Abstract
Globalization in the 21st century provides fresh opportunities for new institutions to establish themselves. Through globalization, academic professionals, technological advancements, and capital can move across borders on a grand scale with greater ease. Many emerging societies have capitalized on this rapid economic development to build world-class, comprehensive research universities. Incidentally, these research universities often involve competing goals, such as the demand for practical labor market training, the need to incorporate the German research-university model, the desire for a liberal arts education, and the call for cultivating global-minded citizenship. With these goals posing distinctive demands, higher education institutions are often laden with tensions and contradictions. This paper conceptualizes the developmental process of higher education institutions by juxtaposing four sets of inter-related contradictions: research versus teaching; looking outward versus inward; quantity versus quality; and egalitarianism versus hierarchy . Such contradictions are examined in the context of higher education institution’s developmental priority to achieve world-class status. Our analysis raises questions about the long-term sustainability of such a strategy. Although the issues identified in this paper are prevalent in the global south, i.e. universities at the periphery of knowledge production vis-a-vis those in North America and Europe, we believe they are common themes with repercussions for institutions elsewhere.
Highlights
John Meyer and colleagues, in a 2008 contribution, made an overwhelmingly positive statement that describes higher education as the central cultural institution of modern society (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank, & Schofer, 2008)
The observers of higher education have identified a trend in the rise of the “super research university," a model initially developed in the United States that is increasingly being adopted by most nations throughout the world (Mohrman, Wanhua, & Baker, 2008; Cole, 2009)
As Ball (2003) rightly argues, a key aspect of the current educational reform movement is the establishment of a new form of control of the field of judgment, i.e., who is to determine what counts as valuable performance, what is effective knowledge production, what indicators are considered valid, and what it means to be an academic
Summary
John Meyer and colleagues, in a 2008 contribution, made an overwhelmingly positive statement that describes higher education as the central cultural institution of modern society (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank, & Schofer, 2008). As Ball (2003) rightly argues, a key aspect of the current educational reform movement is the establishment of a new form of control of the field of judgment, i.e., who is to determine what counts as valuable performance, what is effective knowledge production, what indicators are considered valid, and what it means to be an academic Internationalization regulates actors both inside and outside the academy: rather than carving out a space of individual autonomy, it regulates complex social processes and events into misleadingly objective categories of judgment. The third tradition is liberal arts education Liberal arts advocates, such as John Newman, believed higher education’s mission lies at raising the intellectual tone of the society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life” Our goal is to reaffirm that solutions to these contradictions are essential to long term sustainability for emerging institutions
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