Higher Education in Asia: Challenges from and Contributions to Globalization1

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Higher Education in Asia:

Challenges from and Contributions to Globalization1

Anthony B. L. Cheung

Former President and Chair Professor of Public Administration The Hong Kong Institute of Education

Abstract

The paper puts Asia’s rising, especially its emerging as higher education hub in the context of globalization. By summarizing the four waves of internationalization of higher education over the past hundred years, the paper makes an argument that internationalization is not limited to Europeanization or Americanization, the rise of Asia in the 21st century represents alternative routes to modernity. Asian value and scholarship may serve as a counter-force for the Western- centric globalization of higher learning. In the conclusion, the paper advocates a way towards inclusive globalization and calls for the integration of local/national experience with those of other societies and cultures.

Keywords

Asia’s rise, Asian scholarship, paradigm shift, inclusive globalization

Introduction

This year’s (2011) World Universities Forum, being held in Asia—and a global city of China at that—is an appropriate platform to gauge the impact of Asia in higher education today. “Asia is Rising”, as the conference theme has rightly alluded to. However, our concern here is not so much to self-praise, but to reflect on the role and responsibility of Asian universities in the context of the globalization of higher education in the 21st century, and to see how Asia will change the direction of such globalization—in terms of both the substance of globalization and the meaning of university.

1 This article is based on a keynote presentation at the World Universities Forum 2011 on “Asia Rising and the Changing Architecture of Global Higher Education”, held on 14-16 January 2011 at The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong, China.

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Asia Fasting Emerging as a Higher Education Hub

Following the release of the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rank- ings 2009, the Updates on Global Higher Education (31 October 2009), published by Malaysia’s Institute Penyelidikan Pendidikan Tinggi Negara (National Higher Education Research Institute), ran this headline “Global Rankings: Rise of Asia or Decline of the USA.” Explaining the Asia’s rise, it said that:

As the world changes and becomes more borderless, people start to have more confĳi- dence in their own products to compete in the global platform. As more families realize that quality higher education does not necessarily come from abroad or highly reputable institutions, they shift their attention to local institutions and those from the region.

Governments also play their role in stimulating such shift and growth of confĳidence by providing more opportunities for scientists to conduct research in a more conducive environment. This includes better facilities, future prospects and better remuneration.

The act of attracting local scientists to remain in their own countries as a way to counter the high rate of human capital mobility could be a factor that contributes to the rise of reputation and quality of higher education in Asia and consequently change in the higher education and research landscape.2 (Ooi, Kaur and Sirat, 2009: 2)

Higher education is now treated by emerging Asian nations, not only as part of nation-building, but also as an extension of their national ‘soft power’—to ena- ble them to become more competitive in the global human capital economy.

Around the same time, The Chronicle of Higher Education (5 October 2009) ran a similar headline story: “Asia Rising: Countries Funnel Billions into Uni- versities.” Across East Asia, it said, governments (Hong Kong, Singapore, China, South Korea, and Taiwan) are funneling resources into elite universities, fĳinancing basic research, and expanding access to vocational and junior col- leges, all with the goal of driving economic development. This contrasts mark- edly with the US, where even before the global recession hit, the percentages of state budgets dedicated to higher education have been in steady decline.3 Fig- ures speak. More Asian students are now staying in their home country for higher education. According to UNESCO’s (2010) Global Education Digest, 64.7% of mobile students in East Asia and the Pacifĳic remained within the

2 Poh Ling Ooi, Sarjit Kaur, and Morshidi Sirat, “Global Rankings: Rise of Asia or Decline of the USA,” Updates on Global Higher Education, no. 65 (2009): 2.

3 Mara Hvistendahl, “Asia Rising: Countries Funnel Billions Into Universities,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 2009, http://chronicle.com/article/Asia-Rising-Countries-Funnel/

48682/?key=SGt1cllsOCtNZXEycnVBKHdVPyh9Jkp8PHNFNywaZV5d (accessed October 7, 2009).

