The topic that I have chosen - or, more accurately - was suggesting to me is ‘The Impact of Globalisation on Universities’. It is a relief not to have to talk (or think) about variable tuition fees and the Higher Education Bill. But there is no real escape from the current controversy about fees, because there are obvious links between fees and globalisation. First, one of the arguments for increasing fees, and making students pay, is that globalisation makes it impossible to operate a high-tax welfare-state of the kind that has sustained publicly funded higher education in the past. The argument goes that there is no alternative to higher fees because we, as tax-payers, will not agree to higher taxes to pay for universities and other public services (actually the opinion poll evidence suggests that we would be, if the conditions were right) - but that, even if we could be persuaded to agree, it still wouldn’t work because high-tax high-wage economies will lose out in more intense global competition (again I’m not sure the empirical evidence really supports this claim).

There is also another argument connecting high fees and globalisation. It is argued that, in a global economy increasingly dependent on scientific knowledge and advanced technology, it is essential to nurture world-class universities - because they are the source of innovation and so wealth generation. Just a few weeks ago I contributed to a seminar organised by the Ministry of Finance and Industry in France, which was all about how Europe collectively can create research universities that can rival the very best American universities - Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and so on. And the same kind of thinking is pervasive here. I am sure that the reason Gordon Brown is prepared to go along with top-up fees is that he has been convinced this is the only way to generate the extra funding needed to keep Britain’s best universities globally competitive. That is where variable fees come in - only a few universities can be globally competitive so they must be allowed to charge higher fees than the general run of universities (just as public funding of research in universities must be concentrated on a few ‘winners’ by inventing new RAE grades like ‘double’ 5*s - in England, at any rate!).

I do not accept either of these arguments - for reasons which I hope will become clear. But I do not want to dwell on them but rather to address the wider (and higher?) subject of globalisation.

Why are universities afraid of globalisation?

My argument today is that universities may indeed be surprised by the impact of globalisation – but not because it will be greater than expected and, therefore, stretch to breaking-point the university’s capacity for adaptation; or because it will be smaller than expected and, therefore, globalisation will be a more limited catalyst for change. Universities will be surprised because they may look in the wrong direction and, therefore, to caught off their guard. Instead of being essentially a techno-market phenomenon, leading to a proliferation of virtual, corporate or for-profit ‘universities’ (which can ultimately be controlled and contained within more plural higher education systems), globalisation may present itself as a socio-cultural phenomenon, which subverts the codes of rationality, the communicative culture, the ethical (and ‘expert’?) foundations of the academy – or, alternatively, enriches and enlarges its intellectual possibilities. The real challenge will come not from the New Economy but the New Culture. 

It is ironic that the university, which is probably the oldest international institution and predates the nation state, has been so reluctant to engage with globalisation. Despite the internationalist rhetoric in which we frequently indulge, and despite the evidence of very real international collaboration between universities, especially in research, globalisation has been perceived by many universities as a threat rather than as an opportunity. The potential inclusion of higher education in the World Trade Organisation’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), currently excluded under the ‘public services’ exemption, has led to fears that ‘academic’ values will be subordinated to ‘commercial’ ones if higher education is redefined as a global knowledge industry. Recently four organisations – one European (the European Universities Association); one Canadian (the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada); and two American (the American Council on Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation) produced a joint statement that voiced these fears and urged their respective Governments not to enter into further commitments to liberalise trade in educational services.

Of course, not all higher education leaders and not all universities shrink from globalisation. Some embrace globalisation as a potential catalyst of change, and relish the prospect of the ‘market’ university which they regard, not necessarily accurately, as an inevitable outcome of impact of globalisation on publicly-oriented, if not publicly-funded and controlled, higher education systems. Global alliances of (typically) research-intensive universities, such as ‘Universitas 21’, have emerged. Individual universities have taken bold initiatives to embrace the global future. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced in 2001 that it intended to make many of its teaching materials freely available on the world-wide web. But it is not unfair to characterise the mainstream university response to globalisation as ranging from reluctant acknowledgement that globalisation is inescapable (and, therefore, likely to overturn many of the existing assumptions about the aims and organisation of universities) to a steely determination to resist its alleged corruption of the university’s core academic and public-purpose values.

