Whose “World” Is It? Global Educational Justice in the Age of Neoliberalism
by
How do tensions between refuge and its refusals shape the nature of university labor, especially in light of recent upheavals? From the protest encampments on UC campuses to memory landscapes of Iran and trans activists in South America, UC PhD students in UCHRI’s 2023-24 professionalization program map the search for refuge from local to global.
What the recent social movements on campuses demonstrate is an opportunity to purposefully rethink institutional values and their alignment with the material conditions under which knowledge work takes place.
In the past decade, narratives of global and international higher education have suffused American colleges and universities. Aimed at cultivating global citizenship among new generations of college graduates, American universities have never been more “global.” Their most visible symbols are proliferating educational outposts granting American degrees across futuristic global cities like Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Shanghai, and Qatar’s Education City (which boasts a growing list of American degree offerings from institutions including Virginia Commonwealth, Weill Cornell Medicine, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern). Nearly all American universities have statements of internationalization, as does my institution, UC Santa Cruz, which participated in the American Council on Education’s Internationalization Laboratory (2018-2020), aimed at systematically internationalizing American colleges and universities and cultivating global communities of scholars beyond borders. John Sexton, past president of my undergraduate alma mater NYU and visionary educational internationalist, memorably described NYU’s globalist re-fashioning as creating a sanctuary of global learning. In his utopian imaginings of universities unbound, disparate communities of learning find hope in an interconnected world, while resisting the exclusionary forces of nativism and nationalism.
There is a jarring disconnect between this self-constructed image of global sanctuaries of learning and flourishing, and the widespread assault and crackdown on solidarity encampments across university campuses in the US that characterized the spring of 2024. Across both coasts and beyond, students decrying their institutions’ collusion with the Israeli occupation of Gaza and Palestine publicly staged protests in solidarity to remind us of our collective moral responsibilities while learning and working at knowledge institutions in the US, a powerful Israeli ally.
But the rapid, often violent, crackdowns enacted by university presidents laid bare the limits of their visions of globality, and their rhetorical commitments to international cooperation, exchange of ideas, and solidarity for justice. As students grappled to bridge the empathy gap of living and learning in US universities while weapons designed by their institutions’ research facilities were deployed against civilians and fellow students in Palestine, the public posturing of institutional leadership revealed a deep chasm between competing visions of international and global engagement. The global in academic global engagement today is largely synonymous with networks across new hubs of global capitalism—increasingly in Asia and the Arab Gulf—while consciously obscuring and foreclosing solidarity with other militarized and colonized spaces that problematize the easy triumphalism of educational globalization.
In this regard, American higher education is deeply entangled with, enabling, and capitalizing on a selective identification with the grand narrative of a “rising Asia” or “the Asian twenty-first century.” As political scientist Isaac Kamola has noted in a prescient study of world imaginings in American higher education, the “global,” as educational elites in the US began to define it in the 1980s and 1990s, worked largely as a tactic to free their institutions from locally grounded, material, and political limits on expansion and revenue extraction. Thus, despite the rhetorical flourish of eloquent apologists, who have imagined their “global” universities as sanctuaries of refuge and learning for students from around the world, the system that educational internationalists like Sexton have created have at their core the reproduction of inequality and exclusions—both domestically and abroad. Educational networks between New York, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, and NYU’s over 11 other satellite campuses, for instance, have little space within their globality to accommodate solidarity with the decimation of Gaza’s educational infrastructures. Thus, ongoing activist energies across campuses are the clearest evidence of students’ refusals to accept institutional constraints on the meanings of their intellectual and political worlds, and their attempt to regain control of the educational mission of their institutions.
World Class vs. Global Universities
Two recent books—Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Harvard historian William Kirby, and The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus, each present a determined affirmation of global higher education. At a moment when the political malaise at American universities has been assailed by critics—both from the Right and Left—over inadequate responses to the genocide in Gaza, their contributions from a deliberately “international” lens into US educational politics will no doubt be read and debated widely. The authors have not publicly voiced positions on contemporary solidarity movements across campuses, although Harvard’s William Kirby has spoken out against the insular and opaque governance of Harvard Corporation’s Board of Overseers surrounding the resignation of President Claudine Gay, following her congressional testimony in late 2023. However, the approach of both books to the past, present, and future of US universities in the world is distinct in attempting to transcend domestic culture wars by looking internationally—especially to shifting centers in Asia—toward the promise of renewed educational internationalism for the future.
