Launch of Trinity College Dublin's Global Relations Strategy
Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin
Monday, 10 September 2012
Lord Mayor of Dublin, Tanaiste, Ambassadors, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Welcome to the Trinity Long Room Hub and to the launch of Trinity’s Global Relations Strategy. I’m delighted to welcome our Tanaiste, Eamon Gilmore, who will shortly launch this Strategy.
By your presence here this morning, Tanaiste, you mark the vital importance of this strategy - its importance not only for Trinity, but for Ireland.
The Global Relations Strategy is about building up the international reach of Ireland’s leading university, strengthening our position as a global university with an international profile of students, staff, and research collaborations.
By internationalising Trinity, one of Ireland’s strongest brands, we build up Ireland’s international reputation, and further position this country as a global educational hub.
The success of this Global Relations Strategy will help establish Trinity at the leading edge of higher education in the world, to the benefit of the whole Irish higher education system.
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This new Global Relations strategy operates on a number of fronts and addresses a number of key actions, including:
- increasing the number of international students, particularly students from outside the European Union. This creates the necessary cosmopolitan environment of a global university; it also pays an essential financial dividend;
- improving the student educational experience, which includes enabling students to broaden their minds and become global citizens through studying abroad on exchange programmes;
- building global relationships, which includes strengthening international research collaborations;
- and further connecting with our diaspora of alumni, which involves encouraging alumni to support the mission of the university and increasing philanthropic income.
The Strategy was approved by the College’s Governing Board in May of this year; and I thank board members for their commitment to this new initiative.
It’s a new initiative but it formalises a mission and a philosophy as old as the College itself. Trinity has never been about splendid isolation. Whilst there was an ‘involuntary’ isolation for a few decades after independence, Trinity’s overriding history has always been about reaching out to the wider world. To give some examples:
- in the early 18th century our great philosopher, George Berkeley, provided endowments for the libraries at Harvard and Yale, along with scholarships for graduate studies.
- Trinity’s engagement with Asia began with the founding in 1762 of a chair in oriental languages, and the subsequent appointment of Mir Aulad Ali - an Indian Muslim known as ‘The Mir’ - as Professor of Arabic, Hindustani, and Persian.
- During the nineteenth century, Trinity - together with Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh - trained generations of young men for the Indian Civil Service.
- In 1907 missionaries from Trinity established the Trinity School Fuchow in China, known today as Fuzhou Foreign Languages School. This school has a distinguished history and a Nobel Prize winner among its alumni.
For much of the twentieth century, Trinity had the most international student profile of any university in Ireland, with the medical and engineering Schools in particular boasting numerous students from Asia and Africa. Our staff was similarly international - as professor of international law, Kader Asmal inspired generations of students to join the anti-Apartheid struggle; I can remember myself as a Trinity student going on marches singing “Mandela will be free”. After 1990, Asmal returned to South Africa and was subsequently Minister for Education in Mbeki’s government.
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So, this global relations strategy represents no radical new direction. But it does represent a radical new ambition.
We recognise that while we’re fortunate in Trinity’s international heritage, if we want to maximise potential as a university for Ireland on the world stage, we have to strategize, prioritise and allocate resources.
We have to improve our messaging abroad and coordinate all activities towards this core aim of making Trinity a global player. We will do this, as I’ve outlined, through collaborative research, through internationalising staff and students, and through building on the great resource of our alumni - of which there are now 90,000, living in over 130 countries.
Our first to alumni is to ask that they spread the message about what a great education they received. This is at the heart of the global relations strategy. We wouldn’t have such a strategy if we weren’t convinced by the quality of a Trinity education.
It’s frustrating to know that we have such a commanding university - one with beautiful grounds and buildings; a stunning location; world-famous alumni; an incredible record in research; and flagship research institutes such as the Biomedical Sciences Institute, the CRANN Nanoscience Institute, and this arts and humanities institute, the Trinity Long Room Hub.
It’s frustrating to know that we have all this but that the message may not be getting to where it needs to - to bright students in countries like India, China, Kenya, Canada, Russia, who are deciding which university to attend;this will change - it is already changing.
In the past few months we have signed strategic partnerships with Brown University in the United States, with Beihang University in China, with the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and Thapar University in Patiala - to add to our existing partnerships with, for instance, Moscow State University, the University of California system, or the National University of Rwanda.
As an educational hub, Ireland will have an international student body, mirroring the international profile of its academic staff - some 50% of our academic staff are from outside Ireland. University research will be even more collaborative and inter-institutional, our expertise pooled with centres of excellence abroad, linking effectively with other universities in Dublin and throughout the country where it makes sense to do so.
The resulting dynamism of the education sector could have a multiplying effect on the whole economy. However, constraints on universities need to be taken off before the potential of our universities can be fully realised.
This is a good week for progress towards being an educational hub. Today we launch the Global Strategy. Tomorrow the world QS rankings will be launched from Trinity and my address will be streamed live on the internet. And this summer Dublin was City of Science. It’s through such high-profile international engagements that we will make their presence felt globally.
Dublin was not only City of Science this summer, it also hosted ESOF, Europe’s largest open science forum. On that occasion I again had the pleasure of welcoming to Trinity, the Tanaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Eamon Gilmore.
Allow me to take this occasion, Tanaiste, to thank you for your commitment to raising Ireland’s international profile, including as an educational hub, and to thank our embassies abroad for their support and expertise in this great project. Ambassador McDonagh in Russia and Ambassador Collins in the US this year, gave invaluable guidance, and I look forward to working with the Embassies in Singapore, Delhi, and Bejing in visits I will make over the next three months.
Thank you for your attention, Ladies and Gentlemen, and please welcome to launch this strategy the Tanaiste and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Eamon Gilmore.
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