September 2010 - Trinity College Dublin
27 September 2010
Introduction: Trinity and St Andrews
Provost, Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you for inviting me. I am delighted, as always, to be back in Trinity where I spent four very happy years a long time ago.
In preparing for this talk I wondered about links between Trinity and St Andrews and I came across the message delivered by Trinity’s Provost, Anthony Traill, when he travelled to St Andrews in 1911 as we celebrated our 500th anniversary. (We are celebrating our 600th anniversary in 2013, but that just speaks to the ambiguities of history which I learned to appreciate as a student of history here.) The speech was written and delivered in Latin. In the bygone days of the 1970s Trinity gave preference in admission to students with Latin and it was required for Law and Medicine so I learned it. I was told it would be useful someday. The message reads in part:
Learned gentlemen: it is granted to very few human institutions to enjoy a long life unless, being based in prudence, distinguished by application, and regulated by morality, they be firmly set with very deep roots of excellence…for as the Poet (Virgil) said: ‘all things are fated to run down for the worse and, once undermined, to be borne downstream…’... But the Fates have little power over you…the long and famous history of Your University…is remarkable proof of how much, under the guidance of a great and Noble God and with the patronage of the most distinguished and important gentlemen, the sharp and insightful intellect can achieve in debating ideas, and hard work can achieve for the advancement of knowledge at large; so that not only Scotland but also the whole world…are keenly competing to celebrate your five hundredth birthday….”
Debating ideas and advancing knowledge beyond national borders, that’s what universities were about 600 years ago when we were founded; one hundred years ago when our universities celebrated together, and today, when we are called upon to justify our consumption of public funds. There have been changes. There are fewer references to God and fewer references to Gentlemen today. But the essential purpose of the European University of the 21st Century, is what it has always been: to strive for excellence in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. The fact that so many universities have outlasted most organizations, almost all businesses, and indeed many forms of government, speaks to the centrality and criticality of that task.
That is my theme today. As we confront sharply reduced public funding in the wake of the financial crisis, ever growing demand for access to tertiary education, as well as the breath-taking pace of global technological change, it is imperative that we adapt to the forces swirling around us. But if we are to avoid, as Virgil described, being undermined and carried downstream, we must not lose sight of our core purpose, nor lose confidence in its’ essential and enduring value.
In thinking about our two institutions I realize that we share something enormously important that has shaped our culture. Both Trinity and St Andrews have had a relationship with the culture and country in which they have developed which has set them apart. We know that for centuries Trinity was the Protestant and Anglo Irish bastion in Ireland while St Andrews, was often considered too Unionist and too close to England. This situation of being in the country but not always comfortably of it has given us both a vantage point to observe with acuity but is also part of what has driven our ambition and our achievements.
I spent most of my adult life at Harvard University and had three lives there, as a student, as a professor, and as an administrator. I am completely convinced that part of the success of Harvard is that the power of the institution and its reputation is such that nobody quite feels that they belong. Everyone there is compelled to prove to themselves and others that they are good enough to be there, and this is part of what drives the place. As such, it is not a particularly comfortable place but it is a place of great achievement.
The perspective of the outsider is a very privileged position. It is one that has fuelled great literature, think of Hardy, Beckett, George Elliot or Camus. It has also fuelled the best political analysis, like that of Raymond Aron, Marc Bloch or deTocqueville. In saying this I recognize that I am at risk of offending a large part of my audience. One has only to walk around Trinity today, and think back to when I was here thirty years ago, to realize how much more representative of Irish society the student and staff population of Trinity is today (more representative actually than the St Andrews student body is of Scotland.) This change in the demographic of Trinity’s population came about, I’m sure, by design rather than by accident. It took a lot of hard work and has had a great many salutory effects. (My father grew up on the South side of Dublin and cycled passed Trinity to school on the North side every day. But he never dared to enter under the arch until he came to visit me as a student.) Nevertheless, I am making a plea for the value of distinctiveness here today. Educational institutions like ours must not just become more like the society that surrounds us rather we must help those societies to broaden their sense of themselves to include the distinctive roles, contributions and perspective of institutions like Trinity and St Andrews and other outsiders. In so doing we enrich those cultures in a manner that is not readily transferable to a balance sheet.
