The Paradox of the Global University

Abstract

No university of ambition officially claims to be local. Touting international reach and reputation is a nearly essential feature of university strategic planning worldwide. Yet being a global university is paradoxical. Academic institutions historically are servants of particular cities, regions, and nations, and one of their essential functions has been to connect particular places with world affairs. International rankings regimes, the search for tuition revenue among schools in a few large markets, and the remarkable consistency with which nations pursue status through higher education: all of these deepen the implication of universities in the fate and future of particular locales.

The Subtle Power of Global Governance and Its Ongoing Influence on Korean Education Policy

“…The change of education governance in individual countries by global governance is becoming a global phenomenon beyond a specific region, and in some countries, global governance is causing very radical educational reform in a short period of time. As a representative example, the Bologna Process exerts a strong influence for the purpose of integrating European higher education and enhancing the international competitiveness of European universities regardless of the traditions, cultures, and realities of the individual European countries (Stevens & Giebel, 2020; Toderas & Stăvaru, 2018; Zmas, 2015).…”

A renewed purpose for public serving professionals focused graduate programs in global higher education ecosystem

“…Under the tide of global higher education ecosystem development, a global-local dichotomy has become an obvious factor with a gravitating force to teach and disseminate world's common scholarship, HEI's instrumental role to assist build a nation contextualized with the history and circumstances in which it is placed also came under the light, first, in the US and then in other parts of the world. The study focused on South Asia and Latin America; however, the global-local dichotomy has become a common agenda throughout the world in the decades since WWII (Stevens and Giebel, 2020).…”

Varieties of state commitment to higher education since 1945: toward a comparative-historical social science of postsecondary expansion

“…Couple the charter with universities' long legacy of enabling scholarly congress across other sovereign borders (Willinsky 2018), as well as the distinctiveness of academic calendars, titles, status hierarchies and ceremonies, and the global population of postsecondary institutions comes to appear as a parallel political order. The Universities of Essex, Luxembourg, and Uppsala all are proudly national institutions supported by national governments, but they also enjoy special autonomy over many of their internal affairs, and they conduct all manner of their own diplomacy with other academic sovereigns worldwide (Stevens and Geibel 2020).…”

“…The demise of the bipolar political order also created space for postsecondary change in western Europe. The ongoing accretion of the Bologna process and the larger project of the European Union now sustains a vital transnational academic world that would have been difficult to imagine thirty years ago (Stevens and Geibel 2020). While the United States continues to exert preponderant influence in international status competitions and many universities in the post-Soviet states still remain tenuously connected to European scholarly and scientific metropoles, ambitious universities worldwide must now contend with the formidable power of a newly confederated European academy.…”