This week, the PASCAL
International Observatory’s “Big Tent” collaborative released a new
“Communique”
focusing on the role of universities and civil society to
respond to the massive human migration caused by civil strife. The communiqué, which is being
presented at the PASCAL annual conference October 7-9, notes:
There is rising uncertainty in
many arenas of public and community affairs world-wide: environmental
sustainability, peace, economic instability, exploding inequality, poverty,
youth unemployment and lost identity, health and mental illness, ageing and the
massive movement of peoples. The history of our world is a history of migration
and movement. How do different generations, people and places adapt to what is
and will be a continuing phenomenon?
The
communiqué notes the importance of universities in helping to address these
challenges through research, teaching, and engagement with civil society. “Those of us in higher
education,” the authors state, “need to find a voice beyond the technical,
managerial and narrowly economic, and look for a deeper way of hearing and
acting on the concerns of ordinary citizens: refugees, unemployed, the homeless
and those otherwise excluded.”
Specifically:
We believe universities need to
take a more active role in collaborating with civil society to generate
powerful knowledge, and open up their work to much more fruitful interaction
with wider society. Urgent attention should be paid to how universities prepare
their graduates to play a role in building a more equal and fairer world, and
how they support the wider challenges of empowering citizens to work together,
across these deep divides, to build a better world.
The
current migration involves movement of people to Europe from southern countries
that are overwhelmed by civil strife, economic failure, and political and
ethinic inequality. It argues for
a new balance between the needs of local citizens and those of the immigrants
and refugees and asks, “What more can universities do
here: in their teaching, in their research and its use, in their local-regional
civil society settings?”
One
particular issue embedded in the migration challenge is the large percentage of
young people among citizens in southern countries. It notes that nearly half the population of Asian countries
are below the age of 25—young people for whom globalization has been an issue
for all of their lives and who connect globally with others through
technology. It notes, “This
generation is beginning to experience global citizenship. Yet 'host'
communities and governments are resistant to this 'invasion of youth.’ They fear change and are uncertain what
future rising waves of youthful mobility and migrations bring.”
Noting
that universities “in both North and South are key structures of
transformation,” the communiqué challenges universities to put “more emphasis
on engagement in the global South and on new forms of engagement in the global
North.” It lays out this
challenge:
This requires universities to
take to heart as their primary mission the present and future of our inherited
local and global world. A massive community learning campaign is needed, no
less challenging than mass national literacy campaigns. We share a duty of care
for the future of our young who have little work, little sense of belonging to
anything anywhere. Within and beyond world university rankings we need
awareness of critical local and global issues linked to transformed practices
of engagement. This means respecting the co-construction of knowledge; linking
with local governments, organisations and social movements; new reward
structures for academic staff; and a change in the culture and language of
institutions of higher education. High quality innovative engaged research can
assist rather than weaken good ranking.
Finding answers needs abiding
optimism; new, transformative, forms of individual and collective engaged
lifelong learning; new pedagogies; public and community support for
ethically-based learning; research for action. A good role model for senior
university managers to foster courage, honesty, public service and humanity
might be the nurturing gardener. For university staff, expert in their fields
of knowledge and disciplines, and capable administrators of complex knowledge
organisations, the first duty is to do good for the wide and the local world.
We
must assume that this issue will only continue to grow in the years ahead. Today’s mass migration is being driven
by civil and religious conflict.
However, in a few short years, we may see a more massive migration
driven by climate change—the destruction of coastal communities, the loss of
sources for food and water, and increasing competition for natural resources of
all kinds.
What
practical steps can universities around the globe take to address these
issues? Some thoughts:
·
Develop means to more
effectively collaborate on research and share research results. The Worldwide Universities Network(WUN)
is one example. Collaborative
research opens new opportunities for observation of phenomena in different
natural and cultural settings, creating new frameworks within which to explore
research topics.
·
Expand “sandwich”
doctorate programs that reduce and, potentially, reverse, brain drain from
southern universities that partner with northern institutions. Graduate students from the southern
universities—who may already have faculty roles there—travel to the partner
institution to begin their doctoral studies. They then return to their home institution to complete their
coursework via a combination of directed independent study and online education
and to conduct their research. The
result is twofold. First,
individual students complete their programs at their home institution and are
thus more likely to stay. Second,
the model encourages a research model that can lead to long-term research
collaborations between the partner institutions.
·
Use partnerships to internationalize
the curriculum to ensure that all students—both northern and southern—gain perspectives
on the emerging global society and their role in it. This could include using online learning to bring
international perspectives more effectively into undergraduate and graduate
courses by sharing students and by sharing faculty expertise across traditional
campus boundaries. The Committee
on Inter-institutional Collaboration (CIC) has a Courseshare initiative that operates domestically within the
“Big Ten” network of institution that suggests how such sharing might work.
·
Offer
multi-institutional degree programs through international partnerships, in
which students from multiple institutions around the globe would take online
courses from each other’s institutions in order to complete a degree or
certificate program. Such programs
have the advantage of bringing specialized knowledge of international faculty
to bear on a shared curriculum, while globalizing the experience of students
across international institutions who participate in individual courses. The Great Plains IDEA project suggests one way that this
could be institutionalized within a group of institutions for multiple degree
programs. There are also numerous examples
of collaboration around individual degree programs.
·
Higher education and
civil society associations should collaborate to create a website that collects
and shares best practices in university engagement on these international
issues. Recognizing success is a
sure way to encourage institutions and leaders to innovate and peers to
emulate. Perhaps the PASCAL Big
Tent member organizations could start this process.
Ultimately, the
challenge will be for northern Universities to engage with both institutional
counterparts and civil society organizations to identify research, teaching,
and engagement needs and to effectively respond to them in a systematic
way. Increasingly collaboration
calls for formalized, ongoing, multi-disciplinary relationships among
institutions that share common missions and that are targeted at understanding
and addressing the local impacts of global issues.
Many thanks to PASCAL
and the Big Tent group for mapping out this journey for higher education.
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