Centers of Excellence

I heard David King, the UK's science advisor, give a talk this morning. One of the ideas he threw out was the creation of four centers of excellence of higher education and research in Africa. He suggested that each might have a one billion dollar endowment. The idea would be to attract people from the African Diaspora to return to Africa, to do world class research (related to African problems) in Africa, to train a new generation of scientific and technological (including agricultural, engineering, etc.) leaders for the continent. He stressed several times the value of such keystone institutions is in part that they improve standards for the whole system of education, as the Indian Institutes of Technology seem to have done for the Indian educational system.

I was pleased to hear him state that investing in primary education is important, but is not enough. A country needs to invest in the whole range of educational levels and institutions in order to fulfill its needs for human resources to fill all the critical niches for social and economic development.

Aside from practical questions, such as where all that money is going to come from and whether there are not better ways to invest a part of that four billion dollars, I had a couple of thoughts about his idea.

I was a student in a couple of universities that were building to excellence and are now in the top rank of world universities. I was an early student in the School of Engineering at UCLA and the second PhD from the Graduate Graduate School of Administration of UC Irvine. Both schools had almost perfect conditions -- serving a rapidly growing population in an affluent state of an affluent nation, in regions which were at the time expanding into knowledge based industries. Both were blessed by attractive surroundings and good climate, enabling them to attract good faculty. In both cases, the offerings were of very high quality during my stay, and indeed there is an educational value to participating in the creation of new curricula and new institutions. But it took each of these programs decades to achieve national recognition for excellence. Moreover, each had a quite limited capacity to train students for the early years. So, even if Africa were to create a network of centers of excellence, what would it do in the interim to fill its needs for human resources as the centers went through startup?

Chuck Weiss, a former Science Advisor for the World Bank and currently professor at Georgetown University, pointed out that many efforts to create centers of excellence in developing nations have been unsuccessful, as the centers eventually deteriorated or closed. I think of the International Agricultural Research Centers supported by CGIAR (The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) as an example of successful creation of centers of excellence, but there has long been a fair amount of donor fatigue in financing this network.

Perhaps there needs to be considerable analysis before making a huge investment in centers of excellence as to the conditions needed for such investments to be sustainable.