World-Class Universities in an Era of Globalisation

Speech delivered at IIT Kharagpur, March 23 2012

Thank you for the warm introduction. Let me begin by saying congratulations to you on a momentous occasion: IIT Kharagpur’s Diamond Jubilee. I am absolutely honoured and delighted to be here. Thank you, Professor Acharaya, for extending the invitation for me to come and speak here, and for the hospitality you have shown me. You are bringing an amazing list of speakers here to celebrate over the course of the year, including four Nobel laureates and the science advisor to the Prime Minister, the great chemist C.N.R. Rao. I hope that after these luminaries I will not be too much of a disappointment!

Some of you may know that 2012 is the year of two Diamond Jubilees—the other is for Queen Elizabeth II in England. Both are wonderful events. But as a scientist, I must say that I would rather be here, at an institution that has contributed so much excellence in science over the last sixty years.

It is rather remarkable to think of the foresight shown by those who set up the IITs back in the Fifties: it must have ruffled some feathers to suggest that the nation should invest its limited resources in elite science & technology universities! And as many of you will know far better than I, the history of IIT Kharagpur is especially remarkable. It was of course the first of the IITs, and it was started in the old Hijli Detention Camp, where some of India’s most famous freedom fighters were locked up during the fight for India’s independence. As your website nicely puts it, “this is possibly one of the very few Institutions all over the world which started life in a prison house.”

Sixty years later, it is hard to imagine today’s India without the IITs. They have been so successful that the government is more than doubling their number. India is building on success, because of the crucial role the IITs have played in educating generations of brilliant young scientific minds. IIT alums include people like Nandan Nilekani and Narayana Murthy of Infosys and Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems and of course from this very campus, Mani Lal-Bhaumik, who invented the laser eye surgery known as Lasik, Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone, and Lord Kumar Bhattacharya, who moved to Britain and became an influential professor and government advisor.

There is no shortage of IIT alumni on the Oxford campus either. I spent the first part of the week in Mumbai, where I went with Professor Subir Sarkar of our Physics Department to see one of our flourishing collaborations with Indian institutions: a network of theoretical physicists at Oxford and several of India’s best universities. They are planning to build a massive particular detector several kilometres under a hill in Tamil Nadu, and then to fire neutrino particles from a lab in Oxford through the earth to India. It turns out that the distance between them through the earth—just over 7000 kilometres—is a magic baseline for analysing neutrinos.

IIT Kharagpur is fact “mentoring” one of the new campuses, at Bhubaneswar. The new campus will be, you might say, IIT Kharagpur’s biggest spin-out. At Oxford we also have a spin-out university. It was founded, like IIT Bhubaneswar, by academics and students who were previously at Oxford. It was founded in the early 12th century, and its name is the University of Cambridge. Let’s hope that that will be a good omen for the new institution!

I have taken as my subject “World-Class Universities in the Twenty-First Century”. I want to discuss what it takes for universities to achieve, and sustain, “world-class”: the very highest international standards. This isn’t just a theoretical exercise: top universities are unique institutions that are incredibly valuable to our local, national, and global societies. They have a transformative effect on the lives of their already-talented students, challenging them to even greater heights of achievement, and sending them out into the world equipped to assume positions of academic, cultural, artistic, and political leadership. World-class universities conduct research that transforms our understanding of the world, past and present, and that cures real world problems, such as disease. They generate ideas that become businesses, creating value for our economies. Governments from Beijing to Berlin are investing billions in a bid to transform their universities to world-class institutions. So their existence, and their persistence, matters enormously -- not only to the people who work and study in them, but to the people in the societies around them.

In my view, being a world-class university comes down to four things:

  • Outstanding people
  • A focus on research excellence underpinned by an international, open outlook
  • A commitment to high-quality education; and
  • Sustainable funding to ensure excellence and access.

