And of course, we want the town to hire our students.” The key to overcoming these misunderstandings is communication, he stressed. Professor Gertler asked Professor Chan how geographical context might affect the expectations and nature of the town-gown relationship. Professor Chan noted that in Hong Kong and Thuwal, the Red Sea town where KAUST is located, people on the street know who their university president is. In Los Angeles, where he had served as dean previously, they might not even recognise the name UCLA. “It is a different culture,” he said. “In Thuwal, everybody knows about KAUST but they don’t really know what we do. They say, what have you done for Saudi Arabia? If you’re about science and technology, then where’s your Google? That is the expectation we are facing. Geographical location today is not so important as the cultural and societal context,” he commented. Professor Almeida felt physical engagement with the town is important. For instance, a technological park has been built on UFMG’s grounds in collaboration with both state and city governments. Several research centres have
opened there, including the recently inaugurated National Centre for Vaccines. Her university is also the only Google research lab in Latin America, built on a relationship developed when a spinoff from one of their professors was bought by Google. “We are also trying to be closer to the community, especially those who do not have access to the university. Only 20 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 in Brazil can have access to the university,” she said. At UC Davis, Professor May shared that they were also developing their relationship with Sacramento, California’s state capital, located about 15 miles from Davis. The university has built a medical centre there and is developing an innovation ecosystem in cooperation with government and industry that is expected to bring about 25,000 jobs to Sacramento and US$5 billion annually in economic activity. “We’re now viewed more and more as part of the city of Sacramento and not just part of the town of Davis,” he said. In terms of physical space, Professor Mahaisavariya noted that his university had taken advantage of having
both urban and rural, and old and young, campuses to benefit students and staff and their communities. Apart from offering different kinds of infrastructure and populations to work with, the younger rural campuses are also more conveniently located in their towns, reducing commuting time for staff and students and freeing them for more academic work. In urban campuses, the stronger infrastructure enables them to introduce newer technologies and related ethical standards to rural students, who spend time on the main campus in their first year – something that rebounds back to local communities when they return to the rural campus. “They can access everything from the centre,” he said. “We try to let them know that they can make public goods for local communities.” Audience members also contributed examples of how they navigate the town-gown relationship. Professor Song Gao, President of Sun Yat-sen University, shared that they had campuses in three cities and had partnered with local governments in all three places to develop research centres. A national supercomputing centre was established with the city of Guangzhou that is used not only for academic research but also to serve local companies. Marine science and engineering labs were established in partnership with Zhuhai city. And in Shenzhen, they established two hospitals and a school of medicine. “The important thing for all sides is we have to achieve mutual benefits for local governments and also for the university,” he remarked. Professor Rocky S Tuan, Vice-Chancellor and President of CUHK, responded with an interesting analogy. He had noticed that pop musician Taylor Swift had been named Person of the Year by Time magazine, which reflected, in part, the local economic impact she had on cities where she performed. He wondered if enhancing GDP should be a criterion for evaluating universities’ impact “because I think that is coming,” he said. Professor May agreed, noting that universities were already making substantial contributions. UC Davis, for instance, has been contributing over US$12 billion a year to the local economy. “I’m sure we all have key figures that we can share. We need to highlight those kinds of things more because I think they’re an important part of this town-gown discussion,” he said. Professor Martin Paul, Rector of Ruhr University Bochum, highlighted a different aspect of the relationship which is the exchange of knowledge and information between universities and the community. Universities should be asking people what their issues are and bringing them together with researchers to resolve them, such as by
tapping into citizen science. “It is right that we have no ivory towers. But the towers at my university are made of concrete, they’re barriers for people to interact,” he said. To help overcome that, universities in his community had collaborated on a project that has a shopping mall on the ground floor, a public library on the first floor, and space where citizens can interact with faculty and students of the university on the second floor in the spirit of citizen science. He considered that “town and gown is not a one- way road.” Professor Almeida also addressed the challenge of breaking down barriers by citing Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire. “He said that we cannot change society, instead we have to change people so that they can change society. I think that’s what we have to do, to try to transform our students and also the community so we can make some change in the world. It’s a challenge, but we have to be committed to doing it,” she said. KAUST has navigated its own way to creating such impact. Professor Chan noted how in Saudi Arabia, institutions often have physical walls built around them. KAUST looked at how to break down those walls, but the cost was too prohibitive. Instead, they have gone into the community through the KAUST Academy, which offers continuing education on subjects such as AI and machine learning. “People want to know about those things, but they don’t want to go back and spend four years on a degree. So we are taking KAUST to them and this is increasing our footprint,” he remarked. Panellists in the session demonstrated from their own examples how the town-gown relationship has become especially prominent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a spotlight on the impact of academic research on societal well-being. Universities, though, have always made important contributions through education and research. The panellists discussed how to sustain their engagement with the community through communication, breaking down barriers, reaching out to those who are isolated from universities, and addressing societal needs such as pandemics and sustainability. Increasingly, universities might also be called on to highlight their contributions to the economy, something a few of them are already starting to take into account.
We need each other [town and gown], but the problem is that we don’t understand each other, we have different expectations. ...The key to overcoming these misunderstandings is communication.
Professor Tony Chan President, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
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