This reluctance of higher education to embrace globalisation is puzzling. 

i) One explanation is that globalisation has become closely associated with economic liberalism, which is regarded as a threat to core academic values (because it emphasises instrumentalism, and consequently vocationalism, at the expense of idealism, and so liberal education and scientific curiosity) and also to the resource base of public higher education systems (because economic liberalism tends to undermines the welfare states within which such systems have flourished).

ii) A second explanation is that free-market globalisation, which higher education perceives as a threat, is not just a higher form of internationalisation, to which most universities are committed (both as a rhetorical discourse and also as a practical resource as they compete to increase their share of the, often lucrative, flows of international students). Globalisation is a turbulent and invasive phenomenon, which potentially allows world markets, brands and cultures to override nation-state politics and ‘local’ traditions; internationalisation, on the other hand, can be regarded as a benign expression of harmonious co-operation between nation states and of equitable economic and cultural exchanges.

iii) A third explanation, of course, is that globalisation is a problematical, and contested, phenomenon. Alongside the familiar globalisation of the Right, market liberalisation and mass-media culture, there is a globalisation of the Left, the world-wide movements of resistance to market liberalisation and its political and cultural effects. Both have their distinctive global signifiers; the dress and behaviour of anti-globalisation protestors in Seattle, Washington, Prague, Genoa are as familiar and predictable as the iconic brands of so-called Coca Cola culture. Indeed it can be argued that the globalisation of the Left predated the globalisation of the Right; Green Peace and other environmental movements had already emerged strongly in the 1970s a decade or more before the full-blown development of market liberalisation which did not really get into its stride until the 1980s and gathered pace in the 1990s. Moreover, globalisation for-and-against has come to replace the old fractures in society between left and right, proletariat and bourgeoisie, liberal and conservative. It is the new politics – in very many ways.

Globalisation and the Knowledge Society

These complexities help to explain why higher education feels so ambivalent about globalisation – and also perhaps why, although globalisation can hardly claim to be a new phenomenon, its current form is perceived to be so different and so unsettling. After all, there has been a world economy since at least the 16^th century. International trade as a proportion of total economic activity reached a peak in the early 20^th century. In this sense the economy is rather less global than it was almost a century ago. There have also been ‘world’ societies, such as the Roman or Chinese empires – not literally so in terms of their geographical reach but actually so in terms of their culture and mentality.

So the reasons for the current excitement about, even the obsession with, globalisation are by not as obvious as the flow of political and media commentary would suggest. One reason has already been suggested – the way in which arguments about globalisation have substituted for the traditional left-right discourse of politics. But a second, more substantial, reason is that the forms of globalisation now being experienced feel different from (and perhaps more alien than) older forms of world economy and world culture. There are two main clusters of attributes of 21^st-century globalisation that may help to explain why it is perceived in this way.

Acceleration

The first is the acceleration of all those trends, many well-established for several decades, associated with the idea of a ‘Knowledge Society’ – which itself has been progressively redefined. Once it was an essentially technocratic vision of a society that had grown out of ideological conflict; but now we are now much more aware of the uncertainties and risks produced by a Knowledge Society. You could say that the regular rhythms of the mechanical age, dominated by the forces of production (and, also, of classical Weberian bureaucracy, whether state or corporate) are being replaced by the irregular (even chaotic) rhythms of the electronic age, dominated by the forces of consumption (and of the de-construction of traditional institutions). The results are all around – round-the-clock round-the-globe financial and other markets are only the most obvious. 

a) There are three dimensions of this general acceleration. The first is technological, the remorseless rise of information and communication technologies. This has made an enormous impact on every aspects of our lives – from leisure (such as computer games), through management systems (which allow us to manipulate massive data-sets) to the overall configuration of production and consumption. 

b) But this technological revolution has been accompanied by a cultural revolution – which itself has many dimensions. One is new patterns of social interaction (of which the mobile phone is the most ubiquitous example, but equally significant is the rise of ‘virtuality’ and highly sophisticated visualisation techniques); another is the dominance of global brands – such as Nike or Coca Cola. 

c) The third dimension of acceleration, of course, is the wider dominance of the ‘market’ – and the application of ‘market’ language to non-market domains. Ten years ago Francis Fukuyama heralded the ‘End of History’ More recently Philip Bobbitt has developed the idea of a ‘market state’ as the successor to the nation (and welfare) state. Some dismiss this worship of the ‘market’ as a temporary aberration. Others fear it runs deeper, that there may be a more fundamental incompatibility between acceleration, combining increasing volatility with more intense innovation, and the regularity (rationality?) principles on which the welfare state is based.

