In late 2014, some months after Tadeusz Patzek was approached about heading up a new petroleum institute at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), he moved to the young research university in Saudi Arabia. Patzek had been at the University of Texas at Austin for about seven years, with no intentions of leaving. “I went for the sense of adventure, the sense of creating something new and unique,” he says.
As an astronomy professor at Pomona College, Bryan Penprase got involved with plans to launch a sister college in Asia. “It was so exciting to get a group of dreamers together to say, ‘What is possible?’ The idea was to take best practices and liberate from less relevant things.” Innovation at existing institutions can be “pretty impossible,” he adds. The plan fizzled due to the 2008 global financial crisis, but was later taken up by Yale University in collaboration with the National University of Singapore. The new institution opened in 2011 as Yale-NUS. Penprase helped hire the inaugural faculty and design the curriculum. He is currently dean of faculty at Soka University of America, a small private school in southern California that focuses on global citizenship and a humanistic liberal arts education.
Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) use the instrumented yellow glider to study currents, temperatures, and other properties of the Red Sea as a function of depth. Much research at KAUST addresses regional problems.
Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) use the instrumented yellow glider to study currents, temperatures, and other properties of the Red Sea as a function of depth. Much research at KAUST addresses regional problems.
New universities differ in the reasons for starting them, the models they adopt, and the degrees they offer. Adequate funding is a must—whether from public sources, tuition, or an endowment. But funding aside, from Abu Dhabi to England and from Japan to Canada, the challenges new universities face, their goals, and the ingredients for success overlap.
“Whatever is needed”
KAUST was launched to great fanfare in 2009 (see Physics Today, November 2009, page 24). The main goal was to bring world-class research to Saudi Arabia as a means to diversify the economy, staunch brain drain, and tackle regional problems. Ten years on, it has achieved name recognition, admissions to its programs are highly competitive, and it is amassing patents and spin-off companies. The 158 faculty members, 476 postdocs, and roughly 1100 PhD and master’s students hail from more than 100 countries.
Like KAUST, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan stresses interdisciplinarity and confers only graduate degrees. It, too, is generously funded, which frees researchers from the grant-writing mill and affords them the opportunity to pursue risky, curiosity-driven projects; its high level of funding and direct line to the prime minister’s cabinet generates envy at other Japanese institutions. Japan created OIST in 2011 with the dual aims of conducting world-class research and education and economically boosting the country’s poorest region, and thus contributing to internationalizing its science enterprise. Okinawa’s main industries are fishing and tourism. The island is an hour’s flight from Taipei, two from Hong Kong, and three from Tokyo.
Integration with the Japanese research community is an ongoing challenge for OIST. “We are still exotic in Japan,” says faculty member Matthias Wolf, who works on virus structures. “When it comes to the best students, they tend to go to the top universities on the main islands.” Only about 15% of OIST’s roughly 200 students are Japanese. To come to OIST, he explains, “they have to leave the safety of their traditional educational system.”
Evolving environments
“All new institutions have the same challenges,” says David Frost of Georgia Tech. “What’s important is the manner in which the people and the institutions respond.” In 1999 Frost served as founding director for Georgia Tech’s new satellite campus in Savannah. “You have to hire engaged people who step up and do whatever is needed. You need people who are comfortable in a dramatically evolving environment,” he says. “Even for me as director, it was like sitting on a balloon that was getting bigger and bigger.”
Faculty at new institutions have to be flexible, creative, and willing to do the extra work of program building, says Ajay Gopinathan, physics chair at the University of California’s newest campus, which opened in Merced in 2005. It was created to serve the state’s growing population. “Injecting higher education and economic opportunity into this community in the San Joaquin Valley generated a lot of political will to putting the campus here,” says Gopinathan. Even when the UC budget was cut during the financial crisis, UC Merced continued to grow, he says.
