University of Hertfordshire has the ambition to become a model for the University of the 21st Century. What does that look like and how far are you from realizing this ambition? You said we have an ambition to create it, but we have already realized that ambition. Five years ago we had the vision to create a different type of university, and we can say quite clearly now that we have created a different type of university which will become even more differentiated as we develop further. We are already differentiated in the context of being a university that is very focused upon employment and the business facing aspects of a university. That is what we do and we are proud of that. We are here to ensure that our students, our graduates, get substantial careers using the skills and knowledge we provide for them. In parallel to that, we are working with business partners from both the public and private sector to improve their productivity and their international competitiveness. Putting those two together makes us a unique university in the UK at the moment. We are not a research intensive university, we value skills, we value enterprise, we value entrepreneurship and we value the employability of our graduates. That is what we are here for. Rarely a week goes by without people of prominence from business or from government coming to visit us to see what we are doing here, how we are doing it, and how we are making ourselves relevant for the economy. For instance, we had a very prominent member of the government here this morning, examining what this university is doing that is different from the entire sector in terms of our involvement in economic development, and our involvement in securing that people coming out of this university have the right skills for employment and careers. Many research intensive universities believe that a university that is not research intensive is not a true university. How do you reply to that? There is clearly a place for research intensive universities. The country, the world and the economy need research intensive universities because they will make the next big discovery, for example develop the cancer drug, invent the next silicon chip. or whatever it might be, so yes, we have to have research intensive universities. But if you think about it, in the 21st century economy with an increasing number of people needed with graduate skills to ensure competitiveness, a century where every developed country in the world is trying to engage more and more of its population in high education to uplift the general level skills and creativity, that cannot be done by research intensive universities. Research intensive universities have to be focused in research and discovery while a whole raft of other universities can focus on enterprise, innovation and creativity. One university cannot do all those things. By its very nature it cannot. As soon as you start saying that a world-class research universities has to fulfill the skills gap a particular industry you are diverting it from its very mission, so we must differentiate our missions. Believing that it is OK to have an elite few good universities is a very 1970s model. We have a much larger proportion of our population going to university now, it will be 50% within five to six years, so we cannot have that elitist view anymore. We cannot only have research intensive universities, and the sooner we realize it the better. Having a focus on skills, employability and business relevance means that you have to be increasingly internationally oriented after the globalization of the past decades. Does that mean that the university is moving into this direction at the right moment in time? First, I want to come back to the skills and competitiveness issue. I do not want people to think that we do not undertake research. We work on business related research, and businesses come to us with their problems. Quite often the problems are those of facing a globally competitive market because any business from small, medium size to large corporates are nowadays operating in the international market by definition, you cannot avoid it. Clearly we try to work with companies, both UK companies and companies from any other country in the world, to help their international competitiveness through that research capability. The second point is that we have an obligation to our students wherever they might be in the world to help them develop that multicultural capability to enable them to operate in different countries, different cultures and different business environment. So, of course we have to be international. On our campus we have over 93 different nationalities amongst our students, over 100 different languages, and amongst our staff we have 55 different nationalities, which makes it a pretty international community. We are a multicultural institution with multicultural activities and we a have an awful lot of students from all over the world. Being international is non-negotiable; if you are not international you are not there. We are international. How international is the student population at University of Hertfordshire? On-campus about 14% of our full-time students are international, which is about average for the sector. That is just on the UK campus, but we have also been we delivering our program in many different countries, such as Malaysia, Russia, Greece, Hungary, China, Hong Kong, India, and we have students all over North America on exchange programs. Like many other universities we are engaged in providing multinational opportunities for our students, which makes us a very international university. For example, in April we were in China and part of the trip was doing a graduation ceremony in Shanghai. It was the third time that we have done a graduation ceremony