The globalised university: trends and challenges in teaching and learning

The first thing to note in reviewing this collection is that its main title is totally misleading. This is not a study on the effects on universities of globalisation, understood as those networks of capital, data and human resources made possible by high speed and pervasive communication and information technologies and economic systems which promote international supply chains of labour, finance and commodities.

Indeed, no coherent concept or definition of globalisation underpins the text or its individual chapters – no reference to even the popular ‘gurus of globalisation’ such as Thomas Friedman, who describes globalisation as a technological phenomenon which serves capitalism, and who predicts a resurgence of nationalism as rich economy countries assert their national interests.

In higher education contexts, globalisation encompasses student and staff mobility and fierce competition for international student enrolments, including the enticements of linked migration laws, as Birrell’s work in Australia illustrates. Globalisation in higher education also involves consideration of trade agreements such as GATS (the General Agreement on Trade in Services) and WTO (World Trade Organsiation) regulations, as the work of universities is increasingly conceived of as a tradeable commodity, and here Marginson and Considine are valuable sources, along with Knight. ‘The business of borderless education’, the challenge of for-profit education companies expanding in the main from North America, is well-canvassed by Ryan and Bjarnason.

In brief, there is no shortage of previous publications exploring the globalised university – Scott (1998), King (2004) and Breton and Lambert (2003) being the foremost.

The sub-title of the present book, ‘Trends and challenges in teaching and learning’ is perhaps a better content descriptor, although there is rather more emphasis on the ‘challenges’, which editors Scott and Dixon set out in Chapter 1. This chapter begins with a reproduction of ‘Ozymandias’, the Shelley poem on the decay of despots and their power symbols. Is this intended to reflect the authors’ despair over the HE sector? Or, as they suggest (p. 2) a warning that the ‘traditional’ university may not survive? (NB – it’s already disappeared, folks!) The Ozymandias metaphor is inappropriate in the extreme, unless Scott and Dixon believe that traditional universities were despotic, cruel and arrogant. They go on to spike the usual suspects in the demise of traditional universities – restructuring, globalisation, technology, management ‘fashions’, corporatisation, vocationalism, lack of government funding and, finally, a crippling lack of time ‘to debate philosophical standpoints’ over ‘long lunches’ (p. 4).

No simple ‘solutions’ are proffered – nor are they possible: the university will continue to evolve as these pressures intensify.

The remaining chapters range in a somewhat desultory manner over topics loosely linked to teaching.

De la Harpe and Radloff examine how institutions have responded to an increased focus on ‘the student experience’ as a result of regulatory government fiat and contestable funding, and their resort to Learning and Teaching Plans, and the establishment of new senior positions such as Associate Deans of Teaching. They also note the reluctance of staff to engage in the existing teaching support services provided to improve student learning. (This reluctance is widely shared – I will never forget the proud boast of a mathematics lecturer that he had never attended any activity of his university’s academic development unit because it would be like going to ‘a Marxist re-education camp’!)

Dixon and Scott revisit the changed nature of the academic role in a technology university, the perpetuated valourising of research over teaching and workloads in Chapter 3, concluding that the ‘enemy of the 21st century academic (is) Time’.

Price and Kirkwood traverse the impact of government and institutional drives to the adoption of new technologies in UK universities, with particular reference to the Open University, and recommend a professional development model which involves support staff as well as teaching staff. There is no attempt to relate these issues to the theme of globalisation.

Reynold Macpherson contributes an interesting case study of his (failed) attempt to ‘convert’ a Middle Eastern university to a student-centred approach to teaching, due to cultural patterns of autocracy. The chapter illustrates how the ‘export’ of Western models of education may conflict with other ideologies and confound ‘borderlessness’. Susan Nelson’s chapter on the tensions between teaching and research agendas at a large US public university is a discursive case study, which culminates in a description of the career decisions of two State University staff, one tenured, the other seeking tenure, and the pressure from their institution to expend less effort on teaching in favour of research. The connection of this to the theme of globalisation is not apparent.

The final chapter, by Charles Webber, on Leadership for organisational change, is actually another case study, this time on a unit of the University of Calgary, the Graduate Division of Educational Research and possible directions for niche universities in a globalised world. A potential to focus on providing international distance education is the only link to globalisation.

In summary, the chapters in this book have only the most tangential relationship to its purported theme. A book on globalised universities should surely have covered more on the effects of large numbers of international students in on-shore classes and the teaching approaches staff (and support staff) take to accommodate a more diverse student body; it should have examined the links between corporatisation of universities and the increased use of sessional staff for workforce ‘flexibility’; it should have canvassed the growth in importance of national and international quality assurance and standards agencies which, in seeking ‘harmonisation’ of national standards for degree certification, are moving inexorably to homogenise curricula worldwide. Such a book would also have reprised the role of ICTs and US-derived Learning Management Systems in imposing standardised teaching models. The globalised university is not that book, despite its title.