Towards a Global University Hegemony

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.