Uncertainty

The second cluster of attributes that help to explain why the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation feels so different can be summed up in a single word – uncertainty. Alongside the ‘Knowledge Society’ has grown up the ‘Risk Society’. Contemporary society is a remorseless producer of uncertainties – about individual identity, about social affinities, about gender roles and, of course, about jobs and careers. And these uncertainties cannot be removed because they are derived from the processes of acceleration and innovation. Instead they must be accommodated and internalised – either by accepting that we live for the moment, in a kind of ‘extended present’ or through elaborate protocols designed to ‘manage’ risk characteristic of the so-called ‘Audit Society’. Globalisation is part of this wider uncertainty. But globalisation is doubly-implicated – first, as a generator of uncertainties; but, secondly, as a response (even resistance) to them. As has already been pointed out, anti-globalisation campaigners are themselves part of the phenomenon which they oppose; not only do they employ the most sophisticated technologies (and techniques) of global communication, but they have created their own global discourses, styles, even brands. 

The impact of globalisation on the university

My second main topic is the impact of globalisation on the university (the core of my argument today). My starting point is that we have got the history of the university wrong. The historical record shows – conclusively – that the idea of a university has developed alongside the idea of the state – first the princely state, then the dynastic state, later the nation (and welfare) state. Most universities were established as acts of deliberate policy by states; the very few that predated the formation of states have been decisively remoulded by state action (For example, here in Britain Oxford and Cambridge were subjected to successive Royal Commissions during the 19^th century and subsequent reform). The development of the university in its most classical form, the so-called Humboldtian university, was part of a wider project, the modernisation of the Prussian state after its humiliating defeats in the wars with Napoleon. The origins of the land-grant universities in the United States, another highly influential model for the modern university, can be traced to an Act of Congress designed to promote agricultural improvement.

If the 19^th-century university was aligned with the formation of modern, expert and professional, society, the 20^th-century university was aligned as closely with the development of the welfare state. To the extent that universities have pursued internationalist agendas it has often been in pursuit of national agendas – for example, to increase a particular nation’s share of the market in international students, for diplomatic or commercial reasons; or to relieve the burden on its own taxpayers, by charging international students high fees. This helps to explain why, despite their internationalist rhetoric and their universalist aspirations, universities have hesitated to launch, or re-brand, themselves as ‘global’ institutions.

Now, if you accept that universities are fundamentally national institutions (because, until recently, the idea of the nation and the idea of modernity – and of science – were closely entwined), globalisation poses three immediate threats: 

i) The first threat is to the exclusive privileges granted to universities by the State – as the providers of higher education (and the credentials necessary to gain access into the professions – and, more widely, to occupy elite positions in society). It is the preservation – or not, as the case may be – of these privileges which is at the heart of the debate about GATS. Under conditions of globalisation it becomes increasingly difficult to square the circle, to treat universities in their national context as essentially public-service institutions while encouraging (even forcing) universities to represent themselves as market organisations in an international context. 

ii) The second threat is to traditional patterns of governance in higher education. Even when universities are not directly state institutions, they are still governed according to public-service norms (which include a high degree of institutional, and academic, autonomy). For example, university boards and councils are still typically regarded as trustees, while vice-chancellors and other senior managers, or senates, determine what really happens in universities. But, if we redefine universities as entrepreneurial institutions within a global ‘market’, our current arrangements for governance may be regarded as increasingly anomalous. 

iii) The third threat is to the funding of higher education which is still predominantly derived from public sources. This is true not only in Europe but also in north America, where the overall contribution of privately funded institutions is often exaggerated (largely, perhaps, because of the high profile of ‘Ivy League’ universities in the United States). As the welfare state struggles to preserve core services – for example, in basic education, health and social security – universities may find that their current funding base is increasingly eroded. In some countries, notably Britain since the election of a (New) Labour Government in 1997, there have been efforts to define a ‘Third Way’ between public and private sectors which emphasises the public-private partnerships particularly in relation to the funding of public services. The autonomy traditionally enjoyed by universities, and their consequent semi-detachment from state bureaucracies, have made them especially vulnerable to these new experiments in ‘semi-detachment’ (in other words, reduced availability of state subsidy). Last week’s Higher Education Bill – and top-up fees – are a good example.

In discussing the likely impact of globalisation on higher education we tend to focus on the first dimension – the ICT revolution, global brands and the dominance of the ‘market’. But the other, cultural, dimension is equally important. Both must be given equal weight. Let me take them in turn. There are two main responses to the first dimension of the impact of globalisation on higher education: 

i) The first is that universities must become more self-reliant and more entrepreneurial, with significant consequences for their governance, management and funding. Typically this has taken the form of more aggressive approaches to the recruitment of international students and development of global partnerships, greater emphasis on the commercialisation of research (and, in particular, on its – profitable – dissemination and on technology transfer and consultancy services), and on the development of stronger managerial cultures and infrastructures to control and direct these new activities. But, in my view, these changes are only partly attributable to the impact of globalisation; they are also responses to more challenging national environments. 

ii) The second response is that universities will have to confront – and/or compete with – rival knowledge organisations. But I’m not sure that the first category of rival organisations – so-called borderless education and ‘virtual’ universities – can properly be regarded as rival knowledge organisations. 

