| Abstract: |
Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.2.2023 Strengthening the Liberal Arts
Along the Pacific Rim: The Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges (PALAC)
April 2023 * Bryan Edward Penprase Soka University of America Thomas Schneider
Association of Pacific Rim Universities Copyright 2023 Bryan E. Penprase and
Thomas Schneider, all rights reserved. ABSTRACT While international alliances
among research universities are relatively well established, the challenges
for the small liberal arts college to execute a meaningful global
collaboration can be much more difficult, due both to the much smaller size of
the institution, its more limited resources, and its smaller and more intimate
culture centered on undergraduate teaching and learning. A new alliance of
liberal arts colleges known as the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges
(PALAC) was established in 2021 with the purpose to better articulate the
global components of liberal arts education, and to collaborate on key
projects that will build collective capacity for student-centered liberal arts
education that engages with the world’s most pressing problems. PALAC contains
nine of the best liberal arts institutions from across the Pacific Region,
including institutions in China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Canada, and the United
States. This essay describes the origins, motivations, and context of the
creation of PALAC, its member institutions, and some of the initial projects
planned by the new organization, and goals for global impact for PALAC.
Keywords: Liberal Arts, Global Higher Education, Asian Higher Education A wide
variety of consortial arrangements advance collective action among
universities and colleges and have been a mainstay of the higher education
world for many decades. Many consortia among colleges and universities are
based on proximity, to enable easier exchanges and meetings among faculty and
students. Examples include the Ivy League, the Claremont Colleges, the
Associated Colleges of the Midwest, the Great Lakes Colleges Association
(GLCA), the Northwest 6. These regional consortia enable deep engagement among
the membership, and often include arrangements for athletics competitions,
faculty exchanges, and joint curriculum development projects. In recent
decades, more expansive geographic ranges have been explored for consortia of
research universities to span the globe. These include, among others, the
Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), the Universitas 21 consortium,
and the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). These larger
research universities have the capacity and funding levels to engage across
the globe and to develop a stronger collective capacity to conduct high impact
research on global challenges, and to share ideas on instructional approaches
that are consistent with the missions of these universities. While
international alliances among research universities are relatively well
established, the challenges for the small liberal arts college to execute a
meaningful global collaboration can be much more difficult, due both to the
much smaller size of the institution, its more limited resources, and its
smaller and more intimate culture centered on undergraduate teaching and
learning. Notable US consortia of liberal arts institutions include the
National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), which
includes over 1000 private colleges and universities, and the Annapolis Group
of Liberal Arts Colleges, which includes 180 of the leading private liberal
arts Colleges, the American Association of Universities and Colleges (AAC&U).
These domestic US alliances are often too large to collaborate deeply in
exchanges of students or faculty, but can provide collective advocacy, and
serve to represent the interests of the broad number of institutions in their
membership that share similar institutional missions. Examples can include
AAC&U advocating for and advancing liberal arts within the US, and the
Annapolis Group providing annual meetings for Presidents and Deans to discuss
administrative strategies and leadership in the liberal arts. While these
domestic consortia can discuss particular topics of interest for US liberal
arts institutions, more global perspectives are generally absent from their
membership and from their programs. Consortia can be divided into different
categories, based on their functions. Glazer-Raymo (2002) reviewed the nature
of the 125 member consortia in the US, as identified by the Association for
Consortium Leadership. These consortia vary in size from 3 to 100
institutions, and most can be grouped into categories such as
technology-planning consortia (cooperating on IT issues and distance
learning), business and industry-linked consortia (focused on workforce
training and economic development), research and academic library consortia
(gaining economies of scale in sharing electronic collections and interlibrary
loans), and scientific research and development consortia (sharing resources
to reduce the costs associated with research). Some of the scholarly
literature on consortia and alliances have stressed some of the fundamental
principles needed for success in a consortium. Baus (1988) notes that the
complex relationships among numerous disparate institutions calls for a
“strictly maintained attitude of neutrality” in advancing the enlightened
self-interest of institutions, while maintaining the limits of each
institution as it works toward solving a problem with other institutions. Neal
(1988) describes how consultations on teaching approaches and curriculum can
be a particularly effective form of institutional cooperation, particularly in
helping in promote best practices among faculty and recognizing excellence.
