Keynote Speaker

The Challenges of Research Universities in Developing and
Middle-income Countries

Philip G. Altbach

The research university is a central institution of the 21st century—providing access to global science, producing basic and applied research, and educating key leaders for academe and society. Worldwide, there are very few research universities—they are expensive to develop and support, and the pressures of massification have placed priorities elsewhere. For developing countries, research universities are especially rare, and yet they are especially important as key ingredients for economic and social progress. Reasarch universities have special characteristics. They are fully meritocratic institutions—admitting students and hiring professors based on merit alone. They reward faculty mainly on the basis of research productivity. They have key links to the international knowledge system and are able to collaborate on an equal basis with academic institutions worldwide. They have competence in English, the worldwide language of scientific communication. They require sustained support from the state in order to fulfill their potential.  Research universities are special institutions that need appropriate autonomy and also resources to flourish.

Biographical Sketch for Prof. Philip G. Altbach

Philip G. Altbach is J. Donald Monan, S.J. professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He has been a senior associate of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and served as editor of the Review of Higher Education, Comparative Education Review, and as an editor of Educational Policy. He is author of Comparative Higher Education, Student Politics in America, and other books.  He co-edited the International Handbook of Higher Education. Dr. Altbach holds the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he directed the Comparative Education Center, and chaired the Department of Educational Organization, Administration and Policy, and was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer on education at Harvard University. He is a Guest Professor at the Institute of Higher Education at Peking University in the Peoples Republic of China, and as been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the Institut de Sciences Politique in Paris, and at the University of Bombay in India. Dr. Altbach has been a Fulbright scholar in India, and in Malaysia and Singapore. He has had awards from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), has been Onwell Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, and a senior scholar of the Taiwan Government. He was the 2004-2006 Distinguished Scholar Leader of the New Century Scholars initiative of the Fulbright program.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــ