The Transnational Politics of Higher Education

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, Tamson Pietsch, Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola, Tamson Pietsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317231806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume introduces readers to the relationship between higher education and transnational politics. It shows how higher education is a significant arena for regional and international transformation as well as domestic political struggle replete with unequal power relations.

This volume shows:

• The causes and impacts of recent transformations in higher education within a transnational context;
• Emerging similarities in objectives, institutional set-ups, and approaches taking place within higher education institutions across different world regions;
• The asymmetrical relations between various kinds of institutional, commercial and state actors across borders;
• The extent to which historical and colonial legacies are important in the transformation of higher education;
• The potential effects these developments have on the current structure of international political order.

Drawing on case studies from across the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe, the contributors develop diverse perspectives explaining the impact of transnational politics on higher education—and higher education on transitional politics—across time and locality. This book is among the first multi-disciplinary effort to wrestle with the question of how we can understand the political role of higher education, and the political force universities exert in the realm of international relations.

1
Introduction

The transnational politics of higher education

Meng-Hsuan Chou, Isaac Kamola and Tamson Pietsch

Across the globe higher education is rapidly changing. Universities are increasingly seen as key engines of a ‘knowledge economy’, producing the innovation and the workers crucial to new economies. Driven by rankings that claim to measure ‘world-class’ status, many universities are promoting themselves as ‘global’ institutions and competing to attract renowned researchers, international students, and grant income. Among policymakers too, there is considerable interest in the role that ‘global’ universities play in regional and national development. ‘In a time of crises’, reads the statement of the Rectors and Presidents from nine well-known universities on the occasion of the University of Vienna’s 650th anniversary, ‘universities have a key role to play in Europe’s revival. […] In order to achieve this, they have to be active on the global scale’ (Vienna Communiqué 2015).

This shift towards the internationalisation and marketisation of the international higher education sector reflects much bigger processes that have been reshaping national economies since the 1980s. On the one hand, universities have been forced to adapt to new funding arrangements, governance structures, and regulation, to the emergence of new markets, and to radical changes in technology and the way we receive and impart information. On the other hand, universities have themselves been important actors in this process. In the Middle East, for example, a number of oil-producing countries are currently harnessing their mineral wealth to invest in higher education as a way to diversify their economies and hedge against future disruptions. In cities like Baltimore, in the United States, the steel mills and shipyards that once employed the vast majority of the population have long since been shuttered, leaving higher education institutions and university medical facilities as the city’s largest employers.

Those who have adopted the narrative of the ‘globalisation of higher education’ have often done so in ways that present this new terrain as a smooth space through which people, money, and knowledge travel seamlessly, apolitically, and for the mutual benefit of all involved. For many these changes are exciting. They represent a future in which scholars collaborate on cutting-edge research with peers around the world; in which classes are taken – online or on campus – by a more diverse population of students; and in which administrators work to develop programming and build branch campuses that network their institutions with collaborators abroad. In this view, ‘global academic competition’ makes the ‘free movement of people and ideas, on the basis of merit, more and more the norm, with enormously positive consequences for individuals, for universities, and for nations’ (Wildavsky 2010, p. 7).

This book identifies the transnational linkages and interconnections of this new world of higher education, but it recognises that frictions and contestations are also fundamental to it. By focusing on a variety of regions and actors, this book highlights the ways in which competing interests, asymmetrical power relations, and political contestation at local, national, and regional levels continue to configure and reconfigure contemporary higher education. Rather than turning to the language of ‘global flows’, we are instead interested in understanding the ways in which universities are engaged in transnational politics. After all, higher education institutions pull (and push) people, money, and knowledge across borders, but they do so in highly uneven ways. Moreover, national, regional, and local boundaries are not simply transcended by these connections but continually work to condition the nature of movement and to direct and shape it. Higher education institutions find themselves operating within a transnationally striated space marked as much by difference, competition, and particularity as by the convergence around a ‘global’ model or market.

In this book we demonstrate how the tertiary education sector is a significant arena for domestic political struggles as well as regional and international transformation, and we show how it might be conceptualised as a vibrant arena of study. Our starting point is that the political science literature on globalisation and interstate relations largely neglects higher education and its role in policy transformation. This absence is particularly problematic given that universities have long been important sites for the circulation of people, money, ideas, and expertise. The world’s pre-eminent universities play a very crucial role in social-ising national and international elites, are central to a number of state-building projects, produce economic, social, and political theories that influence national and transnational policy circles, and project soft power across borders.