Fuller (1988) describes some of the early experience within the Great Lakes
Colleges Association (GLCA), founded in 1961 to advance the interests of
liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. The GLCA worked together to promote
off-campus study programs, by leveraging individual institutional connections
to various international partners, and sharing these connections to provide a
sustainable set of off-campus program abroad. The GLCA was also able to
pioneer programs in women’s studies, and work collectively to solve problems
for faculty development and the needs of untenured faculty within their group
of institutions. A longitudinal study of Educational Consortia (Keim 1999)
provides a history of the major consortia and alliances over the 20th century
and describes how these consortia evolved through phases of development
according to a series of stages as described by Grupe (1975). These phases
included a first phase of exploration, which can be initiated by an
individual, a second phase of planning, which ideally involves a committee of
presidents and other representatives to assure the correct level of
institutional support, and then a third stage of implementation. This final
phase can include the development of an administrative structure, with a
formal activation of programs as administered by an executive director. Keim
(1999) also provides a thorough review of taxonomy of consortia among both US
and international institutions. From a study of 134 consortia located in the
US, Canada, Costa Rica, Australia and other countries, and noted the increase
in size of consortia from 1983 to 1996 by number of members, with an overall
decline in the number of consortia, which included 64 percent that were
founded in the period from 1961 to 1980. The most common governance structure
for these consortia was a Board of Directors (40%), with the most common
funding mechanism being a mix of dues and grants. Tadaki and Tremewan (2013)
have documented how consortia can serve as a testing ground for new ideas
among multiple institutions, and thereby provide a “transformative space” for
educational change. The consortium model can be especially necessary in
bringing together international partnerships and the consortium has been a
place where new practices of global collaboration can be tested and validated.
In this way, the international consortium can also serve to mitigate the
divergence and adverse consequences of globalization, by balancing the diverse
cultural, political, economic and academic interests among the partners by
providing new spaces and venues for cultivating the policies, leadership
practices and economic ties that make international cooperation possible.
International alliances and associations among US universities and
international partners also exist, and includes such consortia as the
Association of American Universities (AAU), which brings together 61
institutions in the US and Canada, the Association of Pacific Rim Universities
(APRU), which includes 60 universities, representing 19 economies of the
Pacific Rim, the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), which
represents 11 top-ranked research universities in nine countries, and the
Universitas 21 organization (U21), which brings together 24 research intensive
universities across the world. Additional consortia include the International
Association of Universities (IAU), a UNESCO based open membership organization
that includes nearly 600 member institutions, and the Worldwide University
Network (WUN), bringing together 24 institutions in 6 continents for
collaboration in research. International consortia of liberal arts colleges
are much rarer, for the reasons mentioned above, and yet do exist. Examples
include a grouping of Asian liberal arts institutions known as the Alliance of
Asian Liberal Arts Universities (AALAU), formed by Lingnan University in Hong
Kong in 2017, which includes 28 institutions from Hong Kong, Mainland China,
Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and India, and the Global Liberal Arts Alliance
(GLAA), which includes 11 US liberal Arts Colleges from midwestern states,
paired with 17 international liberal arts colleges from a disparate list of
countries that include Ecuador, Hong Kong, Ivory Coast, Japan, Switzerland,
Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Ghana, France, Nigeria, Egypt,
Bulgaria and Greece. While both of these two alliances have pioneered
transnational collaboration within liberal arts colleges, the two alliances
are either distributed across the globe or concentrated in Asia, leaving an
opening for a new alliance which can focus on engaging the wide range of
nations and economies in the Pacific Region. In Spring 2020, Bryan Penprase
from Soka University of America, and Thomas Schneider from the University of
British Columbia, discussed the idea of new consortium after dozens of zoom
conversations with leaders of liberal arts institutions across the Pacific
Basin. From these conversations, it became clear that there was a need for a
consortium of liberal arts institutions from across the Pacific Basin to focus
on regional research projects and collectively create online and in-person
programs and events, including fieldwork and student projects, shared
instruction, and joint programs. The need for such a consortium was also clear
since many of the new liberal arts institutions in Asia were founded in the
past decade, and would benefit from a consortium that provides them with the
expertise and leverage that could be provided by well-established US
institutions. As we described in our “concept paper” which was circulated to
the Presidents of the PALAC institutions, the proliferation of the liberal
arts college within Asia provided an opportunity for renewal and dialog of
