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Although globalisation has been an increasingly important characteristic of United States higher education for over two decades, there has been little historical analysis of the process or its origins. This article argues that beginning in the early 1970s, institutional, national, and international events established a powerful context for the development of college and university goals that focus on globalisation. These goals are substantially different from the goals of improving the democracy and opportunities for full citizenship articulated in the report of the 1947 President's Commission on Higher Education and subsequently affirmed in other national reports as late as 1971.

"In Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insidious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely the underfunding of the arts and humanities. Working against the increasing commercialization of the academy, Nussbaum sets out a vision of the arts, and especially literature, as central to the functioning of a healthy democratic society, first because they underpin skills of reasoning, argument, and critique, and secondly because they cultivate imaginative, caring, and empathic citizens. Nussbaum's passionate defense of the humanities coincides, and to some degree overlaps, with the emergence of the medical humanities over the past decade or so. Tying the notion of the "healthy" society more particularly to health-care institutions and systems, the medical humanities have pointed to a contemporary crisis of care in Western societies that emerges out of a number of factors, including the increasing bureaucratization and privatization of care services, and the fragmentation of the patient among subspecializations. Having thus diagnosed an ailing system of health care, the medical humanities have, like Nussbaum, prescribed the reading of literature as the cure, asserting that it is particularly good at making better health-care professionals by widening perspective and developing the sensibilities.1 In other words, literature is seen to be valuable because it can help doctors and other health-care practitioners to nurture an empathetic response to the suffering of those who are in their care. What seems emergent, then, across Nussbaum and the medical humanities, is a nexus of concern with a prevailing "health" crisis (whether of democracy or of systems of care), for which the revitalization of the humanities emerges as the necessary panacea, because the arts, and especially literature, make us more enlightened and"