sarkar, who is here today, is one of the leaders of the project. For the most part, these researchers are working together simply because their work is complementary and because they respect each other. But they also plan to make use of the distance between England and India in a very exciting way: by shooting neutrino particles through the earth and observing how they change along the journey.
In other cases, collaborations work because of the partner’s complementary differences - one institution may have particular expertise, for instance, while another offers the capacity to undertake research at a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. Oxford and a dozen institutions across India are engaged in an innovative study of cancer that takes advantage of expertise that each brings. The study of cancer - its causes and how to treat it - has long been an Oxford strength, dating from research more than 50 years ago that first demonstrated the link between smoking and cancer. Today, cancer is unfortunately one of India’s fast growing killers, and India’s health care providers are on the front lines. So researchers at Oxford and across India are working together to understand what is causing the increase and how it can be managed in the context of India’s health care system. On Thursday I’ll be visiting one of those partners, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi.
The benefits of going global: education
The second core purpose of a university is to educate its students. A university’s responsibility to its students goes beyond simply filling their heads with knowledge and skills. There is also a crucial developmental component. We owe it to our students to help them grow into capable adults able to direct their own lives and contribute to their communities, societies and the world.
A degree of cross-cultural literacy is a now a crucial component of this preparation. Richard Levin, the President of Yale, put it well when he said, “We want to do a good job of educating students for twenty-first century leadership, and you can’t be cross-culturally illiterate and be a twenty-first century leader.” One way to promote cross-cultural literacy is by bringing together an international student body and academic staff, and creating ways for them to interact. The number of students studying abroad has shot up to almost 4 million, up more than 75 percent since 2000.
At Oxford, we seek the most promising students - wherever they come from - and the result is a highly international student body. Two in three of our postgraduates come from outside the UK. And I’m delighted to say that no small number of these international students have come from St. Xavier’s! And they have gone on to amazing things. One of the leading lights is Rajdeep Sardesai, the Editor-in-Chief of the IBN18 television network. Mr Sardesai received a bachelor's degree from St. Xavier’s before studying law, and playing cricket, at Oxford. Another is here with us today. Keya Madhvani also studied economics at St. Xavier’s before coming to Oxford to do one of our globally-focused courses: the MSc in Global Governance and Diplomacy. Now she has returned to Mumbai. Speaking of students coming from India to Oxford, I hope some of you are thinking of doing just that, so let me just briefly reassure you: whatever you may have heard, you will be able to get a visa to come to the UK if you get into Oxford. And if you want to stay to take up a job or to start up a new business, that is also possible. Our careers and visa advice service can help Oxford's international students get their first taste of the world of work in the UK.
Oxford does not engineer our admissions to produce diversity - we simply search for individual scholarly potential - but the diverse student body and staff that results from this search produces a terrific interplay of ideas in the classroom, rooted in the different experiences and ways of thinking that students and academics from different backgrounds bring. This interplay is especially rich in the small groups that form the hallmark of an Oxford education. At the undergraduate level, this takes the shape of what we call tutorials. Think of a tutorial as being like a seminar, but in its purest and most challenging form: 1-3 students meeting weekly with a professor to discuss their work. Some of our postgraduate courses - such as in Law - use tutorials as well. Our postgraduate teaching generally is marked by close interaction between students and their supervisors, working on an equal footing in pursuit of scholarly truths in the laboratory and in the library. This approach to teaching maximises face-to-face interaction between students, and between students and professors. Students learn to challenge each other’s ideas and to respond to reasoned challenges to their own. And classroom learning at Oxford is augmented by the rich array of research seminars every afternoon of the week, with eminent speakers from within Oxford's own ranks and often from around the world. With so many interesting academic events to tempt you away from your own work, Oxford will test your willpower.
This commitment to creating a diverse international network of students is especially apparent in Oxford’s newest major creation, the Blavatnik School of Government. Oxford’s impact on public policy has always reached around the world: we have educated 26 British Prime Ministers, but an even larger number of Presidents, Prime Ministers and other top leaders in countries around the world: upwards of 30. With the Blavatnik School, we aim to create a dialogue among future leaders from around the world, each learning and applying cross-disciplinary knowledge to address local and global challenges. Our vision is that in the Blavatnik School, the brilliant young policymaker from India will sit next to peers from Britain, Zambia, Germany, Brazil, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates - you name it! The first class begins in the autumn, and it will be drawn from more than 400 applicants from over 80 countries. 48 of those applicants, and one of the school’s first “Distinguished Practitioners” - Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia - are from India.
Being an international student can be a wonderful, transformative experience; I know from personal experience. But it’s not always easy to be far away from what you know and hold dear. So I believe that universities have a special responsibility to look after their international students: to help them settle into their new home, to help them reinforce the academic skills they will need to flourish, and to help them build the relationships they will need for support. At Oxford, we do this through a virtually unique college system, which provides a home away from home to support our international students in small, multi-disciplinary, multi-national academic communities within a large University.
We also believe that access to an international education mustn't be the preserve only of the wealthy. Oxford has a deep commitment to increase scholarship provision so that academic ability is the only prerequisite for success. Oxford doctoral students are of such high quality that 58 percent have a scholarship - and that percentage is often higher in the sciences. Thanks to our generous donors, we have scholarships specifically for postgraduates from India, such as the Felix Scholarships, which have funded all the fees and living costs of over 30 PGs from India in just the last 4 years. So don't be misled into thinking that only US universities make substantial scholarship provision for their PG students. Those among you who are interested in finding out more are invited to visit the graduate study stand after the talk, where colleagues can provide advice and info about applying for graduate study at Oxford and our wide range of scholarships.
