Since arriving in Northumbia 15 years ago from India, Sonal Minocha has become a vocal advocate for ‘Education Brand Britain’ and lobbied for fresh collaboration among UK universities. She explains her passion to give the next generation of students and staff the same opportunities she’s had and why she never stays in one place for too long.
The PIE: What’s does your role at Bournemouth University entail?
SM: I’m pro-vice chancellor, global engagement at Bournemouth University, I’ve been doing this role for two years. That entails being the champion, both internally and externally, of all global engagement activities, ranging from recruitment, partnerships, mobility and associated service areas. But also, very importantly, to look at education, research, practice – and taking them global.
The PIE: What does global engagement at Bournemouth look like?
“Let’s not think about internationalisation here, the degree here, and then employability afterwards”
SM: It can be described in three parts. Firstly, we are developing global talent: let’s not think about internationalisation here, the degree here, and then employability afterwards. The second is that the purpose of all our research is to drive new global thinking. The third key anchor for Global BU is delivering global traction: it’s about connecting it up to our civic role, which is community work, and our regional and national engagement. We want to deliver impact through that engagement.
The PIE: What’s your student mix like?
SM: The overall student count is about 17,000, and about 14-15% are international students. We’re not aspiring to change that drastically in the next few years; our emphasis is on the quality, the demographic mix, and the diversity of recruitment and experience.
The top 10 countries that we recruit from are a very interesting mix – in our top 5, we’ve got Indonesia, we’ve got Taiwan. I credit somebody who did my job ten or fifteen years ago for that, because they had the foresight and the vision to say ‘Everybody’s going to India, China; let’s go to Taiwan, Indonesia.’ And they incubated and incepted new markets.
We’ve got about 120 partnerships around the world, and we’re working on identifying from that mix up to six key strategic partnerships in places we want a presence in by 2025. When I joined we designed a ten-year vision for a global BU by 2025 – I always said ‘I will not be needed in 2025!’
The PIE: You’ve talked about the idea of ‘Education Brand Britain’. Do you see enough collaboration taking place to make that happen?
“Somebody who did my job ten or fifteen years ago had the foresight to say ‘Everybody’s going to India, China; let’s go to Taiwan, Indonesia'”
SM: Whether it will happen in the UK HE landscape anytime soon I can’t predict, but what I will continue to lobby for is that we have to collaborate. Some countries are becoming very discerning in the kind of education they need to shape their ten year socioeconomic development plans, and we will lose our market share if we’re not careful.
But more importantly, we will lose a place in the global HE landscape that currently says 40 of the world’s political leaders were trained in our country. We will not be able to cite a statistic like that in 20 years if we are just competing with one another.
And you can’t ignore a private university in a way that I think 10, 15 years ago we did. We have to respond to a new wave of competition and collaboration.
The PIE: Is that the key to Britain turning around what has become a bit of an image problem in India, for example?
SM: Well, in India I think we’ve got both an image problem and a real problem, to be fair. The abolition of the post-study work visa was a real game-changer, but whilst we could not have reversed the immediate damage, we could have arrested the image problem.
If we couldn’t win the policy argument around the PSW, my critique is: what have we, in our universities, done to address employability and employment? We could have had a completely different narrative to say, look, just because you can’t work for two years in the country doesn’t mean you are any less employable. Or, this is how we are giving you a different kind of opportunity – this is what we’re doing with Indian employers. Or multinationals. We didn’t do any of that!
“They’re struggling to recruit. And this is one of the sexiest employers you could go for as a future animation professional!”
I think that problem will manifest itself in different ways in China in the next ten years. China, very crudely speaking, wants to move away from being an imitation-based to an innovation-based economy. Its biggest challenge is technology transfer and IP – so you imagine they start finding ways of doing trade to start addressing those issues. Then their educational demands will be very different, and not something the import/export model of UK HE can deliver. How many courses are there in the UK that enable a Chinese national to go back into China ready for the Chinese market and its economy? Hardly any – or maybe I’m getting cynical in my old age!
