Prospects of Higher Education: Globalization, Market Competition, Public Goods and the Future of the University

The global transformation of higher education is being reinforced by a heightened globalism in the broader political economic environment in the wake of the world-wide focus on climate change. If there are common solutions to be found research and higher education will be central to these. This common crisis is turning the vision of universities outwards, to the state of the world. In the last two decades on campus much energy has been absorbed by the epochal collision between on one hand neo-liberal policy and the new public management (NPM), on the other hand the Deweyan conception of education in democracy, and traditional scholarly cultures. These debates are still being played out. But they are now overshadowed by the many implications of global convergence for local practices, national systems and ways of thought. These include the transfer of neoliberalism and the NPM and much more across national borders. Global university rankings are a potent reminder that in higher education, which always was partly internationalised, the ultimate horizon is now the global one. Higher education institutions, especially research universities, are not just objects of globalisation but among its primary subjects. If globalisation is about cross- border flows and systems of people, messages, ideas, knowledge. technologies and capital, then higher education institutions and people who work in them are instigating many of the flows themselves. If globalization is also about world-wide inequalities and injustices - and in higher education and other sectors it is - then universities are both part of the problem, and part of the solution. This book addresses what this means for teaching and learning, and research and scholarship, and policy and organization in higher education. [p.xi-xii, ed].