Britain's premier powerhouse of science and technology, Imperial College London, is looking at setting up a campus abroad, probably in the Persian Gulf, because of the region's proximity to students from India and China, and its fabulous wealth, which would mean fantastic facilities for undergraduates and researchers.
The new rector of Imperial, Sir Roy Anderson, who is an eminent epidemiologist and was chief scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defence, is determined to put the institution on the international map.
His predecessor, Sir Richard Sykes, had wanted to do that as well. When I interviewed Sykes in 2001 he said that Imperial was highly rated among the cognoscenti but was not so well known in the wider world. "If you went out to Kensington High Street and stopped six people and asked 'do you know anything about Imperial College?', they probably wouldn't."
Anderson is now picking up and running with this challenge. He says that British universities have extensive experience of operating abroad but no big player – none of the British universities in the world's top 10 – have yet established a campus overseas. Nottingham University is the highest-ranking British university to have set up campuses abroad, in both China and Malaysia, but none of the top four UK universities in the Times Higher Education international league table – Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial or UCL – has done so.
The issue is fraught with problems. The start-up costs of an overseas campus can be very high. Moreover, staff are often unwilling to travel to the other side of the world and there can be political problems, as happened with Warwick University's attempt to set up a campus in Singapore, which became a victim of academics' queasiness about freedom of speech in the city state.
Imperial is considering Abu Dhabi and Qatar as possible places to set up shop. And Anderson is hopeful that any overseas venture, particularly in the Gulf, would produce a surplus to be reinvested in the Kensington campus.
"Abu Dhabi has huge oil reserves and Qatar has gas," he says. "They both have sovereign wealth funds. The emir in one and the king in the other have said they want to use these funds for health, education and to leave an Arab legacy of contributing to technologies that can find alternatives to oil and gas when they have been used up.
"The idea of a new campus is a 50-year project, not a five-year one."
Imperial's new rector is aware that the university would have to keep control of student admissions to ensure quality. A leading university such as Imperial cannot afford to see a dilution in its brand.
"We would have to control the entry of students," says Anderson. "We would have to take a percentage of students from the Gulf, but the good thing is that the women are interested in studying science, engineering and medicine."
He believes high quality scientists and researchers would be attracted to any place that that had the best facilities in the world and that was prepared to pay them very well.
If Imperial were to set up in Qatar, it would concentrate on a single subject such as engineering linked to materials, energy or gas and oil exploration andit would be part of Education City, the ambitious venture to bring the best in higher education to the Gulf.
So far, American universities have dominated this – Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth and Northwestern Universities. Oxford and Cambridge have declined to take part, perhaps because they don't need to worry about getting their names known around the world.
If Imperial were to participate, it would not only improve its name-recognition but it would also be part of a new education hub for the Asian sub-continent, thereby influencing future generations of leaders in that part of the world. It helps that Imperial College is already involved in Qatar's Education City, assisting with the build ing of a centre for robotic surgery with Oxford University, which will train students and surgeons in the region.
Other centres are also in the pipeline in oil exloration, protonomics and genomics. "They're interested in research centres that are internationally competitive and we're interested in having facilities that could be world-leading over a period of time," says Anderson.
In Abu Dhabi too, Imperial has created a research centre, this time in diabetes. But Imperial has its eye on other countries, notably China and India in which to build a possible new campus. It attracts a lot of outstanding Chinese students to Kensington and likes the fact that China puts huge emphasis on science and technology.
"China is very important too for climate change," says Anderson. "They are not a major player now but you would be foolish to say they won't be in 20 years time."
India is planning to create 10 new science and technological universities and is looking for partnerships with British universities. Imperial is talking to institutions in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, and may help to establish a medical school in the sub-continent.Like other chancellors, Anderson is looking to make Imperial more independent of government by engaging in some astute commercial activity.
Recently, Imperial Innovation Group, of which the college owns a 52 per cent stake, was floated on AIM, the London Stock Exchange market for small, growing companies.. Before Christmas, one of the group's spin-out companies, Thiakis, was sold for £100m. "It is that sort of activity that we need to increase our endowment and our independence from government," says Anderson.
At the moment Imperial's endowment is £240m, but the rector is hoping he can increase it.
Nurturing spin-out companies is not only good for Imperial it's also good for the UK economy, says Anderson. Helping Britain to emerge from recession is another reason why he has been trying to persuade the government to create a venture capital fund for top universities. "We have got to restructure British industry," he says firmly.
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