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Globalization and Higher Education: Competition and Cooperation

Charles M. Vest HM

iCampus: Closing Remarks

Dr. Susan Hockfield: December 1, 2006; Running Time: 1:12:17

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Globalization and Higher Education: Competition and Cooperation

While globalization poses critical challenges for the U.S. economy, Charles Vest believes that knowledge-sharing may serve as the best response to increasingly competitive times.

Vest sketches the increasingly dire situation of U.S. manufacturing, R&D and innovation, which are “migrating and morphing.” Between 2000 and 2002, the U.S. lost 400 thousand jobs in IT manufacturing, and during roughly the same period, foreign firms built 60 thousand manufacturing plants in China, Vest notes. In the U.S., agriculture and industry have given way to the service sector. This means, says Vest, that “a huge part of the population today is employed, and in the future, more, in providing services largely but not exclusively driven by information technology.”

But the U.S. science and engineering infrastructure, in contrast to other nations, is not keeping pace with these changes. Warns Vest, “People everywhere are smart and capable, and give them a chance and the education,” they’ll do at least as well as Americans have. China is already churning out far greater numbers of engineers than the U.S., and making them available to a global market at a far lower cost. The solution is to “strengthen the quality and nature of science and engineering education,” with a focus on technological proficiency, leadership, and international vision.

In practice, this means to Vest a new phase for the research university: creating a physical and/or virtual presence in other countries, alliances with overseas partners, and freely shared, digitally housed content -- what Vest calls “the emerging meta university.” With MIT’s own web-based Open Course Ware as a model, Vest prescribes increasingly accessible resources for scholarship and education, which will prove “strategically and fundamentally important to us, in the true spirit of education, democratization and empowerment.” Sharing underpins “innovation, cooperation and competition worldwide.” Vest envisions a “dynamically constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.”

iCampus: Closing Remarks

In her concluding remarks, Susan Hockfield notes the need to “continually assess the relevance of our means of instruction in relation to the changing habits and expectations of students.” It’s not good enough to come up with new teaching technologies if they don’t motivate or enable learners. The question is whether we “will seize the opportunity to deeply rethink what we do and participate in developing technologies to do what we do even better,” and to liberate students “to innovate their own education.”

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“My personal view is we are observing the early emergence of the Meta University: a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.”

Charles M. Vest

About the Speakers

Charles M. Vest HM

President Emeritus, MIT Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Charles M. Vest has been nominated to become the President of the National Academy of Engineering, with a term starting in July 2007. He stepped down as MIT's 15th president in December, 2004.

During his 14 years as President of MIT, he placed special emphasis on enhancing undergraduate education, exploring new organizational forms to meet emerging directions in research and education, building a stronger international dimension into education and research programs, developing stronger relations with industry, and enhancing racial and cultural diversity. He also devoted considerable energy to bringing issues concerning education and research to broader public attention and to strengthening national policy on science, engineering and education.

Vest's book, Pursuing the Endless Frontier: Essays on MIT and the Role of Research Universities (MIT Press 2004), explores the controversial and significant issues facing academic institutions through the prism of his own presidency.

Vest continues to serve as a member of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, and on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and on the boards of IBM and DuPont.

Vest earned his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University in 1963 and both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 1964 and 1967, respectively. A member of the Mechanical Engineering faculty at MIT, Dr. Vest's research interests are in the thermal sciences and in the engineering applications of lasers and coherent optics.

Dr. Susan Hockfield

MIT President
Professor of Neuroscience

Prior to her arrival at MIT in 2004, Susan Hockfield served as Provost at Yale University, where she was also William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology. She previously served as Dean of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Hockfield is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She earned a B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester in 1973, and a Ph.D. in anatomy and neuroscience from the Georgetown University School of Medicine in 1979.

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