Re-envisioning the Purpose of Universities: WUN Drives Global Perspectives

May 18, 2007

See above: Prof Xu Xiaozhou, Deputy Dean of College of Education, ZJU; Prof Wang Yibing, Advisor for Global University Network for Innovation - Asia and the Pacific, ZJU; Prof Yang Wei, President of ZJU; Prof G.P. Zhou, Dean of College of Education, ZJU; Prof KaHo Mok, Director of Centre for East Asian Studies, Univ of Bristol; Prof Wu Xiaobo, Director of National Institute of Innovation Management, ZJU.

Above: The Opening Ceremony

WUN’s ‘Ideas and Universities’ initiative has rapidly created a global community exploring the conceptualisation of universities since the 11th century and examining how this relates to modern and future views of the nature and purpose of universities on a global basis.

A key part of this has been the extremely successful launch of an international video seminar series themed, The purpose of universities: ideals and realities. To build on this Zhejiang University recently hosted an event bringing key participants together with a very innovative, interdisciplinary and international agenda to explore key dimensions of the modern university with a key focus on ‘Knowledge Innovation and the Entrepreneurial University’. The conference was co-organised and co-funded by WUN and Zhejiang University’s College of Education and its National Institute of Innovation Management.

“The conference was designed to continue discussion on a face to face basis exploring fundamental issues such as what universities are for, and the relationship between the ideals which people articulate and what actually happens in practice,” explains Professor Ka Ho Mok, Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Bristol. “The conference certainly confirmed that virtual research seminars have a place alongside more traditional face-to-face interactions in accelerating and sustaining a sense of a global community engaged in regular dialogue.”

Key faculty from Zhejiang University set the scene, including keynotes from Professor Wang Yibing, Advisor for Global University Network for Innovation – Asia and the Pacific, at Zhejiang University, and Professor Xu Xiaozhou, Deputy Dean, College of Education, at Zhejiang University and the President of Zhejiang University, Professor Yang Wei.

Speakers from the universities of Bristol, Delhi, UW Wisconsin-Madison, Oxford, Sheffield and Southampton took up the twin themes of the fundamental importance to contemporary policy-making in higher education: those of innovation and entrepreneurship.

This global community meant that insights into recently developed practices in a range of universities and a series of critical perspectives could be explored.

Publication of the conference proceedings in both Chinese and English will present the academic community with formulations of key problems that need to be addressed, examples of different contemporary solutions to those problems, and a range of theoretical and critical perspectives that should inform the process of policy-making. An edited volume in English has the working title, ‘The Quest for Knowledge Innovation and the Entrepreneurial University: Critical Reflections’. Selected papers will be published in Chinese as a special issue in Exploring Education Development, a national core journal published by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences in China.

In addition to academic outcomes, significant policy advances will emerge from the ‘Ideas and Universities’ initiative, enabling WUN to lead the debate about ‘global’ universities. “The process of comparing universities in different societies at different times will create awareness of a greater range of possibilities, and allow the higher education community to offer a more informed critique of current planning,” says WUN CEO, David Pilsbury.

The seminar series and associated exchange of students continues and the next in the workshop series will be held in London in association with the WUN-sponsored “Realising the Global University” conference which has attracted major policy figures on a global basis to drill through the rhetoric surrounding globalisation.

(Worldwide Universities Network May 17, 2007)