Session IV: Public Conversation - How to Think About Universities in the Global Age

The marketplace for ideas is, for better or worse, global. What is the nature of the university when knowledge and its carriers transcend boundaries? Nearly four million students cross borders every year to study. The result is a shift in the territorial horizons of higher education: some universities create satellites; others position themselves as magnets for global talent; others forge networks and consortia, like the European Erasmus program or the fledgling BRICS (Brazil, China, India, Russia) University League, or the Pan African University. Emerging partnerships are reinventing the 20th-century model of “study abroad” to include research collaborations and inter-institutional curricula. How do cross-border mobility and collaboration redefine the mission of higher education? How should we assess the competing models of university governance in an age of globalization? What alternatives remain to be explored? Moderator: Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83, President, Princeton University Paulina González-Pose, Chief, Section for Higher Education, UNESCO Bernd Huber, President, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Chairman, League of European Research Universities Jeffrey Lehman, Vice-Chancellor, New York University Shanghai