An interview with Professor Gretchen Kalonji, director of international strategy development at the University of California's Office of the President.

What is the objective of these international partnerships?

The overarching objective is to increase the research and educational capacity of the UC by making more effective, more coherent strategic partnerships in the international domain. Each of our campuses already has a vibrant set of international collaborations underway. But we feel that if we can act more effectively as one UC, we can be more powerful on the world stage – and of course as we increase our research and educational capacity, we in turn increase our capacity to serve the people of the State of California.

What kind of foundation are we building on?

The UC as a system has the greatest range of international collaborations of any institution in the United States – probably any institution in the world, given our unique scope and scale. We have ongoing collaborations essentially in any discipline you can imagine, with multiple partners all around the world. That’s a huge strength. We also have a huge strength in the nature of California society. California is one of the most dynamic innovation ecosystems on the planet, and that makes partner universities and governments around the world eager to work with California.

The demographics of California society represent another huge strategic advantage. We’re a very multinational society, and the UC of course itself is hugely multinational in terms of our student body, our faculty body. One of the statistics that blows people away is that more than 50 percent of our undergraduates have one parent born outside the U.S., and 25 percent of our California students were themselves born outside the U.S. We also have in place a very large study abroad program, which has institutional presence in about 35 countries around the world, so that’s another strength on which we can build.

Some weaknesses include the fact that up until now we haven’t done such an effective job at integrating our international research collaborations with our international education collaborations. The international education approaches are largely classroom-bound, and it’s a goal to increasingly provide our students opportunity to engage in international research in more project-based collaborations.

Another key approach is to work on a multi-campus basis on these international alliances. To date most of the international research is individual faculty member X at campus Y working with another faculty member at another institution – which is great, and we need to continue that and let a thousand flowers bloom and get any structural barriers out of the way. Yet if we’re to effectively address large-scale interdisciplinary problems facing both California and partner regions, it really behooves us to bring together more interdisciplinary teams of faculty and to try and draw from the strengths of various campuses.

We also want to work with multiple sectors in society, both in California and in partner regions – state and local government, industry, civil society – to make sure that the results of these international research collaborations can actually be implemented in real products and service that improve the quality of life both in California and in the partner regions.

How did we pick the countries where we’re establishing these relationships?

Canada and Mexico obviously are our neighbors, and we have incredible ties with them, both economically and culturally, in terms of flows of people, in terms of trade. We have the opportunity with them to forge a North American alliance for competitiveness.

India and China are emerging global giants, as everyone knows. We also are fortunate in California to have very strong links in terms of the demographics of our communities. California is the most “Chinese” in its heritage of any state in the United States, and our economic ties with China are huge. Within the UC we’re fortunate to have very large communities of Chinese origin that have enriched our academic programs – and the same is true of India. The Indian diaspora in California is an incredibly important part of the success story of California in recent decades.

Even if we weren’t California, with our competitive advantages, China and India would have to be high priorities for any region of the United States. If you look at the existing portfolio of research interactions internationally, they’re some of our strongest partners.

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