The opportunity to study with Soas University of London is about to be extended to even more students via an innovative scheme that will bring greater choice to higher education.
Starting this September, Adam Habib, the director of Soas, has set up partnerships between Soas, which focuses on the study of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and a handful of universities in the global south to offer joint PhDs. These will use a mixture of online, blended or face-to-face teaching so that students can remain in their countries of residence but benefit from Soas teaching.
Soas, which is based in the heart of London, attracts students from more than 133 countries worldwide, all drawn by the institution’s commitment to understanding global problems from the viewpoint of countries in the majoritarian world: where the majority of the global population live, such as India, China, Pakistan and Nigeria.
Habib is proud that his students can use the university’s longstanding expertise in Africa, Asia and the Middle East to help shape current thinking about the economic, political, religious, cultural and security issues of our time.
“All of our challenges at this historical moment are transnational,” says Habib, who left his post as vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, to join Soas in 2021. “Think about climate change. Think about pandemics. Think about inequality. Think about social and political polarisation and the ethics of modern existence. Think about the role of AI and its intrusion into modern society. All of these are transnational challenges. To resolve them, you need knowledge systems to talk to each other.”
The partnerships would help to strengthen institutions in areas such as the African continent or countries such as India, rather than bringing all the best brains to London or Oxford or Cambridge to study for a few years, but then never to return to their countries of origin. “They fall in love, they have relationships, they have children, then the possibility of them going back is zero. In a sense, what you are doing is accelerating the brain drain,” he says.
Take Nidhi Bhatia, from Kolkata, India, who is studying for a master’s in international politics, and chose Soas so she was exposed to a global perspective. “Unfortunately, universities in India teach topics such as politics in a very western/Eurocentric manner. The legacy of the colonial experience is still very prevalent in education even at the higher levels in the country.”
Habib hopes the partnerships, which he emphasises should be equitable, may prompt students like Bhatia to think twice before moving to London to study as they will have access to alternative viewpoints in their home countries.
Students taking the new PhD will be awarded a joint degree for a fraction of the cost of studying in London. Overseas students such as Bhatia pay as much as £25,635 for a one-year postgraduate degree. Yet Habib says the cost to Soas is £4,500.
“When you use staff [from our partner university] and our staff to teach jointly, the cost structure falls from £4,500 to £3,000 a year. We put a markup on it of 20% so we are charging a fee of £3,800 a year. We are sharing the surplus,” he adds.
The first global partnership is with his former university, Wits, and will offer a PhD in applied development economics. “The thematic focus is the way in which climate change, financialisation and the pressures of our post-pandemic era impact on African people’s wellbeing and their abilities to manage daily existence,” says Habib. He is talking to two universities in Delhi, India – the National Law University and Shiv Nadar University – about the next partnerships, which would offer courses in environmental law and international sociology. The plan is for four or five to follow over the next five years, creating a new business model for higher education in the process.
He says: “We also want to think through how we address climate change in island states. So, for example, can we work with the University of Mauritius? Can we create programmes to train people in how you manage climate mitigation in island states? This would bring their knowledge systems and our knowledge systems into conversation. If you can do that, you can reach bigger cohorts of people because only rich people can afford to come to London, given the cost structures.”
He adds: “There are very few equitable partnerships across the north-south divide, not because of malevolence, but because it’s really difficult to create equitable partnerships in an unequal world. We are trying to act against structural inequalities. But we can’t address the macro challenges of our times from the perspective of a single knowledge system or from the perspective of a single country. The best way to do that is through a series of transnational partnerships.”
He calls his approach to reimagining how Soas will operate “radically pragmatic”, adding: “radical because we are still committed to social justice, we are still committed to making this place a better world, we are still committed to being a positive disruptor in the British higher education system, but pragmatic by recognising we don’t live in the world we wish existed but we live in the world that does exist.”
Find out about Soas and the opportunities offered by its global equitable partnerships
