Globalization Higher Education

"In this article I seek to reconsider the social and economic purposes of higher education. It begins with the premise that there appears to be a general trend towards governments positioning higher education primarily in terms of the economic role that it can fulfil. Such a trend, however, has attracted considerable criticism. In this article I argue that the problem for higher education is not it having an economic role, but the narrowness of the way in which that role is often conceptualised. Drawing on critical theory I explore the interrelation of economic and social factors within higher education and the wider society in which it is situated. This article argues for a redefinition of the purposes of higher education to ensure that both universities and workplaces are sites of human creativity and that the profound and exciting work within institutions of higher education benefits all members of society."

"The traditional 'lone scholar' view of an Arts and Humanities doctoral student sits uneasily with the skills-based discourse underpinning policies aimed at enhancing researcher development and employability. This paper reports on a case study of a research training programme for doctoral students in the Arts and Humanities at a UK university. It calls for the embedding of the generic skills agenda within a more clearly articulated pedagogic discourse and formulates four pedagogic principles for research training programme design. Additionally, the paper problematises the research trainer role and highlights the importance of paying attention to the students' own learning agendas and the learning value they are prepared to derive from training."

The founder of the profession of interdisciplinary studies revisits the intellectual odyssey he undertook in developing a theory of interdisciplinary studies, which eventually led him to complex systems theory. The precise relationship between complex systems and interdisciplinary studies is probed and the implications of that relationship for both theories are critically examined.

If managerialism points to the ideological foundations and bureaucratisation of contemporary education, marketisation signals its commodification, image and exchange. This paper brings to bear the prevailing influence of marketisation on education. It begins with a brief description of the European context and development of learning outcomes, and outlines the (economic) rationale for their existence. It then sets out to explore the logic of learning outcomes, asking: what is lost in the process of education being exchanged as a commodity? We argue that marketisation, through its constituent concepts of commodification, image and exchange, seduces as an education 'spectacle' and ultimately shapes individuals' value positions. In essence, marketisation, grounded in contemporary neoliberal economics, privileges quantitative, at the expense of genuinely qualitative, educational substance. Further, we argue that learning outcomes are a simulacrum: like other signifiers of commodities, they appear meaningful (although they do exhibit meaning) but are ultimately incapable of delivering what they promise: transferable skills, at most, but not education. Ethical consequences are stark and signal the loss of the intrinsic value of education - a loss that begins with its own commodification.

The theory of academic capitalism is used to explore US and EU marketization trajectories. Comparisons are made along the following dimensions: creation and expansion of intermediating organizations external to universities that promote closer relations between universities and markets; interstitial organizations that emerge from within universities that intersect various market oriented projects; narratives, discourses and social technologies that promote marketization and competition; expanded managerial capacity; new funding streams for research and programs close to the market; and new circuits of knowledge that move away from peer review and professional judgment as arbiters of excellence. We also consider the status of fields not closely integrated with external markets, and see fragmentation of the humanities, fine arts and (some) social sciences to be a sign of research universities marketization.

This 'country study' analyses substantial samples of research papers by Brazilian authors drawn from two global databases. The approach and the findings may each be of interest. Our approach is to examine R&D outputs through bibliometrics (to identify key authors, institutions, journals, etc.) and text mining with taxonomy generation (to identify pervasive research thrusts). We extend prior country studies by providing for interactive data access and exploring military-relevant R&D information. The resulting publication activity profiles provide insight on Brazilian R&D strengths and investment strategies, and help identify opportunities for collaboration. Brazil, a nation of 190 million, evidences a substantial research enterprise, with major capabilities in the life and biomedical sciences, as well as the physical sciences. We benchmark research patterns and trends against several other countries. We find a large measure of international collaboration, particularly with the USA.

Today's conservative movement for the reform of public education in the United States, and in much of the world, is based on the prevailing view that public education is in a state of emergency and in need of restructuring due to its own internal failures. In contrast, I shall argue that the decay of public education is mainly a product of externally imposed contradictions that are inherent to schooling in capitalist society, heightened in our time by conditions of economic stagnation in the mature capitalist economies, and by the effects of the conservative reform movement itself. The corporate-driven onslaught on students, teachers, and public schools-symbolized in the United States by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation-is to be explained not so much by the failure of the schools themselves, but by the growing failures of the capitalist system, which now sees the privatization of public education as central to addressing its larger malaise.

The geography of trade in services is becoming increasingly important for a developing country such as Malaysia. But, present discussion on trade in education services, in particular, higher education and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in Malaysia is rather limited and takes a short-term perspective. This is especially so with respect to the analysis of the impact of the GATS negotiations on the Malaysian higher education system. This article discusses Malaysia's current negotiating position insofar as trade in higher education services is concerned. Malaysia's prospects of gaining from trade in higher education services are analyzed.

