Globalization Higher Education

"To ratify possibilities for worldly linguistic connectivities and critical theorising there is a need to forgo the exclusionary preoccupation with English and Western critical theories. The debates informing the international circulation of Bourdieu's (1977, 1993, 1999, 2004) ideas provide methodological lessons for moving from critical sociology of education to educational research for critique. This study reports on the use of Chinese metaphors to critically theorise evidence of Australian education. It provides an analysis of the translation of Chinese metaphors, their use as theoretical tools and the preempting of the antagonistic reception of Chinese metaphors by Western Anglophone educators. A worldly education of linguistic connectivities and critical theorising is shown to engage in the reflexivity necessary for making Chinese research students' bi- or multilingual competence a presence in Australian teacher-researcher education. At the, same time they are articulating claims for reconfiguring its internationalisation."

"Speaking as an ex-administrator and a tenured professor with a long and varied service record, I want to suggest that service is that part of our collectively negotiated professional workload through which autonomy is most likely to be protected from further erosion if exercised accountably. Service (to the university and the profession) is the least valued of our three areas of responsibility when we consider that typically it "counts" for 20 percent of our workload and annual performance evaluation (APE), two matters of university self-governance over which the academic unit still exercises considerable control and discretion at most universities in Canada. We do ourselves and our profession a lot of damage when we limit our use of collective agreements to punish-and-grieve or grieve-and-punish manuals when they can be key mentoring documents for the profession. Having "paid one's dues" is only the beginning, not the end, of understanding and accounting for our roles in collective institutional governance. Service is the perfect place to learn about and to practice autonomy in the university, because it is through service that we act on what our own academic units have determined to be our workload and the terms of our performance evaluation. The bulk..."

"For Congress 2011, held at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton the ACCUTE Committee for Professional Concerns (CPC) organized two panels, "Situating Sessionals" and "The Corporate University." As I was preparing to present my own paper on "The Corporate University" panel, and while I was in the initial stages of bringing together contributors for this readers' forum, I was also in the thick of working on behalf of my university's faculty association as we negotiated a new collective agreement (which is likely why the term "negotiating" found its way into the title of this forum). Thus, at the time, I was philosophically and substantively absorbed in the idea of the collective rights and responsibilities of the..."

"This paper draws on evaluations of a number of interdisciplinary studentship and fellowship schemes to discuss some of the challenges of developing interdisciplinary research skills in early career researchers. It describes efforts to support such capacity-building in the UK through a series of Interdisciplinary Masterclasses which used workshop-based elicitation techniques to develop smallscale studies in order to synthesise experiential knowledge and foster mutual learning. This has enabled us to build important bridges between research and practice, thereby supporting and developing the interdisciplinary careers of early- and mid-career researchers, as well as research managers and leaders. This paper describes an approach to interdisciplinary capacity-building derived from actual practice. Based on learning from these activities, we offer some suggestions for improved supervision and mentoring of interdisciplinary graduate students and young postdoctoral researchers. If we are to develop effective, future interdisciplinary capacity, we advocate that supervisors/mentors need to focus, not just on the research, but on the particular forms of professional support and mentoring required by inexperienced interdisciplinary researchers in terms of career guidance, the development of publications strategies and network building"

"An integral part of the "American Dream" is the idea that post-secondary education dissolves long-standing class hierarchies. Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility, however, college education has reinforced class stratification the last six decades. Today, seventy four percent of those attending colleges classified as "most competitive" come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile. A vicious circle is established in which, as children of the rich do better in school, and those who do better in school are more likely to become rich, an even more unequal and economically polarized society is crafted."

"This paper examines the conservative critique of higher education in the USA. I argue, first, that the right's call for greater "intellectual diversity" in American higher education should be understood as an attack on the professional self-regulation and disciplinary autonomy that are central to academic freedom in this country. Second, I suggest that the right's politicization of politics in the academy brings to light the importance of our developing a vision of the university that accounts for rather than disavows the political nature of the work we do."

