The University, The State; and The Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas (review)

Reviewed by: The University, the State; and the Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas Simon Marginson (bio) Robert A. Rhoads and Carlos Alberto Torres (Eds.). The University, the State; and the Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 360 pp. Paper: $24.95. ISBN: 0-8047-5169-2. The University, the State, and the Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas is an important book. Though confined to the Americas, it is the best critical collection on globalization and higher education so far produced. It is required reading for those who understand higher education in historical-social and policy contexts: in diachronic terms, not the synchronic methodologies that—as Marcela Mollis remarks in her chapter on "Latin American Identities in Transition"—often dominate in the USA. Rhoads and Torres use globalization as their "central lens" (p. 327) for understanding the problems and dilemmas of public institutions, particularly research-intensive universities. Because universities are both object and subject of social transformation, globalization has elevated their importance. Yet public higher education, once overwhelmingly dominant throughout the world, appears to be in difficulty. Governments have discovered that they can shift costs onto students without losing office, consequently destabilizing the resource base of institutions. In much of Latin America, especially, private sectors are fostered and now command 40% of enrollment. Faculty cultures and faculty power in governance are fragmenting, business models are gaining traction, and administration and marketing have ballooned at the expense of teaching and research. Older notions of the democratic public mission of higher education have faltered, and must be renovated and renewed if public higher education is to move forward. In other words, higher education has been gripped by neo-liberal policies and the techniques of New Public Management. The University, the State, and the Market explores the consequences of this trend, which play out differently between public institutions in the globally hegemonic USA and those in the globally peripheral Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The core premises of the book are (a) globalization is the medium of neoliberal ascendancy; (b) neoliberalism in turn has stamped the character of globalization; and (c) this association is not inevitable. It is a product of historical conjuncture and is made (and can be unmade) by politics. The chapters by the editors and Noam Chomsky emphasize that there is nothing wrong with globalization itself—with the integration of populations, economies, and cultures. Rhoads and Torres like the Internet and worldwide systems of knowledge, the dissemination of rights and the spread of education, our more intensive and extensive encounters with each other, and the resulting new potentials for human creativity and freedom. But the positive possibilities of cosmopolitanism and the "creolization" of cultures are undermined by economic injustice, the refusal of linguistic plurality and cultural respect, and the weakening of democratic institutions. Spreading via global policy imitation and the requirements of lending agencies, neoliberal policies have shaped and limited the cross-border flows of people, capital, and knowledge. [End Page 208] Neoliberalism is not so much an ideology or a political program as a particular zone of imagining and sensibility, where the problems and solutions are predefined in economic terms and behaviours are moulded in the interests of business. Neoliberal reform is strategically flexible, with scope for adaptation to local conditions and possibilities. But the contents of neoliberal policies standardize higher education everywhere in terms of models derived from the USA. All other universities are reduced to inferior substitutes. The values embodied in the distinctive models developed in Latin America are discarded by their own nations. This is not new. What makes The University, the State, and the Market important is the quality of those chapters that take the analysis forward, treating the global as not just a zone of problems but a zone of solutions. The brilliant chapter on "The University in the 21st century" by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura De Sousa Santos, which explores the democratic potential of higher education, is alone worth the book's asking price. It is a mark of the imperial, monocultural character of the globalization of knowledge that while U.S. scholars of higher education are often translated...