I was with Oriental Dreamworks in Shanghai recently, where one of the biggest challenges is the government wants a large percentage of their workforce to be Chinese. But graduate talent in animation hasn’t been trained per se to go back to China and sit at Oriental Dreamworks. So they’re struggling to recruit. And this is one of the sexiest employers you could go for as a future animation professional. The UK alumni aren’t sat there, not many certainly. I know I generalise, but I hope you get my point. Asian focused research needs to feature much more explicitly in our classrooms.
The PIE: Do you think that Brexit is a catalyst to address some of these issues?
SM: Absolutely. It is a very sad shock, but now we just have to use it. I don’t know what the solutions are, but for me it lies in collaboration. In the northeast, there are five universities within a 40 mile radius. Why does each one of them need an HR department, a marketing department, a finance department, and a procurement department? Let’s pause each of our conveyor belts and think collectively about our academic and business models and their readiness for innovation before outside sources become catalysts for change.
“Let’s think collectively about our academic models and their readiness for innovation before outside sources become catalysts for change”
One of the things I’ve tried to do in my tenure in the UK is recognise each other’s degrees. We’ve just never been able to do that! And you think, why not? Having an entrance into Great Britain, not just into Bournemouth University, which I think is just so parochial.
Why don’t we say to an Indian student, come to the UK for a year, you can study an academic term in Scotland, a term in England, a term in Wales, and really get a grasp of live case studies of business in Great Britain? Yet we seem to put ourselves through bureaucratic systems, meetings, all resulting in an end to academic innovation. It will be two years before we can even have a conversation. I sit on committees that do that, and I go in and say – rubbish! It’s got to be changed! I’m never popular for it but ultimately we have to think like the student and the employer who’s demanding this.
The PIE: How would you say your background, moving from India to Britain, informed your work in HE?
SM: When I came to the UK, that was my first time anywhere. I had not done any international travel – I hadn’t even seen India. I was quite closed, until I decided to not settle for the typical future of arranged marriage that lay ahead of me and chose to widen my horizons. I just wanted a little bit more time out of my own life on my own away from my context, so running to new shores of travel and learning was all I could think of!
So I ended up at a British Council fair. Before I knew it, I was filling in forms for Northumbria University. So I was some 4,900 miles away from home, pursuing my Master’s in International Business, which for me became a journey of intellectual development as much as it was of international development. Everything was larger than life and quite dramatic, back in 2001.
I was so lucky to be adopted by Northumbria, by Newcastle, by my peers. I would say I was one of those generations that was caught between old and new India, so I was exposed enough to the world to see that it was enriched and enriching, yet didn’t have full access to it. So what I experienced was a freedom of expression and I never felt like a foreigner in the way I perhaps did back home, or on the campuses in Delhi.
“I’m not a millennial but being caught in old and new India I can relate to them”
When I had finished, my lecturers found me some part-time work. The old PSW scheme helped me stay on – so I’m an accidental academic. My passion emanates from possibly being able to do for the next generation of staff and students what vice chancellors, pro-vice chancellors, deans, lecturers, students unions, all of them did for me in the five universities I have been at in the last 15 years. That’s why I get bored after two or three years working in a place because I feel, okay, this is as far I will get in terms of incepting my view. Time to now move on, to multiply that thinking.
The PIE: That’s interesting because some people struggle to let go of a project.
SM: Unless people then adopt it and grow it in their own ways, it won’t really become a part of the institutional fabric and DNA. I can only incept something, hence why I’ve always been a career traveller. Millennials get it. I’m not a millennial but being caught in old and new India I can relate to them. But my generation doesn’t quite get this motivation – always a task to explain this to headhunters.
Despite that, however, I’ve been really lucky to work with people who have allowed me to, in a very small way, shape institutions where collaboration is greater than competition, the civic is as important as the international and the agenda for developing talent and delivering impact greater than rankings!
