Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [59]
Course offerings can be broadened and faculties and student bodies diversified by either bringing the outside in or expanding from the inside out. The former has been the model in the past: the latter should be the new model. Colleges and universities must develop partnerships with other educational institutions throughout the world. New relationships can be established with already existing institutions. At the global as well as the national, regional and local levels, colleges and universities can undertake cooperative initiatives ranging from simple exchange programs for faculty and students to more complex arrangements that allow the joint sponsorship of curricular and administrative programs. Once again technology makes it possible to expand the number of participating faculty and to diversify both course offerings and the student body. As networking technologies continue to spread and storage capacity and speed of data transmission increase, real-time online education will become both more convenient and more popular.
Beyond partnering with existing colleges and universities throughout the world, educational institutions can serve as consultants to other governments, private organizations and investors who want to start new colleges and universities. The rising costs and growing inefficiencies of traditional educational institutions are creating opportunities for new competitors that are able to deliver high-quality education at a reasonable price. Moreover, as countries become wealthier, they want to establish their own educational institutions to meet their specific needs. In the short term, these developments offer attractive financial opportunities for American colleges and universities to provide advice and even faculty support on a fee-based work-for-hire model. The global consulting firm Mackenzie and Associates has already invested heavily in this business, but there is no reason universities can’t do a much better job.
A third possibility is for colleges and universities to follow a franchise model in which they open branches in different countries. This can be done either independently or in collaboration with newly created colleges and universities, and in fact is already taking place. Qatar, for example, has created a Foundation for Education, Science and Community whose most ambitious initiative to date is the establishment of a project called Education City. The government has entered into agreements with six American universities—Cornell, Texas A&M, Virginia Commonwealth, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown and Northwestern—to jump-start their program for higher education. The foundation website boasts: “At the heart of Education City are six universities … the branch campuses of prestigious international institutions that are delivering some of their most renowned programs. The availability of these world-class programs inspires young learners to strive for higher academic achievement.”
In Abu Dhabi, the government has appropriated the model of the Guggenheim network to create an outstanding museum as well as a new university. Next to the site of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a campus designed to accommodate the twenty thousand students who will attend New York University Abu Dhabi is rising in the desert sands. According to the mission statement, “NYU’s agreement with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi to create NYU Abu Dhabi is the outcome of a shared understanding of the essential roles and challenges of higher education in the 21st century: a common belief in the value of a liberal arts education, concurrence on the benefits a research university brings to the society that sustains it, a conviction that interaction with new ideas and those who are different