In addition to creating an international student body, a second important way to promote cross-cultural literacy is to help students develop a globally-relevant skill set. This is partly about creating opportunities for students to study or work abroad. In recent years, Oxford has created hundreds of such opportunities through our global alumni network, and we plan to do even more. It is also about helping students to build a globally relevant skill set. At Oxford this begins with our emphasis on independent learning and critical thinking, which means that employers believe in our graduates, even when hiring for jobs not directly relevant to a student’s course: investment banks are excited about Oxford English majors. Our postgraduate courses include a strong emphasis on general research skills, not just the narrow focus of a student’s research topic. And our Careers Service offers a great deal targeted at or of particular relevance to international students: an international careers fair, extensive job listings, a consultancy programme designed to fit alongside postgraduate studies, and so on. So our students leave well equipped for careers in diverse areas of work with top employers as well as in academia.
A third way in which a university education can be made more international is by adding new and innovative ways to study the world and its interconnectedness. There are many examples one could highlight at Oxford. One of the more exciting is a Master’s degree we offer in Contemporary India. The first of its kind in the world, this course not only introduces students to a variety of interdisciplinary research on India's achievements and challenges, but also trains students in research methods and critical analysis. These are tools that can be brought to bear anywhere.
The benefits of going global: impact
I have argued that going global significantly enhances a university’s ability to carry out outstanding research and to provide an outstanding education. The third core function of a university is to have social impact outside the classroom, and to my mind it is clear that global links enhance a university’s ability to do this as well. World-class research and education have global impact on their own. Important new discoveries can spread like wildfire. Think back to the penicillin example. Doctors in Oxford saved the first life through penicillin in 1942; by the end of World War II in 1945, the drug was saving an estimated 12-15% of soldiers’ lives.
But many universities also undertake a set of activities that are outside the scope of traditional research and education, and yet that emerges from and complements them. I have in mind activities that for instance disseminate knowledge more widely, tackle global challenges through an international presence, bring to the university new types of students, or leverage knowledge created in the university in new ways. These activities can multiply a university’s global impact. At Oxford, they have become an integral part of what we do. Let me briefly mention three of them that we undertake.
The first is the probably the most underappreciated part of our university: the role our academic publishing arm, Oxford University Press, plays in disseminating knowledge. OUP, as we call it, is a department of the university and the largest academic publisher in the world. It is larger than the rest of the world’s academic publishers put together. Its scale has been driven by a global presence that would make many multinational corporations envious, with 5000 employees in more than 50 countries. Its English language teaching materials and schoolbooks, textbooks, and reference books help to educate students around the world. And of course there is the Oxford English Dictionary. By disseminating new thinking and contributing to education around the world, OUP’s mission embodies the University’s core research and education functions.
A second way in which Oxford’s global engagement helps to multiply our impact is through research carried out in other countries to address challenges specific to those regions. Our Tropical Medicine laboratories are ground-breaking in this respect. For twenty years, our Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine has maintained permanent research groups in Asia and Africa seeking solutions to major and emerging infectious diseases that claim tens of millions of lives annually. The impact has been marvellous: currently recommended treatments for malaria, dengue shock syndrome, typhoid, melioidosis, TB meningitis, diphtheria, leptospirosis are all based on work conducted by our Tropical Medicine labs. With more than 1500 permanent Oxford faculty members and staff, these distant parts of Oxford University also place local capacity building and training at their heart of their work. I know of no other university with a more significant global health research presence.
Third, universities can also create short training programmes to bring what expertise they may have to new audiences, especially international ones. Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education and the Executive Education group at the Saïd Business School design and run a range of customised training programmes for international public and private sector groups.
Closing
My purpose today has been to explain why I believe that international links are so valuable for a university. But please do not interpret my remarks to mean that creating new global links is more important than maintaining and building strengths at the university’s core, or that it is without risks. I have been arguing that going global is an important part of the core activities of the university to do research and to educate its students, while also enabling additional contributions to the nation and the world. But while international links are a powerful tool to strengthen a university, their single-minded pursuit can weaken it if as university leaders we shirk the less-glamorous but central job of cultivating excellence in research and education.
This is not an insuperable problem; good people and good academic management go a long way toward mitigating its effects. But if we focus on attracting big-name foreign academics while neglecting academic staff recruitment more broadly, we may end up with a few big names and an inferior staff overall. If we build a new campus halfway around the world by diverting our best staff from promoting excellence on the old campus, we may end up with a shiny new set of buildings where little good research happens because we cannot attract and retain good staff, and where little good education happens because students do not want to study there. Indeed, a number of universities have had to pull out of highly-publicised plans to open new campuses due to disagreements with local sponsors, regulatory barriers, or inability to attract students.
Businesses also face the dilemma of how to tap into new opportunities without getting overextended. Their challenge is how to expand into emerging markets without diverting too much capital, talent, and management attention from traditional markets that typically make up the lion’s share of the business. Hence the idea - now a cliché - of core competencies: focussing on what you do best. For universities, as I have said, the core competencies are and will remain research and education. So my view is that any new idea for going global should pass a simple test: Will it strengthen the university’s core competencies? That is, will it deliver important new research? Will it provide a more complete or effective education? Will it, along the way, enable the university to make substantial additional contributions to the world?
At Oxford, we do not always answer these questions in the affirmative. For instance, we have been and remain reluctant to open a new campus, partly because being in Oxford remains an essential part of the education we pride ourselves on. It took us close to 900 years to build the first Oxford campus; it may take us that long to build a second one. But for hundreds of years, and in a thousand ways, we have found engaging with the world to be critical to developing and maintaining excellence. It’s a fact of life at Oxford as familiar as the rain.