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region in 2008—up from 36% in 1999.4 The home admission rates to higher education in Asia have gone up—e.g. from 7% a decade ago to 23% in 2008 in Mainland China, 73% to 98% in South Korea and 23% to 32% in Malaysia. In Hong Kong, the home admission rate to higher education has jumped from below 30% to over 60% against the number of persons aged 17 to 20 in the past decade.5

Major Asian universities are also improving in their world status. Based on some world-class university rankings, 15 and 35 of the top 100 and top 200 universities respectively are in Asia.6 Eastern Asia now boasts prominent clus- ters of some high-grade universities, which may ultimately rival the Greater Boston Area of North America, posing an attractive alternative to students from around the world. Thanks partly to the globalization of higher education, Asia is fast becoming a mega education hub too, as can be witnessed by a tre- mendous growth in the number of universities (public, private and international branch campuses and joint institutions), as major countries and metropolises like Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and India all aspire to become regional education hubs:

• Japan—as an attractive regional destination for Asian students, Japan has set to drastically increase their foreign student numbers and work toward the creation of common credit recognition schemes to facilitate student mobility in Asia, similar to ETCS and Erasmus in Europe.7

• China—Inasmuch as China is sending huge number of students for studies overseas, it is also fast becoming one of the most popular study-abroad destinations for students of developed countries. According to fĳigures released in 2006, there were 162,700 exchange students from 184 countries and regions studying in China, which aspires to develop a world-class higher education system and attract half a million foreign students by 2020.8

4 UNESCO, Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2010: Comparing Education Statistics Across the World (Montreal: UNESCO, 2010), 172.

5 University Grants Committee, Aspirations for the Higher Education System in Hong Kong, Report of the University Grants Committee (Hong Kong: University Grants Committee, 2010), 153, http://www.ugc.edu.hk/eng/doc/ugc/publication/report/her2010/annex-e.pdf.

6 QS World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings Results 2010, QS, http://

www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2010/results (accessed January 7, 2011).

7 EU-Asia Higher Education Platform, “Developing Asian education hubs,” EAHEP, http://

www.eahep.org/web/index.php/he-in-asia/understanding-asian-he/96-asian-edu-hubs.html (accessed August 4, 2009).

8 Ibid.

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• Singapore—Under the ‘Global Schoolhouse’ project, Singapore aims to attract 150,000 international students by 2015 (EU-Asia Higher Education Platform, 2009).

Today it is already home to 16 distinguished foreign tertiary institutions including INSEAD, University of Chicago, Stanford University, Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University, DigiPen Institute of Technology, Tech- nische Universiteit Eindhoven (the Netherlands), and Technische Universität München (Germany), as part of the strategy to establish centres of excellence for R&D, knowledge transfer to industry and strengthening the country as an education hub.

• Hong Kong—Hong Kong has a declared policy goal to develop into a regional educa- tion hub and announced new measures in October 2007, including the phased dou- bling of non-local student quota for publicly-funded tertiary programmes from 10%

to 20% of the approved student number targets. In 2009 the government announced an outline to develop education services and to strengthen Hong Kong’s position as a regional education hub.

• South Korea—South Korea is developing the Incheon Free Economic Zone, to pro- vide a hub of world-class research and academic institutions and a global centre for cultural and intellectual exchange, and to eventually host more than 40 research institutes and at least 7 foreign campuses of mostly US universities.9

• Malaysia—The 1988 Education Act permits foreign universities to establish offfshore campuses in Malaysia. The country now aims at increasing the number of foreign students to 100,000 by 2010 and has a strong presence at recruiting fairs in the Middle East.10

• India—India is talking about becoming a new hub of education, particularly in the fĳields of engineering and IT, which would be attractive given the low cost of education there, at an average of less than US$5,000 per year in an engineering institution (see www.helium.com).

