Balancing Global Competition, Regional Partnerships and Community Engagement in the 21st Century Research University: A WUN Virtual Seminar

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Balancing Global Competition, Regional
Partnerships and Community Engagement in the
21st Century Research University A WUN Virtual
Seminar

• Mark S. Johnson
• Department of Educational Policy Studies
• University of Wisconsin-Madison
• March 16, 2010

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Theoretical and conceptual frameworks world
culture theory/neo-institutionalism?

• Recent turn in world culture theory and
  neo-institutionalism to extend insights based on
  alleged global models of schooling to higher
  education focus on convergence of curricular and
  development patterns global isomorphism of
  university organization and policy trends
• For example, alleged alignment of global higher
  education curricula (Frank and Gabler, 2006) but
  also of universities becoming organizational
  actors in new ways (Krucken and Meier, 2006).

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Theoretical and conceptual frameworks world
culture theory/neo-institutionalism?

• In fact, complex mix of convergence and sharp
  divergence across higher education systems
• Yes, organizational accountability has risen
  (through new public management, audits, culture
  of evaluation), yet national and regional
  capacity and quality of such tools diverges
• Yes, new push to own the university through
  mission statements and drives for greater
  autonomy (to be market-smart and
  mission-centered, Zemsky, Wagner and Massy,
  2005), even as battered by competition with new
  rivals

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Global convergence and HE competition rankings
and the risk of isomorphism?

• However, an open question in world culture theory
  and neo-institutionalism is whether such
  convergence is good or bad clearly good that
  normative values of individuality and equality
  are spreading, but what of the costs or other
  risks?
• In global higher education, there is clearly a
  very high degree of risk associated with the
  spread of particular frameworks for global
  competition, as shaped especially by global
  university ranking systems, all accelerated
  sharply since 2003.

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Theoretical and conceptual frameworks world
culture theory/neo-institutionalism?

• Yes, ongoing creation of increasingly complex
  administrative lattices and technical
  structures around the evolving goals of outreach,
  service, public-private partnerships, and
  management, yet again often in distinctive
  national patterns
• Yes, emergence of entrepreneurial faculty and
  university leaders, yet still (at least in some
  cases) constrained by disciplinary practices and
  traditions of institutional and shared
  governance.
• In other words some shared global patterns, but
  also real national and institutional variations?

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Key driver of convergence The second
generation of global university rankings?

• Grew out of the first generation (since 1983),
  largely commercial and media-driven, such as U.S.
  News and World Reports (1983, and others), almost
  all of which were only national based on some
  data about admissions and selectivity, but
  largely on reputational surveys
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Academic Rankings
  of World Universities (ARWU, since 2003) Times
  Higher Education Supplement survey of world
  universities (since 2004), shifted the debate
  toward narrow forms of competition.

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The second generation of global university
rankings, 2003 to present (ARWU, THES)

• Positive dimensions of new rankings to meet
  intense interest on part of parents, students,
  and policymakers in tools for accountability and
  comparative measures of academic quality
• Negative effects focus on research measures
  (codified in citation indexes, English-language
  publications, skewed to natural and physical
  sciences, prizes and other medals, etc.), has
  eclipsed attention to educational mission and
  perhaps especially to outreach and service

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The second generation of global university
rankings, 2003 to present

• Other negative effects often distorted or
  grossly simplified in media accounts, focus on
  national failures to compete (media furors in
  Malaysia, Russia, France, etc.) with little
  attention to deeper causes of disinvestment in
  public HE or complex patterns of university
  development
• Rankings neglect two-year and other
  mission-specific institutions rankings often
  fail to account for complex historical legacies
  or specialized missions of particular types of
  institutions, such as vocational-technical and
  minority HEIs.

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Now a third generation of university rankings,
beyond simplistic comparisons?

