Universities and an Open World in the age of Trump and Brexit

Why should universities argue for open societies against nationalism?

(This article was originally written for the event "The importance of openness for sustainable knowledge societies" 27 September 2017, co-organised by Digital Europe and the European University Association)

2016 was a terrible year. For anyone who thought that the world would continue on its multilateral, rules-based track towards ever greater openness, Brexit and Trump were shocks. Not least since most of the media and intellectuals that for decades had supported the idea of an orderly globalisation creating wealth (and even freedom) for all had bluntly denied that anything like the rise of nationalism could ever happen: In December 2015, the Economist equalled the number of Trump supporters to the number of Americans believing that the moon landings were fake (6-8% of the population). Everyone had been so used to the broad free-trade, multi-lateral consensus, that any deviation sounded like nonsense.

Those days are gone. The nationalists scored significant victories in 2016, and even if Brexit and the Trump presidency are messy; even if elections in the Netherlands and France could be seen as a liberal backlash, the consensus has been broken. What in 2015 could be dismissed as a fringe movement on a par with conspiracy theory advocates, is now a real political force - as the recent German elections have shown. There is no longer a broad consensus that an open world is a good thing. Instead, a considerable part of the population seems to think that economic benefits of openness are ‘your GDP, not ours’ (as was famously said during the Brexit referendum debate), or they might even be willing to make the trade-off between being worse off economically and having neighbours of their own colour.

The nationalist turn is a challenge in itself, but it also forces those of us who believe in an open world based on common rules to be concrete and specific on what we mean by openness. We need to argue explicitly and concretely what it is that we want and why. This goes in particular for the university sector.

Three university views of openness

Nationalism is bad for universities. It is fundamental to the way universities work that the argument is separated from the person. It is not important who you are and where you come from, it is important that what you say is based on evidence. This is what we teach students, and this is how we do research. Moreover, on a functional level, universities need at least three major elements of openness.

International openness – this is the big one. The growth of internationalisation in higher education and research is well documented. Students fly across the world to have access to good universities on other continents, and international mobility options are part of many study programmes. UNESCO estimates that there were about four and a half million students studying abroad in 2015, and the number is steadily rising. There are many reasons for this, but one is the empowerment that a mobility experience means; it is not for nothing that two of the European Commission’s Vice Presidents are former Erasmus students.

Internationalisation is good for students, but mobility programmes are also a way for universities to collaborate and build partnerships. The university sector is getting increasingly competitive, exemplified by the global rankings, and universities need to forge international alliances to retain an edge in this competition. For this reason, top research universities like Imperial College London have joint PhD programmes with prestigious East Asian universities like the National University Singapore or the University of Hong Kong.

When it comes to research, statistics clearly show how international co-publications have increased over the past decades. In many countries, they make up well over half of all publications, and they are often more successful in terms of impact. This is partly due to the ease of sharing that the internet has provided, as well as the lower cost of mobility due to liberalisation of air travel (another benefit of the open world consensus). It is also due to the fact that research is getting more complicated with big infrastructure and big datasets. We know from the EU research programme Horizon 2020 that a part of the international research that it funds simply would not have been carried out if only national funding had been available. Infrastructure is part of this story. Some infrastructure is either so large that it is impractical to have it in many places - the Large Hadron Collider is an example - and some just can only be in one place. The Square Kilometre Array radio telescope has to be in the Southern Hemisphere, and it has to be in a place with no radio noise. That leaves the deserts in South Africa and Western Australia, where it is now being built.

Research also needs an international labour market. Investments in research and development have risen steeply over the last decades, and knowledge-intensive economies need researchers to match this investment. None of these countries have enough home-grown talent to do this; they need to import researchers from the outside. Already at the university, the share of foreign PhD candidates are well into double digits – often close to 30 % - in countries with high spending on research. For these countries, universities as well as research-intensive companies could not do without immigration.

Open research

The big battle in today’s research policy is about open science. Through the internet, we could theoretically all have immediate access to all knowledge, all data, and all published research results. Right now, we don’t. Traditionally, academic publishers have served as gatekeepers to make sure that published research meets high quality standards. In theory, it creates healthy competition: the more prestigious the journal, the more paper proposals, and the higher the mark to get accepted. In most fields, the quality of your research can in theory be estimated by looking at who has published it.

The drawbacks of this system are many: It is extremely costly (subscriptions are expensive!), and it has not prevented a rising number of published results from being retracted and/or not reproducible. As the Economist put it back in 2013: "In practice [peer review] is poor at detecting many types of error"

Importantly, the high cost excludes average citizens from accessing research, if you do not have the money for a subscription (which you don’t, trust me) or happen to be a researcher in a poor country, you have no legal right to access research results. It is a fair guess that much of the research on African wildlife is not available to African researchers. In sum, the present system is expensive for the tax payer, its merits are questionable, and it limits access to knowledge.

For this reason, many public research funders, including the European Union, demand that results are open access. That is of course a good thing, but there is still a need to make sure that the legal system does not create obstacles. The present proposal for a European copyright directive for example could mean that publishers charge for even small citations (you can sign a petition against that here). We also need the proper infrastructure to ensure that research data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable (also known as FAIR), for example the planned European Open Science Cloud, which would create a common European data infrastructure to share data openly.

If this battle is won, open access could give a great boost to science and innovation, and to democracy in an ever more data-dependent world.

Open and inclusive education

Above, I stated that for universities it is not important where you come from, but that you have the evidence for what you say. Well, in reality things used to be slightly different. Universities have for centuries been the place where the elites where educated, and as such the students were largely recruited from the elite, and it did matter where you came from.

Today, labour markets have changed and university education is not only the privilege of the elite, but necessary for many jobs. Now, more than a third of each cohort in Europe receives tertiary education, mostly at universities. At the same time, societies have become more diverse. This means that many more students from a wide range of social and cultural backgrounds attend university. Moreover, as jobs change or disappear, the need for lifelong learning is growing. Universities find themselves in a perfect storm of national, social, and age diversity (not to speak of gender and sexual orientation), and they have to think about how to ensure that all these different persons can get the most out of their studies.

This is not only an ethical imperative, it is essential for being able to provide the high-level skills that the labour markets are increasingly in need of. There are simply not enough people from what is called ‘traditional student backgrounds’. Moreover, higher education – when it is open and inclusive – is an important way to combat social exclusion and inequality.

Many mid-skill jobs are disappearing, and in order to escape exclusion many workers in these jobs have to be trained for higher level skills that are needed, and these are provided through higher education. For all these reasons, education systems need to be open, accessible, and inclusive.

Openness for universities is more than a nice word and an ideal, it concerns concrete issues, challenges and battles that need to be met with concrete action today.