The Changes of Higher Education Towards Globalization

1
The Changes of Higher Education Towards
Globalization

• President Forum of Southeast Asian Universities
• Organized by National Cheng Kung University
  Taiwan
• October 17-22, 2003

Bienvenido F. Nebres, S.J. President, Ateneo de
Manila University
2

• There are three major changes for universities in
  developing countries like the Philippines, which
  I would like to focus on
•  
• First, globalization has raised standards of
  excellence in education and has increased the
  quality gap between universities in rich
  countries and those in poor countries.
• Second, it has also increased the gap between the
  universities in the poorer countries that are
  able to mobilize resources to compare with
  international standards and the poorer
  universities.
• Third, globalization has also internationalized
  professions, communities, stakeholders and
  universities find that they have to relate to a
  more international community.

3

• Raising the Bar of Excellence and seeking not
  just national, but regional and international
  standards.

This is a familiar change and challenge to us
with the different international comparisons of
universities across regions and across the world.
For universities in developing countries like the
Philippines, it has sharpened our awareness of
the gap that has grown between our universities
and universities in our Asian region. The first
challenge of change, which I articulated for the
Ateneo de Manila in 1994, was how to narrow the
gap of excellence between us and universities in
our region.The reason is not just for prestige,
but for the competitiveness of our graduates in a
more demanding world. Unless our graduates can
compete effectively with graduates in leading
universities in our region, we will not
contribute effectively to the leadership needed
in a globalizing economy.
4
This requires major investments in buildings,
facilities, IT infrastructure and equipment,
laboratories, libraries, above all in faculty
with PhD's, in research, in scholarships to
attract the best students. For our students we
have seen the need for more of them to have an
international experience, a junior term or year
abroad. We are just beginning in this and it
requires substantial investment in personnel,
money and time. Since we are a private
university and dependent mainly on tuition
income, raising the bar of excellence has
required larger scale fundraising from alumni,
parents and friends. We are learning from U.S.
universities how to build effective development
offices which attend to alumni and other external
publics and to fundraising.
5
Although it takes up quite a bit of my time, I
serve on the Board of Trustees of two American
universities, Georgetown University in
Washington, D.C., and Regis University in Denver,
Colorado, partly so we may learn from the
American experience.
6

• Globalization has also increased the gap between
  the better universities in a developing country
  and the larger number of educational
  institutions.

In a country like the Philippines, globalization
has the effect of bringing in global standards in
housing, food, vehicles, recreation, education,
etc., and a small portion of the
population lives in such first-world
circumstances. But its other face is that it has
widened the gap between rich and poor.
7
This increasing gap which has its roots in the
large economic disparities in a country like the
Philippines widens the economic resource and
opportunity gaps. It divides the country into
winners and losers and is part of the roots of
the political, military, social turmoil we are
experiencing. It is not possible
to build community, where inequality is too great
and especially where it is widening rather than
closing.
8
The second clear goal I presented to the Ateneo
de Manila in 1994 is that we must work to close
the standards gap between our university and
other schools in the Philippines, in particular
the public elementary and high schools where
about 90 of our young people study. We have
intensified our focus on this concern in the last
couple of years and we are seeking to make a
flagship goal of the university to contribute to
closing the poverty gap in our country.
9
I have often quoted the Nobel-Prize winning
Economist, Amartya Sen, who says that poverty is
not just a poverty of resources, as measured by
GDP or foreign direct investments. It is above
all a poverty of capability and those countries
that have come out of poverty put emphasis on the
institutions that undergird capability basic
education, basic health services, reasonable
access to credit.
10
In the university world where all of us live, it
is quite natural to give priority to our prestige
and standing among our colleagues. Individually,
our standing is measured in terms of our research
and publications, in the quality and achievement
of our students, in the prestige and resources of
our department or
university. The problem is that while moving up
in these standings brings us closer to
universities abroad, it widens the gap between us
and the rest of the country.
11
Recent events of social, political, and military
turmoil have shown that we ignore this widening
gap at our own peril. In a country like the
Philippines, I tell my colleagues that if we do
not focus as well on the matters that will close
the poverty gap (as stated by Amartya Sen), then
our achievements will stand on a fragile social
community that will eventually sweep the ground
from under our feet.
12
The problem is that focusing on this second goal
of closing the gap between us and poorer schools
as a central priority for the university is not
easy. Given the traditional standards by which we
measure university achievement, namely quality of
teaching and of research, this focus often runs
counter to the desire for faculty and university
excellence. For example, our
traditional norms for promotion emphasize quality
of teaching and quality of research. Our standard
university norms do not give priority to
rewarding service to close the poverty gap.
13
Yet if a major goal of our universities is to
serve national purpose in a globalizing world and
if the processes of globalization are actually
creating greater poverty and a major reason for
this is the weakness of basic education and basic
health services, then we must find a way for our
university to focus on these fundamental
concerns. Otherwise we find that our pursuit of
university excellence may serve the individual
university's prestige and the individual
graduate's competitiveness, but it does not serve
national purpose.
14
In the last Strategic Planning Workshop with our
Board of Trustees, we have started to come to an
agreement to focus on these concerns. This
agreement is based on the urgency of the poverty
problem in our country, on our responsibility as
a university from which many national leaders
have come, and on our roots in the Christian
ideals of a university which should be of service
to others. What we need to do on the university
level is to find a way to integrate these
concerns into the mainstream life of faculty,
including integrating them into the world of
teaching and research.
15

• Globalization is also demanding from us that we
  build networks beyond national boundaries. This
  goes beyond the traditional university exchange
  agreements and we find that we have to develop

(a) Study opportunities abroad for our junior
students. This is quite expensive and we can only
do it in a limited way. Perhaps the network of
universities attending this
conference can consider ways to help make such
opportunities more available across our region.
16
(b) Joint academic research with university
departments and laboratories abroad. An example
is that our university has developed very good
capabilities in

• Grid computing technologies and a recent grant
  is allowing us to do real-time analysis of
  functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data
  for medical research in collaboration with Japan.
  
• (c) An international network for research and
  publications.

17
Given the second challenge of focusing on the
poverty gap, we need to look to international
partnerships with universities in developing
countries facing the same challenges as we do. We
need to find
together the way to move towards university
excellence according to globalizing standards and
at the same time serve the central and critical
national purpose of overcoming poverty.