Over the past hundred years, there have been several waves of internationali- zation of higher education. The fĳirst wave involved students travelling to the West to study, which was typical of the 19th century and most of the 20th cen- tury. The second wave involved Western institutions establishing an interna- tional presence through collaboration with local counterparts in offfering joint programs. The third wave, over the past decade, involved the creation of branch campuses in the Asia Pacifĳic region, especially Singapore and Malaysia.11

9 Steven Schwartz, “Wise Up: Restoring Wisdom to Universities Lecture,” Vice-Chancellor’s Annual Lecture, Macquarie University, Australia, 2010, http://www.mq.edu.au/mqvideos/vc Lecture3.html (accessed September 16, 2010).

10 EU-Asia Higher Education Platform, “Developing Asian education hubs,” EAHEP, http://

www.eahep.org/web/index.php/he-in-asia/understanding-asian-he/96-asian-edu-hubs.html (accessed August 4, 2009).

11 Tim Mazzarol, Geofffrey Norman Soutar, and Michael Sim Yaw Seng, “The third wave: future trends in international education”, The International Journal of Educational Management 17, no. 2/3 (2003): 92. According to Mazzarol et al. (2003, p. 92), in 2001 there were 3 branch

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As East Asia steadily comes to centre stage of the international education scene, with their newly recognized world-class universities, a new ‘market’

situation has resulted. Even branch campuses and joint institutions do not just serve the export purposes for Western countries in Europe, North America and Australia, but have also, on top of East Asian countries’ own quality universities, provided the new tools of Asia-centred internationalization strate- gies. In other words, the former importers are now able to become exporters as well, just as Asian countries in the latter half of the 20th century ( Japan, the Four Little Dragons, and then China and Vietnam) had managed to learn from Western industrialized nations and subsequently excelled in the export trade.

The same logic seems to be working in the internationalization of higher education, with education increasingly positioned as a strategic industry by many Asian governments. Nowadays, apart from sending their students abroad and developing offf-shore campuses of foreign (mainly Western) universities to meet the needs of local students to receive good education, there is also an emerging trend among some Asian countries to build up reputable local universities and joint international institutions, both to retain local talent as well as to attract foreign students (from both developed and developing countries).

This may well pave the way for the fourth wave of internationalization of education, with signifĳicant global educational and research implications. With an emerging Asia in the 21st century, notably China and India taking the global centre stage, there is concurrently a growing flow of foreign students choosing to study in Eastern Asia—to learn Asian languages, cultures, institutions, and modernization. According to UNESCO statistics, there were 126,568 foreign students in Japan and 40,322 in South Korea in 2008,12compared to 56,552 in Japan and 2,869 in South Korea a decade ago.13

In due course Asia may well be competing with Europe and North America in international higher education, but this needs not be seen as if an ‘arms race’

with the US and the West in a global politics sense. The rise of Asian higher education is concomitant with the growing importance of Asia in the world

campuses of international universities established in Malaysia with a further four being planned.

In Singapore there were 3 such campuses with up to 6 in planning. Thailand had one with 3 under negotiation, while similar developments were unfolding in Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Brunei and Taiwan.

12 UNESCO, Institute for Statistics, Global Education Digest 2010: Comparing Education Statistics across the World (Montreal: UNESCO, 2010), 172.

13 UNESCO Data Centre, (2011), http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/TableViewer/document .aspx?ReportId=143&IF_Language=eng (accessed January 7, 2011).

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arena in terms of economic growth and regional modernity. It is partly a result of the globalization logic that sees no national and cultural boundaries, making the transnational and cross-cultural understanding of a globalizing world both easier and all the more imminent. The challenge to the Asians is: In order to embrace this new wave of internationalization, what can Asia offfer to the world, by way of its academic studies, scientifĳic and humanistic scholarship, and the

‘Asian Experience’?

The Rise of Asia in the 21st Century: Renaissance and Alternative Routes to Modernity

Much of the understanding of globalization and its impact has been grounded in Western civilization, institutions and values which are regarded as univer- sally applicable to all nations and societies in the quest for development, a process extending the 20th century logic of ‘modernization’. Globalization in practice has not been just any movement of convergence, but one directed towards some kind of ‘Westernization’ model. Whereas modernization was taken as essentially Westernization in the 20th century, globalization too is often taken to mean benchmarking and convergence towards Western (and mostly Anglo-American) capitalism and its institutional offf-springs.