Outstanding people

I start with outstanding people in defining what it takes to be world-class because really, that is what it all comes down to. We talk in universities a great deal about buildings, and of course it matters greatly to have excellent equipment, state-of-the-art laboratories, and libraries rich in historical manuscripts as well as the current literature. But a university is defined by the quality of the minds working within it. World-class universities are sustained by the presence of world-class minds. This means, first and foremost, outstanding professors: people who are doing rigorous and original research and who set high standards for their colleagues and their students, and who inspire them to do great work. They are constantly pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge in their fields. At every leading university I have worked at, a huge part of any academic leader’s job – head of department, provost, vice-chancellor – is to make sure the university recruits and retains the very best academics.

There are important scale effects here: world-class universities have lots of talented people, in all subjects, and at all stages of career development. They think hard about whether they have a critical mass of excellent people working in any given field: it’s hard to attract great people without other great people already in place.

To give you a concrete example of this: one of the most exciting things to happen at Oxford this year has been the arrival of Professor Andrew Wiles, who has come over from Princeton. Professor Wiles is arguably the most famous mathematician in the world: he proved Fermat’s last theorem. With Professor Wiles joining us, Oxford has cemented its status as one of the pre-eminent universities for mathematics in the world.

This example reminds us that faculty searches in world-class universities are now genuinely global. People over-use the term ‘war for talent’ in the business world, but the truth is that there is real and increasingly global competition for the best academic talent. At Oxford, 40% of our academics are citizens of countries other than the UK. India is one of our most important sources: we have almost 100 Indian nationals on staff today.

And the talent isn’t just coming to the well-established universities of the west, either. Indian universities are increasingly attracting rising young academic stars who have studied and taught abroad. Some Indian nationals have always been drawn back to this country by the lure of family, but now the appeal is broader: with research funding declining in many Western countries, the growing availability of research funding and lab start-up grants in India is also drawing young academics.

World-class universities also require world-class students. You can see the effort that leading universities put in to selecting the very best students. In the United States, April 1 is the day that letters of admission for undergraduate study to top universities are mailed out. At Yale, where I used to work, 7.5% of the students who applied for undergraduate admission for this coming autumn received offers. At Harvard, it is 6.2%. Here at IIT Kharagpur, it is 2% - it is so difficult to get in to an IIT that the Ivy League looks like a cakewalk by comparison! Like here, admission to a top university in the US is the culmination of a long, involved process, of students working hard at their secondary school courses and extra-curricular activities; sitting SAT tests; writing essays that describe their interests; and meeting with an alumnus for an interview. For admission to Oxford, we ask many applicants to sit additional academic tests; everyone who is admitted will have had an academic interview, typically with one of the professors that will teach them.

Graduate school applications are subject to similar levels of scrutiny. In the sciences, when you accept a PhD student, you are taking on an academic apprentice and a junior colleague, who will work with you in the lab for the next four to five years. So you want to make very sure that you are taking a student who can handle the work and who is a good fit with your programme.

As universities, we go to all this effort because we want students who will maintain a high intellectual level on campus. We want students who can keep up with, and who will benefit most from the challenging education we provide them with. We want students who will challenge the ideas of their professors and help them to do great research. And we want people who will leave to do credit to their universities as they move out into academic and other fields.   

At Oxford, history helps. Our ability to attract outstanding students whether they may be is bolstered by both a strong reputation, born of 800 years of excellence, and in particular the Rhodes Scholarships, which have reinforced the notion that Oxford is an excellent place for tomorrow’s leaders to train. Oxford has had the privilege of educating 186 Rhodes Scholars from India. Today many others come on Oxford’s largest postgraduate scholarship programme, the Clarendon Awards; others come on Felix Scholarships, which have brought more than 30 Indian students to Oxford in recent years.

The ability to attract international talent—both students and staff—requires not only that universities create welcoming environments, but that governments do the same. Politicians in many countries can be tempted by nativist sentiment and fears of terrorism to shut down visa entry routes for students and staff. Most governments profess to want world-class universities, but it is not possible to shut down our sources of talent and then expect us to compete with the world’s best.

Research excellence

The second requirement of a world-class university is research excellence. At Oxford, about 40% of the university’s income comes from research grants, and two-thirds of our academic staff are on research-only contracts. (The other one-third do both teaching and research). Our academics develop new insights into the way world works, the way cultures interact, into how we can prevent disease, and how we can tackle social problems. Universities provide the long time scales and the freedom of inquiry that enable researchers to make fundamental breakthroughs. You can see some of this very visibly in concrete outputs – numbers of journal papers and books published, patents filed, spin-out companies generated, vaccines created. But we also have to search for it more intangibly, in enhanced understanding of the past or greater knowledge of comparative political systems: in a more sensitive and informed society.

Many countries around the world drive research as much from the industrial sector or from independent research institutes as they do from universities. This is of course important. But universities offer an unparalleled environment for excellent research: a concentration of great minds, free to follow curiosity-driven research agendas, supported by high quality infrastructure, and constantly invigorated by a regular influx of energetic students.

One thing that world-class universities rely on is an open, international outlook on research. You need to keep abreast of the literature internationally, and be seeking to work with the best people in the world, wherever they are. Oxford academics work with colleagues all over the world, and India is no exception. Indeed, we have several well-established research partnerships. One of the most exciting is INDOX: a network of 12 leading cancer centres across India, including the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which we visited in Delhi yesterday. Previously seen as primarily a rich country problem, cancer is rapidly becoming a major killer in India. INDOX is studying the lifestyle factors that influence the risk of cancer on a scale never before achieved in India--tens of thousands of participants. Does vegetarianism or the use of particular spices used in Indian cooking have a beneficial effect? Is the practice of chewing tobacco or the increasing adoption of Western lifestyles in urban areas having a detrimental effect?

The ability to bring minds together in collaborative work across disciplines will, I think, be increasingly important to tackling the fundamental research questions of the 21st century. At Oxford, we are very excited about the Oxford Martin School, an interdisciplinary institute created “to formulate new concepts, policies, and technologies that will make the future a better place to be.” Distinguished academics lead fifteen interdisciplinary institutes focused on major challenges of the twenty-first century, from environmental change and migration to emergent infections and the future of humanity.

Another example of interdisciplinarity at Oxford is our newest school, the Blavatnik School of Government, which opens its doors this year. With Blavatnik, we aim to create a dialogue among future leaders from around the world, each learning and applying cross-disciplinary knowledge and tools to address local and global challenges. As a chemist, I am especially pleased that the school will be the first of its kind to introduce science in the core curriculum, in recognition of the central role that science must play in shaping public policy. The Blavatnik School will also include humanities in the core curriculum, to help students apply lessons of history, literature and philosophy to government leadership using Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to teach negotiation and Henry V as a model for the arts of leadership. How you foster interdisciplinary work, without losing the foundation of disciplinary excellence, is a major challenge for world-class universities today.

But the last point to emphasise about research excellence is that it cannot be forced from above; a university must create the conditions that foster it and then get out of the way. To be a great scientist, you need to have an impact on your field. One of my mentors told me that people should be able to open a journal, read my paper, and without even looking at the author’s name, know from the style of thinking and experimentation that it was my work. He urged me to aim to impress the scholarly community with original thinking that is distinctive and recognisable. Universities have to foster this kind of drive in their people—or at least, attract the sort of people who have that drive already and then give them room to get on with it.

High-quality education

We have discussed outstanding people and research excellence. World-class universities also have a core commitment to high-quality education. Institutions focused mainly on teaching – such as liberal arts colleges in the United States or further education colleges in the UK – have their role to play in the higher education ecosystem. What makes research-intensive universities distinctive is that students are being taught their disciplines by the academics who are – day by day, in the lab and in the library – generating that new knowledge. In world-class universities, it is world-class academics who are doing the teaching. This makes for an incredibly powerful introduction to the world of ideas, and the way in which its boundaries constantly shift.

World-class universities seek to provide an outstanding education that will equip students to analyse problems, to read critically, to conduct experiments, and to approach received wisdom with a critical eye. Whatever your field of study, and whatever your future career, we want you equipped to be productive, inquisitive citizens. Above all, we want you to leave with the ability (and ideally, a desire) to learn, continually, over your lifetime.

