Univer-Cities: Strategic Dilemmas of Medical Origins and Selected Modalities

Water, Quantum Leap & New ModelsVolume III

Anthony SC Teo

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813238749
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

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Building on the second volume of Univer-Cities: Strategic View of the Future — From Berkeley and Cambridge to Singapore and Rising Asia edited by Anthony SC Teo and published in 2015, this third edition presents 12 chapters weaving the dilemmas of strategy and leadership in one of humanity's beloved institutions, the university (with a long view strategy) and the city (a relatively shorter one).

Based on the 2016 Univer-Cities conference hosted by the University of Newcastle, contributors of this volume reflect on the deliberations made by the conference participants, including academic leaders from University of Cambridge and University of California, Berkeley, urban architects, policy planners, and public office holders.

The book hopes to engage the universities' top leadership in addressing accusations of elitism by re-societalisation of the varsities with their eco-system. Often criticised for being unresponsive to the pressing and accumulating problems faced by cities and societies, more can be done for universities to exert their socio-economic benefits and contribute to the progress of humankind. It is a call for academic elites to integrate basic research with the universities' strengths in medical disciplines for community advancement, urban planning, innovation systems and regional economic growth.

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--> Contents:

• Foreword (Koh Boon Hwee)
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• Welcome Address (Caroline McMillen)
• Keynote Address (Leszek Borysiewicz)
• Univer-Cities: Strategic Dilemmas of Strategy & Leadership — Medical Origins & Select Modalities (Anthony SC Teo)
• The Trans-Disciplinary Impact on Academic Evolution: From Medicine to Global Univer-Cities:
  • Dilemma & Strategy: Shaping the University of Newcastle, Australia (R John Aitken and H Le Gresley)
  • Medicine in Cambridge (Gordon Johnson)
  • Meeting Societal Challenges Through Medical Education and Research:LKCMedicine, NTU-ICL Singapore (Bertil Andersson)
  • Univer-City of Zurich: An Evolutionary-Medical Perspective (Frank Rühli and Maciej Henneberg)
• Univer-Cities 2013 Updates: Berkeley, Ottawa, Hong Kong:
  • University of California, Berkeley in the Bay Region: The Present and Future of a Public Research University (Emily B Marthinsen and John J Parman)
  • An Architecture of Light: Ottawa, the City of Light (Roseann O'Reilly Runte)
  • Re-Inventing the University of Hong Kong in Both Mortar and Spirit: Building the Centennial Campus (John Malpas)
• Ecosystems of Globalizing Univer-Cities: Strategic and Evolving Implications:
  • Safe Water for the Developing World: Rhetoric and Reality (Asit K Biswas and Cecilia Tortajada)
  • On Strategy for Developing an Innovative University: S-Factor, S-Gap and Vector Delta (δ) (Nam P Suh)
  • Multi-Campus Internationalisation of Higher Education Institutions (Gabriel Hawawini)
  • A Singapore University Catering to the Needs of a Population Amidst a Volatile and Changing Economy (Cheong Hee Kiat)
• Appendices:
  • Advisory Council of the Univer-Cities Conference 2016
  • Programme of the Univer-Cities Conference 2016
  • About the Unique Univer-Cities Conference 2016
• Index

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--> Readership: Campus planners, architects, landscape and lighting consultants, city planners, mayors, futurists, educators. -->
Keywords:Univer-Cities;Uno, Duo & Tri-Univercities;Medical Origins;Nuclearisation;Strategic Dilemmas of Univer-City Strategy & Human Leadership;Radical Newcastle/Novocastrians;Selected Modalities of Water, Quantum Leap, Deadlocked Productivity Gap & New Models;Alignment Economic Restructuring;Asymmetrical Globalisation;Disruptive Technology;Reskilling;Inequality;Social Compact;Re-societalisationReview: Key Features:

• Affirms the evidence that a young univer-city prevails in these interesting times of unceasing change, restructuring and austerity
• Highlights the opportunities and dangers faced by univer-cities
• Sets the stage for future dialogue in 2019 Univer-Cities conference "The Challenge of Univer-Cities Aligning Mission to Continual Economic Restructuring, Disruptive Globalisation & Unsustainable Inequality: Revisiting The Social Compact?"

