Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Secretary General Per Nyborg Presentation

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Secretary General Per Nyborg, Norwegian Council of Universities

Opening Session - A Norwegian Contribution

Ladies and gentlemen – colleagues and friends.

Due to a turbulent political situation in Norway, our state secretary for education and research, as well as the minister’s political secretary, had to cancel their participation at the very last moment. I am conveying their apologies.

The name Peder Sæther should have been better known back home. I do hope this seminar, and seminars to come, will make his name recognised as a symbol of the Norwegian links to Berkeley. I am very glad that the agreement between UC Berkeley and the Norwegian Council of Universities manifests itself in the very willing participation of the Norwegian academic leadership in the Peder Sæther Symposium. I also appreciate the close cooperation with the Swedes, not equally easy back in Scandinavia where we try to outsmart each other in banking and telecommunication.

This year’s seminar concentrates on higher education in the digital age. Higher education is facing what the state secretary would have liked to call "the three C’s": Challenges, Competition and Commerce. His answer would have been another C: Change. One way to change higher education institutions is to make them virtual. However, I don’t believe that is the final solution.

Challenges
There are at least three challenges facing higher education, the first one being the growing integration of capital, technology, and information across national boundaries, creating an integrated world market. As a consequence, more and more actors have no choice but to compete in the global economy.

The second dimension of challenge is the growing importance of knowledge. Comparative advantages come less and less from natural resources or cheap labor, and more and more from technical innovations and the competitive use of knowledge. Economic growth today is more a process of knowledge accumulation than capital accumulation.

The third dimension of challenge is the information and communication revolution. It took 38 years before the use of radio reached 50 million people. It took only 13 years before the television audience had reached the same number of people, and only five years before the Internet had 50 million users. At this rate, the Internet will soon have more users than there are people on the Earth!

Competition
New forms of competition are emerging. The diminishing importance of distance means that universities can establish branches and schools practically anywhere, or reach out across borders using Internet or satellite technology, and thus are able to compete effectively with national universities.

There is a formidable growth in corporate universities – around 1000 in the US alone. These are not small businesses. Motorola University operates with a yearly budget of around 120 million dollars. Corporate universities may be a real threat for higher education institutions, even in small economies like Scandinavia. We already see that some of the biggest companies in Norway and Sweden are establishing their own educational departments, easily taking over the "university" label.

Commerce
The consequence of this is a tendency to commercialize knowledge. Knowledge is more and more associated with profit-making and commercialization. In Australia, education and what is called "the knowledge industry" constitute the second biggest export article. In the US, education is among the top five sources for export income. According to UNESCO, higher education’s yearly revenue is 27 billion USD.

Education is moving from being a national responsibility to becoming a private good. The privatization is worldwide, and it is market driven. Different types of institutions have emerged during the last years:

• private universities financed fully by the students,
• public institutions who more or less go private (dual mode universities), and
• multinational operations.

National, international, and global networks are in operation, delivering education via the Internet.

Change
The answer to the challenges, the competition, and the commerce could be another C: Change. Higher education has to change to survive. It is not easy to change universities – the paradox might very well be that this is the reason some have survived for 800 years. Someone has said that changing a university is like moving a graveyard – it is extremely difficult and you don’t get much internal support.

However, universities have to adapt to the new environment, where new technologies and a growing demand for knowledge are predominant. Can universities adapt without losing their unique character?  I believe so.

We will have the virtual universities with no campus at all, but more and more, we will also have dual mode universities where the students may be on campus or off campus. Students and teachers on campus will be using the new technology. For a young student, I am sure that the campus of an adapting university will be the best learning environment.

Seen over time, universities have been among the most adaptable organizations in history. Of all the institutions in existence in 1543, only 66 have survived. They are the Catholic Church, The Protestant Church, the Parliament on the Isle of Man, the Parliament on Iceland, and 62 universities. I tend to agree with Charles Darwin, who said:  "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."

 Thank you for your attention.