liberal arts globally. The liberal arts college, initially developed in the
US, has been widely adopted across the world, particularly since 2000 in Asian
countries, as the liberal arts college is seen to provide an innovative,
student-centered, interdisciplinary higher education that is a high-quality
alternative to large research universities. Many of these new Asian liberal
arts institutions are moving from the phase of institution-building to a
second phase in their history where collaborating with international partners
and finding their place on the global stage becomes a priority, providing an
additional impetus for the new PALAC alliance. This new consortium could also
engage in collaborative research on public policy and provide a shared
commitment to advancing more global perspectives in liberal arts teaching and
research in the Pacific region. The consortium can fill a gap in the
international higher education landscape by creating a liberal arts analog
similar in geographical scope to the APRU, but instead focused on
collaborative research and teaching in the liberal arts context. As mentioned
earlier, many liberal arts consortia have worked together to establish
study-away sites, and to focus in the US context on issues related to liberal
arts pedagogy. However, a gap exists in exploring how the liberal arts model
translates in different cultural contexts, and how to fine tune the American
approaches to be true to liberal arts in China, Hong Kong and other Asian
cultures. This topic has been the subject of many international conferences in
recent years, and a review of global liberal arts approaches in emerging new
liberal arts programs in China, Japan, Singapore and India was presented as
part of the conference at Beijing University in January 2020 (Penprase, 2021).
The roots of liberal arts in the Western European culture are exemplified by
the medieval quadrivium and trivium, and in the Chinese culture are
exemplified by the Confucian tradition of developing “virtue” through the
concept of the Great Learning or daxue. These different roots contribute to
distinctly Asian and Western approaches to modern liberal arts, and in many
cases, these new institutions in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore blend
Asian and Western elements of liberal arts curriculum and pedagogy in new
ways. These new models of liberal arts are being developed at many of the
institutions within PALAC, and the alliance has the potential to collectively
study and share the advances in liberal arts within the PALAC institutions.
With this motivation in mind, the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts (PALAC) was
established in 2021. This essay further describes the goals, details of the
establishment of PALAC, some of the initial projects planned by PALAC, and
longer-term goals for global impact. THE GOALS OF PALAC PALAC includes nine
top liberal arts institutions from China, Hong Kong, the US, Canada, and
Vietnam, as listed in Appendix I. Appendix I also includes the founding date
of each institution and the number of students enrolled. The median size of
the PALAC institutions is 1650 students, and the median founding date for
PALAC institutions is 2001. These characteristics give the PALAC organizations
a tendency toward innovation, as many are new “startup” institutions, and
institutional cultures built around a tight-knit community made possible by
the small size. PALAC members are now collectively developing new innovative
educational environments and opportunities for collaborative education and
research among their faculty and students. The group of colleges share a
commitment to comprehensive interdisciplinary training, experiential learning,
a focus on creativity and critical thinking, seminar-style instruction,
undergraduate research experiences, individual development and personal
mentoring, and an emphasis on global citizenship. As an example, Soka
University of America centers its institutional mission on building global
citizenship and is organized within broad areas of inquiry instead of by
departments. Another example is the Fulbright University Vietnam YSELI
Academy, which provides leadership training for future leaders across
Southeast Asia, which is designed to “strengthen ties between the United
States and Southeast Asia and nurture an ASEAN community” (Fulbright
University Vietnam 2023). The University of Puget Sound has been leading
innovation in engagement with Asia among liberal arts colleges since 1970,
with its PacRim program, which provides six months of immersion in Asia that
integrates experiential learning and internships (University of Puget Sound
2023). Pomona College is launching its new Global Pomona program, which
mirrors the mission of PALAC as it seeks to respond to how “the world is ever
more interconnected in confronting vast problems and pursuing the search for
solutions” which makes liberal arts education “essential” since it is
“creative, holistic and rigorous” and it prepares students “to lead the way in
an ever-changing world” (Pomona College 2015b). The goal of PALAC is to share
innovations from its individual member institutions, while building a larger
collective intellectual capacity and impact that the individual institutions
would not be able to achieve on their own. The new PALAC Alliance is designed
to be small and nimble to enable significant progress on collaborative
projects with demonstrable added value for the member institutions. The group
of institutions together can significantly advance the research and education
aligned with the UN SDG’s and to promote global citizenship and create
cultural bridges across the Pacific region. As one example, the Hong Kong
Baptist University in Hong Kong has developed a Global Virtual Hackathon to
advance the UN SDGs in 2021, entitled “A Sustainable New Normal” (HKBU 2021).