When the Provost initially invited me to give this lecture the title that was suggested was The Future of the European University . I grappled with this topic for some time and was on the verge of concluding that I was completely lacking in imagination when I remembered a comment by the inimitable economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, who once said that there are two kinds of forecasters, those who don’t know, and those who know they don’t know. I fit comfortably in the latter category.
As we try to anticipate the future of university education in Europe, however, we can be sure of certain trends. I will speak to just four:
- Increasing globalization of education
- Increasing claims for access to tertiary education
- Increasing opportunities posed by new technologies
- Increasing tensions between public funding and institutional autonomy
Globalization.
The much criticized - and even more often consulted - world rankings and global league tables remind us that we are operating in a global marketplace. This is not a new phenomenon but the scale is unprecedented. Universities have always been outward looking. St Andrews was founded by three French educated clerics along the lines of the University of Paris, and as a result of a schism in the papacy. Today a third of our students are from outside the EU, a third are from the EU and a third are Scottish.
Globally, about 3 million students are studying outside their home countries for a year or more. This is over and above those undertaking a semester or year abroad and represents an increase in 57% in the past decade, notwithstanding what often appears to be the best efforts of border agencies and immigration authorities to make it as difficult as possible to study abroad. In Britain there are 250,000 students from outside the EU and an additional 120,000 from the EU. Throughout Europe there were 200,000 Erasmus students in 08/09.
These activities are increasingly defended in economic terms. Through their international activities higher education institutions are one of the UK’s fastest growing sources of export earnings, and last year brought in £5.3 billion. The trend, however, can be dispiriting to observe as increasingly financial pressure encourages universities to treat foreign students as one Chinese student put it to me “as an ATM machine.” If we treat foreign students simply as cash cows, without adapting our institutions to meet the challenges they present, it won’t be long before the markets will punish us. They will choose to study elsewhere and we will have missed the opportunity to enrich our universities by their presence.
Today the mobility of international students is more complex than it used to be. For generations Ireland rightly worried about the “brain drain,” in which smart young people whose education was subsidized by the state, went off to Britain or American and didn’t come back. On some occasions, as with your Provost, they returned. More often, like me, they did not. This trend continues but increasingly we are seeing indications of what is being called the “brain train.” Just one example of this phenomenon is that of a smart young man from Singapore named Choon Fong Shin. He studied engineering in Singapore then went to Harvard for a PhD. He worked for General Electric and then was appointed a professor at Brown. He retuned to Singapore to lead an institute and then the National University of Singapore from where he was recruited to be president of KAUST (King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia). Incidentally to mark its’ opening, King Abdullah gave KAUST a $10 billion endowment which instantly gave it the 6th largest endowment in the world.
Patterns of mobility are also changing. The US remains the most popular venue for foreign students, followed by the UK and Australia, but their market share is declining. The US dropped from 25% in 2000 to 19% in 2007. The UK, Germany and Belgium also lost ground while Russia, Australia, New Zealand and Korea increased theirs. China has become a major player in the market of international students. The number of students in China has quintupled in a decade and China now accounts for 17% of all international students enrolled in the OECD. China and Singapore are also courting western-trained faculty and expending vast sums on a targeted group of campuses in an effort to improve their universities and serve as an engine of innovation and economic growth.
Today half of the world’s top physicists no longer work in their home countries and cross border science collaboration has more than doubled since 1990 as measured by the percentage of internationally co-authored articles. But it is not simply a case of migrating students, faculty and institutional leaders. Campuses themselves are becoming mobile. In 2009 there were 162 branch or satellite campuses operating globally, a 43% increase in just three years. Over half are American, 11% are Australian and 10% are British. The number of host countries grew from 36 to 51 in those three years.
