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The Rise of the Global University |
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Written by Andrew Ross
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Sunday, 29 April 2007 |
As universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, we have seen how their institutional life is distinguished more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and tradition. Few examples illustrate this better than the rush, in recent years, to establish overseas programs and branch campuses. Since 9/11, the pace of offshoring has surged and is being pursued across the entire spectrum of institutions that populate the higher education landscape—from the ballooning for-profit sectors and online diploma mills to land grant universities to the most elite, ivied colleges. No single organization has attained the operational status of a global university, after the model of the global corporation, but it is only a matter of time before we see the current infants of that species take their first, unaided steps.
The WTO has been pushing trade services liberalization for several years, of which higher educational services are a highly prized component, with an estimated global market of between $40 and $50 billion (not much less than the market for financial services).2 Opponents of liberalization argue that higher education cannot and should not be subject to the kind of free trade agreements that have been applied to commercial goods and other services in the global economy. After all, WTO agreements would guarantee foreign service providers the same rights that apply to domestic providers within any national education system while compromising the sovereignty of national regulatory efforts. Yet the evidence shows that, just as corporations did not wait for the WTO to conclude its ministerial rounds before moving their operations offshore, the lack of any international accords has not stopped universities in the leading Anglophone countries from establishing their names and services in a broad range of overseas locations. The formidable projected growth in student enrollment internationally, combined with the expansion of technological capacity and the consolidation of English as a lingua franca have resulted in a bonanza-style environment for investors in offshore education.
As with any other commodity good or service that is allowed to roam across borders, there has also been much hand-wringing about the potential lack of quality assurance. Critics argue that the caliber of education will surely be jeopardized if the global market for it is deregulated. Much less has been said in this debate about the impact on the working conditions of academics or on the ethical profile and aspirational identity of institutions. How will globalization affect the security and integrity of livelihoods that are closely tied to liberal educational ideals like meritocratic access, face-to-face learning, and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? Will these ideals (and the job base built around them) wither away entirely in the entrepreneurial race to compete for a global market share, or will they survive only in one corner of the market–as the elite preserve of those who are able to pay top dollar for such hand-crafted attention?
Lessons from the China Field
While researching my last book, Fast Boat to China, I did a year of field work in several Yangtze River Delta cities. Once I had wangled a membership in the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, I spent a lot of time attending meetings and functions of that organization. It proved to be a wonderful research site to gather data about the offshore business climate, since almost every speculator on the planet eventually shows up there, expecting to make a fast buck. One of the best vantage points to watch this seedy spectacle was at the Chamber’s social mixers, usually hosted in one of the city’s toniest nitespots, and crafted to ensure a frenzy of networking, promotional pitching, and deal-making. Though I was a regular attender at these mixers, I was invariably taken for a musician (no doubt, because of my physical appearance), who was circulating in the crowd before being called upon to perform. How to dispel this perception? As an ethnographer who wanted to clarify his real identity, my opening gambit in conversation was often something along the lines of “Hello, I’m not here to make money, I just study people who do,” but, despite all such efforts, my interlocutors found it almost impossible to resist pitching their business models to me, just in case I might want to invest.
Indeed, wherever I went on my research trips in China, I was treated as a potential investor (at least after it was established that I was not in fact a musician). It took me a little while to realize that this treatment had less to do with the fact that I was a foreigner than that I was an academic. My business card, after all, revealed my connection with NYU, and NYU is a huge brand in China’s private sector, much revered on account of its Stern business school which contributes in no small measure to that country’s “MBA fever.” So I was automatically accorded some attention, and must confess that, since the Stern name was opening doors for my research needs, I did not go out of my way to decline the opportunities generated by this misplaced association.
