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The Chimera of the 'International University'

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The Chimera of the 'International University' The chimera of the ‘International University’ FRED HALLIDAY No one who teaches in a British university can be unaware of the pressure to become more ‘internationally’ aware: encouragement to admit more overseas (i.e. non-EU) students is accompanied by calls for increased international competitiveness and assessment, and by the announcement of new courses, on a range of topics, that have ‘international’ in their title. The term ‘international’ covers, however, a variety of issues and meanings. It is at once a spur and a sales gimmick, an appeal that issues as easily from the mouth of the financial manager as from the lips of the cosmopolitan scholar. It may be time to question this fetish, not least for fear that an unconsidered pursuit of the international can lead to a less, rather than a more, effective international contribution. Exchange of ideas, and academic cultures, rests more on specialization, a division of labour, than on a pursuit of modish homogeneities. An internationalized crisis The debate on the international character of universities has been transformed in the s by a set of changes in context and direction. Anyone reading the education press will be familiar with the term: ‘world-class’ status, ‘global’ campuses, plans for worldwide distance learning and so forth. The Economist has speculated on the university of the future, with a restricted physical campus and a network of computer-linked outlets and students—a ‘virtual’ or ‘cyber-university’ or, as it engagingly entitled it, ‘core-and-cloud’. Other universities are exploring the implications of technology for this new, internationalized, teaching. This is an edited version of a public lecture originally given at the London School of Economics on May . ‘The knowledge factory’, The Economist, October . Guardian Higher, April . That index of academic concern, the conference, shows where interest is going: in April an international conference at Tours, organized by three universities—Central Lancashire, California State University at Fresno and the Institut Universitaire de Technologie at Tours— discussed the theme of the ‘global’ university. (Papers from www.uclan.ac.uk) In in Los Angeles a group of US colleges got together to discuss, at a meeting on ‘International education in the new global era’, the crisis of international education, covering a range of topics from teaching immigrant communities to language, international relations and technical developments. (Papers from www.isop.ucla.edu) International Affairs , () ‒ 7. Halliday.PM6 99 18/12/98, 1:40 pm Fred Halliday All that is international is not new, however; nor is it necessarily clearly defined, or even international. There is nothing less international than the national prejudices of the powerful. I would suggest that there are at least three different strands of discussion here. They may not necessarily exclude one another, but they are conceptually and in policy terms distinct. In the first place, the economic context in which universities operate and the constraints on them are increasingly similar: annual OECD comparisons show a convergence of public spending on primary and secondary education combined at around per cent, and of that on higher education at around . per cent. Equally, the current crisis of the university—in terms of funding, relation to society, content and means of education—is itself an international one. The problems faced in British higher education are not unique. On the continent there has been considerable public upheaval in France, Italy and Germany over recent years. Students have been on the streets, academics have protested at new directives, intellectuals have speculated on the nature of the academic life. In the United States, which has , institutions of higher education, there is enormous debate, and concern, about the future of education, with much talk of culture wars, dumbing down and the like. One has only to look at the best-selling books: The closing of the American mind, Alan Blum’s lament at the vulgarization of teaching; Generation X goes to college, a vibrant, if itself self-indulgent, account of a teacher enraged by the presumption, sloth and plain rudeness of his under- graduate students, who slouch behind baseball hats, bring their own portable TVs, and all expect to get As; Bill Readings’ The university in ruins, an assault on the role of corporate management in higher education. For those with a com- parative perspective—The Economist in its supplement, or annual OECD indicators—the comparative dimension is taken for granted. It has, largely unnoticed by public discussion, been central to the reports on higher education of both Dearing and his predecessor Robbins: both sent exploratory missions to over half a dozen countries and provided substantial appendices to report on these visits. Education at a glance: OECD indicators (annual publication). Ekkehart Krippendorf, ‘Die Idee der Universität’, Prokla , September , and his thirteen theses on the contemporary university, ‘Zeit und Geduld, Stannen und Nengier’, Frankfurter Rundschau, January . Thesis is ‘…?’ ‘The knowledge factory’. Dearing Report, Appendix , ‘Higher education in other countries’. As a member of staff one is forever arrested by comparisons. A while back I was questioned by two visitors, one from the United States, the other from Russia. The American, neat and fit in his fifties, was to the point: ‘Halliday, I have two questions for you. First, what do they pay you? Secondly, can you choose your own graduate students?’ He was not impressed by either answer. The Russian was older and not fit; he had fought in the Second World War and endured much else. He spoke several languages. ‘Dear Professor Halliday’, he said, ‘for you I have two questions. First, how many days a week do you have to come into the office? Secondly, the books on your shelves—are they your personal library, or do they come with the job?’ British colleagues tend not to ask questions, except about other colleagues, but I suspect they might want to ask one of each of these. 7. Halliday.PM6 100 18/12/98, 1:40 pm The chimera of the ‘International University’ Contemporary discussion of universities is international in a second respect in that it is increasingly related to the process termed ‘globalization’, in the sense of the breaking down of barriers between societies and cultures, and the subordination of all of this to something called the market. Here an element of caution, definitional and historical, is in order. Globalization is not one process, but several, and not all of these processes are necessarily new. Not only goods and technologies but ideas have been crossing frontiers and civilizational boundaries for millennia, as Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Martin Luther and some others, such as Adam Smith, Mazzini and Marx, would be the first to remind us. They did not need the BBC World Service or CNN to get their messages across, or indeed to have an enduring effect. In one dimension of economic and social life, and one with considerable social science, legal and ethical implications, namely freedom of movement of individuals, the world has never erected more barriers than it does today. Globalization, moreover, for all that it brings together and unites, also divides by creating new hierarchies: in income terms the world has never been as unequal as it is now, and part of that inequality is access to quality education, to technology, to good libraries. But globalization of markets, of information, of lifestyle does affect the university in its very workings, as it affects the content of courses taught. Equally, it tends to produce a new elite, what Le Monde has termed a ‘cosmocracy’, of people who are mobile as between countries, contingents and cultures. Like MIT and the Sorbonne, leading British universities, are, among other things, a training ground for this cosmocracy. Internationalization should not mean homogenization. The tendency of globalization to make everything the same, to turn universities into anodyne hotels or shopping malls of the mind, is not the desired goal. Universities are, in this sense, like restaurants: they have distinctive cuisines, more or less creatively linked to national origins, invented or real. Those who teach in universities may indeed allow themselves a measure of patriotism, in regard to what they offer and sell. For this you need to have a student body, and a staff, with a shared ethos about what constitutes academic discussion and quality. A British university culture involves writing essays and a personal relation to a tutor: these are not divinely given, but part of one distinctive, valuable, culture. The same caution should apply to the term ‘market’. Universities are distinct institutions, with a distinct role in society and culture. They are not industrial enterprises, nor policy institutes, nor secular cloisters: our job is to impart ideas and knowledge, to stimulate people to think as well as to train in the skills and knowledge relevant to the modern world. Recently there has been much talk of universities in terms of market analogies: students as consumers, universities as knowledge factories, departments as economically unviable. Universities have to A good example of how the LSE is seen is provided by an article on it from the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger of February . Entitled ‘Werkstatt für kritische Kapitalisten’, the subheadingss include ‘Kreatives Chaos statt Elfenbeinturm’, ‘bierselige Koryphäen’ and ‘Kein intellektueller Kitsch’: workshop for critical capitalists, creative chaos instead of ivory tower, tipsy eggheads, no intellectual trash. 7. Halliday.PM6 101 18/12/98, 1:40 pm Fred Halliday balance their books, but such analogies are misplaced. In the first place universities are a public good—they benefit the community as a whole and require a commitment, financial and cultural, from that community. It is not the job of the university but of the community, and the state, to meet that need.
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