“When I got here, there were pristine facilities but essentially no established programs or students,” Gopinathan says. He was one of four junior physics faculty tasked with setting up the undergraduate and graduate curricula and recruiting students and faculty. It was both a challenge and an opportunity, he says. “We had no institutional inertia. We could be agile in our educational programs and our research.” Among the strategic decisions he and his colleagues made was to focus on select interdisciplinary subfields: biological and soft-matter physics and quantum materials for sensing, computing, and renewable energy. The department has grown to 17 faculty members, he says, and is now building strength in computational and data-science astrophysics. It also plans to increase its focus on preparing graduates for careers in industry.
Being born into a well-respected system with public funding, the new campus was somewhat shielded from the challenges of recruiting students and faculty that campuses with no brand recognition face. In 15 years, UC Merced has grown from an initial 875 undergraduate and 37 graduate students to 8000 undergraduate and nearly 700 graduate students, and counting. Of the undergraduates, 65% are underrepresented minorities and 75% are first-generation college attendees.
In preparation for opening, officials at NMITE (New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering) worked with 25 stand-in students to test-drive everything from the school’s curriculum to the design and architecture of classrooms to relations with the host city, Hereford in the UK. Here, some of that cohort visit a Heineken cider bottling plant to explore ways to reduce the amount of plastic in its bottling operations.
In preparation for opening, officials at NMITE (New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering) worked with 25 stand-in students to test-drive everything from the school’s curriculum to the design and architecture of classrooms to relations with the host city, Hereford in the UK. Here, some of that cohort visit a Heineken cider bottling plant to explore ways to reduce the amount of plastic in its bottling operations.
Similarly, the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) in Prince George and the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) were created by their governments to meet demand. In the case of the now three-decades-old UNBC, the demand came from local communities, says past president George Iwama. “People were seeing their children migrate south and not returning. UNBC provided an opportunity to get an education closer to home. It also produced doctors and other much-needed professionals in the north.” From 2014 to 2017 he was at OIST, and he is now president of Canada’s only private, secular, not-for-profit liberal arts university, Quest University (see Physics Today, June 2017, page 28).
An experimental undergraduate engineering school is set to open this fall in Hereford, UK. NMITE (New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering) is intended to boost the local economy and implement modern pedagogical approaches. Courses will be project based with heavy industry involvement. Students will take one course at a time. NMITE is taking the “bold step” of waiving the usual high school math and physics engineering prerequisites, says founding trustee Karen Usher. “We say if you have grit, curiosity, passion, and work hard, you can learn engineering.” A new higher-education institution is not like a startup company, she says. “Everything has to be in place on day one. What do you do if a student gets sick? What are the learning outcomes of each course? The breadth and variety of requirements are rigorous.”
The Singaporean government launched SIT in 2009 as part of its plan to achieve 40% university attendance and a diversified knowledge-based economy. SIT offers applied degree programs in such areas as nutrition, aircraft systems engineering, and information security. “One of our biggest concerns is that students get the right jobs,” says Yong-Lim Foo, the university’s assistant provost of applied learning. “The government holds us accountable if our employment data looks bad. So far it looks good.”
At the start, low name recognition made recruiting students tough, says Foo. It was also a challenge to get companies on board. “We introduced compulsory internships, and it has taken time for industries to see themselves as part of the training process.”
Ashesi University in Ghana is finding success by embodying some of the same ideas that work elsewhere, notably a limited course selection, training in entrepreneurship, and an interdisciplinary approach. It also introduced community service and a student-written honor code. US-educated Ghanaian Patrick Awuah founded the university in the country’s capital, Accra, in 2002, with the conviction that “a liberal arts education is critical to forming true leaders, because it builds decision-making skills, an ethical framework, and a broad vision,” as he says in a TED talk. “Ashesi” means “beginning” in the Akan language.
