The paper reviews the rapid growth and improvement of science in China since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1980s and especially in the last two decades, situating the achievement and its limitations in the contexts of both the global science system, and national policy and strategy. The key is the effective combination of national science with global science. Science in China has worked to global norms while remaining nested in national government and Sinic governance, in which Confucianism and Legalism are combined with Leninism. The paper reflects on trends in investment in R&D, the number of published papers, discipline balance, national and global networking, and policies on cross-border partnerships and mobility. China has established a strong autonomous position at world level in science that is partly separated from the intensively networked Euro-American systems but has benefitted especially from a mutually productive relationship with the United States. However, that relationship is now in question.
In this era institutions located in the United States exercise an extraordinary global hegemony in higher education, research and codified knowledge that supports American foreign policy and the world role of that nation in other spheres. American global hegemony in education and knowledge does not altogether negate the potential for bricolage, local translation and adaptation, mimed conformities, the diverse editing of universal rules, and other local variations on identity. But it has set in train powerful material forces that favour cultural and linguistic conformity and support specifically American interests, belying the potential of global convergence and integration to operate in a multilateral fashion and carry more plural cultural contents. The first part of the paper considers Gramsci's theorization of hegemony in the context of the relational field of higher education and research. The second part maps the American global hegemony using selected data, focusing on the structural conditions of hegemony, the global academic role of the English language, the concentration of leading researchers and the directions of flows of published knowledge, the attractor function of US universities as the 'world doctoral school' and in academic migration, and the normative impact in policy and university management of models of the research university and commercial vocational education grounded in American practices. The Americanization of knowledge and university education sustains an Americanized global civil society, and supports the US domination of global political economy, popular ideas and images in film and consumption, cultural life and military supremacy in a mutually reinforcing process. By the same token, achieving a greater plurality in language, knowledge and research are crucial to a more plural world and more egalitarian political economy.
The review essay introduces and discusses Wing-Wah Law’s 2019 book Politics, Managerialism and University Governance: Lessons from Hong Kong under China’s rule since 1997, in the context of the position of Hong Kong as a formerly colonised Western enclave within a Sinic political culture, and expands on the associated issues. The book recounts on one hand the rise of managerialism and performativity in Hong Kong’s high quality universities, and on the other their enfolding in demands within the Special Autonomous Region for democratic reforms, tending towards independence from mainland China. Issues of corporatism and issues of political stability and control have coincided in disputes over the role and character of the governing councils, over senior appointments, and in relation to the freedoms of faculty and student activists. The One Country Two Systems formula, while broadly implemented, is not infinitely elastic and cannot manage a cleavage over national identity and loyalty. The differences between China and Hong Kong are more deep-seated than a tally of democratic activism and party-state repression would suggest. They go to the distinction between neo-coloniality and decoloniality and the fundamentals of political culture. The review argues that a wholly Western-style university is no longer fully viable in Hong Kong and ways need to be found to develop a more hybrid approach.
‘As a nation we must be prepared to invest heavily in human skills. We need a community and workforce that has the education necessary to cope with and adapt to a rapidly changing world. We must create a broad base of skills across the whole workforce. Only if we equip our people with the capacities and attitudes to compete effectively, with flexibility and with confidence, can we make the most of future opportunities. In the present day world, with its increasingly sophisticated technologies and the rapid rate of change, people must have the capacity and skill to move with the times, to be flexible, and to be innovative and creative. Of particular concern to the achievement of these objectives is the fact that the education rate in Australia remains one of the lowest in the OECD community.… far too many young Australians leave school too early.’Bob Hawke, Prime Minister of Australia, speech to Participation and Equity Program conference, Canberra, 3 September 1984, Commonwealth Record, p. 1707.
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This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrian PusserBrian Pusser is an Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Virginia. He served as coeditor of Universities and the Public Sphere: Knowledge Creation and State Building in the Era of Globalization (2011); bpusser@virginia.edu.Simon MarginsonSimon Marginson is a Professor of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he is located in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education. Simon's books include Markets in Education (1997), the coauthored International Student Security (2010), and the coedited Handbook on Globalization and Higher Education (2011); s.marginson@unimelb.edu.au.
