Transnationaiization and the University: The Perspective of Giobal Modernity

ArifDirlik
This essay takes up an important challenge facing higher education today as it appears from the perspective of giobal modernity: the challenge of transnationaiization, which has created pressures for the reinvention of the university institutionally and ideologically. The challenge shows every sign of being global, even if its significance inevitably difters from one national context or even one university to another. My observations below are derived mostly, but not exclusively, from the context with which I am most familiar: the United States. But US educational institutions deserve spcial attention for another reason that is bound up with the power of the United States in the world economy and politics: their global reach not only as influential models but also in direct educational activity abroad. Despite some uncertainty andftuctuationarising from war and terror, US institutions remain the foremost destination of international student mobility. US educational institutions are not merely beneficiaries of US power; they are also widely perceived to hold the secret of the economic and political power of the nation, not to speak of successful careers in the global economy. They are sites as well as vehicles and agents of globalization..
boundary 2 39:3 (2012) DO110.1215/01903659-1730617 2012 by Duke University Press

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The historical perspective with which this discussion begins is offered as a reminder that some of the basic problems in contemporary education are not very novel but appear so because changes in the world situation have sharpened the structural contradictions that all along have characterized modern higher education, a product of Euromodernity, which, in its US version, has become nearly global. My primary emphasis is on questions thrown up by what I describe as "the business turn" in the university, which has been stimulated by the global economy and recent availability of a "market" in international students. There are signs already that the resolution of these questions will require the reinvention of the university organizationally, in knowledge production and in education. This is illustrated by contemporary tendencies in the transnationalization of higher education institutions. By way of conclusion, I will turn to a number of salient social questions raised by the transnational turn in higher education. A personal note is in order here in anticipation of the critique I offer below. Evaluation of tendencies in higher education is inevitably entangled in readings of phenomena associated with the idea of globalization, which evoke contradictory responses in their implications.^ For anyone who shares in the cosmopolitan premises and goals of the university, transnationalization is to be welcomed as a further step in overcoming Eurocentric epistemological and cultural parochialism, which has characterized modern higher education despite its cosmopolitan premises. But to be carried away with transnationalization without regard to its social, political, and intellectual consequences is to fall in with the ideological mystification that is characteristic of celebrations of globalization in general. Transnationalization also creates pressure to change the content of education and practices of knowledge production, which would violate equally fundamental premises of the modern university that pertain to its public obligations, the pursuit of critical intellectual work, and attentiveness to place-based concerns, all of which are indispensable to a life-affirming educational agenda. The discussion that follows is guided by my sense that these contradictory tendencies need to be confronted directly rather than avoided out of anxieties about political correctness.

1. For a discussion from the perspective of education research, see Joel Spring, "Research on Globalization and Education," Review of Educationai Research 78, no. 2 (June 2008): 330-63.

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Contemporary Transformations in Historical Perspective Like much that is associated with the term globalization, contemporary changes in higher education practices are not entirely new. Students have been attending "foreign" universities, and universities have been recruiting "foreign" students and faculty, since the origins of the university. Indeed, the word foreign would have made liftle sense in the medieval origins of the university from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when communities of scholars (many of them "travelers") began to gather together in officially recognized corporate entitiesuniversitiesorganized ih colleges and "nations" according to their various origins. If "foreignness" was a relevant idea, it was in the foreignness of the university to its immediate environment. The charters that granted universities autonomy from public (if not royal or church) interference would produce the image of "the ivory tower" that long characterized the university. Jean-Jacques Rousseau captured the cosmopolitanism nurtured by higher education when he wrote in. 1772 that "there were no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and indeed Englishmen, there were only Europeans. They had all been formed in the same way."^ This statement points to the historical roots of our globalized cosmopolitanism, despite two centuries of colonialism and nationalism that separate the present from the Enlightenment. It is also possible to find in earlier periods before our own extensions of university campuses into regions other than their main or head location, such as the Yale-in-China program, which goes back to the late Oing period. The export/import of the Euromodern university model is as
2. Walter Ruegg, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 4, Universities Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9-10. My observations on uhiversity development in this section are based, for the most part, on this volume, and on Walter Ruegg, ed., A History of the University in Europe, vol. 3, Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Also important in its discussion of changes in the structure of the university in the United States is Edwin D. Duryea, The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards (New York: Falmer, 2000). My generalizations refer to dominant trends with long-term consequences rather than specific developments. In particular, I do not wish to suggest that there was a single model of the university in Europe and North America, that the various changes 1 describe were uniform or took place everywhere. Such cosmopolitanism was characteristic also of universities in Asia, some of which predated European institutions of higher education. Nalanda University, located in presentday Bihar, established by the Gupta Empire in India for the study of Buddhism, had students from across the breadth of Asia during its seven centuries of existence.

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old as the history of colonialism and efforts to resist it by adopting the educational practices of the colonizers.^ And, of course, modern universities all along have been involved with government and business." The autonomy of the university has not precluded expectations of service to the public even when public was defined in contrast to the state, more often than not tacitly in accordance with elite business interests. Indeed, in the case of the United States, the university, recognized as a corporate entity from the early nineteenth century, was to serve legally as a model for business corporations.^ The relationship of the university to the state, to business, and to the public (understood as the people broadly) has been as much a legal question as a question of carrying out the functions of the university in knowledge production and the education of students, subject to changing configurations of power between the various constituencies (including the faculty). The university as a corporate entity is legally free, within limits, to act as any other corporation, even as a business. Ironically, it is its status as a legally recognized corporation (private or public) that also has, made possible the autonomy of the university and the freedom from state and public regulation its constituents enjoy in the pursuit of their activities. But that, too, has been subject to change in accordance with changing power relationships in society. It is important to note, nevertheless, that changes in higher education are not just effects of economic, social, and political change. The functions universities have assumed over the last century have placed them among the most powerful agents of change. The increased importance of knowledge production during this period also has strengthened the faculty vis--vis governing boards, giving them greater say over the administration of the university. What is novel about the present, then, if anything? The issue may be not the novelty of any of the phenomena associated with transnationalization but their cumulative effect, and the intensification of long-standing
3. See Ruegg, A History of the University in Europe, vol. 3, chap. 6, for the global diffusion of the European models (English, Scottish, French, and German) in the nineteenth and twentieih centuries. 4. For a revealing example, see Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, "Exporting MIT: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building in India and Iran," in "Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs," special issue, Osiris 21, no. 1 (2006): 110-30. 5. See Duryea, The Academic Corporation, esp. chap. 6, for a discussion of the crucial Dartmouth University case of 1816.