In addition, however, and more significantly, as I discovered after two or three mixers, many of the people most likely to be propping up the bar at these Chamber of Commerce events were representatives of American universities. Some were there for purely social reasons–to make friends and romantic connections--but all of them were ready to pitch their wares as and when the opportunity arose. Desperate for management expertise, the Chinese government, as early as 1991, began to authorize foreign universities to offer MBA and EMBA programs. Shanghai, earmarked for top-drawer development as Asia’s new financial capital, became the epicenter for the joint-partnered or wholly transplanted degree programs offered by such universities, with Washington University and USC leading the pack. In the last few years, other kinds of academic programs have followed suit: especially in industrial sectors crucial to China’s economic growth: engineering, applied science, and tourism management. Skyrocketing tuition fees, long absences from home, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and, since 9/11, visa restrictions, have sharply reduced the flow of Asian students to the U.S. More and more of our revenue-hungry institutions have gone offshore to service these students in their home countries.
After talking to these reps at the bar, and watching them interact with the corporate investors in the room, I came to realize that, as a representative of an American university, I was not at all out of place in this environment. My institutional employer and its “brand” were perfectly at home in this watering-hole for profit-chasing, cost-cutting investors chasing a lucrative offshore opportunity. It’s one thing to joke in the faculty lounge about our universities going off in pursuit of emerging global markets, and yet another to be handed a business card in such an emerging market by corporate reps who want to do business with you and who assume exactly the same of you. My personal experience in China helped me understand how easy it is, in practice, for our academic culture to meld with the normalizing assumptions and customs of corporate business culture.
Certainly, it was easy to see how the academic reps might be influenced by the maverick mentality of these investors. But it is more important to grasp why the investors might feel they have something to learn, and profit materially, from the successes of American higher education in the business of overseas penetration. After all, the history of foreign involvement in China in the nineteenth-century was the dual record of missionary educators and businesspeople, the one pursuing a potential harvest of 400 million minds and souls, the other seduced by the lure of 400 million consumer converts, each community providing cover for the other’s activities. Arguably, the religious educators were more successful. Many of the colleges that American missionaries established have morphed over the decades into China’s top universities, and, in addition, the lure of American higher education for Chinese students has proven to be quite enduring. Such things are not lost on the keen business mind.
Given the rate at which American universities are setting up shop in China, it is no surprise that NYU opened its own program in Shanghai in September 2006, bringing its list of study abroad locations to eight: the others are in London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Prague, Florence, and Accra. At the time of writing, the Shanghai site is one of several locations being considered as branch campuses of NYU (the most controversial being in Abu Dhabi) registered to offer degrees to students who will not have attended the domestic U.S. campus.3 The decision about whether to offer a range of degrees abroad to local nationals is one which several universities had already made. It remained to be seen whether this move would be fully debated in light of the experience of these other colleges, and how such a decision would affect the character and resource-map of the institution. Open deliberation on this question would surely help address the ailing state of faculty governance at NYU. It might also pressure the administration to observe some measure of transparency in policy decision-making. But in practice, NYU, like its peers, had long ago crossed that threshold, and in the larger world of higher education, the distinction between onshore and offshore education–-like that between private and public, or non-profit and for-profit–-had become very blurry indeed
The distinction matters even less when viewed from the perspective of how the export trade in educational services is defined. The WTO, for example, recognizes four categories under this heading. Mode I involves arms-length or cross border supply such as distance learning. Mode 2 is consumption abroad, which is primarily covered by international students studying overseas, enrolled at institutions in the U.S. for example. Mode 3 is commercial presence, basically foreign direct investment in the form of satellite branches of institutions, and Mode 4 is movement of natural persons–such as academics teaching abroad.4 All the current and foreseeable growth is in Mode 1 and Mode 3 ,and much of this is assumed to be linked to a perceived decline in Mode 2 growth. Statisticians justify their own trade as well the core principles of free trade by showing how these patterns of ebb and flow are interconnected. In response, and as a general fiscal principle, organizations will try to balance their budgets by pushing expansion in one area to compensate for shortfalls in another. This is how global firms have learned to operate, by assessing and equalizing the relative return on their investments in various parts of the world, both in the world of real revenue and in the more speculative realm of brand-building for the future. University accounting departments have begun to juggle their budgets in a similar way. A deep revenue stream from a facility in the Middle East will be viewed as a way to subsidize unprofitable humanities programs at home (as is the case at one Midwestern institution where I inquired) just as an onshore science center capable of capturing U.S. federal grant money may be incubated to help fund an Asian venture considered crucial to brand-building in the region.
