Globalisation and its discontents:
a university perspective
Sir David Watson
Professor of Higher Education
Principal, Green Templeton College, Oxford
ESMU/HUMANE Seminar
Oxford University
27 September 2013
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Globalisation and civilisation : a paradox
‘What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our
misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it
up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention
astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the
concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things
with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats
that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that
very civilization.’ (Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents,
[1930])
Outline: eight provocations
• Expectations
• Who owns the university?
• Academic exceptionalism
• World-classness
• Research networking
• University-like businesses
• MOOCing
• Southern theory
Coda: how do universities change?
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P1 The University and Society:
expectations
•Conservative and radical
•Traditional and innovative
•Ceremonial and
iconoclastic
•Excellent and equal
•Entrepreneurial and caring
•Competitive and collegial
•Charitable and commercial
•Monastic and marketised
•Autonomous and
accountable
•Critical and supportive
•Certain and provisional
•Short and long term
•Ethical and Technical
•Local and international
(and in between)
•Private and public
P2 What‟s the jurisdiction?
• Governance (strategic direction, appointment of
leaders, accountability)
• Funding (direct and indirect controls, e.g. fees)
• Operational conditions (subjects and levels of
provision, conditions of employment, procurement
etc.)
Who (or what) makes the weather?
“Stakeholders”
Who owns the university?
•Politicians
•Employers
•Neighbours
•The media
•“Partners” and “clients”
•The HE “gangs”
•The “green ink file”
Who shares the risk?
• Nurture and noise
• Inputs and outcomes
• Pre-nuptial agreements
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Words changing over time
• Stakeholder
• Amateur and Professional
• Client
• Consumer
• Welfare
• Maverick
• Manager
See Maria Boomhower: http://ezinearticles.com/?-Etymology--How-Words-
Change-Over-Time&id=12709
P3 Academic “exceptionalism”
• Stability
• “Flatness:” professionally argumentative
communities
• Wider, overlapping loyalties
• Public purpose/social business
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Academic membership: the
“psychological contract”
• Honesty (inc. scientific procedure)
• Reciprocity
• Manners
• Self-motivation
• Discipline
• Respect for the environment
• Collective agreement
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The question of civility (1)
Being a dean in an arts faculty is very tough. Why? Because colleagues in the social sciences and humanities have been trained to be hyper-critical. Their disciplinary expertise provides them with a toolbox of devices to dissect and unravel the implementation of the best-intended strategic initiatives. They increasingly exercise this talent in extraordinarily difficult funding environments…. They operate in an environment in which a quickly written email may generate detailed semiotic analysis and imputation of ill intent.
In the academic environment, very clever people may turn their very clever minds to negative ends. We can understand and rationalise this. It reflects in some ways colleagues' passionate commitment to their discipline, to their scholarship and their intellectual autonomy. It reflects the influence of the challenging, under-resourced environment in which we work.
But it also may reflect an unwillingness to exercise what John Paul Lederach calls the moral imagination, the ability to empathise, to build peace, in this case with those who do their best to lead.
Sharon Bell, The Australian 12 September 2007
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The question of civility (2)
• “bullying does not occur exclusively in formal hierarchical
relationships between managers and their line reports, although this is
the most commonly-observed relationship…bullying is also reported
as occurring between peers, subordinates, line managers and external
customers or clients” (CMI, 2008, Bullying at Work 2008: the
experience of managers. 3.6).
• Sims, D. (2005) “You Bastard: a narrative exploration of the
experience of indignation within organisations.” Organization Studies
26 (11), 1625-1640.
• Twale, D.J., and De Luca, B.M. (2008) Faculty Incivility: the rise of the
academic bully culture and what to do about it. San Francisco: Jossey
Bass.
• Hollis, L. (2012) Bully in the Ivory Tower: how aggression and incivility
erode American higher education Patricia Berkly LLC.
P4 World-classness
What counts
•Research
•Media interest
•Graduate destinations
•Infrastructure
•International “executive”
recruitment
What doesn‟t count
•Teaching quality
•Social mobility
•Services to business and the community
•Rural interests
•Other public services
•Collaboration
•The public interest
P5 Research networking
The scientific world is becoming increasingly interconnected, with international
collaboration on the rise. Today over 35% of articles published in international
journals are internationally collaborative, up from 25% 15 years ago.
The primary driver of most collaboration is the scientists themselves. In developing
their research and finding answers, scientists are seeking to work with the best
people, institutions and equipment which complement their research, wherever
they may be.
The connections of people, through formal and informal channels, diaspora
communities, virtual global networks and professional communities of shared
interests are important drivers of international collaboration. These networks span
the globe. Motivated by the bottom-up exchange of scientific insight, knowledge
and skills, they are changing the focus of science from the national to the global
level. Yet little is understood about the dynamics of networking and the mobility of
scientists, how these affect global science and how best to harness these networks
to catalyse international collaboration (RS, 2001:6).