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contradictions that not only impart the impression of novelty but exert pressures for change in the organization and knowledge content of higher education, which may be fulfilled only by a structural transformation of the university. While universities are older by far than nation-states, what is at issue presently is the transformation of practices that for the past two centuries have been guided in their design with reference to the nationstate. Finally, while unequal relations between and within societies may have reached unprecedented levels, cultural ftows under circumstances of global modernity are no longer predominantly one-way from imperial centers to the peripheries but are subject to negotiation and travel in the other direction, as sovereign national entities seek to play active roles in shaping globalization. Educational practices of Euromodern origin, reconfigured in accordance with local needs in their transplantation around the world, make claims to alternative possibilities as models against their progenitors in Europe and North America. Rather than simply fall in with or fall into despair against contemporary shifts in education, it may be more useful to identify what may be peculiar to the present occasion of change so as to confront the problems it presents. Because of its close linkages with political order, systemic failure of order inevitably has been accompanied by a crisis of education. A sense of crisis in education, or despair at its failings, especially at the seeming erosion of educational ideals and attacks on freedom, has been endemic to modern education, with its devotion to ceaseless change both in the production of knowledge and the training of future generations. But what is at hand presently would seem to be something more than the ordinary crisis, something that signals changes in the very foundational premises of two centuries of education. It is, therefore, important to view it both in its historical and its structural contexts to understand what may be novel about it against past instances of crisis and change. Stated at a high level of generality, the dynamics of educational institutions are bound up with the dynamics of the world system in which they are situated, albeit in its various localized articulations. And each phase in the successive forms education has assumed has been born out of the critique of its predecessor. Thus, in the European case, Christian education positioned itself in response to paganism and was in turn overcome by a modern education, which, during the Enlightenment, was born out of struggles with Christianity under the authority of science. It is the nineteenth-century university, as exemplified by the universities of Berlin, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, transformed by the vision of science, that would spread first in

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Europe and then go global with European colonization of the world.^ Triumphant globally by the end of the twentieth century, this model of education would seem to be in for a momentous change in response to a new paradigm of education. What are the reasons for thinking so? While driven by a vision of science that by the nineteenth century extended across all fields of learning, the modern university nevertheless has had to answer to two forces that have dynamized European/American domination of the world for two centuries: capitalism and nationalism. Science replaced the scriptures as the standard for truth. But the practices of science (what gets to be researched, how research is organized, what is done with the results of research, etc.) did not, therefore, become the selfless, objectively driven activity that its practitioners and apologists would claim. Most important in shaping these practices have been the demands of a capitalist economy as it assumed a variety of nationalized forms, in some cases, state-managed. Equally important has been the fundamental nationalist functions of cultivating citizens and service to national goals in a variety of ways ranging from the invention of national history and identity to political advice and involvement in military technological research. Indeed, the two goals have been intertwined both in knowledge production (visible most readily in the social and human sciences) and the training associated with higher education. But there also has been an assumption all along that these tasks could best be achieved in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, which made critical thinking into a fundamental premise of the modern university. ' That both freedom and critical thinking have been violated repeatedly, and continue to be objects of suspicion and hostility, should not lead to ignoring its presence at the core of the university. Legal protection of the university's corporate autonomy in the European tradition was fundamental in providing conditions for critical thinking, which has been at the heart of education since the scientific turn following the Enlightenment, especially in Germany. This is not to say that critical thinking itself is modern or European. But
6. The ascendancy of science by no means meant the disappearance of religion from a university education. Missionaries would play a crucial part in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the export of the European/American model of a university education. In a society such as the United States, religion is still very much an issue in education. The transition I am describing here should be understood as the secularization of the university, in the sense Charles Taylor has described it, not as the erasure of religion but as its rendering into one option among others. See Charles Taylor, The Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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it was in Europe that the modern educational paradigm was born during the Enlightenment in the struggles of scientific thinking over and against religion. The autonomy of the university was in a basic sense achieved from the beginning at the cost of its alienation from its social hinterland. The modern public university, more oriented than its predecessors to public service and practical ends, and with an enormous expansion of its student clientele, has played an important part in bringing together learning and the public. But the gap betweeh the town and the gown has never been eliminated, especially at the level of the content of education and different notions of public service. The distance between the university and its social context would assume dramatic proportions in contexts where both Euromodern science and the Euromodern university were foreign imports. Of particular relevance in this discussion are three sets of contradictions in its purposes that have been characteristic of the dynamics of the modern university. First, its knowledge production and educational functions have been premised on an insistent commitment to criticism, which chronically has conflicted with the simultaneous nationalist expectation of its socializing function in cultivating citizens. The criticism I am referring to is not the professional, intradisciplinary criticism that is generally acceptable, subject to the interplay of academic power, but criticism directed at the university as an institution, its social context, and the political order of which it is an integral component. However we may value radical critical thinking that reaches beyond the merely academic or professional, it is also necessary to recognize that it has been no less powerful than the pull of the state or the capitalist economy in distancing higher education from everyday concerns of living. That radical criticism should be at odds with the economic and political sponsors of higher education goes without saying. But it can also be, and frequently is, remote in its concerns from the public it would serve, which mayor may not be undesirable, but in either case is not to be ignored out of sympathy as another source of contradictions between higher education and its social hinterland. Next are those contradictions that are the manifestations within higher education of power relations within the social context of the university, products of a fundamental contradiction between a formal educational egalitarianism and the realities of unequal social relations that have chronically undermined not just the commitment of the university to public service but also research in the public interest. Despite the inclinations of at least some of the faculty, institutional understanding of the "public"

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has reproduced the hierarchical relations of the social and political environment. Exceptionalist claims to the contrary, moreover, higher education is by no means immune in its labor practices to general economic trendsvisible in our day in the swelling numbers of the academic precariat, which resonates with the neoliberal push for flexible labor. Finally, the Euromodern university also has suffered from a contradiction in its simultaneous commitment to national goals and the strictures of a capitalist economy: on the one hand upholding the stability and cohesiveness of the nation, on the other hand answering to the drive of capitalism for globalization and ceaseless innovation with universally applicable rules. The most recent episode of globalization has sharpened this contradiction in juxtaposing global against national citizenship. There is more at stake in this juxtaposition than merely national versus global interest. The globalization of higher education off-grounds it from its immediate social environment, further eroding its commitment to democratically conceived ideas of social welfare and the public good. This last contradiction is the primary concern of the discussion that follows. Transformative Forces in Contemporary Higher Education The sharpening of these contradictions presently points to serious strains in the world system whose configurations of power are in a process of transformation, as capitalist modernity is globalized,, nation-states no longer suffice to define the boundaries of cultural imaginings, and postcolonial formations demand recuperation of knowledges erased under Euromodernity. The shifting of capitalist competition to a transnational level demands a new kind of knowledge of sites of production, marketing, and consumption. Combined with the technologies such as the Internet, which have given substantial reality to globalization, the demand for "justin-time" knowledge has invited the business invasion of higher education, in turn inducing or reinforcing the business turn in the organization and management of the university.' In a global economy where knowledge itself
7. Yoni Ryan, "Higher Education as a Business: Lessons from the Corporate World," Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning, and Policy ZQ (March 2001): 115-35. To cite one example, the University of Oregon, an institution with which I was briefly associated, has recently appointed as vice-provost in charge of international affairs an academic prominent most importantly for his work on and with consulting companies doing business in the People's Republic of China. It would be interesting to do a survey of universities where such a shift from academic to business credentials is under way.

