Joint ventures offer way forward

Is the Monash-Warwick alliance a new model for internationalisation? You have to hand it to the futurists. The 15-hour working week may not have come to pass, and I’m still waiting for my personal jet-pack, but the globalisation of information? William Gibson, Marshall McLuhan et al got that pretty much right. The globe crackles with data hurtling around at a velocity, a reach and volume that could not have been imagined even 20 years ago. And universities – lumbering, ruminative, conservative universities – are going to have to deal with it. We have always offered students an entree into the world of ideas, but they increasingly see university as a staging point into the physical world. A student in Melbourne today is only a shade less likely, in their career, to work in Shanghai, Tokyo, LA or Berlin than they are to work in Sydney. Any education worthy of the name has to prepare them for that. Research is becoming internationalised for a different reason: because the problems that we face, be they climate change, resource scarcity, the wicked public health choices posed by an ageing population, are global ones. As such, they require an international response. From the point of view of either education or research, any higher education provider that does not operate globally will very soon seem provincial. No single model has emerged that describes how a university ought best operate internationally. I suspect a mix of international relationship types is appropriate. Monash can credibly claim to be Australia’s most international university and no two of our international ventures are the same. Our education centre in Prato, Italy provides small groups of mostly Australian students with an opportunity to learn overseas. Our collaboration with the Sunway group in Malaysia offers both undergraduate and post-graduate courses from six of our 10 faculties. And our operations in South Africa, China and India operate on different models again. In December 2011, we entered into what we are calling a “depth alliance” with Warwick. It is different from our other international ventures not just in scale, but in kind. I believe it to be a world first. The idea is that our two universities shall be connected at every level, that we draw upon each other’s strengths, and offer each other’s students international learning opportunities. Universities aren’t the only ones who realise that global problems require global solutions. Funding bodies recognise the benefits of cross-border collaboration. Institution-wide alliances like Monash-Warwick should prove particularly attractive to them because they can provide better return on investment by decreasing the proportion of funding spent setting up joint research endeavours, as much of the machinery is already in place. Although it is less than a year old, and much of the detail is still being ironed out, the alliance is already proving fruitful. It has already attracted significant funding, including seven Joint Strategic Funding Initiative grants, a grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK under its Building Global Engagements program to build connections in the physical sciences, and a grant from the Australian government to support student mobility. Perhaps I can briefly tease out some of the reasons I believe we have achieved what we have so far. Similar cultures and histories. Monash was established in 1961, Warwick in 1965. We are both full service universities, conducting research and education across the range of academic disciplines. We are both successful, but we are interlopers in the upper echelons, without the centuries-old reputation and the accompanying accretion of benevolent wealth of many of our close competitors. Complementary strengths. Academics will always want to collaborate with the best partners they can. It’s one thing for two VCs to shake hands and declare their universities are now joined at the hip. It is quite another for people across the university to make the most of the possibilities such an alliance represents. Ultimately it’s the academics who will breathe life into the collaboration, and they have to respect each other’s work. Pre-existing relationships. When we began to scope the possibility of the depth alliance, we discovered that engagement between individual researchers and partnerships on larger projects were already widespread. Obviously this is strongly related to the previous two points – the fact that your two universities are already working on things together serves as a strong indicator both that your cultures are sympathetic and that your strengths are complementary. Commitment at all levels. Senior management from both universities has been deeply engaged in the relationship. High-level delegations from Warwick have visited us several times and we have reciprocated. We have also appointed a joint academic vice-president to oversee the relationship. The alliance is still young, so despite our early successes it would be tempting fate to offer it as an exemplar. But given the good fit between the two partners and the success so far, I am optimistic that it is one of a small number of promising strategies for producing the quality and scale of research and education today’s world demands. Professor Ed Byrne is vice-chancellor of Monash University. This is an article based on his address to the Australian International Education Conference this month.