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Ce rapport décrit dans ses grandes lignes l’incidence de la mondialisation et de l’internationalisation du point de vue des valeurs et de l’éthique dans l’enseignement supérieur. La première partie examine les valeurs et l’éthique dans l’enseignement supérieur par rapport à « l’Idée d’une université » et identifie les codes d’éthique essentiels au fonctionnement des établissements d’enseignement supérieur en tant qu’organisations créatrices de savoirs. La deuxième partie détermine les implications de la mondialisation. La mondialisation et le renforcement des fonctions de pilotage des établissements d’enseignement supérieur sont liés à la « dissociation » partielle de ces derniers de leurs gouvernements nationaux respectifs, à la multiplication de leurs domaines d’activité ainsi qu’à l’élargissement de la gamme de biens privés et publics qu’ils produisent, et à la diversification des publics qu’ils desservent. De nouvelles questions se posent donc concernant la gouvernance et la gestion des valeurs et des codes d’éthique associés aux biens mondiaux, tels par exemple les obligations de communicabilité, de réciprocité, de liberté universitaire et la protection des personnes dans l’enseignement supérieur mises en évidence par les relations transnationales, et les modalités selon lesquelles les valeurs et l’éthique sont favorisées.
The Netherlands is a West European nation of 16.4 million people with evolved social policies and a higher education system that is widely considered to be excellent, with nine universities in the ...
Australia spends average amounts on education through public investment. This trend poses long term problems like a weakness in early learning, the run-down of industry training and downward pressure on basic research capacity. Adapted from Professor Marginson's address to CEDA's Higher Education Forum in Melbourne, 13 June 2007.
Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.12.14 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY http://cshe.berkeley.edu/ CLARK KERR AND THE CALIFORNIAN MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION November 2014 Simon Marginson Institute of Education, University of London ABSTRACT Copyright 2014 Simon Marginson and CSHE, all rights reserved. Fifty years on, Clark Kerr’s multiversity and the Californian Master Plan for Higher Education stand as signal high points in the building of not just great public institutions but high participation modern human society. Key features of the Californian Model have become a universal template for research universities and system design. Seminal ideas and practices of higher education developed by Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Burton Clark and others continue to colonize the thinking of policy makers, scientists, scholars, students and citizens, with profound effects not just in the United States but in every country. Yet the Californian Model of higher education - which long appeared everywhere else to be ahead of its time – was also specific to its own time and place. The conditions in which it was born, and which nurtured its flourishing, have changed. This is the first of three Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society by Simon Marginson and organized and hosted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education with the generous support of the UC Office of the President and the Carnegie Corporation and delivered on September 30, 2014 at the David Brower Center, Berkeley. Previous Kerr Lecturers include Harold Shapiro, Charles Vest, Donald Kennedy, Hanna Holborn Gray, and Neil Smelser. Keywords: California Higher Education Model, Clark Kerr, Martin Trow, Bob Clark This lecture series is a settling challenge to those invited to participate. It invites us to consider our words with more than the usual care, to summon whatever it is, if anything, that might be distinctive in what we say, and to synthesize and conclude our thought about higher education, a large enterprise populated by intelligent people of almost every description. Yet I accepted without hesitation. I had always liked very much the Uses of the University and saw Clark Kerr as an admirable man. The modern system and institution builders, those who created higher education in the thirty years after World War 2, deserve all our respect. That generation includes my father, Raymond Marginson, the principal executive administrator at the University of Melbourne for more than two decades, still alive and active in university meetings at the age of almost 91. We work within the halls that were built by that generation, first in their minds and then in the world. Clark Kerr was the foremost of the builders. For better knowledge of Clark Kerr and his works, I thank the scholars I have read in recent months, especially John Douglass, Sheldon Rothblatt, and Kerr himself. I begin by discussing the man in terms of the work. First the 1960 Master Plan, the embodiment of what might be called the Californian Model of Higher Education. Second, the 1963 Godkin lectures. Then I move to two other scholars from the University of California, who like Kerr brought Californian thinking to the whole higher education world: Martin Trow and Burton Clark, or Bob Clark as his colleagues call him. I did not meet Kerr but met Trow and knew Clark. Each produced one work that is constantly read and cited. Then I will open the apparent paradox that lurks at the back of all three lectures. The Californian Model, or different versions and aspects of it, has swept across America and the world, becoming installed—at least in the idea—as the modern higher education system norm, in which access and excellence are both secured through diverse provision. The ‘excellence’ component—Kerr’s Multiversity, the large comprehensive science university—is closely imitated in many countries. Yet in California the Californian Model has faltered and the Multiversity is travelling less well. It now seems too difficult to provide access and excellence on a common public basis. The conditions and drivers that sustained the 1960s Model have changed. The Model has changed less. Perhaps that is part of the problem. I will close by pointing the way to Lecture 2.
This paper reflects on some consequences in academic practices in higher education, of the neo-liberal project for the remaking of social order. In conventional critiques of neo-liberalism, it is understood as a project for the suppression of university autonomy, academic criticism and free creativity. But these critiques (which perhaps confuse the neoliberal project with the political conservatism often joined to it) do not go to the root. Neo-liberal practices constitute more than the suppression of persons or opportunities. The neo-liberal positioning of human subjects not only offers benefits to those subjects privileged by it; successful entrepreneurs, senior managers in universities and so on; it provides all human subjects with forms of positive action. Much of the popular appeal of neo-liberalism lies in its potent message about freedom. The argument in this paper is not that neo-liberalism suppresses academic freedoms, but that it channels and limits academic freedoms. We are not robbed of agency per se, but we are robbed of certain forms of agency vital to us.
Changes in student financing in higher education are normally analysed in the terms of political economy, for example as a shift in the public-private balance of costs. This does not do full justice to neo-liberal reform in higher education, in which methods of government are being transformed, with implications for the identities (subjectivities) of students themselves. Focauldian theory provides one framework for exploring these effects. It suggests that an analysis grounded in political economy needs to be supplemented with the study of government policy discourses, the technologies of financing, and shifts in student identities. In the neo-liberal regime the student is formed and self-formed as an investor in the self-as-human-capital. These postulates are explored by examining recent changes in student financing in Australia, including the Higher Education Contribution Scheme, and the partial substitution of loans and self support in place of quasi-universal grants.
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The changes to higher education policy in Australia announced by Senator Amanda Vanstone in August 1996 have significantly altered the environment in which university career services operate. The increased emphasis on competition between institutions, in the context of the requirement that institutions generate more of their own income, has differential effects on different kinds of universities. The older “sandstone” universities and the larger universities of technology have seen their competitive position improve, while the situation facing other universities is becoming more difficult. The new environment has also placed pressure on careers advisers to generate better labour market information for students and to recover a growing proportion of their own costs.
UK higher education is highly internationalised. Two-thirds of science papers with UK authors involve international collaboration, one-quarter of higher education students are international, and their fees constitute more than a fifth of institutional income. What then are the contributions of higher education and research to the global public good? The study investigates this in relation to England within UK, drawing on interviews with 37 people who construct relational global space and carry out cross-border activities. Interviewees included leaders and faculty in three universities, policy makers/regulators, national higher education organisations, and academic experts on higher education. The findings are interpreted in terms of theorisations of global spatiality and global public good. The interviewees believed that English higher education made the world a better place, but this was clearer in research than in high-fee international education, where the imperative of revenue raising took priority with no provision for equity. Potentials for the shared global public good were limited by the often methodologically nationalist and Anglo-centric terms in which cross-border relations were understood. Many saw national good and global good as synonymous, suggesting they had not moved far from the Imperial mindset. Some referred to multiple perspectives on global public good, or mission tensions in international education, but none conceived the global public good separately from national interest.
Research has never been more central to the mission of the university, and research performance is the primary factor that regulates university status and is seen to signify the innovation “firepower” of the global competition state. A striking feature of...