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has come to be regarded as "a force of production" (the so-called knowledge economy), universities are visibly pressured to assume greater strategic responsibilities by rescuing themselves from the ambivalent image of "ivory towers" into functional units of the global political economy. This also means there is pressure on knowledge production to produce the kind of knowledge that responds to the needs of the global econorny.^ Such pressures are more often than not mediated by national states or corporations seeking to enhance their positions in the global economy, adding to the contradictions between the global and the national. In a speech Gordon Brown gave in January 2010 at an international meeting in London, which he described as "the Davos of global education," the former British prime minister characterized education as "a global growth industry" and laid out four dimensions to the globalization of educational activity by UK institutions: recruiting foreign students for British institutions on the basis of "merit and ability," "offering examinations and qualifications that are rightly highly regarded around the world," developing "partnerships between UK institutions and universities in many different countries around the world," and using "distance learning to build on the work of our excellent universities that are already making use of great and rapid advances in the relevant technology." The speech stressed especially the development of Asian societies, such as China and India, which offered new markets for the new industry. As is usual in discussions of globalization by its advocates. Brown saw no contradiction between the national and the global, and represented these globalizing activities as a means to making the United Kingdom into "one of the global education superpowers," while also "placing Britain's strengths at the service of learning and educational advancement throughout the whole world."^ One added benefit the prime minister did not mention is the contribution of international enterprise to the income of British universities, enabling the government to cut its expenditures on higher education.^ Universities in
8. For political, legal, and cultural reasons, the integration of universities with businessrelated research and development has advanced more rapidly in some regions than in others. This is especially noticeable in East Asian universities. For a collection of discussions, see "University-Industry Linkages in Metropolitan Areas in Asia," special issue. World Development 35, no. 6 (2007). 9. Gordon Brown, "Speech on Education as a Global Growth Industry," Number10.gov .uk, Thursday, January 14, 2010, http://ukinindia.fco.gov.uk/en/news?view=PressR&id =21600178. 10. Kris Olds, "Is a UK Funding Crisis an Effective Mechanism to Spur on the 'Education as a Global Growth Industry' Development Agenda?," GlobalHigherEd, January 15,

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the UK, the United States, Canada, and Australia all acknowledge growing financial dependence on foreign student enrollment, which accounts for the urgent tone of competitiveness emanating from these institutions and their governments, which sounds increasingly similar to corporate and state anxiety about losing markets to competitors. Indeed, while there is nothing new about corporate intrusion in the university, or universities behaving like corporations, the resemblance has acquired a new significance in the context of international education.^^ According to the Institute of International Education statistics, in 2009 there were 3.3 million international students at the tertiary level, an increase of 1.3 million from just a decade ago. The top destinations for these students were the United States (20 percent), the UK (13 percent), France (8 percent), Germany, China, and Australia (7 percent each). While numbers fluctuate from year to year, moreover, the top sending countries in Asia are China, India, and the Republic of Korea, in that order (the Republic of Korea is the largest sending country to China).'^ The fluctuation in destination countries adds to anxiety over competition in states and institutions that have come to be dependent on foreign students for revenue.^3 A discussion of a report from the UK in 2009 on the inclusion
2010, http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/is-a-uk-funding-crisis-needed/. One analysis reports that the contribution of international education to the US economy has gone from approximately $1 billion a year in the late 1970s to over $15 billion thirty years later. Jason Baumgartner, "Economic Benefits of International Education to the United States," GlobalHigherEd, May 13, 2009, http://globalhighered.wordpress .com/2009/05/13/economic-benefits-of-international-education-to-the-united-states/. According to a recent report, educational exchanges with the PRC were worth $1.9 billion in 2010, with sixty thousand PRC students attending Canadian universities. "Education the Focus as Prime Minister Harper Continues China Visit," Winnipeg Free Press, February 10, 2012, http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/fpnewstopstory/education-the-focusas-prime-minister-harper-continues-china-visit-139076984.html. 11. On the university turning into a global corporation, with emphasis on the University of California system, see Masao Miyoshi, "Ivory Tower in Escrow," in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 19-60. 12. Institute of International Education, "Atlas of Student Mobility," http://www.iie.org/en/ Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors. See also "Overseas Students Focus on China as Their Destination for Study," Liuxue Zhongguo/Study in China, http://www.study-inchina.org/education/news/200893937353401.htm. 13. Some examples are found in Aisha Labi, "Top Destinations Compiete for Growing Number of Foreign Students," Chronicie of Higher Education, November 16, 2009, http:// chronicle.com/article/Top-Destinations-Compete-for/49144/; "US Universities Take Steps to Attract International Students," The Guardian, November 17,2008, http://www.guardian .co.uk/world/2008/nov/17/usa-university-diversity; Michael Sainsbury, "Blitz to Lure

Dirlik / Transnationaiization and the University 57 of education in "export earning" noted that "these numbers are being constituted, and debated about, in the context of an ideological transitionone that increasingly enables views to emerge of higher education as a driver of economic versus cultural-political change . . . a decade or two ago, it would have been impossible to imagine creating tables . . . in which education is measured against 'scrap plastics' or 'chemical woodpulp.'"^" There is little that is out of the ordinary presently in Brown's reference to education as an "industry." Discussions of contemporary education are conducted regularly in the language of business in references to markets, consumers, commodities, competition, and, of course, the contribution of education to national economies. Universities compete not only with one another but with Internet businesses that have made significant inroads into education. They themselves have become increasingly dependent on consulting companies in marketing and recruitment. Despite widespread professions of skepticism about university rankings, global rankings play an ever more important part in the production and consumption of education, both of which sharpen the competition and drive universities to find means to enhance their rankings.^^ In order to compete in an increasingly crowded market, they make strenuous eftorts to wrap their ofterings in attractive packages that will lure students for their financial, cultural, and intellectual attractiveness, much as any business would package its commodities.'^ For those in the vanguard of internationalization, transChinese Students," The Australian, March 9, 2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ higher-education/blitz-to-lure-chinese-students/story-e6frgcjx-1226017981020. 14. Kris Olds and Susan Robertson, "Taking Note of Export Earnings," GlobalHigherEd, November 25, 2009, http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/taking-note-ofexport-earnings. 15. For a complimentary perspective, see Ben Wildavsky, "How College Rankings Are Going Global (and Why Their Spread Will Be Good for Higher Education)" (unpublished paper presented at the American Enterprise Institute Conference, "Increasing Accountability in American Higher Education," Washington, DC, November 17, 2009, cited with permission of the author). The website for the Kauffman Foundation, with which the author is affiliated, describes it as "the world's largest foundation devoted to entrepreneurship." Whether enhancing rankings also enhances education depends largely on expectations of its purpose and results. 16. The market becomes ever more crowded with the entry as competitors (rather than senders) of states such as Singapore, Korea, and especially the PRC. The packaging includes language programs, financial aid, advantages of location, and, perhaps most importantly, adjustments in curriculum and teaching practices to make their institutions more palatable to studentsundergraduate students who have come to overshadow graduate students as "commodities."