in Shanghai, and for these events we do not use somebody else's university, we hire our own place to hold the ceremony for our Chinese students. We do this because an awful lot of parents and grandparents who fund the studies of our Chinese students cannot come to the UK, so we take the graduation to Shanghai. It is great to see the grandparents and parents celebrate. Interestingly, in the recent graduation ceremony there were three UK students who elected to graduate in Shanghai instead of the UK and took their families across. To my generation that was unknown, but to the current generation it is not unknown at all. It is a change in mindset. Many Vice-Chancellors have emphasized that their universities find it very hard to encourage UK students to go to China. Can we really speak of a change in mindset at University of Hertfordshire? There are an awful lot of things that we find difficult, but if you hide behind things that are difficult then you won't do anything. Sometimes you have to grasp the problem and say ''we are going to do it''. During the same trip we held a seminar for our alumni who graduation two or three years ago, graduates who want to change their careers. It was the first time we have done this, but it is perfectly in line with our philosophy of employability, we are equipping people for careers. We took our career experts to China and held a whole day seminar that was ran by senior alumni, people who left ten to fifteen years ago. Interestingly, a couple of our recent graduates actually got new jobs as a result. Well over a hundred people enrolled for this seminar and the feedback was fantastic. That is what this university does. With many universities, not only in this country but also elsewhere, you graduate and you find a job by yourself. The next time the university contacts you is ten years later when they ask you for money because you are an alumnus. We don't do that here. Once you have been here we are going to engage with you on a constant basis, and if you want to up-skill or want to get a new job then we are here to help. Another innovative initiative we undertook during the same trip was to hold meetings with our senior alumni who are major employers. We did not ask them for money but we asked them to offer placements, internships and job to help our graduates into careers. We have over 120,000 alumni worldwide who all have an ownership of this university. These people will us to provide jobs, career changes, internships, work experiences and placements for our graduates. That is what you do with alumni, and that is the sort of innovation this university is doing and we took that innovation to China. Other Vice-Chancellors think that that was a pretty courageous thing to do, but we got a fantastic response. Sometimes Vice-Chancellors think that this is too hard, but actually it isn't too hard. You just need the courage to do it, so we did it. And you need a Vice-Chancellor to take the initiative and go to China to make it happen… That is right; you have got to associate yourself with it. What do Chinese Vice-Chancellors think of such an initiative? We had quite a few Vice-Chancellors, Presidents and Vice-Presidents, at our graduation ceremony in Shanghai and they were actually quite intrigued as it is not a natural thing for a university to do. As I said before, we are different and this is a new model of university. We have created it, we are doing it and that makes us different. What type of programs were the Chinese graduates who received their degrees at the recent ceremony in China following at University of Hertfordshire? The people who graduate are generally students who came to the UK at least for part of their degree. I have been running degree ceremonies in Kuala Lumpur and Athens for over ten years now. I graduate about 1000 people a years in Kuala Lumpur and an increasing number of these students are Chinese because 40% of the students at INTICollege, our partner in Kuala Lumpur, are international students, and half of these are Chinese students. So there are Chinese students graduating in Malaysia with our degrees. We also have a partner college in Greece, IST Athens, whom we have worked with for over 15 years. At our graduation ceremony last year two Chinese students walked across the stage to receive their MBA degrees, and I am intrigued by this because most of the students are Greek while a small number is British. I asked them why they were graduating with an MBA from University of Hertfordshire in Greece. The answer was that they received their first degree from one of our partner colleges in China, and they wanted to do an MBA in the UK. Then they looked at our MBA and realized that they could do it in Greece, so why not do it in Greece. Now they have a degree from our partner college in China and an Hertfordshire degree that they obtained in Greece. That means working in three different languages and three different alphabets. They are now both working for an American-Greek company trading into China. That is internationalization, and that is fantastic.Also, this July I will be graduating a UK student in Kuala Lumpur who started his degree with one of our partner college in the United States, did his second year in Hertfordshire and his third year in Malaysia, where he will graduate with a Hertfordshire degree in Malaysia. That is three different experiences, North-America, Europe and Asia. This is internationalization and how employable is this graduate? People of my generation would not even have dreamt of even trying to do it. All that we are doing is opening doors and saying it is available. Walk through the door if you want. The rapid development of the higher education sector in China will undoubtedly continue to have an increasing impact on the higher education at a global