Habib: UK v-cs unwilling to build more equitable global academy

Vice-chancellors in the UK have little desire to confront “difficult questions” over their institutions’ “unequal” relationships with universities in the developing world, the director of SOAS University of London has said.

Reflecting on his first 18 months in post, Adam Habib, who previously served as vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, told the Centre for Global Higher Education’s conference that he had seen little evidence so far that colleagues were prepared to engage with the challenge of trying to build a more equitable, inclusive global education system.

Professor Habib has previously voiced concerns over African “brain drain” caused by Western institutions cherry-picking the best students and taking them abroad. He has also criticised institutions’ “unsustainable” business models where high fees for international students are used to subsidise the education of their domestic peers.

But his concerns have so far been mostly ignored, according to Professor Habib. “There isn’t much of this debate in the UK”, he told the conference. “It is [seen as] too difficult and raises uneasy questions, complicated issues.”

Professor Habib said universities were going to have to confront these problems eventually due to the scale of the challenges the world faces and the need for transnational solutions, with the Covid-19 pandemic only the most recent example.

Professor Habib called for much stronger partnerships with universities in the developing world, where both institutions are given a joint say on teaching programmes and the curriculum while also co-financing scholarships and research. He said student movement should go both ways to ensure a shared understanding of cultures and the creation of knowledge that is more universal.

“There is an urgent need for a deeper deliberation on the internationalisation of higher education and how UK universities can collectively respond to the collective challenges of our time,” he said.

“This requires a greater appreciation of the tension between our short-term need – mine included – to build financially sustainable institutions and our long-term desire to be part of a global academy that is capable of responding to these challenges.

“We require a deeper, more nuanced conversation that we are having. Otherwise, and I am serious about this, we are currently behaving in a manner in the short term that will destroy our collective global future. That is the challenge that confronts the UK higher education system.”

Professor Habib said that higher education was currently too enmeshed in the politics of individual nation states and too focused on commercialism. He said that attention should shift onto how to create a more socially inclusive and humane world, but this required “courage” to acknowledge the problems and “have an honest conversation about how to resolve them.”

These conversations need to be happening at a systemic level, as well as within universities and among individual academics, but he said: “My last 18 months in the UK suggests this is not happening.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com