If you think today’s university is home to individual thinkers thinking individually, think again.
Blown open in great part by this century’s digital explosion of information, today’s university is international and multinational in every way. As a result, the most respected institutions of higher learning in the world routinely collaborate and cross-pollinate, creating research and scholarship that cross state borders and academic disciplines.
Far from fusty and insular, today’s university is at the crossroads of the world.
Less than a year ago, Harvard and MIT formed edX to offer free MOOCs — Massive Open Online Courses — conducted with the same rigor as their on-campus equivalents. Today, edX offers classes from U.C. Berkeley, Rice, the University of Texas, Wellesley and Georgetown University in the U.S.; the University of Toronto and McGill in Canada; Australian National University; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland; and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In just 10 months, edX had more than 900,000 course enrollments, and competitive MOOCs, including Coursera and Udacity, are experiencing similar growth.
Does that sound like cozy, cloistered academia to you?
International collaborations at universities are exploding. There are hundreds of joint research programs every year at Tel Aviv University alone, with scientists at schools, organizations and megacorporations on six continents, including Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, the Sorbonne, National Institutes of Health, the Mayo Clinic, Google, Ford and the Air Force. It’s an amazing matrix for innovation and incubation.
Even the silos within the antiquated ivory tower are gone.
World problems are just too complex for any one field to solve. By pulling down intellectual barriers, applying the methods of one field to another and fusing older disciplines into newer, synergized ones, academia is creating entirely new avenues of scientific exploration.
Take one seemingly self-contained field of study — research into the brain, our most complex human organ. Unraveling its mysteries is one of the greatest challenges facing neuroscience, so teams at many universities now include chemists, immunologists, geneticists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, environmentalists, psychologists, philosophers and physiologists.
That’s a dream team undreamed of just a decade ago.
Fueled by that astonishing potential, the evolution of today’s international university continues to pick up speed. It begins even at the freshman level. This year, nearly 22 percent of Stanford’s incoming class hails from abroad. Tel Aviv University matriculated students from more than 60 countries, including India, China and Israel’s Middle East neighbors. And Oxford University enrolled students from an astonishing 138 countries, comprising one-third of the student body.
Imagine the connections these international students will make, building relationships that can last throughout their lives and careers. Each is a potential ambassador, a source of understanding that can lend nuance and stability to our planet’s complicated geopolitics.
The ivory tower has come tumbling down. Good riddance. The universal university that has emerged from the rubble will change the lives that change our world.
And that’s something to celebrate.
Gail Reiss is the president and CEO of American Friends of Tel Aviv University, based in New York.