The HBKU hackathon provided the blueprint for a possible new PALAC hackathon
focused on global climate change. Another example is the DKU iGEM team, which
is an interdisciplinary effort to use genetically engineered microbes to help
fight antibiotic resistant pathogens, which advances the UN SDGs, 3, 9, and 17
(DKU 2023). It is hoped that with PALAC, additional teams can be developed to
further advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals. A further example is the
new Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) fund at NYU Shanghai
to help promote global sustainability in research and education as well as the
broader impacts of these activities (NYU Shanghai 2022). Initial Projects
Initial conversations and follow-up discussions with academic leaders showed a
significant interest to collaborate in four areas. By selecting initial
projects that are of mutual interest among many of the institutions, it is
hoped that 10-20% of the faculty of the individual colleges may be committed
to active involvement in these initiatives. Some of the initiatives that
appeared suitable for PALAC include the following: Experiential field schools,
similar to EnviroLabs Asia (Claremont Mckenna College 2019) or the Global
Clinic program (Harvey Mudd College 2023) at the Claremont Colleges, or shared
research programs for students similar to the Keck Geology Consortium, which
brings together an extensive group of liberal arts colleges fostering student
and faculty research during summers. Such field schools could replace or
complement traditional student exchange and operate outside of the usual
academic semester calendars, avoiding scheduling difficulties. Additional
“study institutes” in summer or winter break periods could rotate among the
institutions. Online collaborative research among the institutions could
operate in parallel to the regular academic year offerings. In the first years
of the program, groups of institutions could initiate a series of online study
institutes that would bring together faculty and students in discussion of
common challenges facing their home countries and the Pacific Region, and ways
to research solutions toward implementing the UN Sustainable Development
Goals. Shared online courses and faculty development programs. The consortium
could share best practices in course design, curriculum development and
pedagogy, comparable to the US-based Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital
Innovation, which gathers ten liberal Arts Colleges together for coordinated
development of online learning capacity. Discipline-specific and
pedagogy-specific resources at individual colleges tend to be limited by the
small faculty; shared instruction can enhance the curricula for institutions
through shared development of online courses in languages, skill-building
summer courses for students in mathematics and writing, select advanced and
highly specialized courses not available at many campuses, and online tutoring
and programs in languages and other subjects. The Alliance can also provide a
platform for frequent discussions among faculty and students within member
institutions and can provide a mechanism for promoting intercultural exchanges
and developing a stronger sense of global citizenship among students.
Credit-bearing programs during summer or other off-calendar periods could be
offered to students within the Alliance to leverage the specific strengths of
member institutions or share opportunities to experience these diverse
geographic and cultural environments represented within the Alliance. Short
winter-break or summer courses could be developed on topics such as
sustainable cities, management of water and air resources, entrepreneurship,
global climate change, and the needs of marginalized communities within the
region. After some time, such credit-bearing programs could be applied toward
a joint degree program in Ocean Stewardship or Pacific Studies, or other
subjects not offered at individual institutions. Promoting a liberal arts
education across the Pacific Basin, advising on issues of public policy from a
liberal arts perspective, and enhancing the cultural dialogue among the
cultures and countries within the Pacific Basin. A strategic collaboration
with the APRU would make these engagements more effective and powerful.
