Universities ‘need good mentors, not just top researchers’

Universities looking to boost their innovative output need to give their students greater individual guidance and take a more holistic approach to assessing their potential, renowned mathematician Tony Chan has advised his colleagues.

Professor Chan has served as president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia since 2018, after nearly a decade leading the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Addressing Times Higher Education’s World Academic Summit, Professor Chan described a critical lesson from the Hong Kong institution involving Frank Wang, the founder of DJI, now the world’s dominant producer of consumer drones with $4 billion (£3.6 billion) in annual sales.

Mr Wang has acknowledged that he was a subpar student. He chose the Hong Kong campus after being rejected by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was later described by his robotics professor, Li Zexiang, as not necessarily one of his smartest students.

But Professor Li saw enough in Mr Wang – even after he skipped classes to finish his senior group project, and still failed to build the helicopter flight-control system he was pursuing – and invited him into a graduate programme.

That mentoring relationship has endured more than 15 years later, Professor Chan told the THE summit, with Professor Li eventually becoming a key adviser and leading stockholder at DJI. The story also contains value for higher education, Professor Chan said, because it should teach universities to think beyond traditional classroom relationships to find potential avenues for innovative breakthroughs.

The bottom line, Professor Chan said, was that as important as it was for research universities to invest in top faculty, they also should prioritise strong mentors. “All universities need to have a few of those,” he said.

Professor Chan was joined at the conference by Tan Eng Chye, president of the National University of Singapore, who described a more structural pursuit of collaboration-driven innovation.

NUS this year merged its Faculty of Engineering and its School of Design and Environment to form a unified College of Design and Engineering. Professor Tan said the specific case matched schools with some overlapping expertise. But more fundamentally, he told the THE conference at New York University, the move reflected his recognition that newer universities should avoid departments altogether, finding they create more structural barriers than benefits.

“The departments, because they are there,” he said, “they protect their own turf.”

The next big challenge in boosting innovation at NUS, Professor Tan said, involved persuading faculty to regularly teach with an interdisciplinary perspective. For that, he said, strategies include hiring experts from industry and relying on younger professors, who are more willing to change. “It’s work in progress,” he said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com