Correction to: Contesting the Neoliberal Discourse of the World Class University: ‘Digital Socialism’, Openness and Academic Publishing

The chapter was inadvertently published with one of the authors’ name incorrectly spelled as “Hazelhorn” instead Hazelkorn in the chapter citation and reference.

Correction to: Three Notions of the Global

The chapter was inadvertently published with one of the references and the citations excluded in the article.

World Class at All Costs

This chapter takes up the now infamous case of the so-called Macchariani Scandal in light of the Karolinska Institute’s tactics for maintaining and enhancing its position as a WCU. It pays special attention to research funding policies in general, and, in particular, the role of the chairman of the Institute’s Board of Trustees, the Liberal politician Lars Leijonborg, as an example of how the dream of becoming a world-class country in the increasingly fierce global competition can have far-reaching negative consequences for national higher education systems as well as for individuals.

Three Notions of the Global

Why do universities go to so much effort to become “international”? Is it to create cosmopolitan global citizens, or to propel themselves up league tables? Is it to promote liberal democratic ideals, or to better recruit international students? There are actually different ways of understanding what is meant by “global thinking”. Currently, the predominant thinking is centred around economic development. But the political ideal of “internationalism” and the philosophical concept of the universal as an intellectual virtue are also alternatives. In this paper, I discuss the sometimes uneasy relationship between these three types of “global thinking”, while at the same time pointing out a common denominator - the connection between the global and the local.

Disorderly Identities: University Rankings and the Re-ordering of the Academic Mind

This chapter focuses on the use of university rankings as a means of ostensibly achieving increased transparency and covertly introducing a competitive market which has impacted on the sector as a whole, on institutions, and on individuals. The systemic characteristics of this new and now increasingly dominant market-driven order are outlined, followed by an exposition of how that order has impacted on the mind-set of academic practitioners by defining the norms of academic professionalism and academic practice. A new kind of orderliness now circumscribes and defines what it means to be an academic. Some of the emergent but pressing alternatives to this identity-kit of orderliness are suggested: disorderly identities that transgress the spatial boundaries of the dominant order, challenge its control of the chronology of that order, and begin to constitute participative and non-hierarchical foci of pedagogical action and participative research.

What Counts as World Class? Global University Rankings and Shifts in Institutional Strategies

Global university rankings have emerged as a benchmark of institutional success, setting standards for higher education policymaking and institutional practices. Nevertheless, only a marginal share of higher education institutions (HEI) are in a realistic position to be ranked as a ‘world-class’ institutions. In the European context, the global rankings have been used to highlight a performance gap between European and North American institutions. Here the focus has been on the HEIs in the top-100 positions, causing concerns over European higher education. This has also become a marker of world-class university. We analyze the strategies of 27 Northern European universities in different tiers to learn how they have adjusted to the reality of ranking. We conclude that the references to global rankings have increased between 2014 and 2018. At the same time, the references to rankings have become more implicit in nature. Nevertheless, we find that the discourse of global comparison and excellence has become more common in the strategies. There are also emerging references to the regional role of universities, which are apparent in the strategies of universities that are clearly outside the top-100 ranked institutions. However, this is also a reflection of the discourse of world-class university.

Realizing the World-Class University: An Ecological Approach

The ‘world-class university’ has become a trope of two rivalrous perspectives. On the one hand, it is used by cross-national and national organizations and institutions (and their leaders) to promote global positioning and achievement. On the other hand, it is deployed as a target of critique by scholars, it being observed that the term – ‘world-class university’ – presses interests, of cognitive capitalism, institutional entrepreneurialism and hierarchy amongst universities. Much less evident in these rivalrous discourses is an attempt to derive a way of holding onto the term – ‘world-class university’ – that retains links with core values of the university itself, such as those of reason, inquiry, understanding, and learning. I wish to use my chapter to mount such an inquiry and to do so by deploying an ecological approach. The university is interconnected with the world in manifold ways, through multiple ecosystems, but those ecosystems –such as those of knowledge, learning, social institutions, persons, the economy, culture and the natural environment – are impaired. Accordingly, could it not be suggested that a ‘world-class university’ would be one that draws on its resources in advancing the wellbeing of the major ecosystems of the world? Such a university would be a university in a class-of-and-for-the-world.

The Marketingisation of Higher Education

This chapter does not stress the marketisation of higher education rather focuses upon the way in which this is done; the marketingisation of higher education. I do not deny that widening access to skills that can fuel growth is a logical extension of a consumerist ideology. What follows acknowledges these structural changes and then focuses on how marketing is a consequence and reinforce of such structural change. Indeed there is a substantial literature which addresses it (e.g. Molesworth et al. Having, being and higher education: The marketization of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer. Teaching in Higher Education, 14(3), 277–287, 2009; Brown R, Carasso H, Everything for sale? The marketisation of UK higher education. Routledge, London, 2013). Nor does it support that marketingation has brought no or only limited contributions to higher education. The expansion of the privileges of higher education to the many from the few, the greater governance and transparency of the process and practices of higher education institutions in their compact with society and a clearer ways to evaluate these activities have, to varying degrees, enhanced higher education. These interventions have opened the market for world class universities (WCUs) allowing them global as well as local reach. Yet it is strange that these improvements are consequences of market interventions by Governments, by publishers in terms of league tables, and by employers in terms of preferred (mythical?) skill sets and not for educative purposes. The emergent practices encouraged by these interventions increase the influence of marketing and facilitate a metamorphosis of institutions from educational entities to market responsive service providers whose intent focuses on impact and enhanced return on capital. This leads WCUs into the endless and Sisyphusan striving, often devoid of any ultimate worthy end but ends which are an inevitable consequence of managing rapidly increasing competition and shifting demands effectively rather than educative priorities. The chapter describes and discusses the consequences.

Spaces of Life: Transgressions in Conceptualising the World Class University

Beyond knowledge, critical thinking, new ideas, rigorous science and scholarly development, this chapter argues for the university as a space of life. Through the complexities and incommensurabilities of academic life, and drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of revolt, Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of Otherness, and Novalis’ concept of Romantisierung, it makes a philosophical argument for recognizing what might appear as uncomfortable transgressions of the marketable, measurable characteristics of World Class Universities. In various ways, the chapter asks where there is space, in the World Class University, for elements which may not overtly align with the neoliberal clamour for international recognition and esteem. In elevating everyday life in the university, the chapter blurs boundaries of the celebrated, strived for rankings with the spaces of life that are dark and heterotopic, messily entangled with histories, polyphonic human and more than human voice, beings and energies, within the university. Revolt provokes a re-turn to re-question the ethics and boundaries of treatments of ‘world’ and ‘class’ in conceptions of the World Class University. Here, ‘World Class University’ is not necessarily a globally streamlined and internationally bench-marked institution, flexing its socio-economic muscles in the face of the world. Instead, it is an institution that speaks for others who have been made silent and deprived of their own critical voice. It speaks for the suppressed and marginalized, and it speaks for the ones who are no longer with us, or who have not yet arrived. It speaks for the people and the times yet to come.

The Paradox of the Global University

No university of ambition officially claims to be local. Touting international reach and reputation is a nearly essential feature of university strategic planning worldwide. Yet being a global university is paradoxical. Academic institutions historically are servants of particular cities, regions, and nations, and one of their essential functions has been to connect particular places with world affairs. International rankings regimes, the search for tuition revenue among schools in a few large markets, and the remarkable consistency with which nations pursue status through higher education: all of these deepen the implication of universities in the fate and future of particular locales.