PROFESSOR MICHAEL Gibbons, Secretary-general of the Association of Commonwealth
Universities, has urged colleague administrators from across the world to examine
carefully the importance of collaboration in an increasingly competitive world.
"Universities are being-subjected to intensifying competition from both within
and outside the education sector and are therefore feeling the need to find
innovative ways to maintain their positions in the emerging higher education
market," he told delegates attending the 14th International Meeting of University
Administrators (IMUA) at the University of Technology's (UTech) Farquharson
Hall on Wednesday.
The delegates have been meeting in Kingston at the University of the West Indies
and the University of Technology since Monday to discuss trends and strategies
in university administration.
Speaking on the theme "New Trends in Inter-university Collaboration", Professor Gibbons said there were changes that will accompany globalisation since the world will become primarily a capitalist economy.
"Universities in particular cannot expect to be exempt - so they enter more intensely into competition with one another not only nationally but internationally. They compete against each other for students, staff and increasingly for resources of all kinds," he said.
But there was still concern about the ability of smaller nations to survive in a global environment.
"Competition is very good but at the moment it is difficult to say it is going to be fair," suggested Professor Abdullahi Mahadi, Vice Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. He expressed concern about the ability of smaller nations to be seen as any real competition without becoming homogenous.
Professor Gibbons argued, however, that "globalisation processes" do not operate to produce the homogenisation of institutions, corporations and products as is often asserted.
"In fact the overall effect - is to increase diversity and produce not uniform but different forms of indigenous capitalism's with different scientific, technological and industrial characteristics," he said.
He also dismissed the idea that the grouping of universities would make them "the equivalent of multinational corporations".
"Universities are in many ways unique institutions and should be preserved as such. Nonetheless, the context within which they now have to operate draws, them into a competitive process, from the imperatives of which they cannot hide," he said.
He identified two partnerships which were necessary to the process.
First, those that are "discovery-based", where staff work together to identify new lines of development and ways of using them in their own institutions; and secondly "innovative partnerships" that would require university managements to adapt their own resources and use them in development.
"Clearly in the new context both types of partnerships are necessary but it is important to be clear what kind you are trying to join," Professor Gibbons concluded.
