Changing Higher Education

Is “excellence” a useful mission for higher education?

I have commented on the essential “nation-state” identity of universities, and how globalization-driven changes in the nature of government are leaving universities without a clear sense of future mission (see e.g.A nation state institution in a market state world, 3/28/06).  Michael A. Peters, in Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education, makes some excellent points about the “default” university  mission that has evolved.

He begins (p.166) by quoting B. Readings (The University in Ruins) regarding some of the consequences of the break-down of the link between the university and the nation state:

The economics of globalization mean that the university is no longer called upon to train citizen subjects, while the politics of the end of the cold war mean that the university is no longer called upon to uphold national prestige by producing and legitimating national culture.

Peters goes on to write:
Readings suggests that excellence has become the last unifying principle of the modern university.  When Ministry policy analysts or university administrators talked about excellence, unwittingly they bracket the question of values in favor of measurement and substitute accounting solutions for questions of accountability. As an integrating principle excellence has the advantage of being meaningless: it is non-referential.

The evolving globalization of higher education

We are becoming accustomed to daily news reports that one US institution of higher education or another is starting a campus or a program somewhere abroad.  We also see a number of other countries (e.g. Australia, England) that have numerous institutions of higher education that are very active in setting up shop in foreign countries, primarily in Asia or Africa.   However,  The Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper, recently published an article reminding one that globalization does not work in just one direction.

Seoul National University (SNU) announced on Thursday that it has plans to build a branch learning center in Los Angeles or San Francisco, in the western United States, where there are large numbers of Koreans. The facility will be a place where overseas Koreans and students can take Korean studies courses or where SNU students can go and work as interns or to take classes from professors in the region.