Keynote Address at Beihang University - 60th Anniversary Celebration Conference on Engineering Education & University-Industry Co-operation. "Activities and Outcomes: Internationalization of Engineering Education - Trinity College Dublin's Perspective"
Beihang University, China
Friday, 26 October 2012
President of Beihang University, Professor HUAI Jinping, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It’s a great pleasure to be here, on behalf of Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, Ireland, on this occasion of Beihang University’s 60th anniversary.
The themes of this conference are close to my heart. I’m an engineer – before I became Provost, or President, of Trinity College Dublin, I worked in the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. My research interests centre on bioengineering and the design of next generation medical devices.
I was fortunate enough, as a postgrad and postdoc, to spend time abroad in the universities of Bologna in Italy, and Nijmegen in the Netherlands. My experience has made me a firm advocate for international education. Increasing student - and staff - exchanges is a priority of my leadership of Trinity College Dublin.
I was also fortunate, when I joined the Trinity Engineering faculty in 1995, to find myself at the cusp of a funding revolution. The key role of universities in developing the economy was starting to be recognised. Within Ireland, funding organisations were created to invest in excellent research, and European Union funding was available for collaboration across the continent.
On campus, we saw the blossoming of entrepreneurship. Academics were co-operating with industry on specific projects, and setting up campus companies, or what are often called ‘spin out’ companies. This level of engagement wasn’t happening when I was a student in the 1980s, and I found it tremendously exciting. It was natural for me to work with industry on some of my own research projects.
So, my personal experience and my perspective on education have centred on precisely the themes of this conference: engineering, the internationalisation of education, and university-industry cooperation. It’s great to be in China, which is increasingly at the forefront of new directions in education, to talk about my experience and Trinity College Dublin’s experience.
Educating global citizens
I know many of you are familiar with Trinity College Dublin.
For those who aren’t - well, we’re a prestigious, multi-disciplinary, long-established university – in fact Trinity was founded exactly 420 years ago, this year. Trinity is Ireland’s highest ranked university and ranked 19th in Europe. The education sector in Ireland is very important because Ireland’s main wealth is the intelligence and ingenuity of the people, not in the exploitation of physical resources.
Industrial employment in Ireland is mainly through Foreign Direct Investment or FDI, with associated linked companies. In such a landscape, educating for a global workplace is crucial, and as president of Trinity, I feel a responsibility to educate global citizens.
What do I mean by ‘global citizens’? I mean people who are committed to their local community – their city region if you like - but always aware of the wider world; people who know about international standards of excellence and are ready to apply those standards wherever they live and work. Global citizens seek to make their communities internationally competitive.
In the past few decades the world has opened up so rapidly, with remarkable advances in travel, communications and trade. The opportunities are immense – but so is the learning curve. International research collaborations and industry link-ups do not just happen automatically, so when I say I feel a responsibility to educate global citizens, I mean that I have to embed this responsibility into the curriculum of the university.
The five internationalising actions
Our curricula must be proactive and designed to encourage an innovative and internationalist mindset. I have isolated five actions that I believe will do this:
- Increasing student diversity and a cosmopolitan campus: Pioneering and entrepreneurial students are flexible, open to other cultures, and able to think beyond their disciplines. The ideal campus has international students who are spending time on exchange programmes abroad, and who experience life outside the lecture room in student clubs and societies.
- Increasing research collaborations and staff exchanges: in this new century academic knowledge knows no national borders. As an example from my own university:
- Trinity’s research collaborations with China have tripled over the past ten years and;
- China’s position among Trinity’s top international collaborators has moved from 19th in 2002 to 12th in 2012, as measured by citations
- Creating markets for new courses: in this increasingly global world, there may be need for new courses, jointly offered by two or more universities. These will be different than that offered by a single institution. To give an example: academics in Trinity and in Peking University are currently in talks to deliver a new philosophy course designed to teach elements of both Chinese and Western philosophy. On a different continent, Trinity has a Masters in Development Practice [MDP] in collaboration with the National University of Rwanda in Africa.
- Encouraging an innovative mindset in staff and students: creating an environment where staff and students release the commercial potential of their research by thinking about potential impacts of it outside their own country.
- Finally, internationalising a city’s innovation ecosystem: The core mission of universities is in education and research, but there is also a critical role for the university in enabling and promoting the innovation ecosystem in its city region. And internationalising it by attracting in innovators from other regions as academic staff and postdoctoral researchers, and students, particularly PhD students.
So, these are my five actions. I haven’t gone into them in too much detail because I know that when it comes to internationalisation and innovation, Beihang University thinks like Trinity College Dublin. You are cooperating with universities all round the world and you have a high proportion of international students. So rather than ‘making the case’ for these five actions, I would just reiterate that these outcomes don’t happen automatically.
They need to be activated and formally incorporated in academic policy. We won’t get global students, international research collaborations, industry projects, or a vibrant environment for spin-outs unless we design them into our university system. This is the job of the university’s leadership - the President and the President’s team of officers, both academic and administrative.
Education is a matter of government policy but the university must be sensitive to the international agenda of education, even in the context of immediate national policies. University presidents and their teams need to be vigilant persuaders for universities as actors on the world stage. In making the case for international education, we need the skills of politicians and diplomats. That may not be what we signed up for as academics, but history will judge us on our failure.
Engineering
I’ve been talking about education in general so let me turn now to engineering.
Of all the disciplines in Trinity – and we have very many, ranging from Humanities and Law to Medicine and Science – well of all these disciplines, engineering is a particularly good example of what we’ve been discussing: Trinity’s School of Engineering is international in outlook and works closely with industry.
Our School was founded in 1847, which makes us one of the world’s oldest Engineering Schools. I’ll give you an example of our research - in aero-acoustics, because it’s relevant to Beihang.
The aero-acoustics research activity in Trinity is led by Professor Henry Rice and Professor Craig Meskell. The group’s projects include jet noise shielding for installed configurations, optimal material design for cabin noise sound insulation, noise propagation in ducts through impeller systems. Looking at the slide here we see a jet engine with a chevron nozzle design. Experimental and computational work is done to minimise turbulence and noise. This is part of an EU funded research programme.
Another field, my own one, is bioengineering: Trinity Centre for Bioengineering. Fifteen Principal Investigators are working on areas from neural engineering to ‘impact biomechanics’, from tissue engineering to mechanobiology.
These are exciting projects, and ones which wouldn’t be possible without industry interest and investment. The impact of engineering research in Ireland has grown massively in recent years, as this slide shows.
In terms of internationalisation, Trinity’s School of Engineering seeks collaboration with peer institutes around the world.
This is a pie chart showing our top 20 collaborating countries in terms of co-authorship. China, as you see, is our third strongest non-European collaborator, after the US and India. I would like to see this grow in the future.
Trinity is also a member of CLUSTER, which is a consortium of twelve elite European universities of science and technology, with associate members from round the world. In its policy statement, CLUSTER declares that “in a world facing unprecedented challenges… the well-being of our society cannot be founded by a single nation or single engineering discipline. Instead, these challenges call for truly international, multi-disciplinary collaboration and a new mindset.”
I’m delighted that Trinity and Beihang are seeking just such collaboration. Earlier this year our two universities signed a Memorandum of Understanding and Student Exchange Agreement, which pave the way for joint undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, for collaborative research programmes in joint centres, and for student and staff exchanges. This is a tremendous opportunity and it’s exactly the kind of proactive curriculum-designing that I’ve been talking about.
If we think back to sixty years ago, to the foundation of this University, no-one could have imagined then that Trinity and Beihang would one day be exploring these possibilities. This is thanks to technology developments, of course, but even more, it’s thanks to a new mindset.
A spirit of openness, of trust, curiosity and interest – a global spirit – is what we want and must educate for in the century. We have a saying in English “where there’s a will, there’s a way” and I do believe that willingness to co-operate is the crucial enabler, from which technology advances followed. But we know from history that periods of openness and trust don’t necessarily last for ever. We have to be proactive about strengthening them. So we need to design cultural knowledge that engenders openness into our curricula. The well-named memorandum of understanding between universities is one enabler of such a design.
I will close with a final point: Beihang has much to impart to Trinity, particularly in aeronautics and astronautics, and Trinity has much to give Beihang. I think where collaboration may prove particularly inspiring for you is in the area of interdisciplinarity. In Trinity we encourage cooperation and link-up between our different Schools. This has led to, for instance, our Department of Music linking up with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering to offer a Masters programme in Music and Media Technologies. Engineering has such universal applications - I hope that through contact with our different Schools, you will help design new courses for this new century. Because I do feel that ‘internationalisation’ necessarily incorporates ‘interdisciplinarity’. It may seem difficult. But sixty years ago when your university was founded no-one could have envisaged this kind of cooperation between us.
I conclude by congratulating again Beihang University on its 60th birthday, and on its international educational activities and emphasis on university-industry cooperation.
Thank you very much.
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