Academic Collaborations in the Global Marketplace by Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko

Author:Anatoly V. Oleksiyenko
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030231415
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Moreover, the OC became experimental ground for the RCB/RCM , a self-financing structure , which called on the small university units to be accountable for revenue generation. This accorded a special status to the OC, as it became a focus of attention of Glonacal U’s senior executives and Governing Council.

The introduction of the independent management structure, however, turned out to be fraught with difficulties. For example, in the absence of “professional fund-raisers”, the revenue generation strategy essentially turned into a competition with other divisions for students. Although the principal had good “financial and mathematical skills”, many other administrators lacked a practical understanding of the financial information system , and were unable to manage RCB/RCM effectively. As one interviewee noted, “it was proving to be a bit of a headache. The staff on which it depended just did not seem to be able to deal with it very well, and the newly recruited Chief Administrative Officer was very keen to get out of it” [SC]. As one senior administrator explained, the financial system, which was developed for a large university processing huge amounts of money, turned out to be irrelevant and complicated for a small campus, where transactions were much smaller. Ultimately, it was deemed not to be worth the cost of maintaining it. The system was abandoned as the upper echelons of university management recognized that it did little to improve the quality of programs or amount of income. In fact, the Outskirts’ experiment ended with a huge budget deficit, which made the executives very cautious about future experiments with entrepreneurial initiatives.

As the Outskirts’ institutional legacy became stamped with marginality, risk aversion, and competition with the Downtown campus , the emergence of international initiatives at the OC was also looked upon with suspicion. The International Development Studies (IDS) program illustrates the point. Established in 1984, the program emerged as a direct response to the growing demand for trained professionals and managers in the field of international development. As one of the participants in the study remarked, the IDS was established by a group of dedicated scholars personally involved in international development projects, as well as in study areas that were closely related to international development. The program was grounded in the philosophy of having a hands-on and “dirt-on-the-boots” interdisciplinary area providing diverse problem-solving and objective-oriented expertise to tackle problems in poverty-stricken, conflict -ridden, disease-affected countries and regions of the world.

For the Glonacal U community , the IDS represented a nontraditional academic construct. It offered direct experience with developing country communities, and entailed knowledge of collaborative planning and management of technical assistance. It called for local academics to help communities abroad build the capacities of their governmental and non-governmental institutions to tackle poverty and improve social development.

Given the IDS’s somewhat “unusual” nature among an assortment of locally-bound programs, its development called for persistence and determination on the part of the Outskirts founding members. In particular, one of the interviewees noted that the role of the Chair of Social Sciences , who was dedicated to international outreach , was indispensable.

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