The New Global Universities: Reinventing Higher Education in the 21 Century

How do you start a new university and create an appealing brand when nobody knows who you are?

Where in the world do you get the money needed to build a top-ranked university from scratch and keep it financially viable?

How do you attract faculty to commit their careers to an institution that does not yet exist, and then convince students and families to invest in the unproven institution?

How does one design a new curriculum that is innovative and distinctive, that is responsive to the demands of the new century, and yet is recognizable to accreditors and employers?

How does a founding team build an effective governance structure and an authentic    shared culture in a brand new institution, without any of the shared assumptions or traditions that most universities enjoy?

To what degree are these new start-ups reflections of a distinctly American approach to the liberal arts, and to what degree do they reflect local traditions and aspirations? What are the different and sometimes hidden meanings embedded in aspirations to offer a globalized form of education and to create “global citizens”?

How can one create a university that protects academic inquiry and free expression in societies that don’t share democratic values?

These are the thorny questions to which Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus seek answers in their book, 'The New Global Universities: Reinventing Higher Education in the 21 Century', by tracing the thought processes and vision setting behind the making of eight new colleges and universities across the Globe.

Fuelled by a passion to remake Higher Education, the minds which worked behind behind these start-up universities across the globe is a necessary read for those in academic leadership. In fact it is an interesting read for anyone interested in institution building and for those who watch the manner in which Higher Education is transforming itself in the light of the challenges faced across the globe. 

The study includes interesting attempts at student-faculty codesign processes to build novel curriculum in setting up of institutions like Olin College of Engineering and Fulbright University, Vietnam. Ashesi University in Ghana and Ashoka University in India are institutions which are built with strong liberal arts spine and modelled on the American ways. The other two start-up universities featured, Minerva University and African Leadership University, target sea changes in the way education is provided. Seminal integration of technology and peer-teaching are key in this effort as it helps bring the cost of the exercise down significantly. ALU is operated from Rwanda and Mauritius and While Minerva University from United States.

These institutions and the narrative of their making help the readers also to understand the manner in which their ideas have taken roots and influenced the policy decisions of not just other HEIs but also the whole of a country, in certain cases. Since Education calls for a never die innovative spirit, the road blocks they faced and the way they went back to their table to reassess and redraw too are curriculum for many an edupreneur of the future. Since these institutions were set up in different parts of the world, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and USA, the authors provide opportunities to see how the cultures and needs vary, and hence the approaches too. 

 

The New York University, Abudhabi, which combines research mission with a liberal arts agenda, the Yale - National College of Singapore tie up with an ‘In-Asia, for-the-world’ curriculum, Olin College of Engineering that swears by a culture of continuous innovation, Fullbright University Vietnam which aimed to chase the ‘intangibles of Excellence’ through a combination of high levels of quality in teaching and research of internationally recognisable standards, Ashoka University, India, with a multidisciplinarity that justifiably emphasises social sciences, Ashesi University, Ghana, and  African Leadership University, with an approach that underscores leadership-entrepreneurship driven development curriculum, and Minerva University that chose to invest in cognitive skills that transcended traditional academic fields: these campuses under the spotlight are institutional leadership models which exemplify practices that have a high impact on student learning.

After taking the reader through the founding of these universities, from the early conversations to brick laying to the capstone thoughts, the book concludes with two chapters that details us with a vision towards transformation in higher education. With in-depth analysis of the working of the said institutions which has been in operation for a period of time, some for a decade, the concluding chapters of the book offer roadmaps too. Considering the complexity of these start-up endeavours  in which the sum is always more than the parts, rather than offer a fool-proof model, the book provides a window side view to the various models which are in different stages of progression. Among these, there are those which went back to the drawing tables and fully reworked the initial models, and those which moved on to consolidate the early gains and those still in the process of sustained exploration.  As the authors say against the backdrop of Olin College of Engineering, education is always a work in progress and in constant need of revision. “it’s an enormous investment of time that can create a collegiate version of the Hunger Games, pitting the hard sciences against the humanities, athletics against the library, and students against faculty”, and hence, many wont venture out that direction. This explains why we need to appreciate them for being, “willing to move beyond criticizing the world as it is.... They have avoided the temptation to prognosticate about new worlds without taking on the hard task of bringing those worlds into being”. 

- Babu. P. K. Ph D.