Stephen J. Rosow

A new set of terms is showing up in descriptions of colleges and universities: “internationalization;” “globalization;” a ‘global university.’ Higher education, the American Council of Education and others tell us, must be ‘internationalized’. Look at almost any mission statement or college viewbook and internationalization and globalization will figure prominently. Universities increasingly tout their international connections as not only of value to their students, but as defining their identities….

Of course, these terms do reflect real practices. American, and some other, universities are opening branch campuses abroad, and are offering degrees abroad. International education programs (study abroad, recruitment of international students, exchanges of faculty, etc.) are increasing, both in terms of numbers of students and exchanges, and the scope of those programs. Moreover, higher education is undergoing integration across borders to an unprecedented degree. This integration has prompted concerns about quality and standards, and led to attempts by international organizations such as the OECD to regulate higher education assessment and standards, even to the extent of promoting standardized curricula across different university systems. Higher education, as is by now well known, has also become an important commodity. In New Zealand and Australia, higher education is among the most significant exports of services. “Educational services” have become subjects of international regulation in the WTO.

So, how does the new “internationalization” of programs, curricula, university structure, and mindset of administrations and faculty differ from the overall trends toward the university as corporation, or the “corporatization” of the university? Is “globalization” and “internationalization” just another ideological justification of the subservience of the university and higher education to the needs of global corporations and an effect of administrators who think and act like ersatz corporate executives?

I do think this new discourse of the “global” university does serve in good part as such an ideological discourse that effectively deepens the understanding of the 21st century university as a corporation. But, ironically, at the same time the discourse of a “global” university opens up new paths for resisting corporatization and more for a democratic and humanistic higher education suited to the new conditions of 21st century life.

Thus, question(ing) the “global” university – and it is a question and neither a given fact nor a foregone conclusion – is crucial for the future of university faculty and professionals as well as for higher education in general and for our students.

A new “public” university?

Public universities are public in at least two senses. One is that they are creations of public policy. The second is that they have a mission to serve the public. Usually, we think of the interests of the state and service to the public as the same. However, their coincidence is, I think, a feature of a particular historical condition. It coincides with the era of capitalist industrialization, and, as the economy changes, so will the university. The aim of the public university in this era was to broaden the inclusion of the public (economically, culturally and politically) – taken to mean the broader population of the territorial state — in the collective life of the nation. However, this meaning of the public is becoming harder to sustain. Under current conditions, the public no longer neatly overlaps with the national. This in part accounts for the current insecurity about what the university is and can be in the 21st century.

First, public universities are less and less public in the first sense of being creatures of the state. As we all know, state funding for public universities, from both the university’s home state and from the national government, is declining as a percentage of university funding throughout the United States. Similar trends are noticeable in other, arguably most, parts of the world as well. In a material sense, the public university is less and less a creature of the state and public policy, and more a hybrid of a private university and what is often now termed a state-assisted university (in New York State at least, so-called private universities also receive considerable state aid, and many national programs that support universities cover public and private universities, so the distinction between public and private seems more and more blurred at best). No doubt, this ambiguous status has opened the university to corporate interventions.

One prominent current argument about the university is that the university is simply another corporation that must compete in the global economy. Higher education is a product, and in the global economy, it is claimed, universities simply cannot afford to carry on as usual. As such universities, and even teaching colleges, need to adopt the same managerial ist logic and structures as other corporations. This is the only way to survive in conditions of reduced state funding. In order to survive under current economic conditions, the university must go global in the sense that it must enter into competitive markets for students and faculty, produce products others want to buy (students, knowledge, and ‘educational services) and do so at competitive prices.

Nevertheless, the idea that the public university has a distinctive mission, to serve the public, remains and has even strengthened in spite of what might be called the globalizing of the dominant public economy. That mission has never been simply to serve the economic needs of the national state or the local community, although these have certainly been important. That mission has also been a democratic one – to educate the citizenry to good citizenship – and an intellectual and cultural one, that is, to enhance and improve the intellectual and cultural quality of public life. The latter, especially, was not merely an instrumental good, but rather a public good in the sense of helping to define and constitute the collective good life. But just as public economies are being globalized, so are the senses of democratic community and intellectual culture.