It is important to remember, as we get caught up in the ever tighter competition for foreign students, in an effort to relieve financial pressure, that there are enormous nonmonetary reasons why a healthy foreign presence on our campuses at every level of our organizations, from students to faculty to non-academic staff, will improve our universities. The more diverse our populations, the more interesting the debates, the deeper the challenges to accepted wisdom will be, and the better preparation for life in a globalized world we will provide our students. Moreover increasing competition from foreign universities will cause us to raise our game, to learn from others, to question how we do things and to figure out how to do them better
It is also crucial to remember as we get caught up in the business-speak of large organizations that increasing knowledge is not a zero sum game. The focus on global rankings that see Asian universities rise and European universities fall contributes to the misguided notion that their gain is our loss. There is no finite amount of knowledge in the world we have to fight over. Knowledge is what the economists call a public good, it cannot be contained within national boundaries and the more of it there is, the better for all of us.
Access
Alongside the growth in international students in European universities has been a dramatic increase in the number of students attending university. From being the preserve of the elite, tertiary education is now seen as a broad entitlement. Britain has witnessed a 50% increase in enrolments in a 14 year period and the Government’s goal is that 50% of the population should receive a university education. As the number of jobs requiring a university education increase, and those that don’t decline; as the rate of unemployment among those without a university education continues to outpace greatly the unemployment rate of the university educated, it is not hard to see the social benefits of this goal.
On average across OECD countries 35% of 25-34 year olds have completed tertiary education compared with 20% of 55-64 year olds. Unemployment rates among people with a tertiary level of education have stayed low at or below 4% on average across OECD countries during the recession. Unemployment rates for those who did not complete secondary school, on the other hand, rose 5 percentage points between 2008 and 2009 while 45% of the 15-19 years olds not in education were unemployed.
One can imagine over the longer term, as economies and technologies develop, and life expectancy increases, that mass tertiary education may become as natural as mass secondary education, and mass primary education before it. For now, however, the commitment to provide 50% of the population with a university education is posing real challenges. The easy solution, of course, is to rebrand vocational and technical colleges as universities and meet the goal. The more difficult but more lasting solution is to improve the standard of primary and secondary schools such that more graduates can meet the entrance requirements deemed necessary to benefit fully from a university education. (This is the responsibility of governments not universities but universities can, on occasion, help. We at St Andrews have worked with Fife Council and come up with a plan to build the new regional secondary school on the university campus. We hope in so doing to raise the aspirations of many of the pupils and increase the interaction between school and university to mutual advantage.) A further option is to be altogether more systematic than governments have often been willing to be in establishing and supporting a diverse sector of tertiary institutions each committed to genuine excellence in their own fields. This would require politically unpalatable steps like rewarding success and divesting in failure. It would require that graduating from a top technological college would be accorded the same status as graduating from a top university.
As the political philosopher, Michael Sandel, has observed, talent is fairly equally distributed throughout the population but opportunity is not. Ensuring that the most talented students who wish to attend university have the opportunity to do so should be a priority of every European government and every university leader. The ranks of Nobel laureates and prize winning professors are filled with those for whom access to a scholarship to attend university was essential for their subsequent success. Our value as a society and the success of our economy are dependent on our ability to ensure that those with the drive and talent, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, should have access to a first rate university education.
Technology
A further trend with which the European University of the 21st century will have to contend is the pace of technological change. Students arrive at university fully networked with their friends and families around the world. They are accustomed to instant access to information on the internet, to watching movies on laptops, and to reading books on Kindles, and to doing all three simultaneously while eating lunch, or chatting to their mother on Skype.
What is the place of a library in this world? For many universities the cost of the library is second only to staff salaries yet the introduction of the internet has had the biggest impact on access to information since the production of the Gutenberg Bible with the first use of the movable type printing press in the 1450s. Will our libraries become charming historical relics beloved only by antiquarians? Or can we preserve the place of the library as the intellectual hub of university life by bringing new technologies inside, adapting to the ways our students learn, educating them to be wise consumers in a world of information overload and teaching them the difference between information and knowledge and instilling in them a desire for wisdom.
No doubt people will wonder, do we need universities at all in the age of the internet? Think of the unnecessarily large carbon footprint as teachers travel to a classroom to give a lecture and students travel to hear it. Could we not stay home and speak to a computer and let our students access the lecture when it suits them? A great many universities, including ours, are engaging in experiments in distance learning, in putting some classes and even entire degree courses all online. If all one needs is a computer why convene at a place called a university at all?