A Balance of Trade
In the interviews I conducted with faculty and administrators at NYU and elsewhere, a clear pattern of talk about this kind of fiscal juggling emerged (though no hard numbers could be accessed with which to match the rhetoric). NYU’s own global programs are an eclectic mix of ventures, spread across several schools and divisions, each of which has its own fiscal boat to float. When viewed in their entirety, it is clear that the programs do not hold to any overall rule about the demarcation of onshore from offshore education, let alone any systematic educational philosophy. Though they lack a coherent profile, they show a clear pattern of exponential growth and expansion on to every continent–-beginning, historically, with the Madrid and Paris study abroad programs in “Old” Europe–and into each regional market as it was declared open to foreign direct investment.
While its eight study abroad sites are primarily for NYU students to send a semester abroad, places are offered to non-NYU students as and when vacancies open up. In addition, as many as sixty summer study abroad programs are currently offered to non-NYU students in Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, Czech Republic, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The absence, from New York, during the Fall and Spring semesters, of a quarter (and, by 2011, a half) of its students allows NYU the option of increasing enrollment, or of reducing the costly expense of providing leased dorm space in downtown Manhattan. Either option has a huge impact on revenue, and seems to be a primary motivation not only for university policy in this area, but also for other colleges to emulate NYU’s successful fiscal example. By 1998, less than a decade after incoming president Jay Oliva pledged to shape a global university to match Ed Koch’s global city aspirations for New York itself, NYU had outstripped all other American universities in the volume of students it sent overseas. It also enrolled the highest number of international students. Oliva was known internationally as the founder and host of the League of World Universities, whose rectors met regularly in New York to discuss how to respond to the challenge of globalization, and his successor John Sexton had made his name by pioneering a Global Law program as Dean of the NYU Law School. 5
In the years since then, NYU has found itself in the forefront of online efforts to offer distance learning abroad (one of which, NYU Online, was a notorious $20 million casualty of the dot.com bust, though its successor has thrived) while each of its schools has been encouraged to make global connections. The Stern business school entered into partnership with the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales to offer an EMBA on a global basis, the law school set up an LLM program in Singapore for students from the Asia region, and the Tisch School of the Arts also chose Singapore as the location for a new Master’s program in film -production. The scale of the university’s proposed joint venture with the American University in Paris (AUP) has upped the ante. While it is not likely to involve more than a small minority of NYU students, its growth potential is tied to recruiting well beyond the 800 international students currently enrolled by the AUP.
Less conspicuously, perhaps, NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS), which educates more than 50,000 adult learners annually in more than 125 fields, has become widely known for its provision of services abroad. This has even extended to graduate programs, which it has offered online since 1994, first through the Virtual College and now through NYU Online. SCPS was one of the first university institutions in the U.S. to register with the Department of Commerce’s BUYUSA program, officially described as “an electronic marketplace that connects U.S. exporters with qualified agents, buyers, and partners overseas.” In the words of one of the school’s assistant deans, this program has helped SCPS to locate agents and partners in countries that they “never would have considered otherwise.”6 Examples of the school’s penetration in the China market include instructional seminars offered to executives in that country’s publishing industry, and a program in real estate finance designed for brokers and developers active in the PRC’s vast construction boom. SCPS is a hugely profitable arm of NYU, and its instruction is carried by an almost wholly adjunct workforce whose compensation in no way reflects the lucrative revenue harvested by course offerings in such non-orthodox disciplines as Philanthropy and Fundraising, Life Planning, Food and Wine, and Real Estate.