Examples of existing research institutes within institutions include the
Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College (Pomona College 2015a) and the
Pacific Basin Research Center at Soka University of America (Soka University
of America 2023). INITIAL YEAR IMPLEMENTATION From the initial planning
discussions with academic leaders, an administrative structure was developed
which included Thomas Schneider as founding Executive Director and Bryan
Penprase as founding Academic Director. This structure was based loosely on
the initial arrangements of the APRU, which begin in 1997, and was governed by
a rotating secretariat, who was one of the APRU university presidents. In
APRU, the secretariat then sponsored the costs of staffing and operations from
the President’s office and handed off these responsibilities to other APRU
presidents. By 2007, an international APRU secretariat was set up, and was
located in Singapore and is now based in Hong Kong. Discussions with the APRU
founding COO suggested adopting a simple administrative structure for PALAC at
beginning to reduce bureaucracy. A plan to rotate the meetings of PALAC among
the member institutions was also advised to share the costs and administrative
burden (Cheng 2021). Like APRU, the management of PALAC was envisioned to
rotate through each of the PALAC institutions for a two-year term, with
additional institutions taking the lead role as Academic Director, and hosting
a meeting for the PALAC alliance. Other administrative tasks for PALAC in the
first years were placed within the lead institution, which in the first years
was set at Soka University of America (SUA). The costs of the PALAC
administration were borne by the lead institution, SUA, which provided
administrative support, IT support for the website development and funding for
the in-person meeting. To formalize membership in PALAC, the member
institutions were given a prospectus “concept paper” that described the goals
of PALAC, and each signed a Statement of Founding that provided a description
of the administrative structure of PALAC, the host institution, and other
details. Each of the 9 institutions then returned the signed Statement of
Founding with the signature of the President or Chief Academic officer to
authorize PALAC to represent the alliance officially. These initial costs were
borne by Soka University of America in the launch year, but with a longer-term
goal toward shifting toward a more traditional consortial arrangement
supported by either external funding from a grant, or from dues collected by
member institutions. To publicize PALAC, Penprase and Schneider wrote an
article in Times Higher Education featuring PALAC in September of 2021. The
article made the case that liberal arts in Asia will benefit from peer support
form a consortium such as PALAC, and provided some of the initial goals for
PALAC (Penprase and Schneider 2021). A PALAC website was developed, using a
domain and hosting outside of any of the PALAC institutions (to assure
continuity with changes in leadership) with the domain name of
pacificalliance.org, with the costs for the web server borne by the HBKU/UIC.
To help increase awareness of PALAC, Penprase gave a presentation on PALAC at
the Times Higher Education Liberal Arts Forum on June 23, 2022 (Times Higher
Education 2022), and a LinkedIn page was created to begin posting social media
articles about liberal arts in Asia in mid-2022. During academic year
2021-2022, discussions via zoom continued to refine the initial project
selection for PALAC, and to develop specific working groups for implementation
in the academic year of 2022-2023. The first in-person PALAC meeting was held
at Soka University of America on June 3-4, 2022, and featured John Sexton,
President Emeritus of New York University, who gave a plenary talk entitled “A
Twenty-First Century Case for a Liberal Arts Institution.” Sexton also was
present on both days of the meeting to provide advice and suggestions for the
new alliance. Travel funding from SUA was provided to two of the
representatives to offset their costs for attending, as well as funding for
John Sexton’s appearance. The meeting included 20 in-person attendees
representing six of the nine PALAC institutions, from Vietnam, China, Canada,
and the USA, with about 20 additional attendees online, as the meeting was
conducted in “hybrid” mode. The entire set of presentations, representing all
the nine PALAC institutions are all available on the PALAC website (Soka
University of America 2022). SECOND YEAR PROJECTS AND IMPLEMENTATION Based on
the discussions from the first in-person PALAC meeting, several top priorities
were identified. Administrative governance and other procedures were
discussed, and it was recognized that a more formal mission statement,
governance documents and financial support mechanism would be needed to