This article reviews and compares the developments in six countries which claim to be an education hub. It explores the meaning of education hub, introduces a working definition, and proposes a typology of three kinds of education hubs as follows: student hub, skilled work force hub, and knowledge/innovation hub. Furthermore, it identifies issues requiring further research and reflection on whether hubs are a fad, a brand or an innovation worthy of serious attention and investment.

It is estimated that approximately 3 million students are enrolled as international students, and it is possible to project that this number may reach more than 7 million by 2025. As global demand exceeds the supply, competition is building for the best of these students. Some countries (or regions) clearly envisage the opportunity this represents and have been strongly stimulating student mobility. There is a race for "brains", be it for professors at the end of their careers looking for new professional opportunities and/or the opportunity to return to their native countries, or for researchers at the beginning of their careers, looking for a place that might offer them a better future, or even for students, who seek more appealing alternatives. How will Brazil fare in this competition for talent?

Subjugated bodies continue to be missing from classrooms, faculty meetings, and educational structures everywhere. Where are the excluded bodies? Where is the untheorized visceral experience of everyday discrimination? Possibilities of inclusiveness must be viscerally felt, not simply disembodiedly spoken. Merely claiming to be a progressive teacher-writer isn't enough to achieve a decolonizing praxis. This claim needs to come from an embodied performance in the classroom, a place where teachers and students alike can perform the scars of oppression on their bodies. Teacher and student bodies, in-between the colonial and postcolonial experience, can then become more present in teaching and praxis.

This contribution explores the transformation of higher education policy from the mere co-ordination of educational curricula by national governments to the embodiment of the Lisbon Agenda's 'governance architecture', together with its impact on national policies, institutions and actors. It does so by charting change in both policy outputs and policy outcomes in four different European countries - England, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - and by relating these changes to the ideational and organizational aspects of the Lisbon Strategy. We suggest that Lisbon acted as a 'script' to be followed by national governments and other policy actors, enabling them to gradually adapt to Lisbon-induced ideational and organizational pressures, and to shape national organizational and communicative discourses that can overcome entrenched interests and transform the prevailing perception of higher education so deeply rooted in national cultural and policy traditions.

This contribution explores the transformation of higher education policy from the mere co-ordination of educational curricula by national governments to the embodiment of the Lisbon Agenda's 'governance architecture', together with its impact on national policies, institutions and actors. It does so by charting change in both policy outputs and policy outcomes in four different European countries - England, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - and by relating these changes to the ideational and organizational aspects of the Lisbon Strategy. We suggest that Lisbon acted as a 'script' to be followed by national governments and other policy actors, enabling them to gradually adapt to Lisbon-induced ideational and organizational pressures, and to shape national organizational and communicative discourses that can overcome entrenched interests and transform the prevailing perception of higher education so deeply rooted in national cultural and policy traditions.

Governance architectures are strategic and long-term institutional arrangements of international organizations exhibiting three features; namely, they address strategic and long-term problems in a holistic manner, they set substantive output-oriented goals, and they are implemented through combinations of old and new organizational structures within the international organization in question. The Lisbon Strategy is the most high-profile initiative of the European Union for economic governance of the last decade. Yet it is also one of the most neglected subjects of EU studies, probably because not being identified as an object of study on its own right. We define the Lisbon Strategy as a case of governance architecture, raising questions about its creation, evolution and impact at the national level. We tackle these questions by drawing on institutional theories about emergence and change of institutional arrangements and on the multiple streams model. We formulate a set of propositions and hypotheses to make sense of the creation, evolution and national impact of the Lisbon Strategy. We argue that institutional ambiguity is used strategically by coalitions at the EU and national level in (re-)defining its ideational and organizational elements.

In 1996, a relatively unknown associate professor of comparative literature at the Université de Montréal caused a stir by publishing a book that showed how colleges and universities are run more like businesses or corporations than educational institutions. Widely read and cited, Bill Readings' The University in Ruins (1996) was an indictment of corporate practices in academia. It announced that business values were supplanting academic values in the administration of universities-and laid the groundwork for a chorus of increasingly dystopian voices decrying the political and economic future of higher education. Readings' book was highly influential and convinced many scholars whose primary area of research was not higher education to start thinking and writing about the corporate conditions of academe. Over the course a dozen years following Readings' publication, many other fine accounts of the corporate logic of the contemporary university were published, including CUNY sociologist Stanley Aronowitz's The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (2001), former Harvard President Derek Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (2003), freelance journalist and New America Foundation fellow Jennifer Washburn's University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education (2005), and more recently, Ohio State University English professor Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (2008). Derek Bok reports how he received "one proposition after another to exchange some piece or product of Harvard for money-often, quite substantial sums of money" (2009, 46). Donoghue boldly

