Since late 2015, the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher education has been conducting research and open scholarly discussion on global, national and local higher education, linking researchers in nine countries. CGHE, which began as a publicly funded initiative of the Economic and Social Research Council in UK in another era, before the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Covid-19 pandemic, has grown its research, publishing and commentary for the changing needs of the time. It now conducts global webinars on higher education topics that regularly draw participants from 30-40 countries and more.

In November this year, CGHE began its second stage of ESRC funded support (2020-2023) which will focus on connecting its research outcomes to policy and practice, and also involves two new projects, one focusing on the place of research in higher education, and the other mapping the global higher education space, with emphasis on Africa, Central Asia and the Caucuses, and Europe. The webinar will review the past work of CGHE and its forward plans for the next three years and invite webinar participants to help us identify the burning questions about higher education that need evidence-based answers. This webinar is about the role and nature of research on higher education, and what a research centre with distributed worldwide capacity can do; but it is also about the core functions of higher education and critical research, which at their best are humanity at its best and a chief hope of the world.