GLOBAL: Report tackles social and human development

The Global University Network for Innovation, known as GUNI, is nothing if not ambitious. Its latest report, Higher Education in the World: New challenges and emerging roles for human and social development, aims to fuel the debate on how universities can contribute to human and social development - what kind of knowledge should they be producing for what kind of society? All this at a time when increasing internationalisation and competition between institutions mean universities are facing a multitude of new demands as never before.

"We assume that the main value of higher education is to serve the common good, at a time in which what we understand by 'good' and what we understand by 'common' is difficult to define," says Cristina Escrigas, Executive Director of GUNI.

This network, set up by UNESCO and the United Nations University in Japan and hosted by Spain's Technical University of Catalonia, aims to drive and encourage innovation, social commitment and quality in higher education worldwide. It currently has 140 member institutions and can be found at www.guni-rmies.net.

The report, with contributions from 52 authors from 28 countries, sets out to chart a course for higher education of the future, according to guest editor Peter Taylor, head of graduate programmes at Sussex University's Institute of Development Studies in the UK.

The first section looks at the main trends affecting higher education in general around the world, taking in the main challenges for universities within the context of globalisation and the new roles universities can be expected to play in terms of education, research, engagement with society and institutional development.

Contributors include Philip Altbach, Director of Boston College's Center for International Education in the US, on how increasing demands on universities are making them essentially reactive rather than proactive agents.

"Universities have been forced to give up part of their vital role as centres of intellectual and cultural life and as analysts and social critics," Altbach says. "They have less space for creative, independent work and less autonomy for taking decisions and thinking."

Deepak Nayyar, a professor of economics at New Delhi's Jahawarlal Nehru University in India, traces how globalisation and market forces are encroaching on the teaching and research agendas of universities. Nayyar also warns of the risks of a global market for higher education in less developed countries.

"We are seeing a surprising proliferation of sub-standard institutions which charge high fees and provide low quality education," he says. "There is little or no feeling of responsibility towards students as most developing countries do not have laws or regulations to protect consumers in this market."

The report's second section explores regional differences in higher education. Bikas Sanyal and Francisco Lopez Segrera provide an overview of the state-of-play in Sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, North America and Latin America and the Caribbean since the World Conference on Higher Education in 1998.

Experts from each of the six regions then provide input on how higher education is contributing to human and social development in their parts of the world. This section includes several examples of best practice, such as how South Africa's University of the Western Cape is developing open software for learning or how Dutch universities are introducing content on sustainable development in their programmes.

The report also includes the results of a Delphi study using the opinions of 214 heads of universities, decision makers and representatives of civil society from 80 countries to describe how universities can contribute to human and social development. While most of those surveyed agreed that universities should play an active role, there was less agreement on how they should go about this.

Nevertheless, the options most often mentioned included updating curricula and improving teacher training, as well as mechanisms of financing and governance. Improving quality and providing equal opportunities to access higher education were also popular suggestions.

The final chapter consists of a series of statistics providing information on different criteria such as spending on education and research, levels of literacy among young people and adults, and other indicators of human development in different countries. The report, published in English by Palgrave Macmillan and in Spanish by Mundiprensa, was presented at the fourth GUNI international conference on the same theme held in Barcelona on 31 March 2008.

rebecca.warden@uw-news.com