58 boundary 2 / Fall 2012 national corporations serve as models in joint enterprises, or the "network university."^' It may be a sign of the changing status of the university as an
17. The "globalization" of the university Is becoming too common to permit a short listing. Some outstanding examples may be mentioned here. New York University has recently taken the lead in these undertakings, with campuses in Abu Dhabi, London, and Shanghai, which will offer joint degrees. Yale University plans a "joint campus" in Singapore (Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications, "Yale and National University of Singapore in Discussion to Set Up Liberal Arts College," September 13, 2010, http://opac .yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=7732). Duke University, meanwhile, has begun construction of a new campus near Shanghai, jointly with Wuhan University, which will confer Duke degrees. The University of Liverpool in the UK announced at the end of October 2005 that it was establishing a campus in the PRC jointly with Xi'an Jiaotong University, which would concentrate on technology. According to a report, interestingly, the campus is to be located in Suzhou Industrial Park In eastern China, which is quite a distance not only from Liverpool but also from Xi'an. The attraction of the location is that it is home to foreign enterprises in the PRC, Including fifty-three Fortune 500 companies. The founding of the university, in other words, is one more example of higher education as an enterprise serving other enterprises. The "joint enterprise" has been the standard form of Sino-foreign business collaboration. The deal, in this case, was backed up by Laureate Educational Limited, an online education transnational. See Polly Curtis, "Liverpool to Establish Chinese University," The Guardian, October 27, 2005, http://www.guardian .co.uk/education/2005/oct/27/highereducation.internationaleducationnews. The plan to "glocalize" New York University by cloning it in Abu Dhabi was compared by one faculty member (Craig Calhoun) to building "an academic chain restaurant." It remains to be seen if "glocalization" in. locations such as the PRC or Abu Dhabi will entail assimilating to the demands of an authoritarian state that provides the capital. On Abu Dhabi, see "The Emir of NYU," New York i\/lagazine, April 13, 2008, http://nymag.com/news/ features/46000/. On NYU in Shanghai, see "NYU Shanghai Campus Breaks Ground," CNNGo, March 29, 2011, http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/nyu-shanghai-campusbreaks-ground-996171. According to the report, while there are already eight hundred US university extensions in the PRC, the NYU-East China Normal and the Duke undertakings will be the first "joint venture" conferring its own degrees. On Duke University, see http://academiccouncil.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/3-24-11-Minutes.pdf. Meanwhile, universities without comparable resources are busy refurbishing their images in accordance with the new demands. The University of Oregon, which long had global connections through its main benefactor, Nick Knight, the founding CEO of Nike, recently appointed a businessman with academic credentials (who has resigned since I completed this article) to revamps its study abroad programs. The university website now describes it as a "global university." In most of these cases, the initiatives come from university administrations and, most likely, the trustees of the universities, while the faculty have expressed qualms over Issues of quality and the implications for academic freedom of cooperation with authoritarian regimes. Several top-level US university administrations refused to intercede on behalf of their faculty who have been banned from China for their contributions to a study of Xinjiang (S. Frederick Starr, ed., Xinjiang: China's Mus-

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economic enterprise that they are now rated by credit-rating agencies for their credit worthiness.'^ Transformations Marketing education has become a major concern of university "business," and international students occupy an increasingly significant "niche" of that market. However we may evaluate these changes and what they herald for the future, there are compelling reasons for thinking that higher education is in the midst of a paradigm shiftnot so much in the turn away from the scientific and technological assumptions of the modern university, which, if anything, have achieved nearly unquestionable dominance, but in the reconfiguration of those assumptions in response to the globalization of capitalist modernity, which compels significant transformations in purpose, organizational presuppositions, and the content of education itself. The nation is still the immediate referent for the university, and the language of national development and welfare continues to pervade the discourse on higher education. But the reorientation in higher education suggests a different conception of the nation: the nation as it is overdetermined by a condition of globality. As is characteristic of global modernity (and associated ideas of postmodernity) in general, the reorientation in higher education at once extends and deepens but also negates the assumptions of Euromodernity. The discourse on higher education already is couched in terms of training for work and citizenship in a globalized world, which calls for a reconsideration of whom, what, and how to serve. As with economic globalization in general, while some benefit from opening up to the world, others drop by the wayside because of their unwillingness or inability to adjust to the new demands. The globalization of universities is consistent with longstanding assumptions of cosmopolitanism in education. But that is only part of the story. Economic considerations are presently primary drivers of
lim Borderland[Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004]). See "China Banning U.S. Professors Elicits Silence from Colleges Employing Them," Bloomberg, August 10, 2011, http://www .bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-11/china-banning-u-s-professors-elicits-silence-fromcolleges.html. The "globalization of the university has reinforced the inherent authoritarianism of university administrations. 18. Susan Robertson and Kris Olds, "'Passing Judgment': The Role of Credit Rating Agencies in the Global Governance of UK Universities," GlobalHigherEd, August 6, 2008, http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/passing-judgement/.

60 boundary 2 / Fall 2012 "internationalization," or "globalization," of both the student body and of the content of the curriculum. I will say more below on how global modernity has changed the meaning of culture and cosmopolitanism. Suffice it to say here that these changes are not comprehensible apart from the reconfiguration of the global political economy. The response to these changes has been to shift attention from the nation to the globe as the context for work and education. Corporate transnationalism, to be distinguished from multinationalism, has redefined the space of work. Other nations make their claims now both in the global economy and global cultural politics. And under the pressures of these transformations, universities are compelled almost by necessity to integrate themselves into their new structural context. A university president from the state of Missouri observes that "our students are not competing against Missouri students or Illinois studentsor students from Arkansas or Kentucky, they are really competing internationally. So if our students don't have a global perspective, it's hard for them to compete." Another one probably speaks for most university administrators when she adds that "these students [foreign students] pay more than double of what the Missouri domestic student pays, so they make a very important contribution to the university's bottom line."'^ The curricular consequences of this shift are much more difficult to predict as responses to it so far are both tentative and in a state of transition. But there are obvious structural pressures arising from student demand, both domestic and international, which would seem to be mutually reinforcing. Despite administrators' enthusiasm about the financial contribution of foreign students, there is little evidence that foreign students may be taking university and college slots away from domestic students, as overall enrollment in these institutions has been increasing at a rapid rate. It would also be difficult to argue that the influx of foreign students is responsible for curricular shifts toward business and technology fields. But at 4 percent of the overall enrollment in institutions of higher education, they add significantly to tendencies to a renewed attention given to those fields that are deemed to be the most "relevant" to careers in the global economy, at the expense of the humanities and the social sciences, which traditionally have been viewed as the foundation for a liberal education. Foreign student enrollment patterns are consistent with general trends. Of the 671,616 foreign students in the United States at all levels in 2009-2010, 21.1 percent were enrolled in business and management, 19. See "US Universities Take Steps to Attract International Students," cited earlier.