It may be more accurate to regard this first category of ‘rivals’ as extensions of the drive towards more entrepreneurial forms of the university itself. These first ‘rival’ organisations are not such a serious threat to traditional universities as we sometimes think – for four reasons. 

a) The first is that universities are likely to be significant players in borderless education. They may even be the sponsors of ‘virtual’ universities, although probably in association with other partners such as mass-media organisations and IT companies. Also much of the actual content of courses will be provided by university academics; 

b) The second reason is that, to the extent that other knowledge organisations become involved, they will concentrate on delivery mechanisms and marketing strategies, not on what would be regarded as the core academic enterprise of devising new teaching programmes. And, of course, these alternative organisations are very unlikely to become engaged in at all in research. So they are very unlikely to become direct competitors. Instead a division of labour is more likely to develop in cartelised structures, with universities providing core ‘content’ and their mass-media or other partners providing the marketing and delivery ‘wrap-rounds’; 

c) The third reason is that only a limited number of subjects are suitable for delivery through borderless education, or virtual, methods – the most important, of course, are computer science (in terms of IT applications rather than basic design), and business and management. Many other subjects are (still) more culturally specific – so demonstrating the limits of globalisation. So I think the extent to which borderless education is new, except in its delivery techniques, is open to question. Publicly funded higher education has always faced competition – for example, from ‘night schools’ or language schools. Such institutions probably stimulated the demand for higher education. The issue is whether the novelty of ICT-powered delivery – and, in particular, its ability to transcend temporal and spatial constraints – are sufficiently powerful to shift the balance of power from traditional to borderless institutions; 

d) The fourth reason is the lessons of the dot.com collapse. Virtuality, by itself, is not sufficiently attractive – whether in the commercial or educational arenas. But on-line delivery, combined with more traditional methods, can be highly effective. A good example is medical education, where simulation and visualisation techniques are well developed. But the need for hands-on clinical experience is still as great as ever. Indeed it is possible to argue that the potential of ICT-powered delivery may actually enhance the position of traditional universities through so-called ‘blended’ learning. 

The second category of rival organisations – corporate and for-profit ‘universities’ – can more accurately be regarded as rivals to conventional universities. But even here the degree of rivalry can be overstated: 

i) First, the threat they pose has been exaggerated – and for some of the same reasons. Corporate and for-profit ‘universities’ are focused on marketing and delivery not educational content (and certainly not research). They are most effective in a narrow range of culturally neutral subjects. Some corporate universities are essentially contrived brands – although perhaps the university should be flattered that they have ‘stolen’ its brand-name. Despite the publicity generated by the University of Phoenix, it poses little threat to traditional universities in core areas such as research, high-status professional training (such as law or medicine) or elite undergraduate education. 

ii) Second, there is evidence that, as profits have been squeezed and competition has intensified (both of which, incidentally, may be aspects of globalisation), companies have tended to down-size, re-define or even close down their corporate universities. Their reaction has often been to concentrate on their core business, outsourcing non-core activities. Unless companies are R&D intensive or need to place a special emphasis on people development (perhaps to underpin a service-oriented and customer-focused corporate culture), the activities grouped under corporate-university labels are likely to be identified as non-core. It is logical, therefore, for them to outsource to specialist providers (like universities!) 

The real challenge of globalisation

The greatest impact of globalisation on the university may be felt in other, less obvious, ways. 

i) The first is inside the university, in terms of the reconfiguration of institutional structures and reform of operating practices. The radical challenge posed by globalisation to the traditional culture of the university may be at the root of the ambivalence towards globalisation apparent in large parts of higher education. 

ii) The second is outside the university. But the threat will not come new kinds of ‘university’ – corporate, virtual or for-profit – that seek to aim to provide university-like services to students and research-users in a more efficient and customer-friendly fashion, but from truly alternative institutions that seek to challenge the core values of the traditional university. 

However paradoxical it may sound, one of the most serious challenges to the traditional university may come from within, from the entrepreneurial university – although it is probably misleading to suggest that there is a dialectical relationship between the traditional university and the entrepreneurial university, or that one organisational paradigm is being superseded by another. The relationship between these two forms is much more subtle and much less dramatic. Here are a few examples: 

• Internationalisation (with or without the profit motive being uppermost) balanced by greater emphasis on regional (and local) engagement;
• The proliferation of research institutes that sit outside traditional Faculty and Departmental structures;
• The drive to widen participation (because the university is not only becoming entrepreneurial but more socially engaged).