In doing so, the authors join a growing chorus of university presidents such as Sexton and Yale’s Richard Levin, who have, over the past decade, made a persuasive case for a “global” re-orientation of US universities and colleges to leverage the rise of Asia, or the “Asian Twenty-First Century.” While these debates and conversations among university administrators have rarely been discussed in tandem with campus protests and solidarity movements—in many cases, they actively seek to transcend them—I propose that both conversations are deeply entangled through their foregrounding of the global, especially a globalizing Asia, as a new frontier for American higher education.
Empires of Ideas is an ambitious, wide-ranging, historic sweep of the world’s leading research universities, culminating in a discussion of China’s universities as global leaders in the “Chinese/Asian Twenty-First Century.” A magisterial work of global history with lessons for academic governance, Empires of Ideas is a meditation on what the modern university is and shows the prospects for “World Class” universities in an interconnected future. With an eye on shifting educational politics in the twenty-first century, but foregrounding instead the innovative and ingenious character of American liberal arts colleges and their capacity for reinvention across the globe, The New Global Universities provides a snapshot of “entrepreneurial” higher education proliferating globally. Written by two leading scholar-practitioners who themselves have experience leading American branch campuses in Asia, the authors introduce readers to global “Start-Up Universities” and their energies as the new frontiers for US leaders to emulate.
Through a series of case studies, both books introduce readers to the myriad ways that universities—past and present—have navigated tensions between multiple commitments and their shifting roles as “global” leaders. In Kirby’s account, we get eight examples of prominent, well-endowed research universities across three centuries, from the venerated Humboldt University in Berlin (the “German Nineteenth Century”) to American powerhouses like Harvard, the University of California, and Duke (the “American Twentieth Century”) and finally, to “Chinese” universities in the “Chinese Century” (Nanjing, Tsinghua, and Hong Kong).1 New Global Universities introduces readers instead to eight lesser-known but no less significant experimental universities in their nascent stages. These include the high-profile global ventures of American universities in Asia and the Arab Gulf such as Yale-NUS and NYU-Abu Dhabi, in addition to other entrepreneurial ventures heavily inspired by US liberal arts colleges such as Fulbright University (Vietnam), African Leadership University (Mauritius and Rwanda), and Asahei University (Ghana).
The rapid, often violent, crackdowns enacted by university presidents laid bare the limits of their visions of globality.
Both books present a persuasive defense of higher education and American universities’ commitments to international engagements, and are a timely corrective to the nativism and neo-nationalism that so often punctuate US campus life. In doing so, their self-consciously global lens into US higher education also expands the boundaries of the often parochial nature of debates surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and educational justice discourse within liberal American college circles. And yet, the authors are ambivalent about the extent to which these new global frontiers of higher education will simply reproduce existing inequalities and hierarchies of knowledge and power or serve to ameliorate them.
World Class Aspirations
“What is the responsibility of the scholar? To be world class.” So explained a senior professor and administrator in earnest as I explored job opportunities at the National University of Singapore last year. Whereas few American university presidents would be as forthright about their ambitions, such broader aspirations to world class status are not unique to the Anglophone postcolony of Singapore, nor to Asia, but also apply to the over 1900 universities across 180 countries ranked on the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and numerous other similar scales, all seeking legibility and recognition within Anglo-American academia. As historian William Kirby writes, the present ubiquity of global university ranking systems is simply one of the most visible ways that modern research universities reflect hierarchies in global politics. Universities are useful barometers of the rise and fall of empires, and the world’s most powerful political and economic centers have unsurprisingly also been leaders in scholarship and learning.
Empires of Ideas draws on Kirby’s unique insight, interviews, experience, and research into multiple institutional histories to tell an important story about higher education in the modern world. A leading historian of modern China and Sino-German relations and a Harvard dean with a wealth of experience with institutions across all three continents, Kirby is well-positioned to undertake this task. Empires of Ideas traces the emergence of modern universities in their most powerful settings—Germany, the United States, and China—while attentive to the global intellectual and material contexts and circulations that enabled them. The University of Berlin (later Humboldt) is Kirby’s origin point for three interlocking phenomena that formed a template for subsequent institutions to follow. These include (1) devotion to scientific research at the highest level (Wissenschaft); (2) commitments to a culture of education in the liberal arts and sciences;2 (3) autonomy and some level of insulation from politics. The subsequent case studies that Kirby introduces—research powerhouses such as Berkeley, Harvard, and Duke (in the “American” twentieth century), and Hong Kong, Tsinghua, and Nanjing—are framed as successors inspired by the Humboldtian ideal and measured by the extent to which they conform to this model.
