Internationalizing and International-benchmarking of Universitities in East Asia: Producing World Class University or Reproducing Neo-Imperialism in Education?
October 21, 2007 at 7:56 pm 4 comments
Professor KaHo Mok, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of HongKong
This paper can be downloaded from http://www.wun.ac.uk/theglobaluniversity/workshop.html
Entry filed under: 07-11-14-Papers, Background. Tags: .
1.
Adam Nelson | October 29, 2007 at 2:36 pm
This paper offers an outstanding review of the effects of neo-liberal marketization on higher education governance in East Asia.
I’m hoping to hear more about the degree to which different universities in China have felt the pressure to seek private funds. Do some institutions feel this pressure more than others? Do elite universities (Beijing, Tsinghua, Fudan, etc.) that receive concentrated state support under the “211” and “985” projects need to seek private funds? Even with added state support, do top-tier universities seek private funds anyway, thus increasing the stratification of higher education institutions within China? What might be the long-term consequences of a highly stratified university system for China’s social, economic, and political development (the experience of the United States might be telling: highly stratified university systems not only reinforce but significantly amplify broader social inequalities of wealth and power).
I also wonder how states that have created bench-marking systems have respond when they have discovered “malpractice and even corruption . . . resulting from the strong drive to obtain world-class status” (8). While bench-marking has not yet hit universities in the United States, it has surfaced in primary and secondary schools, and neither state government nor the federal government has found effective strategies for combating the corruption that inevitably accompanies these systems (e.g., misreporting data, helping students cheat on standardized tests, etc.) How have East Asian states assured the public (or the state itself) of the accuracy and integrity of bench-marking systems—which can only promote “efficiency” if they rest on honest data?
The most provocative part of Ka Ho Mok’s paper comes in its final pages, which raise several important issues. Ka Ho Mok expresses concern about what he variously calls the “westernization,” “Americanization,” or “Anglo-Saxonization” of universities in East Asia, saying many factors—including “sending home students to study overseas and establishing international exchanges” (14)—have created a neo-colonial “dependency culture” in these states and have “reinforced an American dominated ‘hegemony’” in East Asian universities. I wonder if Welch and Zhang’s paper on the Chinese Knowledge Diaspora challenges this characterization (at least with respect to China). I also would note that many scholars in the West also express concern about corporatization, bench-marking, etc. If these policies are neo-colonial, then perhaps European and American universities are also “being colonized” (the United States has not yet adopted League Tables, but advocates of these systems look to admiringly toward the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise as a model worth emulating!) Perhaps, rather than finding the root cause of these changes either geographically or culturally in “the West,” we should look to global capitalism—embraced with increasing vigor by East Asia states themselves—as the source of the “problem.”
2.
Ian Wei | November 5, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Thank you for a powerfully argued paper. I learned a great deal from it.
First, I would like to echo Professor Nelson’s final point in his comments. Many scholars in the West think that the use of market-orientated business models, the emphasis on ranking, etc. undermine THEIR scholarly values and traditions. So scholars in East and West may have a great deal in common in this respect.
Second, I would like to hear more about what is distinctive about the scholarly traditions of Asia. Perhaps I am uniquely ill informed, but it is my impression that in general Chinese academics know far more about universities in Europe and America than European and American academics know about universities in China. The Chinese diaspora analysed by Professor Welch and Profess Zhang must surely see to that. I think many academics in the West would be very keen to learn more about ‘alternative academic paradigms for promoting cross-cultural understanding and cross-national policy learning’ (p. 16), especially if the effect was to contain the impact of global capitalism on universities.
3.
C Stephen Jaeger | November 8, 2007 at 7:20 pm
I read this paper with great interest. It shows the universities of East and Southeast Asia moved by government / state education ministries / administrative guidance and anonymous pressures “in the air” favoring globalization. “Globalization” pushes universities in the direction of corporate structures, a business-model of university operation, and an incentive-system based on market competition.
The paper makes clear the limited benefits of “globalization” and assessment/reward systems in Asia based on benchmarks imported from western educational systems.
Here are some topics that occurred to me in reading Prof. Ka Ho Mok’s paper that might enter into our discussion:
Administration-Creep
Ka Ho Mok, p. 10: “incorporating” state universities has next to no impact on academics, but gives senior management “flexibility in financial matters.” If this means, high salaries and big staffs for deans, provosts and chancellors and tight reins on departmental budgets and hiring, then we have the phenomenon readily notable in American state universities: “Administration creep.” Define administrators as managers, and they become a managerial class, even those who move from teaching/research into administration. The two big divisions of the university, teaching/research faculty and administration, drift apart. Administration asserts its power to set directions and develop strategies. The interests of administration are no longer linked directly to those of faculty. Something closer to a management/labor relationship develops. An attitude develops among faculty (not necessarily those with the strongest commitment to their discipline), that administration is the broad path to advancement, compared to which teaching/research is a narrow path. Faculty senates have no power to resist major decisions touching on the conception of the university’s mission. (Berkeley is an exception. Its constitution grants considerable oversight and veto power to the faculty senate. Possibly one reason for the preeminence of Berkeley among state universities.)
Misconceived Management
Universities aren’t businesses; students arent’ clients; research is not manufacture. The business/market/management model in many ways is contrary to the nature of and resists the mission of universities. “World class” university is one that best realizes what a university is capable of doing for its students and for society, not one whose faculty, driven by external pressures, engages in global competition with others in the field. Competition for what? Inventions that translate into patents, produce royalties and found businesses? That describes a small part of university activity, a part not in the core of the university’s mission.