On October 18-20, 2009, librarians and publishers fought another round in the ongoing open access (OA) debate, which the Chronicle continues to cover. The opening shot-but it is already a reply-was fired by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, when it declared October 19-23, 2009 to be "Open Access Week." 1 Open Access is the name of the idea that the public and universities should not pay publishers for something-usually scholarly journals, though now books are on the radar as well-they have already paid to produce. In principle, universities pay professors to write scholarly books and articles, and it pays other professors to review and edit them, but publishers then collect subscriptions to produce these journals and sell them back to the universities. Instead of buying the work back again, goes the argument, journals should be free and distributed online. Proponents, mainly authors and universities, think journals might not survive if libraries have to pay for them twice, once via the university to produce them, the second time to subscribe. This is particularly the case with science journals, which often cost many times more than do humanities journals. While the costs of humanities and social science journals have been increasingly a concern for research libraries, price increases in the sciences have led to a crisis in library subscriptions. This has been a topic of concern now for over two decades and has led to a boycott of science publisher Elsevier in 2003, among others (Albanese 2004). Now that electronic publishing has gained widespread acceptance, both in the academy and in society at large, the time seems at hand for the end of publisher monopolies.

Academics don't work very much. At least that's a common impression. After all, they only teach a few hours a week, and they have summers off. 1 The claim that they might spend a lot of time preparing doesn't stave off the general impression-reading books really doesn't seem like work. They not only have slim obligations but are sanctimonious about it, added to which their anemic hours are protected by the impregnable shield of tenure. They have an easy ride. To avoid reinforcing this image, once in the early 1990s while I was working at East Carolina University, the provost circulated a memo that we should avoid sunbathing or gardening in our yards during weekdays because it gave a bad impression to the people of Greenville, North Carolina. The UNC system was suffering from budget cuts, so the provost was worried about public relations; he was careful to acknowledge our academic freedom, etc., but didn't want to fuel the idea that we led the life of Riley. Yet, most of the academics I know are always working. They run from the keyboard to a meeting to coffee to teaching to office hours to home, where the work continues, reading for an article or a manuscript for a press, back at the keyboard finishing an article or chapter, or culling through the endless stream of email, or wincingly grading papers. Rather than aristocrats in smoking jackets leafing through leather-bound tomes, they are sleep-deprived and over-caffeinated, working on deadline to finish the book manuscript for tenure, the talk they have to give in three days but haven't started, the papers they have had for two weeks so really need to give back tomorrow, the job search committee they're on that received two hundred applications, and the legal-case-thick tenure file they have to review. Work slides from office to home to coffee house to airport to car, thanks to technological conveniences like the Powerbook, Notepad, Kindle, and

Creating desirable academic departments for individuals' well-being and quality scholarship is an important effort as well as a novel idea. The focus of this reflective article is twofold: (a) We present a social capital theory of social justice covenants as a product and process of community building, and (b) we share the multiple lived experiences of three scholars within the context of our department's covenant ideology and practice. We explore how faculty can promote community and civility by not only developing but also enacting an internally generated covenant while operating within a larger institutional context that produces tension. As related to our purposes, we examined the relevant literature on social capital, capacity building, workplace environments, and organizational covenants to frame our discussion of community-driven action in education. We include an extended application of a covenant that guides our departmental faculty's social outlook, interpersonal behavior, scholarly work, and communal activism. Although our focus is on change-oriented, grassroots activity within higher education, the public schooling context is considered.

Although Detroit is not a centre of global finance, and plays a declining role in global production, it nevertheless participates in the present remediation of the relationship between cities and the globe. Manoeuvring to reposition the city as the global hub of mobility technology, metropolitan Detroit's neoliberal leadership advances particular development strategies in urban education, housing, infrastructure, and governance, all with implications for social exclusion. This paper analyzes Detroit's neoliberal policy complex, uncovering how rituals of place-making and suburbanite nostalgia for the city intersect with broader struggles over the region's resources and representation.

This paper examines the emergence of Hyderabad as a hub of the global information technology economy, and in particular, the role of higher education in Hyderabad's transformation as the labor market for the new economy. The extensive network of professional education institutions that service the global economy illustrates the ways in which neoliberal globalization is produced through educational restructuring and new modes of urban development. Neoliberal globalization, however, is a variegated process wherein local social hierarchies articulate with state policies and global capital. This study shows how caste and class relations in the education sector in Andhra Pradesh are instrumental to forming Hyderabad's connection to the global economy. The contradictions of these regional realignments of education, geography and economy are manifest in the uneven development of the region and the rise of new socio-political struggles for the right to the city.