Empires of Ideas provides an intellectual backdrop to shifts in geopolitics and the role of knowledge institutions in empire-building, although Kirby is less interested in geopolitics than in the lessons to be drawn from various institutional trajectories. For higher educational practitioners, Empires of Ideas explores the makings and unmakings of “World Class Universities.” The individual case studies are fascinating, well-researched explorations with a carefully crafted narrative arc that renders them more than the sum of their parts. As a historian of China particularly attuned to contemporary politics, Kirby is further keen to make a case for China’s higher educational leadership in the “Chinese” twenty-first century. Pointing to the striking contrast in political will and resources devoted to educational expansion in China when pitted against public underfunding in the US, Kirby’s account of China’s ascent and his justifications for academic excellence under illiberal governments will no doubt interest American observers.
The Rise of China and Internationalizing Higher Education
At its heart, Empires of Ideas is a defense of educational internationalism and a call for renewed US-China educational engagements amidst geopolitical tensions. As Fulbright scholarships and Peace Corps exchanges to China and Hong Kong have been discontinued since 2020, and diplomatic tensions between China and the US have slowed the circulation of students, scholars, and ideas, Kirby’s exhortation is one for continued engagement, following his argument that Chinese universities in the “Chinese Century” will continue to develop along world class lines, following the same playbook as their German and American counterparts.
It is worth noting, however, that accelerating internationalization is not unidirectional nor solely modeled after the Euro-American model. The centrality given to “internationalization” in Empires of Ideas is striking, given how the “international” is, in many ways, the new variable that problematizes the Humboltian model (born to serve the Prussian-German State). Pointing towards precisely this same phenomenon, scholars such as Walter Mignolo have argued elsewhere that the (Kantian) Humboldtian tradition of learning from nineteenth-century Germany has long been displaced by the model of the American “corporate university,” produced alongside neoliberal developments. Rhetorical commitments to philosophy and science serve the nation-state, but are already beholden to capitalist interests and new forms of coloniality.
In this regard, one of the most fascinating discussions in Kirby’s conclusion is the prospect of alternative lines of internationalization along the New Silk Road, which he describes as producing more “international” but less “world class” universities. Clearly, they are not the same thing, as the proliferating China-led educational partnerships within Asia—including Suzhou University in Laos, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics in Bangkok, and Xiamen University in Malaysia—evidence. Partially, they represent Chinese-led attempts to de-link from Western epistemologies and material structures; at the same time, they have been critiqued as part of a new imperial project that continues to exploit and assimilate non-Han groups, dissidents, and activists. In Kirby’s estimation, China may be recruiting more students from the Global South, but their overall faculty and leadership are still largely tethered to “Western” universities to satisfy their world class aspirations.
Given their relatively recent emergence, it is unclear at present whether the nascent Chinese university outposts in Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand, for instance, are simply at the forefront of a new wave of coloniality replicating the pattern of American-led educational enclaves globally, or aspiring to alternative models. Arguably, Kirby’s question of Chinese leadership—in higher education and beyond—should not simply be about whether China will lead, but about how, and on whose terms. Despite Kirby’s conclusion that world class universities can emerge in illiberal systems, the broader unanswered question is whose “world” sets the standard and whether it is in our collective interests to aspire to world class if the “world” simply means legibility to Anglo-American academia. Will global higher education in the “Asian Century” under the influence of a Chinese global superpower supplant existing structures of global inequality in knowledge production or create new ones? While Chinese internationalism draws on historical legacies from socialist, nonaligned solidarities from the Cold War era, can these translate into reshaping the material contexts of knowledge production?
Start-Up Universities: Educational Partnerships in the Global South
Questions of global inequality in higher education stand at the heart of Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus’s New Global Universities, which takes seriously ongoing educational experiments that challenge tired narratives of a crisis in public underfunding of the humanities and the frustrating stasis of partisan politics within the US. A breezy, readable account of ongoing experiments to create new “Start-Up Universities” embodying the best of American liberal arts, New Global Universities introduces the institution-building and creative energies—from Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Ethiopia, to Singapore—that have given rise to an entire series of ongoing educational experiments. Implicitly critiquing the world class aspirations that Empires of Ideas centralizes, Penprase and Pickus argue instead that the conservative playbook toward achieving world class ranking in fact stifles the youthful energies, utopian spirits, and open-ended possibilities for a new generation of students. The institutions that New Global Universities introduces are newer experimental initiatives across the globe, many of which are unranked, defying precedents and charting new pathways.