Not surprisingly, SCPS was one of the first educational institutions to receive the President’s Export Award for its work in promoting U.S. educational services overseas. In the U.S. trade balance, education is the fifth largest export service, bringing in $12b in 2004, and arguably the one with the biggest growth potential. In New Zealand, and Australia, among the other leaders in this field of trade, education is the third and fourth largest export services. Given the intensification of the global competition for high-skill jobs, educational services are increasingly a number one commodity in fast-developing countries.7 The Department of Commerce will help any U.S. university to develop this trade, here or abroad, in much the same way as it helps corporations. For relatively small fees, its Commercial Service will organize booths at international education fairs, find an international partner for one of your university’s ventures, help it with brand recognition in a new market, perform market research, and, through use of the premium Platinum Key Service, offer six months of expertise on setting up an overseas campus and marketing said campus in one of over 80 countries.
The Race to Deregulate
The Commerce Department’s activities are fully aligned with the trade liberalization agenda of the WTO, where higher education falls under the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS). Dedicated, like all WTO agencies, to the principle that free trade is the best guarantee of best quality at lowest cost, GATS was formed in 1995, and higher education services were added to its jurisdiction largely as a result of pressure in 2000 from the United States representative to the WTO, backed by representatives from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. This inclusion has been fiercely opposed by most higher education leaders in WTO member nations, most prominently by a 2001 Joint Declaration of four large academic organizations in North America and Europe (http://www.eua.be/eua/) and the 2002 Porto Alegre Declaration, signed by Iberian and Latin American associations (www.gatswatch.org/educationoutofgats/PortoAlegre.doc). The signatories of these two declarations agree that trade liberalization risks weakening governments' commitment to and investment in public higher, that education is not a commodity but a basic human right, and that its reliance on public mandates should make it distinct from other services. Yet the concerted opposition of these professional bodies has made little difference to the 45 countries (EU counts as one) that had already made commitments to the education sector by January 2006.8 Indeed if the current round of WTO negotiations, the Doha Round, had not been logjammed by acrimonious disagreements over agricultural trade, GATS would have concluded its work some time ago, imposing severe constraints on individual government’s rights to regulate education within their borders.
Such constraints are particularly debilitating to developing countries who will lose valuable domestic regulatory protection from the predatory advances of service providers from rich nations. Indeed, a new ministerial mandate at GATS allows demandeurs like the US, New Zealand, and Australia to band together to put plurilateral pressure on the poorer target countries to accept their education exports (demandeur governments are those doing the asking position under the WTO’s request-offer process). 9 Officially, GATS is supposed to exclude services “supplied in the exercise of governmental authority”–ie by nonprofit educational organizations--but most nations that are committed have chosen not to clarify the distinction between nonprofit and for-profit. With good reason, we can expect creeping, if not galloping, liberalization in all sectors if the GATS trade regime proceeds. After all, the free trade culture of WTO is one in which public services are automatically seen as unfair government monopolies, and should be turned over to private for-profit providers whenever possible, all in the name of “full market access.” From the standpoint of teaching labor, this tendency points in the direction of increasing precarity—an interim environment of job insecurity, deprofessionalization and ever-eroding faculty governance in institutions stripped of their public service obligations and respect for academic freedom.
Even in the absence of any such formal trade regime, we have seen the clear impact of market liberalization at all levels of higher education; the voluntary introduction of revenue center management models where every departmental unit has to prove itself as a profit center; the centralization of power upward into managerial bureaucracies; the near-abdication of peer review assessment in research units that are in bed with industry; the casualization of the majority of the academic workforce, for whom basic professional tenets like academic freedom are little more than a mirage in a desert; and a widening gap between the salaries of presidents and the pittance paid to contingent teachers which is more and more in line with the spectrum of compensation observed in publicly listed corporations. None of this has occurred as a result of an imposition of formal requirements. Imagine then the consequences of a WTO trade regime which legally insists that regulatory standards, affecting procedures of accreditation, licensing, and qualification, might pose barriers to free trade in services.