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18.4 percent in engineering, 8.9 percent in physical and life sciences, 8.8 percent in math and computer science, followed by 8.7 percent in social sciences.^" By comparison with overall figures for university enrollment, the largest percentage of undergraduate degrees conferred in 2005-2006 were 21.4 percent for business, followed by education (7.2 percent), and health professions (6.2 percent). Business degrees are also a high percentage of master's degrees, although there they fall behind degrees in education. The distinguishing feature of foreign student enrollment would be the heavy concentration in the fields of business, engineering, physical and life sciences, and math and computer science (57.2 percent of the total), whereas in the overall figures for degrees at all three levels conferred in 2005-2006, the comparable figure is 36.2 percent, with the biggest differences in engineering and the relatively even distribution in overall degree rates beyond the top choices.^' Interestingly, one of the foremost beneficiaries of the new influx of students is English as a Second Language (ESL). Equally significant is the reorientation in the socializing functions of 20. Institute of International Education, Open Doors Data, "International Students: Field of Study, 2009-10," http://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/ Data/lnternational-Students/Fields-of-Study/2009-11. Of the top three sending countries (China, India, and South Korea), China had the highest percentage in business and management (24.3 percent), while India had the highest percentage in engineering (38.8 percent). Interestingly, South Korea had the highest percentage among the twenty-five top sending countries in the arts (10.8 percent), while Vietnam topped enrollment in business and management (39.7 percent). See Institute of International Education, Open Doors Data, "Fields of Study for Leading Places of Origin," http:// www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/Data/lnternational-Students/ Leading-Places-of-Origin/2009-11. 21. National Center for Education Statistics, "Digest of Education Statistics," http://nces .ed.gov/programs/digest/. I intend these figures to illustrate tendencies, and not as precise comparisons, given that the figures refer to different years, and the categories are slightly different in the two sources. According to the NCES web page, "Of the 1,563,000 bachelor's degrees conferred in 2007-08, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of business (335,000); social sciences and history (167,000); health sciences (111,000); and education (103,000). At the master's degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of education (176,000) and business (156,000). At the doctor's degree level, the greatest numbers of degrees were conferred in the fields of health professions and related clinical sciences (9,900); education (8,500); engineering (8,100); biological and biomdical sciences (6,900); psychology (5,300); and physical sciences (4,800)." Decline in foreign student enrollment in the engineering and science fields is always a cause for concern. On concerns over recent decreases in graduate applications from India, see Karin Fischer, "Number of Foreign Students in U.S. Hit a New High Last Year," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 16, 2009, http:// chronicle.com/article/Number-of-Foreign-Students-in/49142.

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higher education, which has had a significant impact both on the culture of higher education and the importance culture has assumed in education. This reorientation is the result largely of changes in the conception of citizenship. Motions of people, and the empowerment of formerly powerless groups (not just ethnic but all socially disadvantaged groups), already have produced important changes in the cultural dimension of citizenship, from assumptions of homogeneity to accommodation of diversity and multiculturalism. These changes are evident in the new culture of diversity in the university, as well as in the attentiveness to the question of culture in education. Domestically instigated changes are reinforced presently by pressures arising from the internationalization of the faculty and the student body. Indeed, the discourse on globalization melds together domestic and global multiculturalism in a catchall conception of diversity as a previously nation-based conception of citizenship is overdetermined by visions of global citizenshipa metaphorical notion except for those involved in transnational institutions of one kind or another.^^ Desirable as these changes are, they need to be viewed critically. As cultural institutions par excellence, universities all along have served as storehouses and vehicles of culture. They also have been entangled in the political and economic uses of culture beyond the merely educational. But new times have brought with them new problems. Domestically, the breakdown of racial, ethnic, and patriarchal hegemony has endowed culture with a new significance in the politics of identity and the definition of citizenship. A similar breakdown is visible globally in the reassertion of cultural identities condemned to oblivion by Euromodern cultural hegemony. Cultural fragmentation in the midst of the globalization of capitalism is a defining
22. Carola Suarez-Orozco, discussing global identities with reference to "global citizenship," observes that an Important source of global identities is the global spread of youth culture (mainly from the United States). The formation of such identities, she writes, "is driven in large part by global media, including movies, television, music videos and recordings, and the internet, as well as global marketing of such brands as Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Nike." See Carola Suarez-Orozco, "Formulating Identity in a Globalized World," in Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium, ed. Marcelo M. SuarezOrozco and Desiree Baolian Oin-Hilliard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 173-202, esp. 196. We might add to these the most important location of a new global identity and citizenship, transnational corporations and their subsidiary institutions, now joined by "network" universities. The destructive Implications of consumerism and commodification for politics and the university implicitly celebrated by Suarez-Orozco as signs of "global citizenship" are the subject of the devastating critique offered by the late Bill Readings in The University in Ru/ns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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feature of global modernity.^^ The globalization of capitalism has produced claims to^ alternative modernities on the grounds of cultural difference. Capital has become more self-conscious about culture in the process of domestication in different contexts, which more often than not finds expression in the language of cultural rather than the more sensitive languages of social and political difference. The so-called knowledge economy, itself a cultural as much as an economic phenomenon, has further foregrounded culture in producing consciousness of a "cultural turn." In integrating culture and economy, it also expresses more cogently than any other of these developments the reification and commodification of culture that is at the core of this turn. The "cultural turn" is no less problematic in the university than in society at large or in global relationships." Conflicts over citizenship and diversification of constituencies already have raised serious questions about the cultural purpose and function of the university. Efforts to accommodate, contain, and manage these diverse demands have turned universities from sites of cultural politics to active participants in the reification of culture. There has also been confusion all along about "diversity" as public and corporate goal. The push for diversity in its original conception was intended to promote greater social equality by making higher education available to marginalized or underprivileged groups in society. At the same time, however, we may recall here that "multiculturalism" as an idea, enthusiastically embraced by universities as a sign of cultural and social enlightenment, originated in the 1960s as multinational corporations searched for ways to manage diverse workforces. Despite all the theoretical talk about "cultural complexity" in anthropology or history classes, universities engage in homogenizing the packaging of cultureusually around ethnic, national, and religious groupingsnot dissimilar to stereotyped notions of "poly-" or multiculturalism in management textbooks.^" As the university assumes more and more of the trappings of corporations as a "culture industry,"^^ its management of culture and diver23. On "global modernity," see Arif Dirlik, Giobai Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Giobai Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 24. On "cultural complexity," see Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Sociai Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). On "multiculturalism" in corporate education, see Arif Dirlik, "The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture," in The Postcoloniai Aura: Third Worid Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 186-219. 25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as