level. How will this affect the international strategy and approach to partnerships with the Chinese Universities at your institution? What will happen in China will follow what happened in Hong Kong fifteen years ago. Hong Kong was a big exporter of students where as now it is a big importer. As you probably know, a lot of mainland Chinese students are going to Hong Kong already. It will be very interesting to see how the development of higher education in China will impact South Korea, India and other nations in the region. However, there will be quite a long lead time to build the system properly, although massive capital investments are going into Chinese higher education at the moment. China is already one of the biggest economies in the world and any university that is not working with China is nowhere, you have got to be working with China. What will happen with British universities that have been sleeping in recent years and have not been active in building relationships with Chinese universities in anticipation of these developments? I think that any university, regardless of where it is, it is not serving its students body well unless it has an international perspective. We are living in a multinational and multicultural world where our students will inevitably engage on a global basis. Students who can only work in one culture will find it very difficult to be successful in the future. Working in more than one culture is really important. We are talking about China today, but to be quite honest the business culture in the UK is different from the business culture in USA, never mind China. Unless you can get people to understand that it is a different business culture it is very difficult to be successful. The issue will be how multicultural you can be as a graduate student, how many different cultures can you assimilate and how many different cultures can you work in. that is going to be one of the issues. Once you appreciate that there are more than two different cultures you will learn quickly, but if you go out think that there is only one way of doing it and that is the American way or the British way then you are not going to succeed. You have to be sensitive to other people's cultures, and once you are sensitive to other people's cultures you learn very quickly how to conduct your business in a different culture. What are the skills and capabilities that make your graduates different in the international workplace? The advantage that this university has is that we are ahead of most of the other institutions in terms of our thinking in terms of skills and employability of our students. We are very focused on the employability of our students. Many universities say that it is all about research intensive, and that is fine for universities who want to be research intensive, but we are far more interested in providing our students with the best employment opportunities. To which extent is the business community in the UK taking advantage of your approach to accelerate their entrance into international markets such as China? That is really interesting. Two years ago I asked Chris Baron who is the Executive Director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, and happens to be one of our alumni, to put together a business lunch for me with leaders of major western companies who are operating in China. My enquiry at this lunch was what sort of skills are these business leaders are looking for when recruiting graduates for companies operating in China. The general message was that language was non-negotiable; you have got to be able to speak Mandarin. The other thing they were looking for is graduates who received a UK stile education and have entrepreneurial skills, are aware of how to manage upwards and are able to interface with their boss - graduates who are able to think laterally. You are not just a cog in the wheel; you have got to be an innovative and creative person. That is the skill base that they are looking for and that is what we at Hertfordshire do. Many universities globally are still in didactic mode. Their didactic model is based on the teacher telling the student what he knows, the student writes it down, three months later in an exam the university asks the student to repeat what they have been told by their teacher and the university will give you a mark and the student will get a degree. They are not developing and testing a student's skills, their ability to work in a company and to interface, their ability to be a team player and work in a project team, their ability to be articulate or to present, all they are testing is can students can remember. Well, that is what I did when I was a student in the 1960s, but the world has changed and we have got to change with it. These businessmen said to me that they do not want graduates who regurgitate the knowledge that has been given to them, They want graduates who understand, think and can express themselves. That is what they are saying and that is what we are trying to create. What your students are going to learn is going to be defined by their teachers. Are you recruiting only academics or does your staff also include business people? That has changed dramatic over the past five years and I will give you two points in this respect. First, every single one of our courses is designed with employer input, none of our courses is designed by a group of academic sitting around a table saying 'I would like to teach this because it is really interesting'. We are not about research-driven teaching, we are driven by what the employer needs. The second point is increasingly how staff are working with companies or employers in a wider sense, they are not just academic researchers. I really do encourage my staff to run their own companies, which is