By Luis Miguel Romero Fernández, Ph.D.
Rector, Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja
Translated and published by COL, 2008
Foreword
The mission of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) is to help the developing countries use various technologies to enhance the scale, scope, impact and quality of learning at all levels. COL's primary focus is the Commonwealth, but because it is the only international intergovernmental agency focused exclusively on learning technologies it has become a global resource for multimedia education and open/distance learning.
COL maintains constructive links with associations that bring other groups of countries together around learning technologies, such as the Francophone RES@TICE, the Asian Association of Open Universities, and CREAD, the Inter-American Distance Education Consortium. It was at a CREAD conference in Ecuador in 2008 that I first met Luis Miguel Romero, the rector of our host institution, the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja. As he guided us around the campus I realised that here was an outstanding academic leader - a conviction reinforced by reading his essay A Prospective Vision for Universities.
The oxymoron 'radical incrementalism', which is emerging as a guiding principle for international development in unpredictable times, is an excellent description of the approach that inspires his transformative university leadership. That leadership has been practised in a remote corner of Ecuador but has relevance throughout the developing world. Rector Romero made his first visit to Africa only recently and was struck by the great similarities between the challenges facing universities there and the psychological and systemic obstacles that he has overcome in Loja. COL is publishing his essay in English so that it can inspire university leaders in other developing countries to escape from the stasis of the mental frameworks in which they are trapped and galvanise their institutions into effective action.
The essay begins with an analysis of the crisis besetting Latin American universities. Whilst some of Dr. Romero's strictures are unique to that continent, most apply throughout the developing world. By allowing themselves to be weighed down by their relationship with governments, universities have surrendered their independence and their capacity to adapt and survive. Private universities partially avoid this handicap, but at the cost of catering only to the richer stratum of society and ignoring research. Indeed, the paucity of credible and useful research is a problem for the whole university system, which suffers from the St. Matthew effect that 'those who have shall receive more and those with little will lose even what they have'.
Universities have failed to get to grips with these issues because of their habit of looking for 'saviour models' or grand plans to solve all their problems at once. Discussion of models and plans becomes an end in itself and gets lost in the myth of perfect rationality with no expectation of any concrete results. Universities have proved incapable of addressing the two great challenges facing Latin America, namely globalisation and poverty.
At Loja, Dr. Romero has cut through these sterile debates and created a liberating belief in the University's usefulness to society which generates the collective energy to bring important tasks to completion. What counts for him is a multiplicity of small actions that yield concrete results. Funding is more a problem of mentality than of dollars and bureaucratic controls merely express the fear of flexibility and creativity that might lead to real accomplishments.
Theorising about problems is easy but this essay has two remarkable features. First, Dr. Romero walks his talk. His accomplishments at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja are palpable. The campus is a vibrant hive of activity with students and staff - who seem little older than the students - exuding enthusiasm and confidence.
Second, he has shown a unique ability to effect reform and innovation across the whole of the university's mandate. When he set up the UK Open University in 1969 Walter Perry espoused three goals: it should reach thousands of students at a distance; offer the best teaching in the country; and conduct world-class research. Lord Perry had the advantage of setting up a brand new institution with strong political support, whereas Dr. Romero's genius is to have transformed an existing university, with all its baggage of inertia and low aspirations, into an institution for the 21st century.
He has found novel ways of cultivating research by getting partner universities in the richer countries to supervise Ph.D.s at Loja instead of sucking his talented undergraduates into a brain drain to the north. Research feeds into development through the concept of technology transfer units and some industrial-scale enterprises operating from the campus. He has transformed the curriculum so that students can look job interviewers in the eye and cite real experience of the world of work. Finally, and of particular interest to COL, he has built up a most successful distance learning programme that operates efficiently and effectively using economies of scale, with high prestige and incorporating new technology as and when appropriate.
The difficulties of teaching both on campus and at a distance are well known. Why has Loja been so successful where others often fail? The answer is that Rector Romero treats his three areas of innovation as an integrated whole. The distance learners benefit from curricular innovation and the technology transfer units involve them in their research work, thereby creating thousands of research assistants all over the country. It all adds up to an exciting and productive academic enterprise that quickly infects the visitor with its sense of eagerness and purpose.
Nurturing the development of good universities in the poorer countries of the world is a vital task for the early decades of the 21st century. Dr. Luis Miguel Romero has shown us the way at Loja, which its inhabitants affectionately label 'the end of the world'. The Commonwealth of Learning is proud to make this short account of his work accessible to an English-speaking audience.
Sir John Daniel
President & Chief Executive Officer
Commonwealth of Learning
July 2008