By the time that GATS negotiations over education were initiated in 2000, the range of educational organizations that had established themselves overseas was already voluminous. These included 1) corporate spinoffs that do employee training and offer degrees such as Motorola University, McDonald Hamburger University, Microsoft’s Certified Technical Education Centers, GE’s Crotonville Colleges, Fordstar’s programs, and Sun Microsystems’ Educational Centers 2) Private for- profit education providers like the Apollo Group, Kaplan Inc., De Vry and the mammoth Laureate Education group (which now owns higher education institutions all over South America and Europe, operates in over 20 countries, and teaches a quarter of a million students). 3) Virtual universities, like Walden University and Western Governors Virtual University in the U.S., the Learning Agency of Australia, India’s Indira Ghandi National Open University, and the UK’s Open University, 4) Traditional universities that offer distance learning, especially in countries like Australia and New Zealand where governments mandated the marketization of higher educational services in the 1990s and 5) for-profit arms of traditional universities, like NYU’s SCPS, or University of Maryland’s University College, and eCornell.10
In the years since then, the volume and scope of overseas ventures has expanded to almost every institution that has found itself in a revenue squeeze, whether from reduced state and federal support or skyrocketing expenses. As a result of market-oriented reforms in higher education, every one of Australia’s public universities is aggressively involved in offshore education in Asia, creating a whole class of educational entrepreneurs, onshore and offshore, whose pursuit of monetary gain has inspired repeated calls for audits. Since many of these programs carry large fiscal risks, the tendency increasingly is to favor conservative models like franchising; producing syllabi in Australia to be taught entirely by local instructors offshore.11 There is not even a pretense of academic exchange involved in this arrangement; where education is little different from a manufacturing product designed at home, produced and assembled by cheaper labor abroad and sold to consumers in emerging markets. In the U.S. for-profit sector, entrepreneurs scrambling to meet overseas demand for degrees (“with no frills”) that have an unambiguous market value, are taking advantage of notoriously loose accrediting procedures to set up shop and pitch their product. Lax regulation in some southern and western states, offshore diploma mill havens like St. Kitts and Liberia, or the infamous Sebroga, a small self-proclaimed principality in Italy, which has granted accreditation to dozens of dubious degree-granting entities, make it easy to license operators who open and close programs overnight to suit market demand.
With China’s economy leapfrogging up the technology curve, the jumbo demand for high-value, professional-managerial talent there has sparked a goldrush with foreign universities scrambling to meet a need that the state (whose professed priority is to fund basic rural education) cannot. There are few US colleges which have not sent prospecting missions to China to scout out offshore opportunities in the last few years. As for their return on investment, many administrators come back from these trips pondering the lesson that foreign companies learned; it is not at all easy to make money in China, let alone break even, and least of all from a joint venture with a Chinese partner, which is the obligatory arrangement for most colleges.12 Even in the absence of guaranteed revenue, many will set up shop for the same reason that corporations have persevered there---to build their brand in the China market or establish their name in the region in anticipation of a future windfall.
