The Worldwide Instantiation of the University

Abstract

This chapter describes the multi-dimensional expansion of the university, focusing especially on its accumulating numbers and global diffusion. It stresses the transcendence and universalism of the university at the global level. It also analyzes how university expansion is expected to occur earlier and more fully in the global core than in the global periphery, in democracies than in dictatorships, in the natural sciences than in the social sciences or humanities, and in world-class research universities more than local teaching colleges. The chapter highlights the university as a global institution and the global knowledge society that arises upon it. It examines the spread of universities around the world and studies local instances of a general model that is a central point to sociological neo-institutional theory.