In recent decades, the role of higher education in world politics has been further amplified by the widespread adoption of ‘Western models’ of higher education outside Europe and North America. Many of the world’s most prestigious universities are also forging new relationships with institutions in Asia, the Middle East, Latin American, and Africa and establishing outposts in places such as Hong Kong, Qatar, and Rwanda. The proliferation of Western branch campuses and joint ventures is mirrored in the growing number of local institutions teaching curricula very similar to those originally developed in American and European universities. Understanding these changes in terms of a ‘transnational politics of higher education’, rather than the ‘globalisation of higher education’, emphasises the ways in which students, faculty, money, and institutions do not simply move across borders, but rather cut across them in ways that reinforce or alter the power hierarchy and particularity of the evolving international order.

There is now a large literature around the language of the ‘globalisation of higher education’ that emphasises institutional isomorphism, pointing to ‘a unique Western institution now gone global’ (Frank & Gabler 2006, p. xiii). Such arguments identify the ways in which universities increasingly appear more and more alike: offering similar courses, pursuing similar objectives, competing for the same faculty and students, and publishing in the same journals. This book is more interested in the apparent isomorphism of transnational higher education. While there are considerable tendencies forcing universities to act in particular ways, the transnational forces of neoliberalism, global ranking systems, American hegemony, and the functional exigencies of economic globalisation play out differently in different locations and are continually being made and remade by actors with a variety of objectives. Within the worlds of higher education there also exists significant variation across institutions – variation that, in some cases, seems to be growing. It is not apparent that developments in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America are necessarily aiming to achieve the same ends, or even using the same methods.

Understanding the profound transformations we have seen in higher education during recent decades means attending to this variation, as well as to its causes and consequences. First, we need to think carefully about the history of the university and the ways in which its relationship with empire, nation, and class is being refashioned in the era of market capitalism. The long-term legacies of European imperialism and trade, as well as their cultural effects, need to be better integrated into an analysis of contemporary higher education. Second, we consider the way university reforms are enacted at national and institutional levels, leading to radically different outcomes in different contexts. For example, the wishes of international financial organisations or norms around academic freedom are often in conflict with the wishes of national governments or institutional administrations. In these moments of friction we can begin to understand and identify the various national and international actors who have a stake in ‘globalisation’, and how they advance and protect their claims through and within it. Third, we develop a more careful consideration of the importance of geographic regions and the ways in which they are emerging as new players in the governance of tertiary education. As regional organisations become increasingly involved in the business of higher education, we see political processes driven by supranational forces that both work through and bypass national agencies.

What is a university anyway?

This examination of the transnational politics of higher education is premised on the understanding that the object of study itself – ‘the university’ – is not fixed but varies dramatically across time and space. There is considerable latitude in terms of what counts as a ‘university’. Today there are as many as 18,000 educational providers across the world that trade under the name of ‘universities’ (International Association of Universities 2014). However, it remains unclear whether or not there is a meaningful concept that unites them (Schreuder 2013,p. xxxvii). In some countries universities operate largely autonomously from the state; in others they are extensions of federal (or state, regional, or municipal) governments. Some institutions are largely state funded; others depend heavily on student tuition, private benefaction, or commercial alliances. While a relative few have endowments larger than the GDP of individual countries, others exist on the continual brink of economic collapse. Some prioritise vocational or professional training, while others embrace and defend the liberal arts and the scholarly life. Some schools are hundreds of years old and are deeply identified by their traditions; others are more youthful and still striving to establish themselves as credible institutions. Some universities are the size of small cities; others educate only a few thousand students. Some are household names; others exist in near obscurity. Treating universities as political institutions, therefore, also requires taking into account the great variety that exists within and among them.

This diversity is intimately connected to the long and multidirectional history of the university. With roots in the educational establishments of medieval Europe, universities were traditionally associated with religious values, the preservation of culture and knowledge, and vocational training for church and state (see Pietsch this volume). Later, under the pressures of political and religious conflict, they shifted focus to provide professional and liberal education to the lay elite with a focus on teaching. Then, in the context of industrialisation, universities became key to science, technology, the growth of the professions, and the expansion of the nation-state (Anderson 2006). And led by German institutions, by the end of the nineteenth century they were increasingly undertaking research. The twentieth century’s wars entrenched this association with research and technology and tightened universities’ connection to military and political interests, as well as to national communities. But none of these shifts entirely displaced the older sense of the teaching function of the university, such that by the end of the twentieth century, notions of its role in fashioning national citizens and training a professional labour force were often combined with an emphasis on its task in undertaking research of broad economic and societal benefit.