As funding becomes tighter these questions will be asked by serious people, and those of us who believe in the value of universities must be prepared to address them. More likely we will be asked why it takes four years to get a university degree, especially given the long holidays and infrequent and variable contact hours. Why not three years, or two? If we are to avoid being “borne downstream” in Virgil’s words as quoted by Provost Trail, we are going to have to be prepared to adapt to the implications of technological developments. When St Andrews was founded students were aged about 12 and studied a carefully prescribed course of logic and rhetoric. I am delighted that my children and I have had the extraordinary benefit of a four year residential undergraduate degree. By the end of the 21st century it strikes me as unlikely that students will invariably be aged 17-21 and stay for four years. It will incumbent upon those of us privileged to lead universities to ensure that we are clear in our own minds as to what is the essential mission of a university, that we embrace technological developments and harness them in furtherance of that mission and not get side-tracked by a futile effort to defend the status quo.
My own view, and I say this as someone who has spent my life as a university teacher, is that students who come to university learn at least as much from their peers as they do from their teachers. The process of convening as a community of learning and intellectual exploration, of engaging with others from different national, racial and socio economic backgrounds, as you seek to acquire knowledge, enhance your understanding, develop your judgement, and join the quest for truth, has to be conducted in person. I do not know what the optimal period for that process might be, but I am convinced that it has to be conducted in the flesh and surrounded by others engaged in the same pursuit.
Funding and Control
A fourth and final trend that will have an impact on the European University in the 21st century is the enduring debate with governmental authorities about public funding and public control of universities. Whereas the 6,000 American institutes of higher education represent a diverse array of institutions, some state funded some not, some – including the most elite - private non-profits and some - the fastest growing sector - private for-profit institutions, European universities tend to be publicly funded. The OECD average of public funding of universities is 73%, in Ireland it is 85% in the US the figure is 34%.
In return for their 65% public funding Universities UK argues that they are worth £59 billion to the UK economy annually and are a major export earner. We argue that the UK sells more brainpower per capita than anywhere else in the world amounting to $118 billion in knowledge services, that is 6.3% of GDP. The UK has 1% of the world’s population but undertakes 5% of the world’s scientific research and produces 14% of the words most highly-cited papers. In other words, British universities provide value for money.
But along with that generous public funding comes a degree of bureaucratic control that I, for one, believe undermines the value of the education we provide by wasting time and resources responding to the bureaucratic demands of the audit culture. If European Universities are to thrive in the more competitive global marketplace in education that is emerging, then we will need to be altogether more flexible in responding to market forces while preserving the essentials of what we do. At present the regulatory weight of bureaucratic compliance undermines our ability to respond flexibly and creatively. The governmental desire to improve the quality of teaching or to harmonize standards across Europe are laudable in many ways, but it is worth examining the internal costs of compliance and asking ourselves whether those resources might not be better spent in the classroom, the library, or the lab.
As universities we are daily called to account to justify our expenditure of public funds, but universities are complex organizations and what we are trying to achieve often cannot easily be measured. The language of the university has become suffused with the language of business. We are given Key Performance Indicators which are chosen more on the basis of ease of measurement than performance to be evaluated. That some of these KPIs may run counter to others, say: Increase standards/Increase access, is ignored. Rather than constructive intellectual engagement with the complexities of education our work is reduced to matrices of easily quantifiable indices.
I have been surprised to discover that alongside this obsession with measurement there has been no effort to measure the effectiveness of the measurement? Vast resources have been expended in complying with regulatory measures of teaching quality but there is no demonstrable evidence that all that measurement has actually had any impact at all on quality. (I know where my axe would first fall if I were responsible for implementing cuts in the education budget. Let’s dismantle this massive regulatory apparatus and then check back in five years and see if we’ve missed it.)
Every academic I’ve ever met became an academic because of a passion for their subject or a love of teaching and often both. I’ve yet to meet an academic who aspired to become a bureaucrat. Rather than trusting the academics we hire to conduct their research and teach their courses, we evaluate their syllabi, peer review their teaching, monitor their exam questions and provide second and third opinions on their marks, all to proscribed and machine-readable formats.
