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GLOBAL: Research: a force for globalisation

Some scholars date the beginnings of globalisation at the first move of humans out of Africa. Some date it from the world religions, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the East-West trade of the classical world.

Some date it from the 16th century preach and conquer empires of the Spanish and Portuguese, or the 17th and 18th century trade and conquer empires of the Dutch and French and English, or the Napoleonic wars, or the expanded trade and migration in the second half of the Victorian era.

But two things are certain. One certainty is that the communicative globalisation of the last two decades, triggered by the internet, and cheaper air travel, has created much closer integration and convergence.

The single inter-dependent world has become central to our daily lives. This is an increasingly similar world - though global connectivity brings us in touch with all manner of diversity.

The other certainty is that higher education and research are central drivers of globalisation - research universities are among the most globally connected and driven of all sectors of society - while at the same time global connections, the global flow of ideas, global comparisons and rankings, and global people mobility, are the most powerful single driver of change in higher education.

The global transformation of higher education has three elements. First, networking itself. One third of the world's population has fast internet access, an incredible two thirds - including some living on a dollar a day - use mobile phones.

If Harvard caught fire tomorrow most of the world would know within a day. Every research university is an intensive user of networked communications, for complex data transfer and real time conversation.

Second, the structure of networks has combined with the role of research - which since World War II has become central to economies, societies and cultures, beginning in the United States, as Clark Kerr predicted - to create a one world knowledge system in English, in which the leading research universities are central players - especially universities in major world cities (though by no means the whole of higher education is so placed).

Third, as more nations undergo modernisation and enlarge their middle classes, participation continues to expand by leaps and bounds on the world scale. As Amartya Sen remarks, the augmentation of human capability through education and public health meets several objectives.

This makes the trend to expansion unstoppable despite the chronic problems of funding policy.

Higher education lifts workplace productivity and the entrepreneurial imagination. It confers on individuals not just vocational opportunity but communicative competence and power to use information and access knowledge.

Not to mention social status. And these benefits are universal, they are generated in almost every country.

The result is that we now have a new type of paradigmatic higher education institution. Clark Kerr's 'multiversity', the university that had multiple constituencies and did everything, has given way to the Global Research University or GRU - which is the multiversity, plus global systems and ranking, and with the role of research even more important.

Some GRUs are themselves mass institutions, such as Toronto with 85,000 students, or UNAM, the national university of Mexico, with 300,000.

Others focus on research and educating elites, and leave mass education to others. Note that while the GRU is still located in national systems of higher education, it is also part of a global system at the same time.

An informal global system, but an influential one. Consider the power that global rankings have achieved, everywhere except in the US which focuses on national rankings, since they began seven years ago.

The GRU contains inherent tensions, however. First there is the tension between national perspectives and drivers, and global perspectives and drivers.

Governments and some IHEs are nationally bordered in vision. Research universities have global ambitions. They want to cut a larger figure in the world--and to be funded accordingly.

Their motives are both selfish and altruistic. At best, universities have a vital role in creating global public goods; such as the knowledge we need to address climate change, water and food shortages, mobile populations and epidemic diseases.

The system of scientific knowledge itself, the basic research system, is a global public good.

The founder of the research university, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was very clear on this point. Governments should butt out and let the universities to shape their own agendas.

But national governments can say, "These global public goods are all very well, but what's in it for us? Why should we pay for everyone else's free rider benefits?"

And "what's the use of us paying for all that open access basic research, if the resulting innovations are captured by foreign companies and our economy gains nothing?"

A nation might be just an 'imagined community', as Benedict Anderson said. But nations are still the site of policy. The Global Research University is at least half global - except politics and funding remain national, except for international student fees and some research money.

Universities now operate in all three dimensions at the same time: global, national, local. And they must work them as synergy, not contradiction.

The second tension is the hierarchy within the GRU network. The Shanghai Jiao Tong top 100 research university list is dominated by the US; the UK is number two, a remarkably strong performance given the under-funding of the higher education sector in this country.

This shows that while support for teaching has been savaged, research has been sustained. The other places are occupied by Canada and Australia, Japan and Western Europe. English-speaking countries have 73% of the Jiao Tong top 100 research universities. We are at the historic highpoint of the Anglo-American university.

Not for long. As everyone knows, the East is rising. This means China - especially - and Hong Kong China, and Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore. It is not yet clear whether any other countries will follow. Maybe India.

The innovation tigers in Asia focus mostly on applied research but are investing so heavily in R&D that their basic research systems are expanding too. Note that in these systems, public investment is crucial to the accelerated growth of research outputs and tertiary participation, while public funding is declining elsewhere.

China decided to increase university funding during the GFC - rather than reduce it as in the US - in order to close the gap more quickly. This worries some commentators in the Anglo-American world, especially as Western European universities are also strengthening. But the rise of the East is a boon to those of us in the Asia-Pacific.

More generally, a more plural global knowledge economy has to be a good thing - it adds to the diversity of perspectives and the sources of leading ideas, and provides a more distributed basis for advanced cooperation on global problems.

The growing economic and knowledge power of China might also see the elevation of Chinese to the role of a second global language, alongside English. Spanish might become a third global language, given its increasingly important bi-lingual role in the United States.

The third tension in the GRU is those left outside the hierarchy and the network altogether. In many nations, especially in Africa, there are no Global Research Universities. None are in sight. Research capacity is rudimentary or non-existent. Institutions are un-funded or unstable.

Participation rates are low - long lines of people are waiting for the opportunities the high income countries and parts of Asia now take for granted. Many millions of lives are blighted by the global knowledge gap.

For the next generation in Africa, as in parts of Asia and South America, time is running out. This suggests that a major public good role for research universities in developed systems, in this period, is the establishment of long-term partnerships with higher education institutions in emerging systems.

There are good examples of such collaboration now. It is especially important to create a stable research capacity. Established universities can also augment teaching and learning through curriculum benchmarking and joint staff appointments that help to overcome the salary gap.

For example - to name one I saw recently - the work of the University of Illinois with science, engineering and computing at Vietnam National University. The objective should be to create top 500 GRUs in every nation, to pluralise the capacity for knowledge-based cooperation on a world scale.

In this manner the global system of higher education moves partly beyond the limits of the nation-state system, with its steep hierarchy, hinting at the potentials of an inclusive global society.

* Simon Marginson is professor of higher education in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. This is an edited version of a keynote address he gave last week at the British Council's Go Global conference in London.