As premier US universities face an unprecedented attack from Washington, from funding-cuts to student visa crackdowns, Sergei Guriev, economist and Dean, London Business School (LBS), frames the challenge. Underlining that student and faculty diversity are a “necessity” for excellence and innovation, he says one way to ensure that is for academic leadership to be neutral. For, being neutral allows everyone (wherever you come from) to feel safe and different people to have different views.
What’s your view of what’s unfolding on US campuses?
The (university’s) capacity to focus on academic excellence and bring together diverse groups of students is not a luxury but a necessity — to concentrate on excellence in academic research and teaching… At LBS around 95% of students are international and 90% of faculty are international and it cannot compromise on its capacity to bring people from around the world. It is a necessity for the global business community. If you want to run a global company, you need to understand how to work with people from different cultures, different sectors as well. Luckily, the UK government supports us being a global business school…Indian students are the biggest national group in LBS, accounting for about 20% of the student body.
For us, freedom of speech is very important. The UK government actually obliges us to maintain freedom of speech. It doesn’t interfere with what we do and I think it’s also very important. Global universities bring students from countries that are not necessarily aligned with each other. Our students come from all kinds of countries, and sometimes these countries are not even at peace with each other; sometimes these countries don’t recognize each other’s borders and have different views on values. The capacity to bring those students together and offer them an opportunity to work and learn together is what LBS has been doing so well for many decades now.
Do you think the US crackdown on foreign students’ visas and threats of funding cuts will disrupt this global movement of students ?
It is not my job to discuss or criticise policies of democratically elected governments. But there is a major tension between the excellence of the US university system and its capacity to attract the best students and best faculty from around the world. If American universities are not able to bring the best students, that will actually undermine their capacity to excel in innovation, education and research.
Will the current environment deter students or their parents from sending them to these premier global educational institutes?
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We don’t know yet…we will see whether, for example, students who would otherwise apply for Harvard, would now go to LBS. We’ve not seen that yet, but it’s just too early. It may happen in the coming months. Some University Presidents and Deans of business schools have expressed those concerns.
How would you handle a US Govt-like pressure on your campus?
If it arises, I will handle it. Legally, we are an independent institution with our charter. What is good about being based in the UK is that it is a country with a long tradition of rule of law…(that) protects the autonomy of the university.
To what extent is the current US campus climate linked to how they handled the Israel-Hamas protests?
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I will not criticise any other university. Actually before coming to LBS, I was Provost at Sciences Po, Paris, where we handled those issues as well. We were faced with those issues and that was very difficult after October 2024, in particular. One of the things that I did when I arrived at LBS was I wrote to all members of the community saying, LBS is a business school that focuses on business education and research. We don’t have a comparative advantage in being involved in politics or geopolitics. So we will not make political statements.
As a dean, I know that I am an individual citizen, an academic, but my voice is very hardly distinguished from the voice of the school. So, as a dean, I will also not speak on political and geopolitical matters as long as they are not directly related to our core business.
But then, I said that my priority is the safety and well-being of students. Wherever you’re coming from, on the campus, my job is to provide you with an opportunity to feel safe and study. So if there are disruptions, which are interfering with my students’ capacity to do what they came here to do, I need to somehow negotiate with the protesters and convince them that it is not my job to interfere in politics. My job is to protect students, wherever they come from, whichever nationality or religions they come from.
In the letter to the community, I also wrote that we are neutral. Not because we don’t care about these conflicts, we care deeply, but we are neutral because every person, wherever you come from, should have a right to feel safe and express their own opinion, even if this opinion doesn’t agree with the opinion of others. And being neutral allows different people to have different views.
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How do you address a campus conflict if groups have different views?
We have very clear policies on discrimination, hate speech and whenever students cross those boundaries, we talk to them and remind them of those policies. And in my less than a year at the school, we had one episode where a student was not careful about what they said on social media and we talked to the student and the student removed those posts. But in London Business school, students are excellent, rational, pragmatic…discrimination and hate speech is not tolerated…Universities have to foster the debate.
How do you see the tariff war, is this America’s Brexit moment?
It is and it bears many similarities with Brexit. I think it’s very clear to any economist, both for Brexit and for the trade war, that it will have negative economic implications. Brexit undermined UK economic performance and data suggests that it cost the UK economy about one percentage point of GDP per year. The trade war is very hard to quantify because we don’t know which tariffs will remain in place. But all mainstream economists agree that it’s going to be bad for the world economy, and, first and foremost, for the US in particular. What I would say is that UK voters voted for Brexit, knowing that it may be economically costly, and US voters voted for President Trump, knowing that they care about non-economic issues probably more.