Commentary
International Cooperation in Higher Education and the Role of UNESCO: Remarks delivered at the Thematic Debate
UNESCO Executive Board
by Yale President Richard C. Levin
Paris, France
October 4, 2006
Good morning. I am honored by the invitation of your Chairman to participate in this important Thematic Debate on the strategies that UNESCO might employ to carry forward its important mandate of "contributing to peace and security through international cooperation in education, the sciences, culture, communication and information." Your task is worthy, and it warrants strong support by all governments and their citizens.
I must apologize in advance that my expertise permits me to tackle only a very narrow band of the broad spectrum of possibilities available. I speak from the perspective of higher education, and therefore I will not address directly the fundamental problem of ensuring literacy and basic education for all, a problem that has motivated most of UNESCO's efforts in the sphere of education. But I do believe that the forces of globalization have made possible greater international cooperation in higher education, and I also believe that such cooperation can indeed contribute to peace and security among nations.
Thus, I would like to offer observations about where UNESCO's efforts might make a difference: first, by encouraging the flow of students across national borders; second, by facilitating international cooperation in research; and third, by supporting efforts to make educational and scholarly resources freely available on the Internet. UNESCO might consider not only direct support for such activities, but also efforts to reduce the barriers imposed by national legal systems upon each type of activity.
The flow of students across borders
Of the forces shaping higher education none is more sweeping than the movement across borders. Over the past three decades the number of students leaving home each year to study abroad has grown at an annual rate of 3.9 percent, from 800,000 in 1975 to 2.5 million in 2004. Most travel from one developed nation to another, but the flow from developing to developed countries is growing rapidly. The reverse flow, from developed to developing countries, is on the rise, too. Today foreign students earn 30 percent of the doctoral degrees awarded in the United States and 38 percent of those in the United Kingdom. And the number crossing borders for undergraduate study is growing as well, to 8 percent of the undergraduates at America's Ivy League institutions and 10 percent of all undergraduates in the U.K. In the United States, 20 percent of newly hired professors in science and engineering are foreign-born, and in China the vast majority of newly hired faculty at the top research universities received their graduate education abroad.
What are the consequences of these shifts among the highly educated? Consider this: on the night after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Jewish students at Yale (most of them American) came together with Muslim students (most of them foreign) to organize a vigil. Or this: every year the student-run Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford (FACES) organizes conferences in both China and at Stanford, bringing together students from both countries chosen to discuss Sino-U.S. relations with leading experts. The leaders of student groups promoting international collaboration are in touch with each other daily via e-mail and Skype, technologies that not only facilitate cooperative projects but also increase the likelihood of creating lifelong personal ties. One more example: earlier this year the United Arab Emirates convened a conference for undergraduate women from around the world to discuss perspectives on the advancement of women as leaders. The bottom line: the flow of students across national borders — students who are disproportionately likely to become leaders in their home countries — enables deeper mutual understanding, tolerance and global integration.
Many universities are encouraging their own students to spend part of their undergraduate experience in another country. Yale and Harvard are moving in the direction of requiring all their students to have an international work or study experience before they graduate. And in Europe, more than 140,000 students participate in the Erasmus program each year, taking courses for credit in one of 2,200 participating institutions across the continent. Universities are also establishing more ambitious foreign outposts to serve students primarily from the local market rather than the parent campus. And true educational joint ventures are gaining favor, such as the 20-year-old Johns Hopkins-Nanjing program in Chinese and American Studies, the Duke Goethe executive M.B.A. program and the MIT-Singapore alliance, which offers dual graduate degrees in a variety of engineering fields.
UNESCO can advance its mission of contributing to peace and security by encouraging all nations to open their borders to the flow of students. Even a temporary restriction on the flow of students can cause persistent damage. For example, in the wake of September 11, changes in the visa process caused a dramatic decline in the number of foreign students seeking admission to U.S. universities. Objections from American university and business leaders led to improvements in the process and a reversal of the decline, but the United States is still seen by many as unwelcoming to international students. National governments need to understand that the flow of students, because it encourages cross-cultural understanding, is an investment in national security, not a threat to it.
International cooperation in research
International cooperation in research is well established in many disciplines. For example, particle physicists from Asia, Europe, and the Americas regularly collaborate on major experiments. There are several critically important partnerships in astronomy between the United States and Chile. And international collaboration in archaeological work has gone on for more than a century. Today, Yale has extensive activity with local partners in Egypt, Syria, and Mexico.