This model of a university as balancing the missions of research and teaching has come to function as something of an ideal type, evoking large, sprawling campuses containing a jumble of classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and offices – alongside dormitories, cafeterias, sports complexes, and music and theatre venues. This version of the university traces its origin to the research universities that first emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century and were later adapted in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In the United States, the German model was blended with the older and predominantly religious colleges of the East Coast and flourished in the context of state support through the 1862 Morrill Land Grant Act (Cole 2009; Pietsch this volume). This piece of federal legislation gave land to state governments to establish colleges and universities that offered students ‘scientific and classical studies’, training in ‘military tactics’, and education in ‘branches of learning […] related to agriculture and the mechanic arts […] in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes’. When commentators speak of the ‘Americanisation’ of higher education, they are usually referring to this notion of the research and teaching university. Yet not only is the American university system an historically specific by-product of the incorporation, adaptation, and bastardisation of other university models, it has subsequently become so diverse that it remains difficult to describe exactly what it is. State-supported ‘public’ universities now sit alongside community colleges, liberal arts colleges, religious institutions, and of course the privately endowed, elite fee-paying universities (led by the Ivy League). Indeed, in 1963, the president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr, famously suggested that the ‘uni-’ in university was no longer accurate and that these institutions had become so complex and multifaceted that they should instead be called ‘multiversities’ (Kerr 2001). When non-Western states (many of them former colonies) looked to the example of the public university as a model for the establishment and expansion of their own university sectors in the second part of the twentieth century, they too did so in this same spirit of strategic adaptation, emulation, and incorporation.

If this was the landscape of universities for most of the twentieth century, during the last three decades much has changed. ‘Arguably’, reads a report for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 2009, ‘the developments of the recent past are at least as dramatic as those of the 19th century when the first research university emerged in Germany and then elsewhere, and fundamentally redesigned the nature of the university worldwide’ (Altbach et al. 2009). At the base of these changes is the dramatic growth in the number of tertiary-level students. UNESCO statistics suggest that between 2000 and 2007, entry rates for tertiary-level programmes increased by approximately 53 percent, with this growth concentrated in countries of medium and higher income (Altbach et al. 2009, p. vi). It is predicted that the number of students enrolled in higher education will reach 262 million by 2025, doubling the number of 2010 (178 million) (Goddard 2012). This ‘massification’ of higher education has transformed the worldwide system, driving the increased international movement of students, the growth in the number of private providers, and the changing funding and governance mechanisms of the sector.

Students are travelling across national borders in increasing numbers, with 4 million on the move in 2012 (up from 2.1 million in 2002) and estimates predicting a rise up to 7 million by 2020 (UNESCO Institute of Statistics 2014). On one hand, harmonisation strategies are seeking to systematise degree offerings to facilitate and accommodate this mobility, with the European Bologna Process matched by similar processes in Latin America, the African Union, and the Asia-Pacific. On the other hand, new institutions are being founded to meet this need, with places like Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates turning themselves into academic ‘hubs’ by attracting respected foreign universities to establish local campuses, while a host of international partnerships and private initiatives are also emerging, particularly in the poorer countries (Altbach et al. 2009, p. v). Additionally, new forms of course provision are emerging, with universities and private providers both developing digital technologies to expand access to higher education, a phenomenon exemplified by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Within this context of increased provision and competition, global rankings have stepped in to not only establish a criterion for what counts as a ‘university’,¹ but also develop metrics to measure their relative ‘values’ and standards.

This has all come with significant changes to the ways that universities are funded and governed. In many countries, cash-strapped and deregulating governments have looked to market mechanisms to meet the costs of higher education. The old controls on student numbers, student fees, and guaranteed government grants have been removed, and universities increasingly operate within what is frequently called a ‘marketplace’. They compete for both domestic students and research income, supplementing reduced state funding with money from high-paying foreign students. ‘Knowledge transfer’ and partnerships with military, medical, creative and scientific industries, and foreign universities, as well as private philanthropy, are features of this funding landscape. At the same time the university has professionalised, with new management tiers and administrative reforms that have often attracted the ire of academic staff who oppose growing ‘corporatisation’. While all of these processes have their own histories (the movement of people for academic study is, for example, a phenomenon that dates back to the wandering scholars of medieval Europe), since the 1990s these forces have coalesced with and reinforced each other, adding up to what is often called the ‘globalisation of higher education’.

Although usually coming with the promise of widened socio-economic participation, these shifts have not always answered the big questions of higher education. Access and equity remain real issues: although t...