Ninth Level Ireland

“It’s hard to take in the full impact of the coronavirus catastrophe on Higher Education in Ireland. For fifteen years, many colleges have been pursuing an ever more intensive global agenda. My own university’s strapline is famously ‘Ireland’s Global University’ and the first iteration of our newly global strategy was equally clear: ‘Forming Global Minds’. This agenda quickly became all-invasive. Not educationally, however …” (more)

[In a Strange Land, 21 March]

“Globalisation, long regarded with suspicion by some, is now under full-scale attack. ‘Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalisation – moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas’, said US president-elect Donald Trump in a speech in June. ‘Globalisation has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy. I used to be one of them …'” (more)

[David Matthews, Times Higher Education, 15 December]

“A growing number of colleges and universities are emerging as multinational organizations – creating start-up versions of themselves in foreign countries. Those vacationing in western France may drive past a campus of Georgia Tech University …” (more)

[Jason Lane and Kevin Kinser, The Conversation, 5 June]

“Findings show that people (not technology) will drive change, revenue is the ultimate goal, and HE is globalising, but gradually …” (more)

[William Lawton, Guardian Professional, 2 October]

“In a post on Globalisation and the University, I picked up on William Robinson’s work on the mechanisms by which a transnational capitalist class, acting through a transnational state apparatus, and supported by a neoliberal political society, hatched from within national capitals …” (more)

[Richard Hall’s Space, 22 February]

“In his Globalization: nine theses on our epoch, William Robinson argues that ‘activists and scholars have tended to underestimate the systemic nature of the changes involved in globalisation, which is redefining all the fundamental reference points of human society and social analysis, and requires a modification of all existing paradigms’ …” (more)

[Richard Hall’s Space, 18 February]

“There are few higher education institutions that would report a disinterest in becoming more internationally connected, more open to international students or being able to offer more international research opportunities to their faculty …” (more)

[GlobalHigherEd, 19 April]

“… Over the past two or three years the number of academic jobs advertised as vacant has been a fraction of what it once was. As funding is cut almost everywhere, faculty are staying in place as long as they can retain their jobs, and those leaving due to retirement are often no longer being replaced. Just as the spread of communications technology has made intellectual globalisation more and more of a reality, the physical migration of lecturers is in decline …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 9 August]

“Australia’s Academy of Science and its international peers are calling on all governments to support collaboration. Creating the conditions for ‘true globalisation’ of knowledge in science and technology means establishing virtual collaborative research centres to advance innovations in education. So says a coalition of peak science bodies supported by the Australian Academy of Science …” (more)

[Jill Rowbotham, The Australian, 13 June]

“‘Emerging nations are transforming the scene, although traditional powers remain.’ That’s how physicist and former CERN director Christopher Llewellyn Smith today summarized a new Royal Society report on the state of global science. The report, titled Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global Scientific Collaboration in the 21st Century, analyzes peer-reviewed science papers with abstracts in English to assess which countries were claiming slices of an expanding research pie …” (more)

[Sara Reardon, Science Insider, 28 March]

“In David Lodge’s 1984 Booker-listed novel Small World, one of the main protagonists, Professor Morris Zapp, declares that ‘the world is a global campus … the American Express card has replaced the library pass’. Just over twenty-five years later Ben Wildavsky investigates the globalisation of Higher Education, and implicitly whether Lodge’s vision has come to fruition …” (more)

[Matthew Partridge, British Politics and Policy at LSE, 27 February]

“It is not just meetings of the rich and powerful that are getting increasingly cosmopolitan. Global universities are ‘reshaping the world’, argues Ben Wildavsky, the author of The Great Brain Race. Because big problems often transcend borders, many ambitious students demand a global education …” (more)

[HT: Shane O’Mara]
[Economist, 20 January]

“Ben Wildavsky’s book The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities are Reshaping the World is well worth reading. Wildavsky places international education firmly in the context of globalisation. He makes the case for international education as free trade in minds and ideas and as a key pillar of globalisation …” (more)

[Robert Cosgrave, Tertiary21, 27 October]

“The Irish Times and other media today carried a report on the publication of a new globalisation index produced by Ernst & Young which places Ireland third on the globalised states list. The EY index joins an increasingly crowded field, so what follows is a bluffer’s guide to globalisation indices. As always, a good starting point (but never more than that) is the relevant Wikipedia entry …” (more)

[Alan Matthews, The Irish Economy, 30 January]

“The American Association and Colleges and Universities (AACU) just released a survey of employers that looks at the characteristics employers want to see in the graduates they hire, and a related paper from the AACU Board called The Quality Imperative. The survey (which does not in any way contradict others that I have seen previously) reports that only one in four employers feel that higher education is doing a good job in preparing students for success in the global economy …” (more)

[Lloyd Armstrong, Changing Higher Education, 21 January]

“‘Despite the proclaimed virtues of globalisation, there is an all too evident closing of minds and hearts’,  said Professor Saleem Badat, Vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, at the South Africa-Nordic Centre (Sanord) conference on Inclusion and Exclusion in Higher education held at the university from 7 to 9 December. ‘Arrogant power, narrow economic interests and dubious orthodoxies’ are ruling thinking about what universities should now be and do …'” (more)

[Anthea Garman, University World News, 20 December]

“According to a report that has just been published in the UK, we can expect that globalisation will have a much more visible impact on universities in the near future. Until now, the international dimension of higher education in this part of the world has mainly been experienced through overseas student recruitment …” (more)

[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 9 December]

“Universities and national higher education systems have become Globalization’s Muse – ‘in essence, a widely recognised and worshiped route for full participation in the knowledge society’, says a new book from Berkeley edited by John Aubrey Douglass, C Judson King and Irwin Feller. With contributions from 19 US and international authors, the study describes and analyses changes in the global landscape of higher education with focuses on the themes of convergence, competition and congruity of policy and practices …” (more)

[University World News, 8 November]