CHAPTER ONE

UNIVER-CITIES: STRATEGIC DILEMMAS OF STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP — MEDICAL ORIGINS & SELECT MODALITIES

ANTHONY SC TEO

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress” Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr

“To me, you are America”

President Xi Jinping, when asked in 2012 why he chose Muscatine, Iowa instead of visiting Washington, DC

Introduction

The Univer-Cities Conference 2016 at the University of Newcastle picked up the torch from Conference 2013 at Nanyang Technological University. The Univer-Cities discourse started with a focus on Implications for Asia Vol. I, Strategic View of the Future Vol. II to the present focus on Dynamics of Univer-Cities with Medical Origins that is Volume III in the series. Different, Complex and Integrative?

University of Newcastle Vice-Chancellor Professor Caroline McMillen through her academic leadership and unrelenting charm was our Host and Co-Chair of this conference. Deeply committed to this narrative which is well documented in her Volume II chapter “Recasting the City of Newcastle as a Univer-City: The Journey from ‘Olde’ Newcastle-upon-Tyne to the New Silk Road”, Professor McMillen and her Project Team created an outstanding conference and milieu for robust deliberations in 2016.

The Univer-Cities Conference 2016 (UC2016) continued its tradition of the trinity of unique engagement amongst collegiate academic leaders primus inter pares: evolving conversation, multi- & trans-disciplinary; continuity update; and published proceedings.

We are most grateful for the diversity and trans-disciplinary input of thought leaders amongst whom are Vice-Chancellors, Presidents, PVCs, DVCs, AVCs, architects & policymakers from disciplines like anthropology, architecture, bio-engineering, business, campus development, chemistry, disruptive economics, environment, history, hydrology, law, medicine, plant biology, psychology as well as writers, classicists, musicologists, pharmacologists, et al. Our Univer-Cities Conference Advisory Councillors include Nobel Laureate for Chemistry CalTech Professor Rudolph Marcus; Plant Biologist Professor Bertil Andersson, NTU President & Nobel Trustee; Emeritus MIT’s Ralph & Eloise Cross Professor Nam-Pyo Suh; and Emeritus Berkeley’s Environmental Design Dean & Chair Professor of Architecture Professor Richard Bender.

Interesting Times 2016: Unexpected, Dilemmas & Paradoxes Before we delve into the proceedings of UC2016, let’s note the big elephant in the conference room. Our conference took place at the time of the US Presidential Election in November 2016. Two aspects of evolving ecology of the past seemed to converge. Firstly, the rural and suburban voted for radical change from “America is great when it’s good” to “Make America great again”. The first epigram is innocuous yet prescient as it highlights the 33-year relationship of China’s President Xi Jinping and the now US Ambassador Terry Granstad to Beijing (then Iowa Governor, meeting a young and promising Hebei agriculture official in the cornfields of Muscatine in the great granary state of Iowa) — a potential re-supplier of grain to narrow the US trade deficit with the PRC!

Secondly, with US univer-cities in mind, we are reminded of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862 that led to the setting-up of modern research universities to develop the mechanisation of agriculture. Examples are institutions such as MIT, where the mission is so reflected in its founding constitution, and Texas A&M (Agricultural and Mechanical) University, the fourth largest US research-intensive land, sea and space grant institution in collaboration with NASA, NIH, NSF and Office of Naval Research. In academic disciplines, it melded from STEM (science, technology, engineering & mathematics) to A&M’s STEAM (with “A” returning as “Agriculture”) and more. Convergence and trans-disciplinarity are to trump academic silos.

Continuity: Past, Present & Future

The past is not another country as described by VC McMillen who gave a tour de force from Homeric times of The Mighty Dead to the 21st century. Ambitious inter-continental visions of the University of Newcastle (UoN) from its medical origins with a strong engineering focus confronted the alignment of “dilemmic strategy and dilemmic leadership”.

What made UC2016 different— was it the conversation? A classicist, Professor Morpeth of UoN, may have a point: that the discourse has a professorial style — which he takes to mean: “That quality where knowledge and mastery of the art and craft of the profession of letters, develops its own distinctive style of presentation which takes the intellectual argument, exploration or observation to another plane or level effortlessly.” This can be said of many, and Cambridge Don Johnson and UoN VC McMillen would probably win a straw poll (and pleasingly, Stockholm Water Prize Awardee Professor Biswas was invited to a colloquium, in February 2017 by HH Pope Francis through the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, on water as a human right leading to an expected Rome Declaration; and potentially an encyclical).

