The Rise of the Global University: 5 New Tensions

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-the-Global/65694/The "multiversity"—the university with multiple constituencies and demands that Clark Kerr, the former president of the University of California identified in the 1960s—has given way to the Global Research University, or GRU. The Global Research University is the multiversity with much more mobility, more cross-national research and learning, and more global systems and rankings.Knowledge, the free currency of higher education, flows anywhere and everywhere, like quicksilver on a metal table. At the same time, global connections; global comparisons and rankings; and global flows of people, ideas, knowledge, and capital are transforming higher education.In that transformation, three trends have come together: Global networking Knowledge to drive research Democratization of education The convergence of those trends, and the emergence of the Global Research University, has created a new set of tensions: The tension between national perspectives and global perspectives.Governments and some institutions focus on their own agendas—which are usually local or national. Universities must now operate in all three dimensions at the same time: global, national, local. They must become smarter about managing the balance between those three dimensions and, where possible, work them in synergy, not conflict. The tension between elite research and mass teaching. The tension between sameness and diversity. Global comparisons, systems, and the Anglo-American model are making universities more similar—and penalizing those that are not, including nonresearch institutions, and all universities using languages other than English. The tension within the hierarchy of the most-competitive global universities. The tension between those inside the hierarchy and those outside it. These tensions are endemic to GRUs but are not impossible contradictions. Not all tension is destructive. Throughout its history, the university has combined differing and even opposing missions and forces. The secret of its long historical continuity is that from time to time it finds new ways of reinventing itself. It devises new combinatory models and strategies, changes its inner culture, and renovates its external mission. Thus we moved from the liberal academy of J.H. Newman to the scientific and professional university to Clark Kerr's multiversity and now to the Global Research University.The GRU must resolve the tensions running through it, harnessing the energy of paradox as a creative force. If it can do so, it will meet its key challenges: to be locally and globally effective at the same time. To move forward on both elite research and democratic education, whether within the same institutions or by bringing different institutions into conjunction. To devise common systems and methods of standardization which broaden creativity rather than narrowing it. And to further lift the stellar universities, while spreading the research function across the whole of higher education, contributing to the knowledge economy throughout the world.