This ‘challenge from within’ is also apparent at the level of systems. One of the primary motives for the so-called ‘Bologna process’, the drive to create a common European higher education area, is the desire to make European universities more competitive in relation to American higher education – even though this requires substantial (and unwelcome?) modification of the traditional structure of courses and degrees in many European systems. 

But the challenge from without, from truly alternative knowledge organisations, may be even more radical. In the last decade new social movements have emerged which to a significant extent have taken over from traditional political movements. Examples include campaigns to defend the environment or to promote sustainable development, the women’s movement in its many forms – and, of course, opponents of market-led globalisation. These movements are often very sophisticated in terms of their knowledge bases and their use of global media. Yet they may also pose a radical challenge to traditional notions of scientific excellence (even of scientific objectivity) to which the university is bound. They espouse alternative knowledge traditions – which once could be dismissed as merely ‘local’ but now, in an age of globalisation, demand to be heard around the world. Globalisation gives them voice. 

Typically it is assumed that globalisation will reduce cultural (and linguistic) diversity by promoting a secular, mid-Atlantic, Anglophone culture. But, in fact, new communication and publication technologies have dramatically affected the economies-of-scale in academic publishing (and, therefore, make publishing in minority languages much more viable). At the same time globalisation has provided the means for minority languages and minority cultures to establish global coalitions to resist the hegemony of the (predominantly Anglophone and free-market) ‘West’. An example of the darker consequences of globalisation’s capacity to empower the disempowered is the challenge posed by organisations that use ‘Western’ technologies (including all the paraphernalia of the Knowledge Society and globalisation) to attack ‘Western’ values.

Conclusion

This is why the impact of this second form of globalisation on the university may be even more dramatic than the impact of the more familiar globalisation of ICT, global brands and market liberalisation. There are three ways in which its impact may be felt. 

i) First, because of this cultural revolution, students come to the university with a new temperament, culture and mentality. Students have learnt to navigate a de-centred world and live multiple lives. They come to higher education with more diverse forms of preparation – all students not just so-called ‘non-standard’ students. As a result, they often resist socialisation into traditional forms of academic culture. Their commitment to participating in a holistic, intense, linear learning experience can no longer be taken for granted – even in elite universities. The Balkanisation of the university curriculum may be a reaction to their more episodic and fragmented engagement. Their attitudes to work and careers – and even to social and personal relationships – are also very different. What matters to many students now are not élite or professional careers, which they know are either unavailable or else will occupy at best half the span of working life, but exposure to and immersion in a ‘graduate culture’ which confers meaningfulness and identity through other means that work; 

ii) Second, the impact of ‘cultural’ globalisation is not confined to higher education; it also affects research. We recognise that knowledge is now generated in much more heterogeneous environments where producers, users and brokers mingle promiscuously and where experts in neatly regulated ‘scientific communities’ no longer hold sway. Knowledge, as a result, has become not simply more highly contextualised – for example, in terms of growing emphasis on its potential applications – but also more intensely reflexive – with the results, first, that controversy and contestation now play much more significant roles in knowledge production and that, secondly, that it is important to (try to) grasp the implications, as well as the applications, of research. This has major implications for universities as research producers, because their privileged status has tended to be eroded. But it also has major implications for universities as teaching institutions, because of the proliferation of (and competition between) alternative knowledge traditions and because of the wider social and cultural impacts of two or three generations of mass higher education;

iii) Finally, and most fundamentally, ‘cultural’ globalisation is producing a revolution in ‘communicative culture’. Universities have developed a particular ‘communicative culture’ – cerebral, ‘objective’, codified and symbolic – a culture summed up in a single word logos which embraces mathematics and the natural sciences just as much as (perhaps more than) the traditional humanities. Yet globalisation promotes a different kind of ‘communicative culture’ – visual, intuitive, volatile, ‘subjective’ in which distinctions between the intimate and the domestic and the official, the public, the corporate have been eroded. Intimacy and virtuality coexist under conditions of globalisation – with untold effects for traditional forms of scholarly and scientific discourse. Although this other ‘communicative culture’ has not been entirely absent from the university in its broadest sense (for example, it has been espoused and practised in art schools and music conservatoires), it has been very much on the fringes of traditional academic culture. Perhaps a role reversal is imminent. 

Universities will have to come to terms with this radical democratisation, this wider social distribution, of knowledge generation – just as they will have to engage with new kinds of students and with new ‘communicative cultures’. All these things are consequences of globalisation – which are at least as important as the potential challenge of borderless education or corporate universities produced by more familiar high-tech and free-market forms of globalisation  – more important in the long run perhaps. 

Peter Scott
Kingston University