Globalization of Higher Education and Research

May 29th and 30^th

University, a central institution in charge of knowledge production and transmission, has undergone major transformations over the last twenty years. Initiatives of diverse natures, from the European Bologna Process to the “Shanghai ranking” have played their part in the simplification of students’ mobility. Indeed, flux of students are increasing exponentially, especially from Asia. These decades have also increased global corporation’s sponsorship and partnership with academic research integrating global innovation circuits. In these turmoil times, new countries and new universities appear as important actors at the global scale, and national systems of higher education suffer greater internal polarization processes. If knowledge’s production and transmission have always been international, the extension and intensity of this phenomena seems to have gone one step further.

These transformations, combined with the contemporary trends of capitalism, led to the emergence of a global market for higher education and knowledge: rise of tuition fees, skyrocketing students’ debt, new public management of faculty, quantitative evaluation criteria and competitive calls for grants are just few of the changes that are watering down frontiers between the University and the market. Even if these changes do not mainly translate directly into universities’ privatization of universities, in this global university, knowledge is increasingly exchanged as a commodity.

It is in this context that we invited recognized researchers and university’s authorities from different parts of the world to think together about university’s present and future.