Compared to Kirby’s historical sweep of well-known, revered universities like Humboldt, Harvard, and Hong Kong, Penprase and Pickus focus on lesser-known institutions produced by collaborations between American higher education elites and “Global South” educational entrepreneurs. This introduction is a timely and important one. Their case studies each present alternative definitions of what a university looks like, from the radical experiments of online campuses (Minerva) to multi-sited campuses (African Leadership University), or residential colleges (Yale-NUS, Duke Kunshan University). Indeed, the trajectories of both authors, US-based academics who “gave up” coveted US-based positions to co-create Duke Kunshan University (Pickus) and Yale-NUS College in Singapore (Penprase), exemplify this shift as they evangelize their inspiring lessons from the world to reinvigorate higher education and the liberal arts in the US. New Global Universities presents the practical lessons drawn from their institution-building process, including cultivating a reputation, fundraising, recruiting faculty, overseeing campus construction, and navigating the inexorable tensions between local and global commitments (including academic freedom), as broader lessons about the politics, ethics, and practical workings of institution-building.
Admittedly, the selection of “global universities” that Penprase and Pickus profile is of incredible unevenness and diversity. There are those extremely well-funded outposts of American universities concentrated in wealthy hubs across Asia (such as Yale in Singapore and NYU in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai), but also other less well-endowed, creative universities seeking to work around these limitations, like Ashoka University in India, Fulbright University in Vietnam, and Ashesi University in Ghana, in addition to US-based projects like the fully online Minerva University and the residential Olin College of Engineering. Penprase and Pickus candidly acknowledge that their prospects are mixed; instead of reducing inequalities, they can accelerate and accentuate them. In every case study, the perennial challenge of resistance without reproduction, and the tensions between conflicting priorities between multiple stakeholders, remain salient.
The fact that so many of these global experimental initiatives were conceptualized in American MBA classrooms by people with decades of US experience seems to contradict the notion of popular energies and creativity organically emerging outside of American borders. In the most successful instances, top-down planning from state bureaucrats in authoritarian states like Singapore, China, and the UAE— leveraging an American brand for their own statist agendas—is the main driving force in these projects. Where “grassroots energies” or popular activism and organizing attempt to steer their institutions forward, they are also susceptible to state capture. Unsurprisingly, the less well-endowed institutions have to deploy the most extensively corporate logics, such as the African Leadership University (networked across Mauritius-Rwanda and online), where a start-up culture bleeds into its educational ethos and leaders wax lyrical about education and students as building a product, complete with product management and customer and user experience. The strong imprint of American capitalist and corporatist logic in these new institutions has led other critical voices to more accurately describe these global universities in question as “American-styled Global Universities” to foreground the specific direction of intellectual and capital flows, in contrast to the “non-place” which the global sometimes invokes. For some of their most strident critics, US-inspired campuses abroad are far from utopian spaces of learning, but instead “offshore education” outposts akin to a “colonial metropole seeking new sources of income and educative subjects.”
So many of our institutions…ultimately use rhetoric about diversity, inclusion, and global engagement to obscure profit imperatives, while remaining shot through with American imperial hubris in viewing the world beyond Europe and the United States.
The greatest points of tension within these new global universities—especially those located in Asia and Africa—are their historical legacies of colonialism. Ironically, postcolonial states like India, Singapore, and Ghana are embracing a Western educational philosophy in the tradition of American liberal arts. While Penprase and Pickus are wary of “American-styled rhetoric” about decolonization and diversity as a performative gesture to Western sensibilities, that is not to foreclose a meaningful reckoning with hierarchies of knowledge and power that are growing at these institutions as well. Calls to decolonize the curriculum wade into the already fraught territory of delimiting the scope and purpose of these global universities while creating possibilities that are different from what institutions based in the US can achieve. They also demonstrate the agency of students and scholars, who can leverage intellectual resources to speak back to locations of power within their own institutions. In many cases, the boundaries of initially envisioned “global citizenship” do not foreclose students from reflecting critically on their deeply flawed institutional homes and pushing their boundaries. To quote Yale-NUS College graduate Faris Joraimi, who has written about pursuing decolonial options within new global universities like Yale-NUS College, “We [undergraduates] can reclaim the university as a space to reimagine more just futures. Rather than thinking of it as an object to be decolonized, we can and should take the university as a vehicle for decolonial possibilities.” To do so would be, as Kathryn Kleypas writes, to balance the tensions between the luster of “brand America” and the “America-bashing” that coexist at so many of these global universities to produce a locally-rooted critique that can defamiliarize power structures and reshape universities in the US and abroad.