Obtaining accreditation for Ashesi “was a huge battle,” says Suzanne Buchele, who stepped down as provost in 2018. “The venture was seen as a condemnation of existing universities.” But, she says, the institution is gaining visibility. “In 2014 people had not heard of it. Now, if you get asked for a bribe at a police checkpoint and say ‘we can’t because we work at Ashesi,’ they accept it.” And these days, she adds, parents ask how they can get their kids in.
Challenges and incentives
In the 1990s and 2000s, American and European universities opened offshoots, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. Many of them failed, says Georgia Tech’s Frost, who cited as a common cause the reluctance of the established partner to cede control. “Separating authority and accountability is a disaster. The best people to make decisions are the ones who live in the community every day. You need agility to adjust to local conditions.” In some cases expectations were unrealistic. For example, the parent university may have wanted to make money and then pulled out if that didn’t happen on the anticipated time scale.
Still, some partnership models have worked, and new universities continue to crop up. Fulbright University Vietnam opened its doors in Ho Chi Minh City last fall. The main objectives are to spread a western educational philosophy and “for Vietnam to compete on an international level,” says Ryan Derby-Talbot, who until late last year was the university’s chief academic officer. Seed money comes from the US; the sources are USAID and the Vietnam Debt Repayment Fund, created in a 1997 agreement between the US and Vietnam to repay Vietnam’s wartime debts. Eventually the private, nonprofit university will have to rely on tuition. The university is setting up career services for students. “That matters a lot in that part of the world,” says Derby-Talbot.
A challenge with new institutions, says Derby-Talbot, who previously taught math at Quest University, is “mission drift.” To be successful, an institution has to have a clear mission and stick to it. “Higher education in general is under pressure,” he says. “It’s helpful to send a message to the public that resonates, and to be known for what is important to the particular place.”
New York University started NYU Abu Dhabi as an independent satellite campus in 2010. Joseph Gelfand and Ingyin Zaw were attracted by the pioneering spirit required of new faculty. Since they are a couple, it helped that they both landed jobs in the physics department. Until recently, faculty hires and promotions were approved by both the local and parent campus. After a while, “we no longer needed as much help,” Gelfand says, “and in some cases—though not physics—the home department wanted to shed the extra work.” The campus adheres to NYU standards and answers to the NYU provost, he adds.
Denis Simon is executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, just west of Shanghai, China. The university is one of nine institutions started jointly by a Chinese university and a foreign one between 2004 and 2017 with the aim of internationalizing the country’s higher education system. “These are pilot experiments in an attempt to produce world-class universities,” says Simon. “The idea is to see what kinds of pedagogical approaches work best here.” Duke Kunshan opened its doors in 2013. Students earn degrees from both Duke and Duke Kunshan universities; the Duke degree is accredited by the same organization as at Duke University in North Carolina. Simon says it’s easier to recruit faculty in the humanities and social sciences because “many of them are interested in China or Asia,” but in science and math, faculty sometimes “have to be incentivized to come.” He lists as incentives superb infrastructure, research support, and high-caliber students.
Among the challenges, Simon says, is learning to simultaneously uphold US principles and be respectful of Chinese customs and regulations. “We are trying to get our students to think critically and to challenge their instructors; this is not always easy in a society where respect for teachers is a core value.” Another example is cross-cultural integration of the three communities on campus: Chinese, American, and others. “That requires constant attention and nurturing.”
For institutions that recruit internationally, language and cultural differences can challenge faculty and students. OIST researchers benefit from the 2009 decision in Japan to accept grant applications in English. At KAUST, the foreigners and many of the Saudis live in an onsite enclave. For some, human rights, political issues, and the country’s links to terrorism can be tough to square with the university’s vibrant research environment. Isolation is a challenge at many of the new campuses, whether because of a time difference, far-flung location, or other reasons. “If you like living in big cities, Merced doesn’t have as much to offer,” says Gopinathan. But his campus, KAUST, and others got a leg up in hiring during the global recession. And, says Gopinathan, the UC Merced physics department has a high faculty retention record.