"The Bologna Process is the newest of a chain of activities stimulated by supra-national actors since the 1950s to challenge national borders in higher education in Europe. Now, the ministers in charge of higher education of the individual European countries have agreed to promote a similar cycle-structure of study programmes and programmes based on the strategic aim of enhancing student mobility in two directions: to increase the attractiveness for students from other parts of the world to study - primarily for the whole study programme - in European countries, and to facilitate intra-European - primarily temporary - mobility. Studies aiming at establishing the results of this policy face various problems. Statistics move only gradually from 'foreign' to 'mobile' students, but remain insufficient with respect to temporary mobility. Individual European countries opt for such varied solutions that an overall overview is hardly feasible. Yet, some general trends are visible. First, Bologna has contributed to greater internal mobility of students from other parts of the world, but not to a more rapid increase of intra-European student mobility. Second, the event of outwards mobility during the course of study up to graduation has turned out to be more frequent than expected by many experts, but differences by country do not fade away. Third, the value of student mobility gradually declines as a consequence of gradual loss of exclusiveness."

"This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging 'culture of fear' in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy."

"Universities, particularly research-intensive ones, have responded to a variety of external and internal influences by retooling their missions, culture, and organizational structures to generate revenue from market opportunities. This has resulted in the marketization of higher education: organizational practices that blur the boundary between knowledge-driven and profit-driven institutions. This blurring has spurred debates and uncertainties over the scope and boundaries of the 21st century university. We argue that these debates spring from institutional boundary work at the intersection of the three main missions of the contemporary academy: knowledge production, student learning, and satisfying the social charter. These missions can sometimes create areas of synergy, but also tensions that are particularly acute where market logics and business-oriented practices contradict academic values. Within knowledge production, a key dilemma is the extent to which knowledge advancement should aim for transcendence versus revenue generation. Within student learning, the dilemma involves incommensurability between the ideals of democratic citizenship and demonstrable return on investment. Within the social charter mission, the dilemma is over whether the university can serve the public welfare while also facilitating the growth of local and national economies."

"The emerging economies of the BRICs - Brazil, Russia, India and China - will, it is assumed, lure back home both students who go abroad to study and some graduates who have settled in the West, because of their dramatic economic growth and expanding higher education systems. The problem is that data seem to show this is not the case. The brain drain, now euphemistically called the brain exchange, seems to be alive and well. International Higher Education published research last August by Dongbin Kim, Charles AS Bankart and Laura Isdell showing that the large majority of international doctoral recipients from American universities remain in the United States after graduation."

"The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of 'collaboration' stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, 'folk theories' of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual 'nano' cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved."

"This article presents an empirical study of transnational higher education in China at the institutional level. The units of analysis are the Chinese partner universities of transnational higher education programs. Through comparison of research universities and teaching universities, the study finds that transnational higher education programs are developed and perceived differently by these two categories of universities. For teaching universities, transnational higher education is mainly used to expand enrollment. It is the most active internationalization activity on campus. For research universities, especially top research universities, transnational higher education's major function is to provide academic opportunities for those aspiring for advanced professional degrees. It is only one of the many internationalization activities on campus. Teaching universities tend to use transnational higher education more to generate revenue and reduce cost."

"What has upped the stakes in this absurd drama is the cultural dominance of hope and success in a neolibera...l age, now the mandate, measure and mantra of the corporatizing university. We live in the depressive ruins of the university, an entity dedicated to the rabid pursuit of illusory success when any substantive mission that might give that success substance has long since been mortgaged to market values (see Readings 1996 and Werry and O'Gorman 2009). The fetishization of excellence and outcomes, the prevalence of 'audit culture' (Strathern 2000) and prevailing instrumentalism and vocationalism, all institutionalize, codify and restigmatize failure. Now the encompassing regime of the test eclipses all other ways of understanding and valuing schooling: through standardized testing, student evaluations and bureaucratic measures of school 'performance', the threat of failure is the defining condition under which we (not just students but also teachers and institutions) operate. In these contexts, accidental failure is perilous, and the strategic, emancipatory or experimental use of failure - however much it is still necessary - is freighted with risk, danger and difficulty. The right to fail (with all its promise of inclusiveness, generosity, freedom) can only be claimed at an ever-mounting cost."