quite novel in many places. What better way is there than having staff explain theoretical concepts and then engage the students by applying these concepts to real problems that the businesses of our staff are facing. Bringing that knowledge out is a real skill for a good teacher. By the end of this decade, about 80% of our undergraduates will have a work experience as part of their program; we are at about 57% now. Having work experience as part of their program is invaluable to get a job because you are not working based just on your knowledge, you are working based on the skills that you have developed whilst working within a company. In a modern knowledge-based economy, students who are working in multinational, knowledge-based companies are mixing with people at graduate and postgraduate level on a permanent basis. They are learning from the intellectual capability of other people, that is part of the learning process. Chinese students coming to University of Hertfordshire must have quite a culture shock since your approach to higher education is very different from the traditional model… It is a challenge, but we do an awful lot of work with them in terms of induction, learning to learn and exposure to new learning methods. I won't pretend for a moment that we are 100% successful, but we are getting better all the time. We have an incredibly good feedback system that enables us to constantly improve our students' experience. During the most recent visit to China we held three alumni reunions where I probably met around 500 to 600 of our alumni and they have incredible jobs. It is absolutely amazing and they all feel that they have had a fantastic experience at Hertfordshire. Because the Chinese economy is growing extremely quickly relatively young graduates can get into fairly senior positions very quickly. Our graduates are getting good jobs straight away; that is the opportunity that China gives. The international experience that they have gained was very focused on skills, which enables them to jumpstart successful careers in no time. As you mentioned, University of Hertfordshire is years ahead of other universities in terms of business focus and employability but the other universities will be catching up quickly. What are the priorities on your agenda to stay ahead of the competition? We are going to increase the number of students with work experience as part of their program up to 80%; that is really important for me. We are going to structure our employment service, building on the experience that we had in China, to provide improved employability support for students. We are starting 'Graduate Futures' which is an employment matching service where we match the skills that employers look for in their recruitment with our graduates. We will match our graduates with jobs and we will build that interface more and more. Also, based on this infrastructure we will be linking companies in different countries. The university is very proactive in supporting its students after they graduate and we want to develop our position as an interface between our graduates and employers at a national level but also internationally level. Sino-British trade is projected to double by 2010, which implications does that have for a business facing university that wants to be ahead of the curve? Which role will China play in the future development of the university? That is a really interesting question. In many ways the university will have to be careful, although I do not often use that word.However, we do need to be careful. On campus 14% of the students are international students – students who come to the university to study in the UK in an international environment. About 35% of our international students are Chinese, and I would not like to grow that proportion because our Chinese students would not want to study next to a Chinese student from another part of China. Attracting more Chinese students would dilute what we want to achieve, and we are actually trying to diversify the internationalization without growing the number of students of Chinese origin on campus. China is a very tempting market for international students, but I think that the relationship with China will change. We will see a lot more staff exchange and increasing research cooperation, while we will also be working with business in China. We have a few good links in China but we will form more links with universities in China on the basis of more two-way student exchange. I do not see a huge growth in Chinese students coming to the UK. That might be good for some universities but not for mine. Since careful does not feature prominently in your vocabulary would you consider opening a campus in China? It is not on my agenda to open a campus in China at the moment. I have looked very carefully at what Nottingham and Liverpool have been doing, but I am interested in joint ventures that are being established. That is where we might go, but I will take a view on whether that is the right thing to do or not. It won't be just a financial decision, it will be a cultural and educational decision. I would like to give you the opportunity to send a direct message to your alumni in China, current and potential partner universities, prospective students and of course the Chinese business community. I am immensely proud of the achievement of our alumni, they have developed incredible careers. For this university the agenda is very clear. Our agenda is insuring that our students have the ability to develop those careers. In order to do that, we will work with business to make sure that our graduates have got the right skills and are eminently employable by the right sort of employers and will develop careers. That is what we want and that is what we are here for: students come first.