The United Arab Emirates and neighboring Qatar have been especially successful in attracting foreign colleges with lavish offers, and are engaged in a bidding war to outdo each other to add cultural cache to their portfolio of corporate brands; The Louvre, Sorbonne, and the Guggenheim were all approached by Abu Dhabi government representatives at roughly the same time NYU was asked to set up a branch campus.13 Dubai hosts a complex called Knowledge Village for offshore branch campuses from Pakistani, Russian, Canadian, and Indian, in addition to select British, Australian, and American universities, In Qatar, several top brand American universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M, George Mason University, and Virginia Commonwealth, are already established in Doha’s 2,500 acre Education City, with all expenses paid for by the royal family’s Qatar Foundation. 13
Students in the Middle East have every reason to feel they may not be welcome in the U.S. after 9/11, while the philosophical world-view associated with the War on Terror has provided administrators with an additional set of arguments to justify their newfound presence in the region. Many of their faculty are no doubt persuaded by Thomas Friedman-style reasoning that aspiring Middle Eastern students would be better served by a Western, liberal education than by the curriculum of a glorified maddrasseh. Never mind that the host countries in question are quasi-feudal monarchies which ruthlessly suppress Islamism, among other belief-systems, and are in no small measure responsible, as a result, for the flourishing of terror in the Middle East and beyond. So the debate falls along familiar lines--is it better to try to influence the political climate in illiberal societies by fostering collegial zones of free speech or is the instinct to engage student elites in such societies a naive, or at worst, a colonial instinct?
Notwithstanding the rhetoric of any university’s overseas mission, it is not at all easy to distinguish some of the new offshore academic centers from free trade industrial zones where outsourcing corporations are welcomed with a lavish package of tax holidays, virtually free land, and duty-free privileges. Indeed, in many locations, Western universities are physically setting up shop in free trade zones. In Dubai the foreign universities are basically there to train knowledge worker recruits in the Free Zone Authority’s other complexes–Dubai Internet City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Studio City, DubaiTech, and the Dubai Outsource Zone. In Qatar, the colleges share facilities with the global high-tech companies that enjoy tax and duty-free investments under that country’s free zone law. Some of China’s largest free trade locations have begun to attract brand name colleges to relieve the skilled labor shortage that is hampering the rate of offshore transfer of jobs and technology. The University of Liverpool, first to open a branch campus in Suzhou Industrial Park (which attracts more FDI than other zone in the PRC), advertised entry-level positions at salaries beginning at $750 per month.
Corporate Universities?
Some readers might justifiably say that as long as the quality of education and integrity of research can be maintained, and the lure of monetary gain kept at bay, the push toward internationalization is something of a moral obligation for educators in affluent countries. Surely, it is a way of sharing or redistributing the wealth that the reproduction of knowledge capital bestows on the most advanced nations? Surely, the domestic hoarding of all this largesse only serves to perpetuate the privileges (not to mention the parochialism) of American students, while it sustains the grossly overdeveloped economy supplied by our universities? At a time when our multinational corporations are plundering the resources of the developing world in the scramble to patent genetic material and copyright indigenous folk tales, surely educators are obliged to set a better example.
In response, I would ask whether the overseas penetration of Anglophone colleges overseas is really the best way of delivering such goals, especially when the main impetus for expansion to date has clearly been less philanthropic than revenue-driven, and when the crisis of domestic student debt is more likely to be exported in the form of a new “debt trap” for students in developing countries to bear. Isn’t there a more direct way for universities to make globally available the knowledge and research they generate?
One obvious alternative is to give it away for free, with no intellectual property strings attached. In MIT’s pioneer OpenCourseWare project, the university makes its courses accessible online for self-learning and non-degree-granting purposes. Other colleges, like Tufts, Utah State, and Carnegie-Mellon have followed suit. To date, MIT’s courses are being translated in China and other Asian countries. While laudable in inspiration, the content that is being imported has a clear cultural standpoint. If it is not absorbed alongside teachings from a local standpoint, it remains to be seen how this export model will differ, in the long run, from the tradition of colonial educations. All over the developing world, governments, desperate to attract foreign investment, global firms, and now, global universities, are channeling scarce public educational resources into programs tailored to the skill sets of a “knowledge society” at the expense of all other definitions of knowledge including indigenous knowledge traditions. Under these conditions, higher education is increasingly regarded as an instrumental training for knowledge workers in tune with capitalist rationality as it is lived within one of the urban footprints of corporate globalization.
