| |9 December 2016HIGHERReviewand the use of weapons of mass destruction; meeting the growing demand for energy safely and efficiently; accelerating scientific and technological development to improve the condition of human beings and infuse ethical considerations into global decisions. These global issues need to be solved for achieving a society that can co-exist on the planet harmoniously. In a practical context, however, in most countries, universities are unable to undertake research to address these global issues due to lack of adequate funds. A global university educates global students. A global University should be able to attract international students coming from different countries with diverse ethnic background and all students should be allowed to express themselves without bias or discrimination. Cultural openness is a critical pre-requisite. The willingness to embrace attitudes, pedagogies and systems from beyond the national context is necessary. This does not mean throwing away or setting aside the unique contributions that a particular location or institutional tradition might make in the process of globalisation but it certainly means being comfortable going beyond them.A global university has global partnerships. A global partnership is to be built on complementarities with the collaborating parties gaining mutual advantage. The difference between a global university and a national or regional university is that those choices are made with a view to opening up to global influences and contributing to the global scene rather than take decisions that are driven purely by local financial imperatives. It also understands that pursuing a strategy to go international is a long-drawn effort requiring patience as partners will take time to understand, bond and take actions to assimilate each other's unique contributions to enrich the pool of knowledge.Finally, a global university should educate its students to become global citizens and prepare them for global careers. It covers a wide array of challenges from certification and accreditation, at the more straightforward end, and all the way through to ensuring that the curriculum includes international problems and to the teaching of the much more complex soft or transferable skills that a global citizen must possess. The realisation of the dream of producing a global university, for any country, does not come easily and so also for India. It is not also sufficient that a country spends huge sums of money to push some of its universities to global university status. Other actions should be taken, in tandem, to support the cause of Global University dream. To put it succinctly it is the equivalent of converting a city like Bangalore into London or Boston and making members of faculty think like Harvard or Cambridge University professors while educating the local population to think global, act global and consciously contribute to make the local environment attain the characteristics of a true, global, melting pot.
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