Can Provincial Universities be Global Institutions? Rethinking the Institution as the Unit of Analysis in the Study of Globalization and Higher Education
October 30, 2007 at 10:28 am 5 comments
Glen A. Jones, Higher Education Group Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
This paper can be downloaded from http://www.wun.ac.uk/theglobaluniversity/workshop.html
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Adam Nelson | October 30, 2007 at 12:44 pm
This paper shows clearly that a “global” university can—and perhaps must—also be a “local” or “provincial” university. Each of these levels of agency (local, national, and global) exists simultaneously with the others, shaping and being shaped by them.
My own paper on the institutionalization of plant research in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shows a similar interplay of local, provincial, national, and international aims 200 years ago. Just as Professor Jones’s paper finds that “changes taking place within the disciplines . . . as a function of the growth of knowledge and increasing specialization might be having a significant impact on the day-to-day life of the university and the experience of its students and faculty” (9), my own paper finds that historical changes in botanical/agricultural research gave rise to new disciplines—and new professorships; shaped the day-to-day experiences of students and faculty in the university; affected the development of the local, regional, and national economy; and ultimately influenced the United States’ position in global trade.
I wholeheartedly agree with Professor Jones that, rather than focusing solely on the institutional dimensions of change, we need to frame the process of internationalization “in terms of . . . the complex interface between institutional and understructural processes” (10). To understand the process of internationalization, or to “realise the global university,” we need to place universities in their broadest possible social, cultural, political, and economic—in a word, historical—contexts. Then we’ll see more clearly that “universities operate on multiple planes, and that a university can be strongly local and global in orientation at the same time” . . . and in important ways, this has been the case for a very long time (15).
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Anne Peterson | November 2, 2007 at 9:19 pm
As a researcher who has been asking “how international is my university?” I welcome the matrix framework which Prof. Jones has proposed. And, while I agree that it is problematic to pin down where on the local-national-global continuum a university is at a particular point in time, I am beginning to doubt whether we will ever gain a comprehensive understanding of internationalisation given the context-bound nature of each institution and the individual and collective agents within it. To help us in shifting our focus, I would welcome further analysis at the unit level and description of the understructure housing the academic tribes that comprise the faculty. What I hear most often is disciplinary, cross-institutional comparison: i.e., “we’ll never be as international as university X. We have only five lecturers in Portuguese and it has 25.” These are the kind of metrics at the worm’s eye view.
Looking forward to the discussion.
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Glen Jones | November 8, 2007 at 12:48 am
I have enjoyed reading the comments from Professors Nelson and Peterson. Professor Nelson’s work provides a very thoughtful example of how studying the changes and advances in research can provide a foundation for exploring broader changes at the university (and broader societal) levels of activity. I find the inter-relationships between levels of authority and activity quite fascinating – and while I think that the matrix model that I am proposing needs further development – it strikes me that looking at higher education in multi-leveled/layered organizational terms can help avoid at least some of the over-simplification that one finds in the literature on globalization and internationalization. Professor Peterson makes this point quite clearly and asks for more research focusing on the understructure level. While I agree with her that it will be extremely difficult to ever get a comprehensive understanding of internationalization – I think that looking at activities at the understructure level in relation to the institution and higher education system might provide us with a greater understanding of higher education systems – even if internationalization (which according to Knight is a process) remains quite difficult to get our heads around.
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Joanna Al-Youssef | November 9, 2007 at 12:25 am
Thank you for a very interesting paper. The question I always find myself asking when reading about internationalisation is how international is the research on internationalisation? So far, the frameworks used in looking at internationalisation in higher education have been confined to the immediate context where the studies take place. I can see that the global higher education matrix is a way forward in this regard, offering a broader perspective on the issue. I’m interested to know more about how this matrix could be applied, and how it can inform policy and practice.
One of the biggest challenges facing the university where my case study research is being carried out is the tension between the high level of autonomy that departments enjoy, and the attempts by the central management to implement a newly developed international strategy with the expectation that it will work for all. I was wondering whether the matrix proposed here could be used as a diagnostic tool for such a tension.
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Professor Rosemary Deem | November 11, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Glen’s paper touches on an important topic and one I explored in Deem, R. (2001). “Globalisation, new managerialism, academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism in universities; is the local dimension still important?” Comparative Education 37 (1): 7-20., albeit from a slightly different perspective. These local, national and global tensions are often a practical challenge for academic leaders, as I know from my own experience on a working group about regional policy at Lancaster University in the late 1990s, since some academics resist the notion that they can and should contribute to local as well as international concerns, particularly in respect of research. The matrix suggested is a useful one for future empirical research in a field where there is often more speculation than generation of research data.