• Led by German Center for Higher Education (CHE)
  system (1998), allows for dynamic on-line
  comparisons between criteria and capacities of
  different degree programs (very user-friendly,
  but not then compiled as institutional rankings)
• Recent turn to more qualitative projects such as
  European Research Index on the Humanities (ERIH,
  and other European Science Foundation projects),
  which seek to expand citation criteria and
  measures of research productivity to allow for
  variations between disciplines and nations

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Where will the third (or fourth) generation of
global university rankings lead?

• Thus, to pose the essential dilemma of this talk
  how can universities (not just elite
  institutions) acknowledge the inevitability and
  urgency of global competition (shaped in the
  media and public mind by simplistic ranking
  systems), yet at the same time balance this
  necessary attention to the imperatives of
  internationalization with new approaches to
  regional partnerships and especially to local or
  community engagement?
• In context of public anxiety about the Great
  Recession and declining public revenues, HEIs
  must address all three domains simultaneously.

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Reinventing the research enterprise in the
context of revitalized education and service

• Too often, the global, regional and community
  domains are conceived of as mutually exclusive,
  or as conflicting missions how can they be
  rethought to be mutually reinforcing and linked?
• As the third and possibly fourth generation of
  university ranking systems evolves, how can they
  be designed to highlight and reinforce the
  relevance of such regional and local missions?
• How should incentive structures and faculty
  practices change to allow for this new balance
  between global, regional and local missions?

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Earlier turning points that failed to turn? Or
that got eclipsed by global ranking debate?

• In fact, powerful trends in U.S. and other HE
  systems in 1990s and 2000s to address just this
  need for a dynamic balance between three domains,
  but reforms eclipsed in public mind and policy
  debates by politically-driven issues?
• Innovative HE reforms globally to balance and
  integrate the global, regional and local domains,
  but they remain under-researched, and thus have
  not acted as strong policy signals masked by
  methodological biases in ranking systems?

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Earlier turning points that failed to turn? Or
that got eclipsed by global rankings debate?

• These trends and the slippage between the
  dynamic innovations within higher education and
  the frequent misunderstandings among wider
  publics, highlight the need for several changes
• First, there needs to be more collaboration for
  research on comparative and international higher
  education, to illuminate such trends
• Second, higher education researchers need to
  engage in more systematic outreach to publics and
  policymakers in order to contextualize such
  rankings, and to offer alternatives (?), such as

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Reinventing the role of undergraduate education
and research in U.S. universities?

• National Science Foundation AIRE (Awards for the
  Integration of Research and Education) and other
  programs (1997 to present), to foster
  experiential student research in STEM fields
• Boyer Commission, Reinventing Undergraduate
  Education A Blueprint for Americas Research
  Universities (1998), which drew together an array
  of key trends from policy and practice
• Research as gold-standard for all students
• Inquiry-based first year experience for students

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Reinventing the role of undergraduate education
and research in U.S. universities?

• Coherence and sequence within disciplinary
  frameworks or major programs, yet linked
  throughout to innovative interdisciplinary
  inquiry
• Systematic training in communication skills and
  independent research and writing abilities
• Work to train graduate students as apprentice
  teachers, with attention to new scholarship of
  teaching and learning and new assessments
• Change faculty incentives and promotion
  structures to improve education and service.

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Reinventing the role of undergraduate education
and research in U.S. universities?

• Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science,
  Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (National
  Research Council, 1999)
• Greater Expectations A New Vision for Learning
  as a Nation Goes to College (AACU, 2002) and
  College Learning for the New Global Century
  (AACU, 2007), all designed to synthesize a new
  consensus focused on experiential,
  inquiry-based and service-oriented undergraduate
  education as the gold standard?

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Reinventing the role of the public research
university for the 21st century?

• Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and
  Land-Grant Universities (1996-2001) APLU and
  other reports, outlined need to rethink
  traditional approaches to research, teaching and
  service as a new focus on shared discovery,
  learning, and engagement to shift from research
  by faculty on behalf of outside constituencies
  toward shared process of collaboration with
  external partners
• Such an approach could encompass workforce
  development, but as sustained collaborations.