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sity becomes one of its selling points to potential customers. Diversity is a selling point in university advertisements. So is "sensitivity" to different educational traditions students may hail from, which, needless to say, may bring along certain virtues of cpen-mindedness but also less desirable elements as well, which is a feature of all so-called traditions. Hybridity has become an asset rather than a liability, as insider knowledge of more than one society has come to be viewed as a precious commodity. Hybrids are accorded such prescience, whether or not they do in fact command such knowledge. While the push to diversity is socially and culturally desirable, the transnationalization of "diversity" favors the corporate over the public vision. As international students and faculty acquire a new value as sources of revenue, as well as conduits for global connections, they open up possibilities of manipulating "diversity" away from the public vision, which has inspired it toward one that more closely feeds into corporate needs. The confounding of difference within with difference without means that foreign students may now be counted in meeting "diversity requirements"and they also bring additional revenue to boot. Rather than serve egalitarian goals, diversity thus reinvented is likely to contribute further to the inequalities of the corporate order in which higher education is embedded. Global competition for students also has encouraged the "selling" of national or local cultures (rather than simply a good education or an "advanced" culture, which is no longer viable or admissible), of which the most egregious example may be the case of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The so-called Confucius Institutes, instruments of the search for "soft power," openly combine the peddling of cultural artifacts with the search for business connections through the medium of language instruction. That they are welcomed into institutions of higher education anxious to establish connections with an up-and-coming world power is another sign of changes at work in the subjection of cultural to economic and political considerations, and the aftendant instrumentalization of culture, in which higher education institutions globally have become complicit.^^ The comMass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 120-67. 26. For two examples, from the United States and the PRC, see Rebecca Knight, "Learning to Cultivate a Global Mindset," FT.com (Financial Times), January 10, 2011, on culture education at the Stern School of Business at New York University http://www .ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5209c98c-1a75-11e0-b003-00144feab49a.html#axzz1qFSrelT6, and "The Business of Culture," on a recent meeting at Beijing University to discuss the

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plicity is not simply in the political and economic degradation of issues of culture. Even more importantly, it is complicity in providing the comforting cover of culture over oppressive political and economic practices.^^ Chaiienges Globalization of higher education is an ongoing process with still unpredictable outcomes. There are many forces reshaping higher education in our day, social and political forces as well as the innovative technolodevelopment of the "culture industries" over the next decade, sponsored by the Chinese government, http://english.peopledaily.com,cn/90001/90782/90783/7257098.html. Missouri University, mentioned above in connection with the effect of globalization on students, recently inaugurated a Confucius Institute. According to its chancellor, the institute "will bring Chinese language education to students of all ages and provide consultative services to those who wish to develop business relationships between Missouri and China." See "Colorful Opening Ceremony Welcomes Confucius Institute to MU," Missourian, April 8, 2011, http://www.columbiamissourian,com/stories/2011/04/08/ confucius-institute-opens-mu/. In the meantime, the Arizona State University Confucius Institute has announced plans to extend its work into public schools, to teach not just language but also culture, all this in the midst of a crackdown in the PRC on intellectuals and dissidents. Given their professed respect for their cultural legacies, Chinese authorities and academics have been notably unabashed about commodifying culture. In sheer self-serving narcissism, however, few could beat the statement by the CEO of an Internet company regarding students who cannot get into a university: his company offers "a way for them to get the American dream without leaving home." See Vickie Chachere, "International Students Flock to Online American Universities," www.bisk.com/PressReleases/ foreignstudents.pdf. 27. See Anne-Marie Brady, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), for the increasingly sophisticated methods deployed by Chinese authorities for propaganda, mostly learned from US publicity practices. The Confucius Institutes are also reminiscent of grassroots propaganda work of the guerilla revolution that brought the Communist Party to power. For the negative consequences of the politically motivated language and culture teaching promoted by the Confucius Institutes, see the excellent discussion by Michael Churchman, "Confucius Institutes and Controlling Chinese Languages," China Heritage Ouarterly (The Australian National University), no. 26 (June 2011), http://www .chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles,php?searchterm=026_confucius.inc&issue=026. Some Confucius Institutes, Indeed, have gone beyond avoiding sensitive questions (as specified in contracts with the Hanban) to actively try and keep out of campus activities that might offend the PRC government. For an example provoked by the Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon, see the comments by Glenn Anthony May, "Confucius on the Campus," Asia Sentinel, March 4, 2011, http://www.asiasentinel.com/index .php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3035&ltemid=206.

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gies associated with the Internet that are transforming both knowledge production and education. Some', if not all, of these forces have been placed in service of the globalization of the university and in turn have drawn new impetus from it. Higher education is under pressure from the globalizing forces in economy and culture. Increasingly, it is also an agent of globalization. Hand in hand with the business turn in knowledge production is the marketization of education in the chase after foreign students, now rechristened "international." Similarly, there are new pressures at work on all students, domestic or international, to transnationalize so as to acquire greater marketability in the global economy. Culture has acquired a new significance as a commodity in global political and economic transactions, which have led to a paradoxical hardening of cultural boundariesand ghettoizationeven as motions of people reveal its complexities.^ Even within the context of the university, recognition of difterence, and its market value, more often than not leads not to integration in difterence but grouping in imagined cultural clusters, usually defined by nation and ethnicity. Attractive as they are, Utopian visions of "global villages" that no doubt motivate many well-intentioned advocates of globalization in higher education have adverse consequences that demand critical analysis. I will focus here on five consequences that seem to me to warrant urgent attention because of their social, political, and intellectual implications. First, and most obvious, is the contribution of universities to glob28. Colleen Ward, "The Impact of International Students on Domestic Students and Host Institutions," Education Counts (2001), http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ international/the_impact_of_international_students_on_domestic_students_and_host_ institutions. This analysis also concludes that foreign students overall have made little Impact on educational practices, that there is little interaction between domestic and international students, or international students and the community. This study was commissioned by the New Zealand government but draws upon evidence from elsewhere. Governments and institutions are anxious to remedy these problems. The degree of success obviously differs from place to place. For a more recent discussion that reaches similar conclusions with reference to curriculum and teaching, this time in Australia, see Janette Ryan and Susan Hellmundt, "Excellence through Diversity: Internationalisation of Curriculum and Pedagogy" (paper presented at the Seventeenth IDP Australian International Education Conference, Melbourne, Australia, October 21-24, 2003), http://www .aiec.idp.com/PDF/HellmunRyanFri0900_p.pdf. It is remarkable in studies such as these that in their concern for meeting the different needs of foreign students from different educational "traditions," the analysts show little concern for what may be lost in the processcritical thinking, for instance. Indeed, there is little discussion of what is gained or lost in intellectual terms, with emphasis mostly on smoothing out existing wrinkles.

