The world and the university
Volume 17 Number 2, Hilary 2005
'Globalisation' is an overworked word, but for good reason. We cannot talk sensibly about the present or the future of Oxford, or of universities generally, without acknowledging three certainties: the global movement of students, the global movement of academics, and the global nature of research.
Students travel the world in vast numbers. In the UK we tend to see overseas students largely as a source of income: purchasers of a valuable product, who are vital to keeping our underfunded institutions afloat. We need to remember that these students are discerning customers with a strong motive for making the right choice - and also that the quality of students is central to the quality and reputation of a university. They are the source of graduate assistants, high-quality post-docs and intellectual capital. Scholarships for international students are not pure philanthropy and speaking English is not enough to attract good overseas students for evermore.
Academics also move, all the time, and not just within countries but between them. They are among the most footloose, unsentimental and individualistic of professions. They make their careers with an eye on their own disciplinary community far more than on their current institutional base; and they strive for positions in the most prestigious, research-intensive departments they can manage. Universities of necessity spend large amounts of time and money luring desirable faculty and working to keep them in place. Successful academic careers are frequently and increasingly made in a global context. This is possible because, in a world where goods move easily, but individuals far less so, academics are a group for whom governments make immigration relatively easy. It would be nice to think that this reflects a commitment to culture and to knowledge for its own sake, but of course it has more to do with the view that universities are central to the economy.
Politicians do generally recognise that there are close links between economic success and the existence of major research universities, especially for rich countries competing at the 'high-skill' end of the spectrum. Such universities generate new ideas and direct spin-offs, but are equally important in creating a very attractive environment for high-tech and other export industries such as financial services.
Finally, the research communities to which academics belong really are global. Of course, in a sense they always have been. Adam Smith's work was enormously influential in France and Germany; Edison's lab in New Jersey is lined with German-language science journals. But the emergence of English as a genuine world language for scholarship, especially in science, plus the internet and cheap travel, have created disciplinary global villages.
So any elite university that, like Oxford, wants to stay at the top has to think about its present and its future in a global context. It needs to be attractive to students internationally. It needs to recruit from (and guard against) a global labour market. And it needs to be a central part of global research networks.
Yet at the same time, Oxford, in common with all the world's great universities (and almost all of higher education) remains rooted in a nation and a national culture. Where we are born and what passport we carry continue to define our lives, probably more than any other single fact about us. Equally, higher education throughout the world, including the private universities of the USA, receives a very large part of its funding from national governments.
In part this is because politicians, especially in democracies committed to opportunity, want to offer chances to large numbers of their own citizens. This is increasingly important in a world where doors slam shut in the faces of those without credentials. But national higher education policies also reflect, very strongly, the sort of country that its people - or at least its ruling classes and opinion-makers - want it to be.
National systems do not have to be all the same: on the contrary. And nor do elite universities. On the other hand, both a nation that wants universities with a global profile and a university that has elite ambitions have to recognise and accept some basic facts.
First of all, league tables are going to become more important, not less so. More universities, more students and more mobility result in vast amounts of information out of which potential applicants (and their parents and sponsors) have to make sense. Applicants are also perfectly aware that universities themselves are not necessarily the most reliable source of warts-and-all descriptions of what is on offer.
In that situation, trusted and apparently objective rankings and commentaries become enormously important (much as Which? reports can be for consumer durables). They need not all use the same, or a single, measure: indeed the less that is the case, the better. Universities ought to have diverse specialities and expertise, and it is through such diversity that they can differentiate themselves and stand out.
On the other hand, for a university like Oxford to maintain a very high reputation globally, it will not be enough to score highly on one or two measures and much less well on several others. There is room for certain institutions, such as the French grandes écoles, to specialise in teaching a specifically national elite (and they do it extraordinarily well), but that is not the way to reach the top of the league table.
There is, now, a recognisably international group of successful adults: people who see their career in a global context. Many other professionals and business people continue to make their careers within a single nation-state, but a globally prominent university needs to be, among other things, a proving ground for that international elite.
For those who aspire to be 'global' - and international elites characterise the academic, as much as the business, finance, sports and media worlds - where you are educated or trained is critical, for what you learn, for the networks and for the label. For universities, this looks increasingly likely to create a winner-take-all world, in which the 15 or 20 institutions that 'everyone' recognises will find it accordingly easier to attract queues of good applicants, good international faculty, sponsorship, research funding, in a potentially virtuous circle. To be one of them, I think, means staying near the top of the league tables for just about everything.
This new global environment produces not just students who move, but parents with an international perspective. That has some major implications for national governments, which I am not sure they have grasped. Many, perhaps most, parents are prepared to make enormous investments in and sacrifices for their children and they are not really terribly concerned about other people's - or at least, only insofar as this does not prejudice their own offspring's chances. So if national universities are judged inadequate, parents will send their children elsewhere. The more English becomes the general language of higher education (as is happening quite rapidly around the world), and the more people have access to organised loan and repayment schemes for university education, the easier it will be for relatively well-off families to think in terms of the world, not just their home.
This is not just about students from newly developing countries moving West. The students of the developed world can and do forsake their home institutions. Neither of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's sons chose German higher education: they went to Harvard and MIT instead. I do not think it matters very much for a country's future if foreign companies own its water utilities, or make its cars. I do think that it matters for a nation's future economic, cultural and civic well-being that its elite should respect and use its own universities.
What are the lessons here for British higher education policy, and for Oxford? The main one is hardly novel, but it remains wholly essential. Universities must have genuine autonomy if they are to succeed in the global environment. Humanity spent large parts of the twentieth century running natural experiments to see what governments could achieve, and it is completely clear that they cannot 'pick winners', cannot create entrepreneurial and innovative institutions, and cannot even forecast the manpower needs of their own public sector industries.
Successful university systems are always those that are competitive, decentralised, can respond fast and are outward-looking: notably Germany in the nineteenth century, the USA today. British universities have remained as good and as successful as they have because they have been not merely independent in name and law but also, by European standards, fairly independent in reality too. However, they are increasingly preoccupied with looking inward, with making sure that their systems and procedures comply with yet another complex government directive, and, when looking outwards, with keeping government and its agents off their backs. This really is - to use another useful cliché - like being asked to drive with the handbrake on: simply upgrading the car without releasing the brake is no solution.
In addition, Oxford needs to acknowledge that it is engaged in a complex balan-cing act, albeit one that is common to any would-be player in a global market, and not just higher education. An elite research university has to take account of all the 'league table indicators'. But it must also be distinctive. Oxford has a huge advantage in the latter respect, because its history has made it very distinctive indeed. Deciding which bits of this wonderful heritage it wants to keep, nurture and project will be more difficult, and I doubt that it can keep them all.
With finances still critical, and no sign of any genuine let-up in regulation, our governments also need reminding of the lesson taught to us by Bologna and the Sorbonne. Time, for a top university, can indeed run out.
Alison Wolf (Somerville 1967) is Professor of Management at King's College London and author of Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth (Penguin).