If universities were to closely follow the corporate offshoring model, what would we expect to see next? In a labor-intensive industry (a characteristic that education shares with the garment industry–75% of education costs go on teaching labor), the instructional budget is where your employer will seek to minimize costs first, usually by introducing distance learning or by hiring local, offshore instructors at large salary discounts. Expatriate employees, employed to set up an offshore facility and train locals, will become a fiscal liability to be offloaded at the first opportunity. If your satellite campus is located in the same industrial park as Fortune 500 firms, then it will almost certainly be invited to produce customized research for these companies, again at discount prices. It will only be a matter of time before an administrator decides it will be cost-effective to move some domestic research operations to the overseas branch to save money. And once the local instructors have proved themselves over there, they may be the ones asked to produce the syllabi, and, ultimately, even teach remote programs for onshore students in the U.S.
Inevitably, in a university with global operations, administrators who have to make decisions about where to allocate its budgets will favor locations where the return on investment is relatively higher. Why build expensive additions at home when a foreign government or free trade zone authority is offering you free land and infrastructure? Why bother recruiting overseas students when they can be taught more profitably in their countries of origin? If a costly program can only be saved by outsourcing the teaching of it, then surely that is the decision that will be made.
Along the way, there will be much high-minded talk about meeting the educational needs of developing countries, and some pragmatic talk about reducing the cost of education for domestic students. Substandard academic conditions will be blamed on foreign intermediaries or partners, or on “unfair” competition. Legislators and top administrators will grandstand in public, and play along in private. Clerical functions and data-dense research will be the first to go offshore. As for teaching instructors, those in the weakest positions or the most vulnerable disciplines will feel the impact first, and faculty with the most clout–-tenured fulltimers in elite universities--will be the last and the least to be affected.
As far as the domestic record goes, higher education institutions have followed much the same trail as subcontracting in industry—first, the outsourcing of all non-academic campus personnel, then the casualization of routine instruction, followed by the creation of a permatemps class on short-term contracts, and the preservation of an ever smaller core of fulltimers, who are crucial to the brand prestige of the collegiate name. Downward salary pressure and eroded job security are the inevitable upshot. How do we expect offshore education to produce a different result?
From the perspective of academic labor, I don’t believe we should expect an altogether dissimilar outcome. But the offshoring of higher education, if and when it occurs, will not resemble the hollowing-out of manufacturing economies, with full-scale employer flight to cheaper locations, or even the more recent select outsourcing of white-collar services, where knowledge transfer involves the uploading and downloading of skills and knowhow from and to human brains on different sides of the planet. The scenario for education will be significantly different, given the nature and traditions of the services being delivered, the vested commitment of national governments to the goals of public education, and the complexity of relationships between various stakeholders.
Moreover, for all the zealous efforts to steer higher education into the rapids of enterprise culture, it would be easy to demonstrate that, with the exception of the burgeoning for-profit sector, most universities do not and cannot, for the most part, function fiscally like a traditional marketplace, and that the principles of collaboration and sharing that sustain teaching, learning, and research are inimical or irreducible, in the long run, to financialization after the model of the global corporation. Yet one could say much the same about the organizational culture of the knowledge industries. High tech firms depend increasingly on internationally available knowledge in specialized fields; they collaborate with each other on research that is either too expensive or too multi-sided to undertake individually; and they depend, through high turnover, on a pool of top engineers to circulate brainpower throughout the industry. So, too, the management of knowledge workers has diverged appreciably from the traditions of Taylorism, and is increasingly modeled after the work mentality of the modern academic, whose job is not bounded by the physical workplace or by a set period of hours clocked there. Modern knowledge workers no longer know when they are on or off the job, and their ideas—the stock-in-trade of their industrial livelihoods—come to them at any waking moment of their day, often in their most free moments.14 From this perspective, talk about the “corporate university” is a lazy shorthand. The migration of our own academic customs and work mentalities onto corporate campuses and into knowledge industry workplaces is just as important a part of the story of the rise of knowledge capitalism as the importation of business rationality into the academy, but the traffic in the other direction is all too often neglected because of our own siege mentality.