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alization as ideology, which is quite consistent with the "business turn" in higher education but is also revealing of the undermining of its critical intellectual mission in the process of becoming a business or an appendage to it. In order to justify their new venture into globalization, university administrators and faculty paint a rosy picture of globalization as an inevitable process with unqualified positive consequences that is at' odds with the evidence of its negative consequences for many around the world, including those in advanced societies who are marginalized by the globalization of the economy.23 j ^ e economic benefits from globalization are not to be disdained in difticult times. But the misrepresentation of economic as educational benefits brings into the heart of higher education the corporate mystification of the consequences of globalization that consciously or unconsciously undermine the intellectual and cultural mission of the university. As the statements above by Missouri educational ofticers exemplify, ideological reification of globalization also shifts responsibility for failure in the new economy from the systemic consequences of globalization to those who are its castawayshardly what one would expect from educators with a sense of social responsibility.^" It follows, secondly, that higher education has become a participant in the construction of a new class structure emerging and drawing its sustenance from global practices that distance it materially and intellectually from its immediate social and political context. The current internationalization of the university is made possible in the first place by the emergence of a new market that is also a product of globalization, a "transnational capitalist class," whose oftspring can aftord a "foreign" education, preferably in North America or Europe, but also in slowly increasing numbers in other
29. An example is the 2011 Global Conference of the University of Southern California, to be held not in Los Angeles but Hong Kong, entitled "Global Challenges and Enhancing Opportunities." The featured speaker for the conference is Thomas Friedman, an unabashed promoter of globalization. USC, it should be noted, has the highest percentage of foreign students (21 percent of the total) in its student enrollment. 30. Whether globalized or stay-at-home, college students are also increasingly burdened by debt. The administrators' take on this may best be described as student-debt financing of the university, including some of these activities of "globalization." For an excellent discussion, see Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, "The Debt Crisis in American Universities," The Atlantic, August 17, 2011, accessed August 21, 2011, http://www.theatlantic .com/business/archive/2011/08/the-debt-crisis-at-american-colleges/243777/. I am not aware of any studies of the debt incurred by foreign students in attending these institutions. Judging by my acquaintances in the PRC, it is probably also considerable for students who are not of elite backgrounds.

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locations of "promise," such as Beijing or Shanghai.^' The desire of this new class for a foreign education, and the benefits it brings in the global economy, has spawned a consulting industry of its own devoted to creating "designer students" who can make it successfully to the most coveted institutions.32 Educationally mobile students are no longer just the graduate students supported by grants and fellowships; increasingly, they are selffinancing undergraduates.33 Educational institutions in turn are redefining their goals to train their students for success in the global economy, which has become a criterion for institutional quality. If these developments do not necessarily lead to the corruption of higher education, they nevertheless render it into a breeding ground for class inequalities, which increasingly have assumed a new dimension in the difference between the globalized and the stay-at-homes.^" Third is the absence from the discourse on globalization of its consequences for life at the everyday level, what we may describe as "placeconsciousness." The "off-grounding" of life at the everyday level, as the late Jean Chesneaux described globalization, possibly was responsible for the appearance of a concern with "places," which paradoxically has become audible since the 1980s, in tandem with the rise of a consciousness of glo31. See Leslie Sklair, The Transnationai Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), and a recent report by Chrystia Freeland, 'The Rise of the New Global Elite," The Atlantic, January/February 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/01/the-rise-ofthe-new-global-elite/8343/. 32. Dan Levin, "Coaching and Much More for Chinese Students Looking to U.S.," New York Times, May 29, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/business/global/30college .html. 33. Graduate students are still the majority, but the largest increases in recent years have been at the undergraduate level. In 2009-2010, 61.9 percent of students were selffinanced, a slight decline from the previous year, possibly due to the recession, which also has affected the total number of students. Institute of International Education, Open Doors Data, "International Students: Primary Source of Funding," www.iie.org/ Research-and-Publications/Open-Doors/Data/lnternational-Students/Primary-Sourceof-Funding/2009-11. 34. There are, nevertheless, important signs of corruption. The most egregious so far may be the case of Dickinson State University in North Dakota, which was discovered to have turned into a diploma mill for foreign students, the great majority (over 80 percent) of them from the PRC. See "Audit: North Dakota University Awarded Unearned Degrees," February 11, 2012, http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/11/audit-north-dakota-universityawarded-unearned-degrees/. Dickinson State University had a Confucius Institute in the making for nearly a year, which was dropped when the scandal became public. See Ashley Martin, "Confucius Institute No More," Dickinson Press, accessed February 12, 2012, http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/event/article/id/55361/.

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bality. Beginning in the 1980s, under the impact of the Thatcher/Reagan "revolutions," it became increasing evident that many localities in the UK and the United States suffered from the motions of corporations in pursuit of spatial advantage, which would become a defining characteristic of the globalized, "post-Fordist" economy. The newly visible vulnerability of "places," along with new concerns for community, was no doubt an important element in a new consciousness of place. The globalization of the university has entailed some mobility in networking and campus extension, but not similar kinds of devastating abandonment, and as far as places are concerned, emphasis has been mostly on the economic benefits of globalization accruing to local communities from the foreign students who are paying customers. There is liftle reason to expect private institutions such as the University of Southern California to be concerned with life at the everyday level in their surroundings (except out of reasons of security). But the absence of such concerns from the discourse on globalization of public institutions does not bode well for the future of the university as a social institution. Equally disconcerting are the implications of globalization for the responsibility of universities in cultivating a consciousness of responsibility for the public sphere, which is subject to fragmentation under pressures from the globalization of capital, which also depletes it of essential resources. In a highly ethnicized society such as the United States, the public sphere is already under pressure from the surge of ethnic affiliations within and across nation-state boundaries. Higher education also has had to face the challenge of the disintegration of commonly shared values by the introduction into the pool of the values of those previously ignored. Socializing into difference and diversity is also socializing, but it is a socializing that is at odds with assumptions of commonality in the constitution of -the national public sphere. Global multiculturalism and multiculturalism at home are mutually reinforcing in shaping the culture of the university and producing ideas of citizenship that depart significantly from earlier ideas of national belonging and citizenship. The proliferation of ideas of citizenship introduces considerable ambiguity into the socializing functions of the university, reinforcing the effects on the public sphere of an education geared increasingly to the production of labor power for a global market.^^
35. The relationship between pedagogy and the public sphere is a subject of many essays by Henry A. Giroux, a foremost theorist of pedagogy in the United States. For a sampling of his writings, especially on the corporatization of education and its implications for the public sphere, see Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies

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These systemic changes also have provoked parallel changes in the content of educationon the one hand, the ascendancy of those parts of higher education that are deemed relevant to the global economy and its needs; and on the other hand, the incorporation into educational activity of identitarian demands. Ways of learning suppressed or viewed as curiosities under the banner of science, including religions, have made a comeback as groups drawing their identities from them have acquired a hearing denied to them earlier in the name of universal values that transcended difterence. Postcolonial challenges within and without societies seek to dethrone science as the compass for education,, to replace it with a variety of ethnomethodologies. These groups, we should emphasize, are by no means homogeneous internally but are also divided over the relationship to the pulls of globalization. Finally, what we may be witnessing are the consequences of a momentous collision between the universalism propelled by a globalized capitalism and its values, and the proliferation of identity claims at odds with one another and suspicious of all claims to universality. Critical thinking, it seems, is being squeezed out of existence in this momentous collision. It is under assault from a variety of cultural perspectives and, more importantly, from the disappearance of universally accepted standards. It is endangered also by pressures from both sponsors (business and the state) and customers (students) to render higher education more functional to successful performance in a globalizing economy, which shifts emphasis to goal-directed rather than open-ended or critical inquiry in knowledge production, and career-directed training in education. The narrowing of options also shrinks the space available for criticism, which may be the articulation
(New York: Routledge, 2000), and, "Militarized Conservatism and the End(s) of Higher Education," Truthout, Tuesday, April 5, 2011, http://truth-out,org/index.php?option =com_k2&view=item&id=294:militarized-conservatism-and-the-ends-of-highereducation. A multiculturalism that unites rather than ghettoizes is the subject of Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millennium (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997). The classic example of what I have described above as life-affirming education that confronts issues of class and place in education is Paolo Freir, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Seabury, 1973). See also Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freir, and the Pedagogy of Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). For a "course" in critical globalism, see Kate Holbrook, Ann S, Kim, Brian Palmer, and Anna Portnoy, eds.. Global Values 101: A Short Course (Boston: Beacon, 2006). "Place," of course, is crucial to indigenous approaches to education that stand at the opposite end of the spectrum to globalization. For an example, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: ZED Books, 1999,).

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in the university of the authoritarianism that is an accompaniment of the managerial turn in business, the state, and educational institutions alike. There is no single solution to these problems. Higher education everywhere is subject to the same pressures arising from the globalization of political economy and culture. Nevertheless, the problems thrown up by these pressures are articulated difterently in difterent national and local contexts. Their resolution, too, must difter according to different material circumstances, as well as difterent visions of the place of education in society. In all cases, however, recognition of globalization not just as a solution but also as a fundamental problem of higher education is a necessary point of departure in its reinvention. The critique of globalization in higher education, as in political economy or culture, would be self-defeating and obscurantist were it to deny the value of global knowledge and global citizenship, both of which, with difterent understandings of "global," have always been fundamental premises of both learning and education. Some of the deep problems humanity faces presentlyecology, hunger, resources, motions of peoples and cultures come to mind readilyrequire global solutions and need to be addressed at the global level. Higher education has a crucial part to play in their solution. There is a visibly increased awareness around the world that if these global goals are to serve purposes of human welfare rather than the abstractions of capital, development, and the nation-state, they need to be grounded in equally indispensable local knowledge and citizenshipinformed by the concretely local lifeworlds of everyday existence. If the global helps overcome a parochialism that is oblivious to all concerns other than the immediately local, without a parallel awareness of and a sense of responsibility to the local, it produces the social, ecological, and epistemological destructiveness that has characterized modern development and resulted in the predicament that human life presently faces. It also sharpens divisions between a globalized elite and a localized majority that are no less devastating in their consequences than inequalities of class, gender, or race, or mental and manual labor, as is plainly visible in contemporary societies globally. There are powerful forces at work globally that seek to make higher education into an instrument of a discourse on globalization that betrays no awareness of these consequences or, for a variety of reasons, prefers to be silent about them. We need to resist these forces if higher education is to live up to its obligations as both the conscience of social life and one of the most strategic institutions in the production of a critical consciousness of human life and purpose.

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Globality, Places, and the Humanities: The Significance of the Social It is tragic (in a very fundamental sense) that the global/business turn has led to a crisis of the humanities in the university when they may be needed the most in cultivating this social conscience. The crisis of the humanities presently is due to some of the tendencies discussed above namely, their seemingly marginal relevance in a world where technology and global business seem to rule the world, which makes them less attractive to students. But it is also due to an inherent conservatism, exclusiveness, and the elitist legacies that lie at their origins. There is little the humanities can do about forces beyond the control of intellectual life and education.^^ It is, however, within the purview of education to reinvent the humanities: to open them up to a global sense of what it means to be human, to overcome the separation of the human and the nonhuman, which is a prerequisite of any serious ecological consciousness, and to open up the boundaries between the humanities and the social and natural sciences to encompass a broader range of human life and intellectual activity. How a balance may be achieved between canonical needs and attention to everyday practices in the content of the humanities must of necessity vary from one context to another. This has been a challenge all
36. This needs to be qualified somewhat, as there is an alternative for the humanities to adjust to the needs of business and technology to "humanize" technologists, or promise improvements of business goals (such as "innovative thinking") in return for their support for the humanities. I hope it is also clear that what I am proposing here is something entirely different. An example of a new collusion between business/technology and the humanities was provided recently by a radio program in Stanford, California, entitled "Humanities and Technological Innovation." The occasion for the program was the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University, featuring cyber executives promoting the humanities. The advertisement for the radio program announced that it was in response to "a growing consensus in some academic and business circles that technological innovation increases when engineers have training in the humanities, or when they interact with humanities scholars" (KOED Radio, Forum with Michael Krasny, May 9, 2011, http:// www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201105090900). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, representatives of technology were more eager to speak to "human needs" than the humanities representative on the program. Needless to say, jobs were a major concern to all. On the radio program, there was no mention by its advocates of what the humanities may offer by way of social conscience, only its practices of analytical and creative skills that render it kin to engineers and computer people. Such are the virtues of "hybridization." The "critical thinking" I am proposing is different from that necessary for technological or business creativity. The conference may offer an illustration, nevertheless, of the point here that place is important in the reinvention of the humanities-in this case, Silicon Valley.

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along, defying pressures to standardization. One of the ironic accompaniments of globalization has been an intehsification of the consciousness of place, not as a substitute for nations or globality but as an important concern among others, long neglected under regimes of modernity and modernization. Places have retained their particularities despite homogenizing pressures of national or global forces, and acquired a new significance with enhanced ecological consciousness. More than ever before, choices in a humanistic education need to be driven not by parochial traditions of one kind or another in the humanities but by a necessary awareness of the articulation of these traditions to new ways of understanding the world: to the concerns both of the global and the place-based, to the need to ground universal knowledge and values in the concretely local, open to dialogue with local knowledges, and to cultural needs that, of necessity, differ from one place to another even within national contexts, with different relations to the nation or the globe. Only then can the humanities speak to the needs of the diverse constituencies of contemporary education and perform the indispensable task of bridging the gap in ideological consciousness between the global and the local while bringing to each a critical understanding of the other.

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