But I want to focus on a new trend in research that has great potential for advancing the scientific capacity of developing countries. This trend involves sourcing portions of a research program to another country. Yale professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Tian Xu directs a research center focused on the genetics of human disease at his alma mater, Shanghai's Fudan University, in collaboration with faculty colleagues from both schools. The Shanghai center has 95 employees and graduate students working in a 4,300-square-meter laboratory facility. Yale faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students visit regularly and attend videoconference seminars involving scientists on both campuses. The arrangement benefits both countries; Xu's Yale lab is more productive, thanks to the lower costs of conducting research in China, and Chinese graduate students and faculty get on-the-job training from a world-class scientist and his U.S. team.
Yale has a similar facility at Peking University in Beijing, where Prof. Xing-Wang Deng directs a program studying the biology of plant systems, aimed at improving crops. Like Xu, Deng is a graduate of the institution where he performs his research. But it is only a matter of time before China sets up similar facilities for outstanding foreign scientists who have no prior connection to the country.
UNESCO could play an important role in encouraging the diffusion of this form of international research collaboration to other developing countries. From a developing country point of view, it is difficult to imagine a more effective method of capacity building in science and technology. With an initial investment in training a cadre of technicians and investing in laboratory facilities, developing countries can create a platform for the conduct of world-class research. Then, by attracting a small number of leading scientists on a part-time basis to supervise research in these facilities, the host country can benefit from having its students and faculty gain direct experience with state-of-the-art research and eventually build an independent capacity to undertake such work.
Internet Access to Educational Resources
The revolution in communications that has propelled the globalization of the economy has created a new set of opportunities to advance education and research in developing countries. The advent of the Internet makes possible the virtually costless distribution of academic course materials around the world, potentially enriching the education of both individual learners and students enrolled in colleges and universities. Electronic access to books and scholarly journals that might enhance both education and research is expanding rapidly. These developments have great potential, and UNESCO could have an important role in making possible the realization of that potential.
In 2002 MIT inaugurated its Open Course Ware project. Today, two-thirds of its courses have materials available on line, free of charge. The course materials include syllabi, study guides, examinations, problem sets and assignments given to students, lecture notes in some cases, and, in a few cases, videotaped lectures. About 50 institutions around the world have followed MIT's lead in putting course materials on line, and the University of Texas has established a Web site that allows faculty anywhere to submit their course materials for posting. A recent survey showed that 77% of the off-campus users of MIT's materials are from outside the United States. It also revealed that 47% of the users are individual learners, 32% are students enrolled in classes at another educational institution, and 16% are teachers seeking to design or improve their own courses.
Materials such as those posted on line by MIT have great potential for enhancing the quality of education around the world, especially if used judiciously by faculty to strengthen the content of their offerings. There is similar potential in the use of entire lecture courses from world-class institutions. Until now, most audio or video taped versions of entire courses have been available only commercially from the many on-line universities that have sprung up around the world. Currently, Yale is experimenting with the production and on-line distribution of six of its best-taught lecture courses in the arts and sciences. The material, which will be posted in the fall of 2007, will be protected by copyright, but available for wide use under a novel form of royalty-free license, allowing the unlimited re-use and distribution of the material for non-commercial and educational purposes, as long as the source of the material is acknowledged. The combination of on-line lectures and course materials developed by global experts with a local instructor to interact with students could become an exciting and effective new approach to strengthening the curriculum in universities around the world.
Scholarly materials are also becoming increasingly available on line. In 2004 Google announced plans to digitalize and make freely available the library collections of Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. Works from the public domain will be available in their entirety; excerpts will be available from works still under copyright. Publishers have sued Google in an effort to block the implementation of its plans, claiming that the project violates copyright law.
Scientific and scholarly journals have become frightfully expensive, making access prohibitively expensive for most individual scholars and for many if not most university libraries around the world. But there are efforts under way in the United States to ensure the free availability of recently published articles. Last year the National Institutes of Health, the largest source of medical research funding, requested that all its grantees submit their research papers for posting on a centralized, searchable data base within 12 months of publication. Compliance was limited for technical reasons, but legislation currently under consideration would require and provide funding for on-line posting of research papers supported by any federal agency within six months of publication.
It seems clear that UNESCO should do whatever it can to encourage these growing tendencies toward making instructional materials and scholarly publications freely available on-line. These trends could have a major positive impact on the quality of tertiary education in developing countries. In some cases achieving wider access may require the modification of existing copyright law, but in many cases the need to change the law may be avoided by encouraging scholars and publishers to use more creative forms of licensing, which allow royalty-free re-use and distribution for non-commercial and educational purposes. UNESCO could be very helpful in disseminating information to its member nations about the availability of free on-line resources, and it could help to educate scholars and publishers about the new forms of licensing that are emerging to facilitate access.
I wish you well in your efforts to set a new course for UNESCO in the years ahead. I hope that my suggestions may stimulate your thinking about UNESCO's role in higher education, one small corner of the broad domain of your important responsibilities.