We are carving a niche of “thinking paths” which inspired Darwin, a narrative in which univer-cities would redefine the New Silk Road. The cornerstone of our conversation is the commitment to peek into or “live the future”. We view the challenges through our collaborative vision inspired by imagination, insight and intuition that grapples with the creative balance. This conversation is weaved out of the dilemmas of strategy and leadership in one of humanity’s beloved institutions, the university (with a long view strategy) and the city (a relatively shorter one). The univercity evolves seemingly, symbiotically from its origins, a millennium ago, in Bologna, Cambridge, Oxford and Paris.

The prequel and the ensuing five pillars make the University of Cambridge so successful. The five pillars comprise two abilities — to deliver excellence in education and research; and three commitments — to collegiality, being a truly global university and service to society.

In his Keynote Address Sir Borysiewicz stated: “These apparently contradictory demands are at the heart of the Univer-Cities Conference. How can we be rooted in our local, regional and national context while building international networks to address the kinds of problems facing humanity today. At the same time, we are expected to educate for a world where technology has transformed the pace of change. Nowhere is this complex mix of interests more difficult to bring into a creative balance than in the field of medicine and healthcare.”

Creative Balance, Dilemmas & Paradoxes: To be sure, “paradoxes invite consideration of alternatives that are interdependent as well as contradictory” (Smith, Lewis & Tushman, 2016). This affects strategy as well as core leadership and the widening society of stakeholders. Nobelist Niels Bohr shares this view enabling progress whereas Kissinger thinks of strategic co-existence.

I envisage dilemmas and paradoxes are on a continuum betwixt human and nature’s condition. So I am partial to address the human dilemmas of leadership and paradoxes of nature. Iconic is whether Time Travel could bring us to the Past when we’re in the Present. Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, is grappling with this Space-Time paradox framing it for best experimental parameters in a limited “finite region” of the universe (Hawking, 2013).

Sir Borysiewicz’s video Keynote Address serves both as a prequel of the medical origins at Cambridge in 1540 with the appointment of Sir John Blyth and the sequel that UC2016 is held at the University of Newcastle befitting its reputation in research in medicine and healthcare with the lead-off address by Newcastle’s Laureate Professor John Aitken, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Faculty of Health and Medicine).

1.UoN & Strategy Dilemma: Professor Aitken presented the core theme by framing it as the strategy dilemma. The future strategic role of the Faculty of Health and Medicine (FHM) with the other faculties is as a regional university with responsibility to society and always collegiate and in open collaborative ways:

a clear vision for 2025 which will see the institution standing as a global leader distinguished by a commitment to equity and excellence and to creating a better future for its regions through a focus on innovation and impact.

At its origin, the Medical School pioneered problem-based learning spearheaded by founding Dean Maddison (and then Professor Saxon White who was an active delegate at UC2016 asserting for more humanities). Aitken embraces the indispensability of collegiality (and technology as an enabler) in total agreement with Sir Borysiewicz.

Aitken postulates a way to address the strategy dilemma of medicine and other disciplines in that “health and medicine constitute an ideal nucleation point in the development of such an open collaborative approach”. Such an approach nurtures convergence and a creative destruction of silos (benign and evolving) of faculties and disciplines. This aids the transversing of the states from multidisciplinary and cross-disciplinary to highly sought trans-disciplinarity of research.

Trans-disciplinary research at the University of Newcastle coalesces its multi-disciplinary research in the Hunter Medical Research Institute (HMRI) with some 1,500 home grown and foreign talent research scientists. Professor Jennifer Martin best profiles its trans-disciplinary approach, bravely taken as a

‘reductionist step’ back to basic science in order to understand why people respond to medications so differently. All of the leadership of our team is from outside of Newcastle! But we have all moved here because of the freedom and support from the University and the encouragement to think broadly and internationally. Newcastle is a very exciting place to be at the moment.

The strategy dilemma of university and society reveals the tension and the attendant commitment: “Society in general will only ever accept what researchers do, if the outcomes of their labours are measured in terms of social and economic impact.” The corollary that is proposed is therefore to “develop an integrated language, administrative framework and physical infrastructure that facilitate rather than discourage such interactions”. Doubtless, this is a Herculean task. However, this is just what was embarked upon as described by Professor Malpas in his chapter “Re-inventing the University of Hong Kong”. Malpas opined: “The whole process to me boils down to the right people, right place, right time. It was a God-given opportunity and a real team effort.”