sustain PALAC in the coming years. These steps are ongoing, as are plans for
seeking external funding to support the activities of PALAC. The goal in these
discussions was to find priorities for PALAC that were shared from as many of
the partner institutions as possible, to assure widespread participation
across the alliance. To also share the responsibilities for managing the
alliance, PALAC developed a plan to rotate the governance of PALAC on a
semi-annual basis, and to also rotate the venue for a PALAC meeting among the
member institutions. The specific projects which appeared most feasible in the
second year, centered around two main areas – collaborative instruction and
research on global climate change and its impacts on marginalized communities,
and faculty exchanges. To provide a bit more information on these two topics,
some specific ideas which will be implemented in the coming year are outlined
below. Collaborative instruction on global climate change As many of the
institutions within PALAC have expertise on the topic of global climate
change, and since the Pacific Region is both impacted by global climate
change, as well as a source of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases
generated by the dynamic economies of Asia and North America, the possibility
of a global engagement between China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the USA on
global climate change seemed an ideal focus for PALAC. To begin
implementation, SUA will begin to develop a new website featuring shared
instructional materials, new imagery from NASA on global climate change, and
articles on global climate change. This project is planned to develop into the
Pacific Alliance Project and a new online textbook known as the Pacific
Alliance College Press, with an editorial board that includes members from
PALAC institutions. To begin the project, SUA faculty members George Busenberg
and Robert Hamersley will work with the SUA group to gather materials for the
online resource and aided by visiting faculty member Hung Phan (formerly from
Fulbright University Vietnam), a series of online discussions on the topic
will be conducted with students and faculty at SUA and other PALAC
institutions in Vietnam and China. Additional projects that are hoped to be
developed in the coming year include: Hackathon bringing students together
across PALAC to work on topics of mutual interest, perhaps related to the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goals.Global dialogs among students across PALAC
focused on pressing issues, such as global climate change.Collaborative Online
International Learning (COIL) courses for exchange (could include both
synchronous and asynchronous coordinated courses).Collaborative offerings for
summer courses among PALAC institutions (could be a mix of in-person and
virtual experiences). Faculty Exchange To begin implementing faculty
exchanges, openings at the PALAC campuses for visiting instructors are being
shared, with the hope that faculty members on sabbatical or visiting the other
campus can offer a course or a lecture to begin a series of exchanges. Since
many of the PALAC institutions are quite new, having the mix of experienced
and new faculty meeting and sharing ideas will be a great avenue for faculty
development. Faculty opportunities at Fulbright University Vietnam and Duke
Kunshan University are already being shared within PALAC, and procedures for
posting opportunities and arranging for housing and payment for the visiting
faculty are being worked out. In the coming year it is hoped that PALAC can
create many opportunities for faculty exchange that would include: Faculty
exchanges for short-term teaching and for sabbaticalCoordinated efforts within
PALAC administration for sharing experiences and solutionsStudent exchange
programs for experiential learning in Jan. term and short immersions as well
as semesters FUTURE DIRECTIONS After the initial years of founding, it is
hoped that the PALAC alliance can serve a vital role in articulating how
liberal arts education translates into the different cultures and countries in
the Pacific Region. Already the emergence of new liberal arts institutions in
China, Singapore, Japan and India have redefined the nature of liberal arts in
exciting ways that have integrated cultural elements from each country into
the canon of texts that are read, and the priorities of the institution that
reflect the needs of the local cultures and economies of Asia. These efforts
also are shaping the ways that new technologies such as AI and biotechnology
in the exponentially changing economies of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”
and liberal arts approaches are vital in making more ethical and sustainable
development of these technologies in the Asia-Pacific Region (Penprase, 2011).
