A recent report by the Martin School at the University of Oxford (whose remarkable benefactor, James Martin, sadly died this year) bemoans the lack of institutions able to manage the interconnected world in which we now find ourselves. The report is surely right about that.
Could the same plaint be made about universities? At first glance, there might seem to be remarkably little global governance of universities. But look more closely, and there is, in fact, a bewilderingly complex set of networks and institutions that provide some form of international oversight.
University research is covered the most fully through a patchwork of efforts. The most formal governance arises out of international science projects. Organizations like CERN and many global health organizations provide formal and substantive lines of responsibility concerned with particular international scientific facilities. Then there are fledgling organizations being constructed out of the bilateral and multilateral agreements between national research councils. And there are some instances of genuine international research organizations: Europe is the most advanced here—think of the European Research Council as just one instance—but there are many other examples. And as these bodies multiply, so they also increase their orbit of concern. For example, research conduct, open access, and the like have all come onto the agenda.
When we come to teaching, the picture is less certain. There are certainly grand instances of international cooperation, especially those based around the Bologna Process. There are some regional accreditors as well. But there are few instances of the kind of mass assessments of teaching to be found in secondary education, which benefits from efforts like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA.
Then there are all manner of disaggregated and generally informal means of international governance. Research (and to a lesser extent teaching) performance is audited (if that is the right word for it) by higher-education rankings and the like. Rightly or wrongly—though mainly wrongly—these lists are taken seriously by many governments, if only because no international data, however suspect, are drawn together so easily anywhere else.
And last but by no means least, there are all of the networks of universities that exist. Most of these are too large to be much more than talking shops for university presidents, which is why, increasingly, the tendency has become to sacrifice size for the effectiveness provided by smaller and more tightly bound groups of institutions able to articulate common goals.
It’s a bit of a hodgepodge, though, any way you look at it. It is therefore open to what the academics Thomas Hale, David Held, and Kevin Young describe in their recent book, Gridlock: Why Global Cooperation Is Failing When We Need It Most. International, multilateral institutions are flagging, even where they exist.
Yet, as higher education internationalizes, it seems to me that some kind of more formal and more integrated global governance of universities may become necessary. A series of networks and ad hoc public and private institutions cannot cover this gap. National regulation of universities is no longer enough as universities increasingly become global organizations. By default, universities could end up being controlled by world trade agreements, by bodies like the OECD and Unesco that are not university-focused but are taking an increasing interest in the sector, and by a coalition of private technology firms in ways that universities will not like but which they will have little ability to fend off when they have no body that can argue their case.
So this is a call for a long-term global university organization, an organization that will start to set values and standards, certainly, but, more importantly, a body that can make the case for what universities and colleges have become: some of the most important actors striding onto the world stage.
