Back to the limelight
Imperial College London president hails China link, urges collaboration
President of Imperial College London Alice Gast has spoken highly of the college’s link to China, and urged more cooperation and collaboration between the Chinese and British institutions.
China connection
With less than 17,000 students on its books, just under half of them undergraduates the rest postgrads, Imperial has proved to be a magnet for Chinese students and researchers.
Gast told the Xinhua News Agency in a recent interview: “We really greatly benefit from a tremendous number of Chinese students, currently 2,600, coming to study here at Imperial. They’re exceedingly bright and clever, and there’s a great opportunity here for them, especially as the world is becoming much more interconnected. We have opportunities to really drive innovation and entrepreneurship.”
With 7,000 Imperial alumni in China, there are three very active alumni associations and a very strong growing network growing, with many entrepreneurial alumni in China pursuing their own companies.
Gast said that the alumni in China can give back is connecting with today’s students both as role models and mentors themselves, as well as being connections when Imperial students want to go to China. And it’s not only Imperial’s Chinese students who benefit from that network, but all students attracted to China, including those thinking China might be the place where they’d like to launch their start-up or expand into the Chinese market, and so our alumni network is very beneficial for that.
Small is beautiful
Imperial College London traces its lineage back to the 19th century. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, envisaged the creation of a cultural area in London composed of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and the Imperial Institute.
It was in 1888, more than a quarter of a century after her husband’s death, that Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the Imperial Institute.
Today it is ranked among the top universities around the globe, the only high-ranking university in Britain to focus exclusively on science, medicine, engineering and business.
If any topranking higher academic institute proves the old saying “small is beautiful” it is Imperial, punching its weight in numerous external rankings against much bigger universities around the world.
As universities across the globe strive to become bigger, Imperial is way down the list, especially when compared with the more than 160,000 enrolled at the University of London, the biggest higher education combine in Britain.
So if big might be good and small is beautiful, can a university maintain its own characteristics by becoming bigger or is it better to remain individually independent, but smaller? Gast replied that whatever the size, universities need to maintain their own characteristics. “I think one of the great benefits is to have a diversity of opportunities, and a diversity of types of institutions where different students will thrive in different ways,” said Gast. Larger universities benefit from scale and have broader sets of opportunities, while smaller universities can be more focused. “I think that no matter how large or small you are, there are natural sizes for thriving research groups,” said Gast, adding she sees a lot of multidisciplinary challenges where academics collaborate across disciplines, and still end up then with a group that’s kind of a natural set of colleagues that they affiliate with. Gast agrees that the pursuance of excellence has nothing to do with the size of a university, saying it’s important to measure excellence on all of its measures, not just by quantity. Post-Brexit As for Brexit and Britain’s future outside the EU, Gast said after Brexit if EU citizen are considered as international foreigners, Britain needs good immigration policies. “I’ve been a strong supporter of international student visas, but also entrepreneur graduate entrepreneur visas,” said Gast. She wants opportunities for collaborators and top research programs to have free movement or access through other mechanisms and immigration policies.
“I still believe that needs to happen so London and Britain, and Imperial, can remain a magnet for talent.”
Gast wants to be able to bring in people from all over the world, including China, not because of a new agreement, but because Britain has had immigration policies that allowed universities to bring in international students and scholars.
Uncertainties surrounding Brexit are the most damaging thing because people are wondering and worried about what’s going to happen.
“We definitely study all the possible scenarios, and we have worked very hard to make sure we’re building and maintaining our ties to Europe,” said Gast.
“We’re talking to many others in other countries to make sure we can still collaborate across the borders, no matter how the borders have set up.”
As for the age of robots, will Imperial, famed for its scientific research, ever see AI replacing its lecturers and tutors?
Gast said she does not see machines taking over the lecture halls in the future.
When does she expect the first AI teacher to appear at the university?
“I think we will have AI partners for teachers, and we will have teachers who will make great use of AI, and that will be wonderful because they can allow the human teacher to focus on what they’re really good at, and augment their understanding of the group,” said Gast.