University Forum on the Global University
Discussion Note #2 – The Goal is Scope, not Scale
Nick Lemman (Journalism School)
In the age of globalization, every significant institution has to decide how to
globalize itself—there’s no one model that works across the board. MacDonald’s and
Starbucks can set up fairly similar retail locations all over the world. Big financial
institutions can operate offices—though not always retail offices—in every
significant city in the world. Internet companies like Google and Facebook are global
automatically in the sense that the Internet is globally available, but they have to
vary what they do depending on local, national, and regional sets of rules that
prevail in different locations.
The leading American research universities still haven’t developed what looks like a
standard model for how to globalize—which makes working on this issue at
Columbia right now especially interesting. Some universities have set up full-scale
branch campuses abroad; Columbia, under Lee Bollinger’s leadership, has rejected
this approach. It’s logistically challenging, it’s expensive, it carries a risk of dilution
of quality, it offers only partial coverage of the world, and it often entails entering
into partnerships with governments that don’t honor our core principles of
academic freedom and freedom of expression. Of course, it we’re not going the
branch campus route, that raises the question of what we are doing.
One way to frame the question is to say that globalization can involve operating on a
global scale, more on the Starbucks/Google/Chase model—that is, there would be
an obvious Columbia presence everywhere—or that it can involve operating on a
global scope, meaning that Columbia remains mainly a New York City institution but
nonetheless finds a way to be conceptually or intellectually global. Which should we
choose?
Scale: Columbia has eight Global Centers, which is a relatively logistically modest
move in the direction of achieving global scale. It also has a large number of
relationships with affiliated academic institutions all over the world. And of course
essentially all Columbia faculties are active members of academic organizations in
their disciplines that operate globally. What seems impossible is genuine physical
globalization. A Starbucks branch is about 2000 square feet. Columbia University in
the City of New York is about 13 million square feet. The project of replicating the
enormous range of facilities that make one of the world’s great research universities
what it is in multiple locations is insuperable.
There would be two other ways to achieve global scale. One would be through a vast
wave of mergers. Starbucks did not become global by buying up coffee shops, but
Chase became global, in substantial part, by acquiring other banks. It might be
conceptually possible for Columbia, Oxford, and Beijing Universities to join together,
with others, into one big university with a single administration and a single name,
so that, in fifty years, there would be half a dozen of these global academic
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University Forum on the Global University
superpowers competing with each other. We could call that that financial industry
model.
The other way to achieve global scale would be the Internet model, in which what
Columbia offers pedagogically, and the ways in which faculty members conduct
their research and institutional lives, could be done so well online that “being at
Columbia” could be achieved just as easily in a village in Bhutan as in Morningside
Heights. If one sees the life of a great university as necessarily entailing a mainly inperson experience for students and faculty, then this wouldn’t be attractive, and in
any case the technology to support it doesn’t currently exist. But it’s worth thinking
about. And life isn’t conceptually neat; either or both of these models for “scaling
up” (as they say in Silicon Valley) could be pursued in partial form.
Scope: On to global scope. Probably the most provincial moment in the life of the
University comes when the loudspeaker plays those songs by Frank Sinatra, Jay-Z,
and Alicia Keys at the end of the Commencement ceremony every May. Otherwise,
there is no part of the University that has no students or faculty from abroad; there
are no faculty who have dealings with only American colleagues; and probably not
many courses operate from an entirely regional or national perspective.
One way to think about scope is first to try to identify what would take Columbia up
to the next quantum of global consciousness, and then to delineate a series of
necessarily more mundane logistical arrangements that would make this possible.
Here are a few examples. It may be that every part of the University should strive to
achieve a student body and a faculty that has a higher percentage of non-US citizens
than it has now. This would almost automatically change the feel and perspective of
university life, in ways that work their way down to every classroom and every
meeting. And to achieve that would require, among other things, a good deal more
financial aid for students who could not participate in the US student loan programs.
Or one could say that course syllabi at Columbia should have to manifest a global
perspective—and that would require some formal review mechanism. Or one could
say that students and faculty should be spending less of their time here in
Morningside Heights, and more abroad—and that would require funding, better
online systems, and a revisited set of academic requirements. The point is that
“scope” has a purely conceptual ring to it, but it wouldn’t wind up meaning anything
unless it also had a robust administrative component. In order to stick, big ideas
have to be made manifest through lasting procedures. “Scope” implies looking at all
the core procedures of the University afresh: admissions, recruitment, promotion,
research administration, pedagogy, libraries, and on and on.
I hope none of the above has the feeling of providing answers to what are
necessarily highly complex questions. It’s meant only as a framing device for further
discussion.
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