Understanding the value and cultural rooting of liberal arts institutions in a
diverse mix of countries will help clarify the essential nature of liberal
arts education in liberating the talents and creative capacities of students
and faculty. In addition to the educational projects mentioned above, the
larger collective body of expertise within PALAC should enable something like
a “meta-university” that has larger critical mass in several areas. With the
advances of online and remote learning, solidified by the COVID-19 pandemic,
the ability to easily connect communities and students in meaningful ways has
become technologically easier than ever. By developing avenues for
collaboration in instruction and communication, as well as an online
infrastructure to enable fast and frequent communication between PALAC
students and faculty, new research and new insights will emerge that would
have been impossible on the campuses in isolation. The global PALAC
“meta-university” in some ways mirrors Clark Kerr’s notions of the
multiversity (Kerr 2001). Kerr’s 1961 work, The Uses of the University,
described the multiversity as one that “draws on many strands of history” to
create interlocking communities centered on the diverse intellectual cultures
proliferating in the increasingly specialized research universities of the
20th century. Kerr’s multiversity describes the competing fractionalization
within individual research universities, which can be a source of chaos and
competing interests that often are irreconcilable. A closer description of the
potential PALAC “meta-university” was provided by John Sexton, who in building
the NYU global portal campuses in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi described how global
universities can become “incubators for a secular ecumenism” by building “a
community of interlocking communities” (Sexton 2020). It is hoped that the
intense residential communities within the PALAC campuses can work together to
create this PALAC meta-university, based on its “community of interlocking
communities.” To accelerate the process of development of this collective
research capacity, PALAC will also explore development of new types of online
infrastructure for sharing procedures for managing research. These types of
infrastructure could include many kinds of resources, both administrative and
academic. An online academic commons for PALAC will facilitate and accelerate
this development, and minimize barriers for productive research collaboration
among our members. As outlined by Pomona College President Gabrielle Starr,
some of the steps that might be particularly helpful in moving toward
collective research capacity in PALAC would include working out the details
for a unified and shared understanding of the following: IRB
alignment/facilitationConsideration of export controlsShared understanding of
peer review standards, perhaps aligned with the Hong Kong principles of the
World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRIF 2022; Wager and Kleinert 2013)
It may also be possible to share significant research resources among PALAC
institutions, due to the increasingly distributed and online nature of much of
today’s scientific research. Examples of specific research infrastructure that
could be shared among PALAC institutions includes: Shared resources for high
performance computing Shared resources for instrumentation/analysis DNA
sequencing Spectrometry Others Online instrumentation with remote operation,
such as Remotely operated telescopes Oceanographic research instruments
Weather and pollution monitoring stations With the collective resources made
possible by PALAC, it will be possible for the group of liberal arts colleges
to advance both in teaching and research. Through the shared academic commons,
it will also be possible to have shared case studies of environmental changes
in our regions with impacts on marginalized communities, and a mechanism for
publishing research with peer review among the PALAC institutions. With this
collective capacity the institutions within PALAC should be able to advance
and achieve far more than they could individually and create impact on global
research and education far greater than would be typical for institutions of
their small size. Ongoing discussions are also underway to add member
institutions in key regions of the Asia-Pacific (Japan, Malaysia, Australia,
etc.) to allow PALAC to fully implement its initiatives and to take advantage
of the different teaching schedules within the Northern and Southern
hemispheres. An additional possible emphasis for PALAC will be to help
increase the capacity of each institution for more effective academic
administration, perhaps involving visits or exchanges among administrators.
Together these steps will help PALAC provide both increased advocacy for the
liberal arts across the Pacific, and more support towards the fledgling
institutions as they develop beyond their “launch” in to mature and
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2022. https://wcrif.org/guidance/hong-kong-principles. Appendix I: Listing of
PALAC institutions (more information available at
https://pacificalliance.org/) Location University or College Year of Founding
Undergraduate Enrollment website Canada Quest University Canada 2007 600
https://questu.ca/ China NYU-Shanghai 2012 2000 https://shanghai.nyu.edu/ Duke
Kunshan University 2013 1000 https://dukekunshan.edu.cn/ Hong Kong Hong Kong
Baptist University 1956 10, 000 https://uic.edu.cn/en/ HKBU United
International College 2005 6000 https://uic.edu.cn/en/ USA Soka University of
America 2001 540 https://www.soka.edu/ Pomona College 1887 1650
https://www.pomona.edu/ University of Puget Sound 1888 2650
https://www.pugetsound.edu/ Vietnam Fulbright University Vietnam 2016 500
https://fulbright.edu.vn/ * Bryan Penprase, Vice President of External
Academic Relations at Soka University of America, is the current and founding
Academic Director of PALAC, while Thomas Schneider is the current Chief
Executive of the APRU. We are grateful to the support of Soka University of
America for providing the funds needed to launch the PALAC alliance. |