"Linking key policy themes of interest in the published literature on development studies and comparative education, the article initially explores the potential benefits and risks of partnering transnationally for contextually informed research and sustainable development from the perspective of Southern and Northern higher education institutions. Higher education partnerships recently supported by the development-assistance agencies of Canada and the United States are compared and critically assessed according to the internationally relevant themes of external and internal funding, the involvement of additional partners and funders, and project duration. Comparative analysis of datasets compiled from AUCC- and HED-managed sources that encompass 74 CIDA-supported and 186 USAID-supported university partnerships active during 2007-2009 shows that CIDA awards tend to be substantially larger in amount and longer in duration than most USAID awards and that participating universities have contributed impressive cost-share resources. The concluding section draws out wider implications of study findings for North-South higher education partnerships with sustainable-development objectives and for the literature on the possibilities and limitations they embody."

"This article adopts the critical theory approach to reflect and analyse the impacts of globalization on the internationalization process of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region. It argues that globalization forces many of the higher education institutions in the region to follow global practices and ideologies of the Anglo-American paradigm without developing their own unique systems and honouring the rich cultures of their own countries. While higher education institutions are indulging in internationalization in terms of marketization and economic pragmatism, they have to ask themselves, 'What is missing in the process of internationalization?' This article argues that internationalization of higher education contributes to building more than economically competitive and politically powerful states. It represents a commitment to the development of an internationalized curriculum where the pursuit of global citizenship, human harmony and a climate of global peace is of paramount importance."

"This paper examines discussions of Generation Y within higher education discourse, arguing the sector's use of the term to describe students is misguided for three reasons. First, portraying students as belonging to Generation Y homogenises people undertaking higher education as young, middle-class and technologically literate. Second, speaking of Generation Y students allows constructivism to be reinvented as a 'new' learning and teaching philosophy. Third, the Generation Y university student has become a central figure in concerns about technology's role in learning and teaching. While the notion of the 'Generation Y student' creates the illusion that higher education institutions understand their constituents, ultimately, it is of little value in explaining young adults' educational experiences."

"The evolution of strategic management concludes that formulation and implementation is an emergent process. In today's knowledge-based society this requires that managers develop more creative ways to align strategies with core competencies to maximise organisational performance and efficiencies. This paper evaluates the approach taken by a university-based research collaborative to illustrate an integrated planning process that supports strategic management in higher education environments. Utilising the concepts of road mapping and interactive planning, this case study provides insights into the participative approach used and provides a modification of several conceptual models to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of this process."

"This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with 'problem-based' curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential consequences of such a shift in higher education policy for the identities of university teachers, researchers and students, and suggests that these calls for reform are premised especially on the problematic assumption that, in Bernsteinian terms, 'regionalised' curricular inputs can be expected to produce 'generic' knowledge outcomes within the university."

"This article offers an analysis of conservative critiques of education with particular attention given to how policy problems are framed to build public consensus. It investigates how conservatives claim political legitimacy and describe education and social problems in ways that promote a conservative agenda. Using a case study of the Australian Howard Government's education policy, the article draws on Lakoff's work and particularly his 'moral accounting schemes' to identify the politics that are not always apparent in debates, but which nonetheless play a powerful role in popular and policy understandings of schools and universities and which help shape policy solutions to the problems those educational institutions are said to face."

"As economic conditions around the country (and world) impose increasing limitations on funding for higher education, it is worthwhile to review some of the major reasons that higher education costs are so high and rise so rapidly. An understanding of these reasons is critical to making rational responses that preserve (and perhaps even strengthen) important components of institutional mission. This is, of course, a subject that has been extensively written about over the past several decades by many authors, but since responses to the current economic situation seem to generally ignore what is known about the problem, perhaps another brief review is justified. Interested readers will find my many earlier takes on this issue collected here"