Universities receive large subsidies from the government and as such we should be accountable for those funds. Universities make many economic arguments to justify their public funding. We at St Andrews, for example, have demonstrated that for every £1 of public money given to the university we return £7.50 to the economy. Across the OECD a male with a university degree will generate $119,000 more in income taxes and social contributions over his working life than someone with only a secondary school education. Even after taking the cost of university education into account, the net public return from investment in tertiary education is $86,000 in generated income taxes and social contributions over the working life of a male in the OECD.
In the near term as European governments face relentless pressure to get their economies back on track there is an opportunity for universities to try to break the mould by, for example, offering to trade less public money for more autonomy. For their part governments will be confronted with making choices about whether they are willing to loosen the reins of control, to recognize diversity in the sector, to allow different funding models, and to invest more heavily in successful institutions. I hope that European universities in the 21st century will be a diverse and variegated mix of institutions with differentiated funding models and with students advised and able to attend the university that is the best fit for them rather than a homogenized assembly line manufacturing ever faster and more similar degrees.
Conclusion: Defence of the Humanities.
John Stuart Mill was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews in 1865. He was not a very conscientious rector but in his rectoral address he demonstrated that he understood the purpose of a university. He asserted that: “A university exists for the purpose of laying open to each succeeding generation.. .the accumulated treasures of the thoughts of mankind.” Perhaps more controversially he went on to say that: Universities are not intended to teach the knowledge required to fit men for some specific mode of gaining their livelihood. Their object is not to make skilful lawyers, or physicians, or engineers, but capable and cultivated human beings … Education makes a man a more intelligent shoemaker if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes, it does so by the mental exercise it gives and the habits it impresses.” Today in our universities which are open to a vastly larger percentage of the population than was true in Mill’s day, we actually try to do both, to educate both skilled and cultivated doctors and lawyers as well as philosophers. But in our eagerness to provide the skills, which after all is what the government believes it is paying us to do, and what the students and their parents are expecting us to do, we must never forget our obligation to cultivate the aspirations of our students and to educate them to a life of learning and intellectual exploration.
In the straitened economic times that all European universities are facing, the arts and humanities will increasingly be asked to justify themselves and their consumption of public funds. We can respond in the expected ways, Trinity, I’m sure can point to the fact that the Book of Kells draws in a large number of foreign visitors who spend money freely in the city. Museums, art galleries and theatres can point to the economic impact they have by attracting free spending visitors.
But the defence of humanities should not simply rely on economic arguments, even if these are the most readily quantifiable. In her new book, Not for Profit, Martha Nussbaum powerfully challenges the view that education is primarily a tool of economic growth. She goes further and suggests that economic growth does not necessarily contribute to an improved quality of life. Rather she argues that the neglect of the humanities will undermine democracy which relies, as Rousseau understood so well in educating Emile, on the human ability to empathize, to be interdependent with others as equals. Nussbaum wrote that if current trends towards the neglect of the humanities in favour of applied learning continues:
“nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance.”
Surely everyone, in societies as wealthy as Europe today, deserves to live a life that entails more than physical well-being and the ability to consume material goods. Everyone who has had any sustained engagement with the arts and humanities cannot imagine life without them, while a real knowledge of other times and places and peoples must be the firmest basis for a sustainable peace.
Not that universities are beyond reproach. We have stood back and quietly observed as enrolments in the arts and humanities have plummeted, yet we assert that they are important. We stood back and failed to question when the markets soared to improbable heights and rampant materialism took hold. We have responded to pressure to provide applied skills for the market place but have often failed to engage constructively and critically in questioning our political leaders, probably for fear of jeopardising our public funding or our comfortable perches as part of the establishment. If universities do not demonstrate the independence of spirit and critical thinking that we claim are the hallmarks of a respect for the humanities, then who will?
By its investment in the Long Room Hub Trinity has demonstrated its commitment to research in the arts and humanities. This beautiful building is a wonderful physical expression of that commitment. You are to be congratulated for doing so. For myself, I have been honoured by my connection with the Hub. When the 21st century draws to a close, I trust that the leaders of this university will look back on that investment as one of the wisest the university has made.
Thank you
Louise Richardson