Toby Wilkinson, Head of the University’s International Strategy Office, explains why, and how, Cambridge is taking a more strategic approach to its international activities.
Increasingly, the major funders of research are putting greater emphasis on ‘grand challenges’ – the big problems that confront the whole world, from sustainable energy to public health and food security. Such immense challenges are best tackled by large, international, multi-disciplinary teams; no single university can do it alone.
The University of Cambridge is international: our history and excellence are world-renowned. We are also a globalised institution, yet our worldwide activities are less well understood, even here in Cambridge.
In addition to the thousands of individual collaborations with scholars on every continent and in every discipline being pursued by our academic colleagues on a daily basis, every facet of the University – from Schools, faculties and departments to the Colleges, museums and libraries, not to mention Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge Enterprise – engages in international activities. These range from student and staff exchange to collaborative research, from capacity-building to business development. Keeping track of this complexity, and supporting new international ventures, is the responsibility of the International Strategy Office (ISO), a small central unit based in the Old Schools. But why is it important to map and support Cambridge’s overseas activities?
The first and most important reason has to do with research. Cambridge is a research-led university: research informs our teaching and it is our excellence in research – based in turn upon our success in attracting research funding – that underpins our global reputation.
The landscape of research funding is changing. Increasingly, the major funders of research are putting greater emphasis on ‘grand challenges’ – the big problems that confront the whole world, from sustainable energy to public health and food security. Such immense challenges are best tackled by large, international, multi-disciplinary teams; no single university can do it alone. That means forging research partnerships – supported by exchange programmes for post-grads, post-docs, and established researchers – with other leading institutions around the world.
Such partnerships are larger in scale and more complex in structure than the investigator-led projects at which Cambridge has traditionally excelled. The ISO has been set up to help identify the opportunities for larger-scale international collaborations, and to support their establishment. Programmes such as the Centre for Chemical Biology and Therapeutics in Bangalore, India, visited by the Vice-Chancellor last month, mark the start of a trend towards more institutional-level research partnerships for Cambridge around the world.
Opportunity and risk
Two further reasons for taking a more strategic approach to international engagement have to do with opportunity and risk. Only by understanding the full range of existing relationships that Cambridge has with a particular institution or country can synergies be identified and opportunities for partnership properly assessed. Only by having a complete picture of Cambridge’s overseas interactions can risk be measured and mitigated. In an age when universities’ international operations are under greater media scrutiny than ever before, it is particularly important to protect Cambridge’s reputation by ensuring that all our global activities are commensurate with our mission and values. Hence, both due diligence and ‘joining the dots’ are important roles of the ISO.
These three key aspects of global engagement – partnership, opportunity and risk – are explored in more detail in a paper approved last term by the General Board and the Council of the University. For both internal and external audiences, a new series of webpages, launched by the ISO this term, seeks to build greater awareness of the richness and complexity of Cambridge’s international activities.
None of this, however, would be possible without the support, cooperation and information provided by the constituent parts of Cambridge, especially the academic Schools, faculties and departments, the Development and Alumni Relations Office, the Research Office and other parts of the UAS. The ISO aims to ensure that, globally, Cambridge is greater than the sum of its parts.
While the ISO has developed a series of guiding principles and a handbook for international engagement, a traditional ‘international strategy’, neatly encapsulated in a single document, would be at odds with the University’s bottom-up culture of academic autonomy, and could not capture all the opportunities for a global institution as complex as Cambridge. Rather, a more strategic approach to global engagement will always be a work in progress, changing and developing in tune with new international developments and opportunities.