Knowledge, Networks and Nations: global scientific collaboration in the 21st
century
Royal Society Policy Document 03/11. London: The Royal Society DES2096
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P6 “University-like businesses” “Anyone who has ever run a university, a film studio, or an open source software project will tell you that getting the most out of people seldom means managing them more, and usually means managing them less” (60).
“Whole Foods approach to management twines democracy with discipline, trust with accountability and community with fierce internal competition” (72).
“[W.L.] Gore wins big by not betting big, but betting often and staying at the table long enough to collect its winnings” (95).
“Like an elite engineering school, Google‟s management model is built around small work units, lots of experimentation, vigorous peer feedback, and a mission to improve the world (107).” “As is true in academic life or on the Web, control at Googled is more peer-to-peer than manager to minion (111).”
“Torvalds [Linux] understands that in a community of peers, people bow to competence, commitment, and foresight, rather than power” (207). “Like professors vying to get published in prestigious journals, coders hanker for the peer recognition that comes from making a visible contribution….The lesson: a successful opt-in system is one that allows contributors to take their „psychic income‟ in a variety of currencies” (209).
Gary Hamel (2007), The Future of Management. Boston: Harvard Business School Press
P7 Open and Distance Learning
• 1838 University of London external degrees
• 1890s US “degrees by correspondence”
• 1920s NYU and Harvard “radio” degrees
• 1965 UK University of the Air (Open University)
• The “mega-universities” (John Daniel)
• 2002 MIT On-line
• 2006 Khan Academy
• 2008 The “connectivist” movement (Manitoba)
• 2010 Udemy
• 2012 The Year of the MOOC (Udacity, Coursera, Futurelearn)
P8 “Southern Theory”
• “Social science can only have one, universal, body
of social theory, the one created in the global North”
(ix).
• The “new configurations of knowledge that result
when Southern theory is everywhere respected, and
differently formed theories speak together” (xiv).
Raewyn Connell (2007), Southern Theory: the global dynamics of
knowledge in social science. Cambridge: Polity Press
The view from the South
University-community engagement: the
“northern consensus”
• “Being there”
• Character and democratic instincts
• Service-learning and volunteering
• Public support
• Knowledge transfer
“Globalization from below.”
• “It means stepping back from those obsessions and abstractions that constitute our own professional practice to seriously consider the problems of the global everyday.” (17-18).
• “In the public spheres of many societies there is concern that policy debates occurring around world trade, copyright, environment, science and technology set the stage for life-and-death decisions for ordinary farmers, vendors, slum-dwellers, merchants and urban populations. And running through these debates is the sense that social exclusion is ever more tied to epistemic exclusion and concern that the discourse of expertise that are setting the rules for global transactions, even in the most progressive parts of the international system have left ordinary people outside and behind.” (2).
Arjun Appadurai (2000) Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination. Public Culture, 12: 1-19.
Universities in the “global everyday”
• External national power and internal control
• Social, political and economic circumstances
• Professional/vocational training
• “Translational” research
• Aid
• Academic freedom (and corruption)
• A global header tank (e.g. brain circulation, IPR)
David Watson, Robert Hollister, Susan Stroud and Elizabeth Babcock (2011) The
Engaged University: international perspectives on civic engagement. London &
New York: Routledge
University-community engagement: a
“southern narrative”? (1)
– relative lack of a “comfort zone;”
– drive for “transformation” or “solidarity;”
– priority of “development” (or social returns) over
“character” (or individual returns); and of
“national cohesion” over personal enrichment;
– strong focus on human capital, and
“employment” over “employability;”
– “necessity trumps choice,” and investment in HE
is seen as more than a consumer good;
University-community engagement: a
“southern narrative”? (2)
– use of private bodies for public purposes;
– use of international partnerships for assistance
not “positioning;”
– fewer hang-ups about the instrumentality of the
“vocational curriculum;”
– acceptance that religion and science should work
in harmony;
– a very practical world of “Mode 2” engagement,
alongside Mode 2 research and teaching;
– a sense of societal pull over institutional push.
Coda: how do universities change?
• The “avalanche”
Michael Barber‟s “Avalanche”
• A global labour market
• Not met by traditional HE
• Cost increases
• Fall in graduate premium
• Content revolution
• New providers
Barber, M., Donnelly, K., Rizvi, S. (2013) An Avalanche is Coming; higher
education and the revolution ahead. London, IPPR.
http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/10432/an-avalanche-is-coming-higher-
education-and-the-revolution-ahead
Another way
Who is this?
Coda: how do universities change?
• The “avalanche” • Proximate development
• Progressive engagement
• Marginal gains
• Creative, temporary cross-
subsidy
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“A grown-up culture”
“The leadership priority seems to be to create and
preserve a grown-up internal culture, where
emotionally intelligent interactions predominate,
which neither over-claims nor over-blames, and
which has a good, research-informed, sense of itself,
its possibilities, and its position in the scheme of
things.”
Guest Editorial, Higher Education Quarterly, 62:4, 319-22