There is nothing new about universities supporting international collaborative efforts—research projects, exchanges of students and faculty, specific short-term partnerships around urgent issues, etc. What then, if anything, is different in the project of “the global university,” one that a growing number of universities in the U.S. are now heralding?

From where I sit, it seems to have three distinctly different aspects in comparison to past collaborations.

One is a modified stance on the part of university leaders, especially university presidents. Even though in some cases not much may be different regarding research practice and academic collaboration, there is a difference in how the university leadership frames such collaboration and recognizes its value. This is quite important and helpful at a time when more and more conditions and processes are becoming global, from epidemics and trade to culture and politics.

Secondly, a potentially foundational difference from past practice should be the making of institutional and technical infrastructures for global academic work. This would take us beyond traditional forms of collaborative research and exchange. What I have in mind here is a multi-sited arrangement producing distributed outcomes and enabling decentralized access. I want to differentiate such a format from familiar individual and institutionally centered collaborations. A new graduate student, a recently hired assistant professor, or a newly recruited senior professor, all of whom may have few contacts at their new institution, can utilize this new set-up if it can aid in their research. This new format would function as a collaborative grid, with “open” access—where open is of course conditioned on some kind of membership, based on expertise. In the natural sciences, my former colleague at the University of Chicago’s Argonne Laboratory, Ian Foster, has developed a digital grid for scientific collaboration, which is one version of such an infrastructure already in use.

Such platforms for active and participative research collaborations among individuals in several universities are likely to be of greater use for some subjects and types of inquiries than others. I can also imagine that the social sciences, where interpretation is critical, would resist this more than some of the natural sciences, even though particular branches of the former, those focused on global conditions, should be doing this.

Thirdly, while part of the project that is a global university is to develop an infrastructure for such multi-sited research efforts, we need to distinguish this infrastructure from the actual research work and its contents. I think of infrastructure as necessary yet indeterminate, or at least sufficiently indeterminate to accommodate not only what we know we need now, but also what we have not yet understood we need to do—the imponderables that arise out of cross-border research and/or research focused on global conditions. This also means taking seriously the knowledge produced elsewhere and incorporating it in our research and interpretations. This seems extremely exciting and very necessary to someone like myself who is interested in global migrations, global finance, and the sites, such as global cities, where we can study the interaction of the national, with all its specificities, and the global, with its standardizing logics.

There is a price to be paid for such a reorganizing of research and interpretive practices. The types of infrastructure it requires can depersonalize collaboration. Participation depends less on who you know than on what you know. It does sound somewhat arid, cold, unfriendly, and generally very unattractive to many who really enjoy the personal aspects of collaboration. But it would make quite a difference in terms of bringing in all kinds of knowledgeable researchers in a given field—many of whom would previously be excluded under older formats centered on who you know or who knows you, a key vector in traditional forms of institutional collaboration. The new types of collaborative grids bring to the fore what sociologists often refer to as the strength of weak ties, which I would extend to the strength of weak networks. We might think of this as the advantages of “open source” collaborations. A growing number of fields of research require these types of open cooperation.

This new structure would raise the heat on those accustomed to being on top of the heap. But in the long run, it would make a real difference in decentralizing the production of knowledge away from those who are now privileged by being in rich countries with geopolitical power. While some of the personal consequences might not be so appetizing to some of us, as the privileged, the pursuit of knowledge in certain fields would be enhanced by the multi-sited sourcing of data sets, place-specific understandings, unfamiliar interpretive traditions, and so on.

This is clearly a greater potential unsettlement of academic institutions and of academic comforts than is signaled by casual use of the term ‘global university,’ uses that often simply signal more international conferences and exchanges. The more foundational sense of global university is serious stuff—seriously unsettling stuff.

Finally, and somewhat of an idiosyncratic observation, I think that a global university is a project, and right now this is a project that is at its beginnings. But it is already revealing a shape. It is not a vertically integrated institution that develops a particular “department” for global affairs. It is an assemblage of particular fields of inquiry that increasingly require a global perspective and multi-sited sources of knowledge, as well as intra- and inter-university networks. I find the concept of assemblages useful for capturing this mix of infrastructures and open formats—it is also one way of capturing an incipient condition. Admittedly, assemblage is a category I find useful in my own research into conceptual instruments through which to understand the global as it is getting constituted, as process. It also serves to give a shape to a vast array of distinct global projects within a university, with no visible connection, and where we should not expect any connection to emerge (this is not the general Zusammenhang), yet where synergies can be produced. This is a shape marked by a measure of openness that can accommodate future endeavors that we cannot even imagine today.

The author is the Lynd professor of sociology and a member of the Committee on Global Thought.