Different countries approach this challenge in quite different ways, and multiple approaches can produce world-class universities. Consider the US and the UK, both of which I know well and which together have most of the world’s best universities. In the United States, a wide-ranging secondary curriculum leads to a liberal arts education for undergraduates. Students will spend half of their time in one discipline, but will also be required – through a core curriculum of some kind – to cover defined and common areas of knowledge. They will study a foreign language, they will explore moral philosophy, and if they are a scientist, they will still be required to study courses in literature and the arts (and vice versa). Their deep disciplinary specialisation will come during their doctoral studies.

In England, the approach is very different. England has a much more specialised secondary system, where students choose 3-4 courses to study intensively for 2 years at the age of 16. This is followed by a highly specialised undergraduate degree: at Oxford, if you study engineering as an undergraduate, that is all you study. You immerse yourself in your subject, and do not spend time outside your major--except insofar as an engineer needs to learn some mathematics. But this will be taught by engineers!

In many other countries, including India, the systems fall somewhere in between these two. It isn’t obvious to me that there is a right or a wrong way of doing this. Choice is important: different kinds of students will thrive in different environments. It is important, however, to think hard about what we are trying to achieve with our curriculum, and to ensure that whatever the subject mix, that we are equipping students with first-rate analytical and communication skills.

In an age of mass higher education, we have decided at Oxford that a combination of independent study and extremely small group teaching is the best means of transmitting these skills. Our undergraduate tutorials – weekly, hour-long meetings of typically two students and their professor – provide our students with direct feedback on their work, and force them to think through the material for themselves. At graduate level, we combine a rapid immersion in research with a growing set of skills training modules. For all students, we provide membership in two academic communities: a department, as in other universities, which is subject-specific, and a college, which spans all subjects. Colleges originated in Oxford and Cambridge, and in a large university of 20,000 students, provide smaller, multidisciplinary communities of up to 700 students, in which you live and study. This model is common in India as well.

Whatever system of teaching and curriculum you come out with, it’s clear that great universities think as hard about the education they deliver as the research they conduct. And they think about how to help their students meet the challenges that this education presents. World-class universities -- for example -- are increasingly international in terms of their student body. At Oxford, more than a third of our students – 15% of our undergraduates and 61% of our graduate students – are citizens of countries other than the UK. Australia, for instance, is the seventh largest source of students at Oxford. We have many students, in other words, who grew up in cultures and in academic traditions quite different to the standard in the UK. So we have to consider how we help both our students and our academics to adapt to our unique environment.

Sustainable funding

Fourth and finally, world-class universities require sustainable funding that helps them to achieve excellence and to ensure access for their students, regardless of means. This may sound like a less glamorous subject than the other three, but it is of course absolutely fundamental. One of the reasons that US universities have been dominant in the league tables is their financial resources: their endowments have provided them with secure funding and therefore the ability to support great professors, build cutting-edge facilities, and provide financial aid and scholarships to attract the best students, regardless of means. UK universities have historically had smaller endowments but have relied on diversified funding streams – research grants, government grants for teaching and for research, and in Oxford’s case, publishing income – to maintain their position. Excellence in universities, as in virtually everything else, costs. That is why, as the head of a world-class university, I spend a significant amount of my time fundraising. Ultimately, properly managed endowments provide the best long-term financial security for universities. And I know that IIT Kharagpur has had some big recent successes:  for example, Prabhakant Sinha has given $2 million to create a bioenergy centre of excellence here. Congratulations – this is excellent news.

Closing

The four components to a world-class university that I have described – outstanding people, research excellence, high-quality education, sustainable funding – are high hurdles. But when built up, over years, with care and commitment, they make world-class universities truly wonderful places to work, and important contributors to their economies and societies. IIT Kharagpur has accomplished a great deal in its first sixty years. Well done. May the future hold even more new and exciting chapters for this inspirational university. Thank you for having me here, and for listening.