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (1)

• More systematic support for faculty-student
  research and student-led research projects (U.S.
  Council on Undergraduate Research, CUR and NCUR,
  etc.) students as colleagues (Campus Compact
  and others) also new attention to student
  creativity and research in all domains, including
  performance in arts and humanities
• Also U.K. Centres for Excellence in Teaching and
  Learning (CETLs), with new attention to student
  research and independent learning

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (2)

• Global spread of new approaches to service
  learning and service-oriented degree programs,
  aka community-based learning and community-based
  research (CBL and CBR) also Council of Europe,
  university as sites of citizenship, and other
  European service programs emerging research
  evidence highlighting utility of degree-relevant
  service learning programs for both academic
  achievement and student retention
• Adapting tools for technology transfer beyond
  STEM into arts, humanities, social sciences?

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (3)

• New innovations to blend more traditional study
  abroad programs with service learning, and to
  build multi-national student teams for service
  (yet acute lack of research on effectiveness, and
  lack of public sector funding for such programs)
• Sophisticated new attention to how combining
  student research, service, and peer support
  programs can improve social cohesion and work to
  improve academic and social integration (Hu,
  Scheuch, Schwartz, Gayles, and Li, 2008)

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (4)

• Well-established innovations around triple
  helix of university-industry-government
  relations (Etskowitz and Leydesdorff, 2002 also
  Mowery, et al., 2004), especially through tech
  transfer
• OECD project on role of higher education in
  regional development (OECD, 2007 etc.)
• Key tools role of university research in and as
  economic development spin-off companies and
  analyses of labor markets university-sponsored
  SME incubators and student entrepreneurship
  programs applied research work with NGOs.

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (5)

• Another significant and directly relevant issue
  emergence of new assessment tools in U.S.
  (National Survey of Student Engagement or NSSE,
  Collegiate Learning Assessment or CLA, now
  possible CLA-inspired PISA 2), which can help
  provide research data on trends as well as act as
  policy signals for particular innovations. CLA
  (from CAE) related to College and Work Readiness
  Assessment (CWRA), linked survey tool for
  secondary-to-higher education analysis.
• Also European curricular tuning and ENQA.

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (6)

• Emergence of new classification schemes (in U.S.,
  for example Carnegie Community Engagement
  Classification, to develop elective categories of
  institutions to analyze depth and breadth of
  regional and local engagement
• Parallel efforts in Europe (EUA) to develop new
  university classification schemes linked to
  emerging evaluation and rankings systems
• Goals to highlight second (education) and third
  (service and engagement) missions, without
  compromising globally competitive research?

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (7)

• Key obstacles encouraging faculty to align their
  own research agendas with national, regional, and
  local organizations and actors to build
  sustainable partnerships with external interests
  for universities to develop the organizational
  capacity to support such complex CBL and CBR to
  build clinical and outreach professorships
  that carry equal status and rewards as research
  careers and to value quality in teaching and
  quality in engagement equally with research?

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Tools for reinventing university missions and
balancing the three domains (8)

• Furthermore, all of these efforts to balance the
  domains of the global, the regional and the local
  must be accompanied by a qualitatively new effort
  to reach out to national and local media, and to
  popularize and publicize such innovations
  together with local partners. In other words, if
  an institution were in trouble, would the
  surrounding region and communities rally to save
  it or not?
• High-quality student-led research programs can
  not only fulfill all of these policy goals in all
  three domains, but can also help to publicize
  them?

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In conclusion, beyond such education and
engagement, what is the research agenda?

• Many deeper, more nationally or locally-specific
  trends in global higher education development
  masked by convergence in policy rhetoric and
  external or superficial institutional
  isomorphism?
• Acute need for more in-depth and nuanced
  approaches to program evaluation and rankings
• Even more acute need for collaborative and truly
  cross-cultural studies of variations in
  curricula teaching and learning and especially
  of cognitive and development processes as they
  unfold in various national and cultural contexts.