The Nature of Academic Accountability: Benchmarking/ league lists/ Increased accountability: A system of rewards based on productivity and publication site will meet with the scorn of most researchers. One need only ask the colleagues from the UK, whose reward system rewarded abundant, not necessarily excellent publication of research. The advocates of “accountability” by quantity and place of publication may well find that they are instituting the predominance of mediocrity in universities. Excellent research emerges in many forms and at its own pace.
State Support and the Fundraising University
Ka Ho Mok, p. 10: University of Hong Kong suffered budget cuts of state funds and sought “self-funded programmes”, turning their research into commercial products.
While it’s true that some sectors of the university can generate high revenue, neither that nor fundraising are stable sources. A de facto sense of privileged power in the university develops in those sectors, favoring further the business model and relegating to secondary status core disciplines, like arts, humanities, social sciences.
States have long-term interests and deep investments in sustaining the university; businesses and wealthy patrons have specialized, localized, short-term interests. No collection of raised funds can replace state support, and the administrators and university leaders who resign themselves to diminished state support and leadership reduced to fund raising are supporting trends inimical to the state university.
Support by Institution or Academic Unit vs. Support of Individual Talent
Create a few “top-tier,” “flagship” universities (Ka Ho Mok, p. 5) in China, nat’l univ’s become world universities.
Reward an assimilation to western/American models renders academics “prostitutes” (quoting Vidovich, Yang and Currie, 2007).
Assessment programs diminish academic freedom and the values of Asian scholarship, represent a “new imperialism.”
I propose this thesis for debate: the first and main criterion for distribution of research funding should be the cultivation of individual talent. “Top tier” and “flagship universities” develop because of the talent of their faculty, not because education ministries declare them “top tier” and pump money into them.
The university cultivation of individual talent begins at the high school level.
See the comments of Yale U. President in the Financial Times “who argues that the UK research funding model simply is not up to the task of delivering world class globally ranked universities. Contrasting the US funding model with the UK, he argues the US model, of selective funding to reward ‘merit’, means that this model is more flexible and “it is also more meritocratic”. The Financial Times reports the Yale president as arguing that ‘…allocating a large block grant to a university after assessing it for quality department by department results in the weak being pulled up by the strong.’” (our website, “Global Higher Ed Blog: http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/)
The Balance of International and Local: “Two Legs”
The danger of the present moment is that a corporate, market-based model, riding high, “globalizes” in indifference to the local and traditional, amputates one leg of the university. I’ve argued in my paper the severe limits on the possibilities of globalization, the local being one of the main limiting elements. That argument is consistent with the thrust of Ka Ho Mok’s paper.
4.
Ross Benbow | November 9, 2007 at 1:20 am
Thank you, Professor Mok, for a fascinating and thought-provoking paper. As a graduate student studying the privatization of higher education in Tanzania, I saw a number of similarities between the situation in East Asia and the situation in Tanzania. I thought perhaps I could offer a brief comment.
Beginning in the early 1990s, the higher education sector in Tanzania began to undergo a process of privatization through a series of government initiatives. These initiatives (1) opened the sector to private organizations, (2) established a government-based monitoring body to certify public and private institutions (which are now established as equal entities in the eyes of the law, as in the case of Taiwan), and (3) promoted managerial “decentralization” and independent resource allocation and cost-sharing measures in public institutions. While the modes and discourses surrounding the changes in Tanzania seem to be based on the same neoliberal, market-oriented ideas as in East Asia, it is interesting to note that the initiatives in Tanzania were influenced much more by internal, as opposed to international, pressures. Tanzania’s universities still serve only 1-2% of the university-age cohort, and while international donor pressure is said to have played a minimal part in greasing the wheels of privatization (to what extent is hard to gauge), it was a steadily growing public outcry for more capacity in the higher-education system, together with pressure from church organizations and civic groups, that ultimately led to the changes in Tanzania.
Certainly, these differences between the situation in Tanzania and the situation in East Asia can be linked in part to the comparative infrastructural strength of the regions’ university systems. The Tanzanian higher education sector continually struggles to recruit and pay faculty, replace outdated equipment, and offer facilities that can meet the demands of an exploding student population–and, of course, Tanzania doesn’t yet have the luxury of worrying about its universities’ ranking world-wide. While embracing international rhetoric regarding entrepreneurialism and decentralization, then, Tanzanian education policy has developed more in reaction to internal political pressures and the fact that government has not been able to increase university funding to meet the demands of secondary school graduates.
Still, despite these dissimilarities, scholars in sub-Saharan Africa have consistently pointed out the negative repercussions of adopting neoliberal, UK- and US-based approaches in university reform, and Professor Mok’s main argument regarding the reproduction of imperialism is well-taken (for a great example of this argument from an African perspective, see Andrew Okolie’s “Producing Knowledge for Sustainable Development in Africa: Implications for Higher Education” [2003]). University leaders, however, have struggled with the obvious necessity of developing African-centered research and teaching programs while also meeting the demands of students and families who see American- and British-oriented education as more economically appealing. The solution, as Professor Mok points out, may lie somewhere in the middle.
Thank you again for your work, Professor.
Ross Benbow
Doctoral Student
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison