Going boldly into global interaction!

The World 100 Reputation Network gathered members, new delegates and interesting speakers at its conference (‘To Boldly Go’) in Washington DC last week.  We were there to talk about global reputation, brand, rankings and internationalisation.  The fact that people came from the four corners of the earth to debate these issues (Australia, South Africa, China, Japan, Europe, US, Canada...) made the discussions rather different from the domestic conferences we all attend.

First the Dutch experience – Pauline van de Meer Mohr (President at Erasmus Rotterdam) led us through the fascinating discussions that Leiden, Erasmus Rotterdam and TU Delft have been having about the nature of their collaborations.  Central to this are the potentially conflicting issues of individual brand identity and having global impact by working together.

Stacie Spector, Coms Director extraordinaire, shared her experience as White House, UC San Diego and now Salk Institute communicator in the US.  The ‘bench to bedside’ journey of biomedical research is how she characterises Salk’s efforts to bring their research to the attention of policy-makers and the public.

And from Seoul, Jun Ki Kim, Vice-President at SNU demonstrated the detailed and complex work they do on co-citation analysis, partly to determine where they should pursue global research alliances.

Monash, Melbourne, Manchester, Tsinghua, Helsinki, Cornell and Hong Kong also led debate and discussion.   We were hosted by American University.

One thing I learned – the international agenda for higher education is getting more complex (but more interesting!) all the time.  World rankings, overseas campuses – they get the headlines, but the detail of what people in universities are doing every day in order to grow global activity is compelling and encouraging.

Hilary Layton

Director of Internationalisation