Global Collaboration & University Alliances

How can universities collaborate across borders — and across continents — in meaningful and sustainable ways? In this clip, Brian MacCraith examines the long-term potential of university alliances, with a focus on the European model and its implications globally. He highlights the essential role of government backing, shared metrics for impact, and consistent funding to enable deep institutional collaboration. MacCraith also advocates for new models of partnership between universities in the Global North and South, urging institutions to prioritize mutual learning, student exchange, and co-designed research. From virtual hackathons to stackable credentials, he outlines how cross-regional partnerships can enrich education and address real-world challenges. For institutions seeking to expand their global impact, this conversation reinforces a key lesson: effective collaboration requires vision, resources, and a genuine commitment to shared purpose.

The renewal of funding, so the first cycle of renewal has happened for these alliances and those that are performing, in terms of showing examples where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, they're the ones getting funded to go forward. And I'll give you one good example, you know we talk in these conversation about the importance of the impact of universities. So again, Utopia, that particular alliance is involved in a major project to come up with a set of criteria for measuring the socio and economic impact of the alliance. And because there's a whole diversity of universities across 10 different countries, different styles, different scales, they have to find a common approach to this, which is what they're doing. But number one, they're considering impact. Number two, they're recognizing the diversity of approaches, the diversity of contexts, but coming up with a with a common set of standards. And that's happening right across all the activities within the alliance. So the major challenge is how far can it go in terms of collaboration, and you know there there will be barriers along the way in terms of other draws on the universities and their own responsibility to their national governments, national society and so on. But what is important is that the governments back these and the fact that all of the governments received funding from the European Commission and the commission is saying these are the models we want to support. So I think that is helping the universities so that they aren't being pulled in two separate directions. It's very difficult for universities to do anything beyond their absolutely core business, particularly public universities, when you know it's a governments providing funding, and most governments now have performance-based funding they have responsibilities in return for the funding they give. Very, very difficult for universities to do anything outside that envelope of activities without external funding. And I think it's one thing one learns in a university, one has to seed fund almost any initiative. One has to provide a resource to enable things to happen and that's why the the European Union, in the case of the alliances, they've provided that funding, and they know that the impact and the level of development will be commensurate with the level of resourcing provided. So yeah, particularly for like any under-resourced organization trying to do something new, something different, something that eats up time where you have to you have to allocate your your your faculty, your broader community in the university to make something happen. If you don't resource that then something else surfers and then the whole collaboration will never be successful. So that that resourcing is critically important. Yeah.. no, the the the funding piece is critically important. So your question is about you know what can other parts of the world learn from this? I think it's possibly too early to come up with any conclusions at this stage. I think these are so fundamental, so significant in scale that it will take a while for the overall impact of - I mean it's a long-term experiment really to see how this works out but it needs consistency of support. And I say it's it's very pleasing that in the president, Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the European Commission, in her recent statement for the next seven years of that European government is saying that at the core of education, higher education in Europe, are these alliances. At the core of research and innovation are these university alliances. So I think that sort of consistency in the long term will be very important in getting the beneficial impact which is the potential of these, but it will take a while. Well, I'm a huge supporter of alliances between universities and in the global north and the global south. And I think if I was guiding the universities of the world, I would say that every single university in the global north should partner with one in the global south. I think there has to be in in such alliances a mutual respect. I mean, I think there will frequently be a great disparity in levels of resourcing and I think there has to be generosity of recognition at the very least in those sort of relationships. I mean, a key example of where a collaboration or alliances between universities in the global north and the global south would be student interactions and the the mutual awareness that can come from students in the global north and the global south in regular dialogue. I mean one idea that we were dealing with was the notion that hackathons, virtual online hackathons between students in the global north and the global south, but perhaps the problem statements would come from the global south. But think of the learning experience peer-to-peer between students having such a diametrically opposed life experiences but the learning from both and the degree of innovation that can happen, but also in terms of the societal and global responsibility of universities that research problems being addressed in the global north would be informed by the, for example the climate change uses that are rapidly encroaching on the global south. There's such a rich diversity of possibilities that can emerge from those collaborations. I think they're critically important. I think again, in terms of looking at the responsibility of universities to be responsive to society the best example, the best examples of problems, real life problems, existential problems could come from those genuine alliances with universities in the global south. So yes, I'm a big supporter of such alliances.