Putting sustainable development at the heart of global engagement
UL Vice President Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey writes about the future of international higher education
Putting sustainable development at the heart of global engagement
UL Vice President Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey writes about the future of international higher education
UL Vice President Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey
UL Vice President Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey
Putting sustainable development at the heart of global engagement
UL Vice President Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey writes about the future of international higher education
UL VP Global and Community Engagement Professor Nigel Healey Picture: Sean Curtin/True Media
Universities have always been international, welcoming scholars and students from across the world to share ideas and collectively advance human knowledge. University of Limerick is no exception.
Founded in 1972, on the eve of Ireland’s accession to the European Union, UL was outward-looking from the outset, reflecting Limerick’s current strapline – ‘Atlantic Edge, European Embrace’.
Its first president, Ed Walsh, came from Virginia Tech, introducing US concepts to UL like the grade point average and cooperative (work-based) education.
Embracing Europe, UL introduced Ireland’s first European Studies degree and encouraged all undergraduates to undertake outbound study mobility under the EU’s new Erasmus programme.
For UL, this international outlook was important in shaping its distinctiveness and guiding its transformation into today’s research-intensive institution. Co-op education and international student mobility established UL’s reputation as Ireland’s leader in graduate employability.
Engaging in EU-funded multinational research projects built capacity and increased global research impact. And growing numbers of international students from outside the EU, where there are no government restrictions on the tuition fees charged or the number of non-EU students enrolled, allowed UL to diversify its revenue and reduce its dependency on government funding.
In recent years, most notably since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations in 2015, the impact of universities’ international activities on both planetary health and other countries has come under increasing scrutiny.
Most obviously, the carbon footprint associated with student mobility – whether UL students going abroad on exchange or international students travelling to UL for a semester or a full degree – contributes to the climate crisis.
Many international students, especially those from the Global South, are attracted by the prospect of using a UL degree to forge a high-paying career in Ireland. This contributes to the global brain drain, with less developed countries losing their best and brightest talent to richer nations.
International research partnerships can also encourage, over time, the best researchers to migrate to the best-resourced universities, with UL benefitting from this phenomenon at the expense of its partner universities.
UL’s response to the SDGs, which has included the development of the UL Sustainability Framework 2023 and the Climate Action Roadmap 2030, has also involved a fundamental reappraisal of the university’s global engagement.
In seeking to “put sustainable development at the heart of everything we do”, UL has been exploring ways of mitigating the negative impacts of its internationalisation in terms of the SDGs, while reframing global engagement to positively contribute to sustainable development.
In terms of SDG 13 (climate action), this means seeking ways of achieving the benefits of international student mobility at a reduced carbon footprint. Building a network of UL offices in the main source markets, where locally employed recruitment staff carry out the visits to schools and education fairs and assist potential students with their applications, can replace the long-haul travel associated with sending UL-based recruiters around the world.
A similar benefit can be achieved by substituting online education for campus-based face-to-face delivery. UL is expanding its range of distance learning programmes to reach students in their own countries, as well as using so-called ‘blended intensive programmes’ to allow students to achieve the same learning outcomes with much shorter periods of international mobility.
As an island with no direct rail routes to mainland European, international mobility will necessarily continue to involve air travel for the foreseeable future. To this extent, another way of responding to SDG 13 is to ensure that the carbon footprint created by international travel has the greatest possible impact in terms of students’ learning experience.
In other words, if a student is going to travel for education, the impact must be transformational, not just superficial ‘academic tourism’. This means ensuring that the mobility achieves deep intercultural learning and ontological shock, by designing these goals into the curriculum and assessment.
Global engagement for sustainable development also means building partnerships that contribute to SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equality) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities).
Distance learning, for example, can open up educational opportunities to young women who may be forbidden to travel abroad for study, or to lower income students who cannot afford a conventional campus-based degree.
The positive contribution of such transnational education is even greater where UL partners with a local institution to provide a UL or joint degree since this helps to build capacity and enhance the quality of education on the partner country.
UL’s new global engagement strategy 2023-28, ‘Action through Partnership’, sets out a range of ways in which UL is using international partnerships to advance its core goals of research and teaching, while realigning its activities to contribute directly to achieving the SDGs.
It has involved some real heart-searching and recognising that our past achievements in terms of internationalisation were not without costs for the planet and other countries. But it represents a coherent attempt to put sustainable development at the heart of global engagement and to be honest about the trade-offs and challenges involved.
And ultimately, challenging the status quo is the raison d’être of a research-intensive university like UL.
