6th Higher Education in the World

GUNi report

September 29, 2015

The Roads Now Taken: Interrogating the Changing Role of Higher Education

Institutions in Light of Globalization Trends and Challenges

UNESCO Chair in Quality Management of Higher Education and Lifelong Learning “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania

Local and Global Engagement of HEIs

Balancing global, national, regional and local demands and needs

- tensions, demands;

- social missions and responsibility of HEIs in the light of global-local tensions?;

- strategic position of nations and institutions;

- role of knowledge hubs/regions; of knowledge/knowledge cities;

- local development needs/demands of HEIs for global/local sustainable

development and social justice

• Going beyond the economic

• social and cultural benefits and tensions that arise for institutions and the

community

Private/Public Spheres of Action in the Provision of Higher Education:

• impact of the economic crisis and subsequent austerity policies; • future of universities (Kwiek, 2006, 2010); • the “public vs. private good” university; • collapse of the ‘‘communist’’ alternative in Eastern Europe (1989) and its [lessening] ideological influence on the future of global capitalism; • new, transnational discourses on higher education and its reforms; • changing relations between the state and market forces in providing higher education; • transformation of the ideals of the state and its social responsibilities; • decline of the traditional ‘‘Humboldtian’’ university; • emergent ‘‘knowledge societies’’ with direct needs to be catered for by educational institutions;

The public/private divide in higher education …

• loose, overlapping boundaries (Marginson, 2007); “Public goods are goods that (1) have a significant element of non-rivalry and/or non-excludability, and (2) goods that are made broadly available across populations. Goods without attributes (1) or (2) are private goods”. (p. 315)

“In the global dimension higher education produces a mix of private and public goods. Globalisation enhances the potential for both kinds of goods. The mix is policy sensitive, but there are no adequate forums for global policy making. Global private goods are broadly understood. Global public goods – and the potential contribution of inter-governmental forums, and non-government agents, to those goods – are not”. (p. 330) “We become all too easily trapped in understanding higher education in terms of a dualistic public/private ideology, and a policy horizon still bounded by the nation-state despite the obvious fecundity of globalisation”. (p. 330)

• new “marketization” of higher education; • competitive discourses;

the university’s development and its relation to the nation-state the role of explanatory variables (micro-causal mechanisms, ideas, discourses, path departures, governance politics, and elite strategies);

tensions caused by [the IMF’s] structural adjustment policies, new governance challenges, difficult socioeconomic problems, depleted budgets, need to rely upon so-called market mechanisms for significant resources (Pyle and Forrant, 2004); conflict between public service funding and private purchase of educational goods ;

return on investment (state/vs private student financial support, loan schemes, cost-sharing and related tensions regarding access and equity issues);

How to approach these issues

the need to shape research “to follow the money trail” (Whitchurch, 2012);

transfer of available and new knowledge from the university to outside environments (Hall, 2008); challenges to the (new) role of the university vs. the State (Scott, 2004);

the need to maximize on competition, performance and efficiency (Thornton, 2009); the gradual homogenization of academic research towards mainstream, short-termism, practical, large applicability areas;

gender issues

University-local space

Global space

• dynamics and contradictions of the marked hybridity of practices

• ways in which the ‘local’ is producing the ‘global’

Expected results

End of presentation

Thank you