Penprase and Pickus conclude on an upbeat note. Their concluding chapter helpfully includes a dialogical reflection on the possibilities and limitations of the “global university” model, which is rapidly proliferating. Despite various setbacks to the institutions they profiled (such as the sudden closure of Yale-NUS College and the inevitable pains of leadership renewal in others), the authors strongly identify with their broader mission for higher educational reform, where students’ learning and global engagement are centralized in otherwise unwieldy institutions. There is much to identify with and root for in these experimental ventures, although I finished the book on a more ambivalent note. Faced with dual pressures from state and capital, the struggles against assimilation are real: these ventures are either assimilated into neoliberal logics that translate into renewed focus on research outputs and rankings, or are stymied by authoritarian state control. In this regard, the case studies the book provides present a valuable window into the ongoing struggles in global higher education as it unravels in the twenty-first century.
Worlding Universities in an Age of Educational Globalization
Writing at a moment of personal transition, and having spent the past twelve years as an international student across various universities in the United States—receiving a BA from New York University and a PhD from UC Santa Cruz—I count myself as a beneficiary of international higher education, the intellectual and activist energies on US campuses, and the opportunities for self-actualization and discovery which were made possible by the space to learn, unlearn, and think about who I am and aspire to be. At the same time, it has been impossible to ignore the neoliberal core of so many of our institutions, which ultimately use rhetoric about diversity, inclusion, and global engagement to obscure profit imperatives, while remaining shot through with American imperial hubris in viewing the world beyond Europe and the United States.
I am sympathetic to the critiques that Empires of Ideas and New Global Universities raise, and the futures that they envision. When asked by well-meaning acquaintances and relatives for advice on studying abroad in the US, I now often find myself pointing them toward the “new global universities” that Penprase and Pickus introduce, rather than the better-known research powerhouses featured in Kirby’s Empires of Ideas. However, the “broad and deep anxiety about the future of American higher education within the United States,” which Kirby has pointedly identified in a recent issue of Daedalus on the advances and challenges in international higher education, cannot simply be resolved by the reification of the wealthy capitals of Asia, the allure of Asian markets, and the fantasy of transcending local politics by exporting American educational models overseas, re-orienting or locating their institutions elsewhere. Rather, what the recent social movements on campuses demonstrate is an opportunity to purposefully rethink institutional values and their alignment with the material conditions under which knowledge work takes place.
Among the multiple perspectives voiced by scholars and commentators regarding solidarity encampments springing up on US campuses, renewed educational exchange has been one of the unlikely proposals on the table. A list of pithy suggestions proposed in Nicholas Kristof’s May 1, 2024 New York Times column, “How Protestors Can Actually Help Palestinians,” included renewed educational exchanges to Palestine as a possible pathway towards greater and more meaningful solidarity. Kristof’s suggestion was a reaction to what he perceived as the counterproductivity of performative actions, which at times distracts from the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis in Gaza. I disagree with Kristof’s framing of both aspects: social movements rooted within US campuses and educational travel to Palestine are not diametrically opposed, but are in fact part of a deliberate process of re-orienting one’s Worlds. But I find parts of his proposal, especially a push toward intentional, institutional commitments to sending students to live and learn in Palestine, sharing in the communities under siege from violent settlers, to be eminently practical examples of where divestment and re-investment may begin, in the slow process of rebuilding decimated Palestinian universities. In the initial accepting of ten displaced Gazan students on scholarship, creating a cultural center for Arab and Palestinian students, and expanding Palestine and Middle East Studies, the negotiations at Rutgers University, for instance, have proved instructive for how longer-term institutional transformations might begin.
A generation of American college students and activists are coming of age at a moment when their institutions are marketing “global” education and identities as part of the college experience, with guaranteed study abroad and travel experiences aimed at cultivating this global citizenship. Earlier this year, I unsuccessfully interviewed for an “International Studies” position at a US university, which despite its lofty aims toward international experience for diversity and educational justice, entailed study abroad programming that one faculty privately described as akin to franchising Starbucks at international airports. As the ongoing solidarity movements of spring 2024 remind us, students explicitly reject this vision of global higher education. They are not concerned with the superficiality of world class rankings or global experiences, nor the worlds of the sheltered educational enclaves within what Penprase and Pickus describe as WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Instead, they are returning to alternative visions of the global, inspired by the refusals of activist movements before them, to address the struggles for global educational justice in our contemporary moment.
Banner Image Credit: Joshua Tan.
This publication was supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding M22PS5863. UCHRI thanks editor and writer Michelle Chihara for her developmental work with the series contributors.