The discourse of the “global” university reflects a change in the sense of the public mission of the public (and I think private as well) universities. The ‘global university’ and the “internationalization” of the university do not merely refer to a new dependence on global economies. It also points to the increasing participation of universities in global systems of relations (markets, research networks, etc.), which implies an increased responsiveness to economic, political and moral imperatives beyond the borders of the national state. The “global” university increasingly sees itself as providing a global public good: higher education.

Higher education is being refashioned in the mindset of the “global” university as a public good in several senses. First, the university produces the science and knowledge appropriate to solving global problems, reflected in part, for example, in the shift in research areas and sources of funding, from national defense toward research in the life-sciences and nano-technologies, which at least potentially sever wider and multiple (not especially national) publics. Second, the university creates important elements of the infrastructure of the information economy, which, again, potentially pluralizes and broadens the scope of public worlds. Third, the liberal arts have been retooled to develop new humanisms and cosmopolitanisms that promote tolerance and sharing among cultures whose interactions are becoming more fluid and prominent. Finally, by spreading higher education around the world, the global university thinks of itself as enabling democratic empowerment in both national and local milieus, suggesting the redefinition and respatialization of democratic community. In other words, the education of citizens and the enrichment of collective life also at present intervenes in wider and multiple publics beyond and below the nation-state.

Toward a new debate

In the discourse of the “global” university, the conception of higher education as a service industry faces off against the idea of higher education as a global public good. The mission of the public university has become a site of contestation over the form and scope of public life. Who defines the relevant “public” and who should participate and how in the diversities of collective life that are emerging as the nation-state ceases to monopolize political community?

As the late Bill Readings said, the modern university may be “in ruins,” no longer either the humanist enclave or the Humboltian engine of national development and solidarity. If this is the case, we in academe must therefore rethink the university. The first step, of course, is to “think” the university in the first place, to open it to a free intellectual engagement about its limits, structures, and possibilities, rather than assuming that it must be one way or another. Can the discourse of the global university prompt us to such a (re)thinking? Does it help us to appreciate the confusions about the contemporary university in a way that allows us to think about the university, even as it often confines thought about the university to passive and unthinking acceptance of current trends, especially its subjugation to the powers of the neoliberal market? The aim of this site is to think the university.

Is the “global” university just another name for the corporate university, or the university as capitalist corporation? Much is at stake, I think, for faculty in engaging the debate about ‘the global university’. The dominance of the debate about the global university by neoliberal conceptions of globalization poses significant challenges to university faculty and professionals.

1. If one values the democratic and ennobling elements of the public university, can one avoid the cynical appreciation of cultural diversity as a weigh station in the pursuit of new markets (once we understand a culture enough to sell them products or to employ their workers our cultural appreciation stops)?
2. If we value the democratization of access to higher education, can we resist the increasingly prominent turn to the use of contingent labor in order to serve the increasing numbers of students and the increasingly diverse population?
3. How can research remain flexible and critical if its primary benefactors are private corporations intent on competitive advantages in global markets?
4. Do digitization and new information economies suggest new strategies of democratization, or the further deterioration of faculty governance and control of their own work?
5. Can a traditional model of civic education sufficiently resist the trends toward the instrumentalization and managerialism taking hold in university administration (justified, of course, by the demands of neoliberal globalization)? Or does the idea of the university need to be reinvented, its sense of the public world in which it participates rethought in ways that loosen its attachment to traditional forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism?

I pose these questions – and they are not the only ones that can and should be asked, nor are they necessarily formulated in the most fruitful ways – in order to open discussion. The site encourages contributions that advance progressive theorizing about the university under current conditions as well as contributions that address more concrete and particular issues.

Stephen J. Rosow*

* The views expressed here do not represent the views of UUP or anyone other than the author.