Aitken reflects on the emerging reality of creating innovative value for the university and the broader set of stakeholders of the university: the univer-city, government, health service and industry extending to society at large. Recalling Sir Borysiewicz’s comment on “creative balance” and a silver lining: “paradoxes invite consideration of alternatives that are interdependent as well as contradictory with a view of ‘dynamic equilibrium’” (Smith, Lewis & Tushman, 2016) rather than solely anchored on consistency (of being wrong or right).

To be sure, a new thoughtful matrix and process of review would be needed as distinct from the publication orientation pursued by research-intensive universities. Newcastle, Australia’s seventh largest city — together with its University’s innovation initiatives, new urban redevelopment city-centre campus with it business and law schools — is an emerging smart city. Novocastrians who possess an engaged and radical streak (Bennett, Cushing & Eklund, 2015) would trust and verify Aitken’s words of the value of a “fair go for all”. In situ action is needed to counter global trends of inequality in healthcare accessible by the rich vis-à-vis the less well off towards assuaging Sir Borysiewicz’s concerns. The apparent inequality in Cleveland (and quite a number of other cities) of private medical excellence co-existing with segments of poverty of care is glaring, yet there is hope in the expressed policy vision of the incoming WHO chief: to reduce that inequality globally, potentially aided by fast and “brilliant technologies” (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2016). However, the consensus is not clearcut, as recent research emerges: there is Yale’s Starman Dilemma Proposition — fair inequality versus unfair equality?

Cambridge Sequel in Scale & Scope: The disruptive innovations of the Cambridge Bio-medical Campus (CBC) and the phenomenon of the Cambridge Silicon Fen share a common feature that erupted only in the past half century. However, one is mindful of the nascent power of evolution of the univer-city of the Cambridge market town, and an over 800-year collegiate continuity through its 345 Regents or Vice-Chancellors drawing leadership from amongst its community of scholars (Johnson, 2015).

There was the innocuous strategic move of the Addenbrooke Hospital in the midst of Cambridge (now morphed into the Judge Business School) to the outer southern border and the founding of CBC, one of the largest world-class medical and health science research and teaching clusters and the biggest in Europe with some 12,000 scientists and heath science professionals. This is no less than the univer-city’s strategic view of the future with decided preemption to lead and prevail (Teo, 2015).

Centres of research now include the Li Kashing Cancer Centre, the Hitchison-MRC Research Centre, $0.5 billion AstraZeneca-MRC Centre for Lead(ing) Discovery for “regulating biological processes”, Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, laboratories and the teaching hospital and healthcare services. To be sure, although managed by the University of Cambridge, the broader societal stakeholders, amongst others, are the Cambridge University Hospitals-NHS Foundation Trust, MRC, Cancer Research UK, Addenbrooke’s Hospital and University of Cambridge Medical School and the status accorded by the NIH-Biomedical Research Centre.

Two underlying strains intertwine in this narrative. As a pre- eminent magnet for global talent, if Nobel Prize awardees colour the rainbow of thought leadership, the pool connected with Cambridge breakthrough research now nears the magical 100. Crick and Watson of double-helix and Nobel fame half a century ago interweave this and brilliant technologies. The ARM start-up in the Cambridge Silicon Fen (of Trinity and Jesus College beginnings) was valued in a UK-Japan transaction at over $30 billion. It leads in digital convergence, mobility and increasingly as an indispensable utility in human communications and enabling unbeknownst healthcare outreach.

Nuevo NTU-ICL Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine The new kid on the block is Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, and its joint-enterprise of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and Imperial College, London. With a strategic vision of pioneer medical innovations for a future healthcare system (amongst NTU’s Five Peaks of Excellence), the new community of physicians would be able to operate and manage multi-professional teams in the emerging healthcare systems and combine strengths of recent bio-engineering-medical with the University’s capabilities. The strategy also addresses the needs of the silvering population and enhancing the context of tropical health through its collaboration with the centennial Tan Tock Seng Hospital and its famed complementary specialty as a teaching hospital-partner. Freer from legacy issues, NTU has implemented a new pedagogy of “Team...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Quo Vadis Univer-Cities?
• Halftitl
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• Welcome Address
• Keynote Address
• Chapter 1 Univer-Cities: Strategic Dilemmas of Strategy & Leadership — Medical Origins & Select Modalities
• Part I The Trans-Disciplinary Impact on Academic Evolution: From Medicine to Global Univer-Cities
• Part II Univer-Cities 2013 Updates: Berkeley, Ottawa, Hong Kong
• Part III Ecosystems of Globalising Univer-Cities: Strategic and Evolving Implications
• Appendices
• Index