In all likelihood, we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be; both are mutating into new species that share and trade many characteristics. These changes are part and parcel of the economic environment in which they function; where, on the one side, a public commons unobtrusively segues into a marketplace of ideas, and a career secured by stable professional norms morphs into a contract-driven livelihood hedged by entrepreneurial risks; and, on the other side, where the busy hustle for a lucrative patent or a copyright gets dressed up as a protection for creative workers; and the restless hunt for emerging markets masquerades as a quest to further international exchange or democratization.
It may be all too easy for us to conclude that the global university, as it takes shape, will emulate some of the conduct of multinational corporations. It is much more of a challenge to grasp the consequences of the co-evolution of knowledge-based firms and academic institutions. Yet understanding the latter may be more important if we are to imagine practical educational alternatives in a civilization which relies on mental labor to enrich its economic lifeblood.
NOTES
2.. OECD figures, which only covered students studying abroad, were $30 billion for 1999. Quoted in Thomas Fuller, “Education Exporters Take Case to WTO,” International Herald Tribune (February 18, 2003) p. 15. Estimates of the global market for educational services vary wildly. For example, Richard T. Hezel, president of Hezel Associates, a research company focused on e-learning, values the market at around $2.5 trillion in 2005. Elizabeth Redden, “No Risk, No Reward,” InsideHigherEd.com, http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/07/for_profit (December 7–, 2006), accessed December 27, 2006.
3..The two largest branch campuses under consideration are in conjunction with the American University in Paris at a site on the Isle Seguin, and in Abu Dhabi, where representatives from the Emirates have offered to build NYU a campus from scratch.
4.. These basic GATS definitions can be found at http://www.wto.int/english/tratop_e/serv_e/cbt_course_e/c1s3p1_e.htm.
Mode 3, in particular, has seen intense plurilateral pressure on developing countries from OECD states to open up their services sectors.
5.. The philosophical drive beyond NYU’s global aspirations in the Oliva years is summarized in “NYU: The Global Vision” (NYU: 1995). In that document, Duncan C. Rice, Vice-Chancellor at the time argued that NYU had a “unique obligation among colleges to become internationalized” because “it serves the greatest international entrepot in the world.” The university’s history of fulfilling the educational aspirations of the “sons and daughters of working Americans and waves of succeeding immigrants” made it an especially appropriate mission to undertake.
6.. See Jennifer Moll, “Trade in Education and Training Services: Excellent Opportunities for U.S. Providers,” in Export America; The Federal Source for Your Global Business Needs, an arm of the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration.
http://www.ita.doc.gov/exportamerica/NewOpportunities/no_edu_0902.html.
7.. For an ultimately enthusiastic, though broad-ranging, summary of some of the salient issues in the GATS debate over educational services, see Pierre Sauve, of the OECD Trade Directorate, “Trade, Education and the GATS: What’s In,What’s Out, What’s All the Fuss About?”
link
8.. Jane Knight, “GATS: The Way Forward after Hong Kong,” International Higher Education, 43 (Spring 2006).
9.. David Robinson, “GATS and Education Services: The Fallout from Hong Kong,” International Higher Education, 43 (Spring 2006).
10.. See Sauve, Ibid.
11.. Fazal Rizvi, “Offshore Australian Higher Education” International Higher Education, 37 (Fall 2004).
12.. Paul Mooney, “The Wild, Wild East,” Chronicle of Higher Education (February 17, 2006).
13.. The Guggenheim and the Louvre have been named as initial players in a plan for a 670-acre cultural district on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island. Nicolai Ourossoff, “A Vision in the Desert,” New York Times (February 1, 2007).
13.. Knowledge Village’s official website is at http://www.kv.ae/en/. For the Qatar Foundation, see http://www.qf.edu.qa/.
14.. Andrew Ross, No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
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