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From the Editor: Globalization and the University
Lawrence Hanley
It’s hard to deny the power of globalization these days. Hooked up by new and improving technologies, we can check the front page of Le Monde or the Guardian online every morning. We can find out that the late, great Enron ran into local resistance and financial trouble when it tried to buy into the Indian energy market, or that a new provincial governor in Afghanistan used to run a take-out restaurant in Los Angeles.
We tend to think about globalization in terms of the faster, wider diffusion of things: money, images, commodities, ideas. But we should probably also think about globalization in terms of the vaster and speedier circulation of problems and dilemmas. This kind of globalization is nowhere more evident than in the challenges confronting international higher education.
We put this issue of Academe together on the basis of geography, seeking reports from as many different places as possible. The challenges to higher education in each locale are specific—the problem of political control in China, the chronic displacement of women and gender in Egyptian higher education, the historical seepage between state and university in the Dominican Republic. Yet at the same time, these local challenges are increasingly filtered through common forces and currents.
In many places, academic freedom remains an embattled ideal, though with new variations. In China, the state has yet to relinquish its authority over the academy. Yet, as Qinglian He describes it, economic and social reforms associated with globalization have forced Chinese authorities to adopt "softer" forms of coercion. Hoda Elsadda narrates the continued failure of the Egyptian university to transcend the gendered strictures of Egyptian culture and society. And Daniel Maguire’s erudite and elegant letter against the Vatican’s new Ex Corde policies reminds us that academic freedom is hardly guaranteed here in the United States.
Elsewhere, the ideal of academic freedom, seemingly straightforward, has been made more ambiguous and complicated by new relationships between state, society, and university. Faced with a shift in government funding, Australian universities have aggressively begun to market their degrees to overseas students. More than just supplying an alternative "revenue stream," as Simon Marginson explains, these efforts are helping to restructure university curricula and priorities. Writing about the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, María Josefa Canino and Josefina Pimentel document the new alignments between university and economy that are undermining traditional academic structures and values. These changes threaten the university even as they disclose possibilities for reform and progress.
The autonomy of universities, as Martin Snyder writes, is a balancing act between responsibility to academic values and responsiveness to social and economic demands. As concept and reality, however, autonomy is always contested, as academics and universities in eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics are discovering.
Recent events in Europe, Latin America, and the United States have demonstrated that neither students nor faculty have been passive in the face of globalization’s many challenges. John Akker and Robert Quinn report on two projects that bring institutions and faculty together across borders to defend academic values and mobilize the power of the academic community.
These efforts make sense. Historically, the market and the university emerged together as perhaps the first truly global institutions. Their increasing and complex global insinuation may represent the real, unexpected subtext of this issue of Academe.
Finally, it’s no easy matter to succeed Ellen Schrecker as editor of Academe. Her intelligence, editorial talents, and sweated labor have made Academe into a magnetic and lively source of ideas and information. I plan to continue that tradition.
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