Andrew Hamilton, vice chancellor of the University of Oxford and former provost of Yale University, spoke of the importance of global partnerships of scholars at Universia, a recent meeting of 1,100 college and university leaders from 46 countries, sponsored by Santander Bank. Trusteeship asked him to talk more about these ideas and how boards might think about them.
Why are systemic partnerships of international scholars increasing—and increasingly important?
The challenges posed by the 21st century have increasingly required an international outlook from the world’s leading universities. This internationalization means universities becoming increasingly interconnected with people and institutions across the world through student and faculty mobility, research collaborations and funding, and the establishment of new offices and campuses abroad. Modern information technology, rapid transport, and telecommunications have meant that such internationalization can be effected more easily than before.
One historic example of international collaboration is that of penicillin, which was developed by a remarkable international team in Oxford in the late 1930s, including the Australian Nobel laureate Howard Walter Florey, the German Nobel laureate Ernst Chain, and the English biochemist Norman Heatley. The main point is that it took a multidisciplinary team working with the pharmaceutical industry and collaborating internationally to translate penicillin’s potential into a medicine that has saved millions of lives. The challenge is to repeat that kind of process systematically.
Oxford’s experience is that thinking internationally—in drawing together both scholars and the best students—leads to an outward-looking and open academy, capable of major advances.
How can multidisciplinary academic teams best tackle international problems?
Multidisciplinary teams can partner with industry to deal with such problems by carrying out research in other countries to address challenges specific to those regions. Oxford’s Tropical Medicine laboratories in Asia and Africa seek—and find—solutions to major and emerging infectious diseases that claim tens of millions of lives annually. They have pioneered a strong partnership between Oxford faculty members based overseas and local doctors and researchers. Currently recommended treatments for malaria, dengue shock syndrome, typhoid, and other diseases are all based on work conducted by such laboratories. The results of their research also feed directly into public health policies across both continents.
The recent outbreak of Ebola is a reminder that new threats can emerge at any time. It is an Oxford laboratory that will be testing the new vaccine that has been developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and GlaxoSmithKline.
You’ve talked about universities and “wealth creation.” What do you mean by that?
Universities have, over the centuries, succeeded in adapting to the challenges of successive generations, and wealth creation is just one of the demands of 21st-century society. Such challenges change over time, but include demographic shifts, technological advancements, and ever-more-complex world problems. In addition, these challenges are accompanied by the expectation that universities will continue to deliver their core missions of teaching and research within the context of an ever-widening stakeholder base.
Fortunately, universities have a capacity both for innovation and for educating innovative people. So, in recent years, we have seen much more emphasis placed on institutions engaging in technology transfer: identifying research results with industrial commercial potential and actively marketing those results to companies that might continue their development, or spinning out companies that can do that themselves.
How should boards in particular understand these developments and their impact on their institutions?
Board members tend to be well aware of the international dimension of universities. In many cases, the walks of life from which they are drawn are already internationalized. What certainly helps is an understanding— communicated through interactions with administrators and faculty members—of how modern universities operate, in terms of research, teaching, recruitment of staff, and student enrollment. Only then can the concerns and aspirations of boards and faculty be aligned for the benefit of their institutions.
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