In higher education, there is concern that internationalization may lead to a loss of cultural or national identity, and the homogenization of curriculum.14 While internationalization should have been a two-way street where students move largely from south to north serving important needs in the developing world, it seems the north has largely been dominating the process.15 As universities promote their influences by expanding their education across national borders, this has not resulted correspondingly in genuine intercultural exchanges, and the embracing of the values of internationalism or cosmopolitanism. Turner and Robson, for example, have argued that

particularly within the context of historically successful imperial societies, the tempta- tions of conceptual colonialism are seductive because of the highly implicit nature of much that underlies routine educational practices . . . . . one of the key challenges

14 Jane Knight, “Internationalization brings important benefĳits as well as risks,” International Higher Education, no. 46 (2007): 8.

15 Philip G. Altbach and Jane Knight, “The internationalization of higher education: Motivations and realities,” Journal of Studies in International Education 11, no. 3/4 (2007): 291.

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inherent within any shift towards more inclusive conceptions of internationalization must begin with making existing local values and practice more explicit.16

History, though, has not worked as simply as that, but has ironically been full of examples of divergence and deviance from strong world trends.17 Two forces have always been at work, serving to spoil attempts to impose a ‘universalist’

regime of global order and modernity. First, the force of indigenization: as Samuel Huntington18 put it, many followers of the Western modernization model would eventually opt for ‘balancing’ the West by developing alternative systems, i.e. to modernize but not to Westernize. Second, the limited social base of any monolithic Western (or indeed global) model of development be it economic or social. As John Gray argued eloquently in his book False Dawn about the delusions of so-called global capitalism which underpinned much of the globalization practice until the recent global fĳinancial crisis triggered by the Wall Street meltdown:

A global free market presupposes that economic modernization means the same thing everywhere. It interprets the globalization of the economy . . . . as the inexorable advance of a singular type of Western capitalism: the American free market.

The real history of our time is nearer the opposite. Economic modernization does not replicate the American free market system throughout the world. It works against the free market. It spawns indigenous types of capitalism that owe little to any western model.19

To really appreciate the complexity of the world, we need to go beyond the West and all it represents. This calls for a fundamental paradigm shift, to recognize that precisely because of globalization and a borderless world, modernity is taking shape in many forms and through diffferent paths. ‘Asian Values’ have often been derided as representative of regime values imposed by authoritar- ian paternalist governments in the region to suppress desires for individual freedoms and democratic governance. This is unfortunate. The Asian values systems date back to centuries of history and major civilizations which had produced great cultures, arts and sciences, and scholarship and thoughts.

16 Yvonne Turner and Sue Robson, Internationalising the University (London: Continnum, 2008), 52-53.

17 Anthony B.L. Cheung, “Globalization versus Asian Values: Alternative paradigms in under- standing governance and administration,” Asian Journal of Political Science 8, no. 2 (2000): 4-13.

18 Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Afffairs, summer 1993, 27.

19 John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta Books, 1999), 13.

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Whatever sense of post-Cold War Western triumphalism emerging after the downfall of the Soviet empire in the 1990s has now subsided, thanks to the recent global fĳinancial tsunami. It is now widely accepted that the former superpower-domination by US capitalism is steadily giving way to a form of co-supremacy of regional economic blocs, including China and India. The Time magazine of 10 August 2009 even used “Can China Save the World?” as its headline story, arguing that the balance of global economic power is shifting eastward.20 In his provocative book The New Asia Hemisphere, Kishore Mahbu- bani proclaimed: “The rise of the West transformed the world. The rise of Asia will bring about an equally signifĳicant transformation.”21 Drawing on Samuel Huntington’s earlier observations that the peoples and governments of non- Western civilization no longer remain the objects of history as targets of West- ern colonization but have joined the West as movers and shapers of history, Mahbubani moves one step further by suggesting the advent of a new historical epoch which will witness an enormous renaissance of Asian societies.22

One does not need to be an Asianist to recognize an Asian modernity has come of age that will have great impact on the rest of the world. Such Asian modernity (entailing an advanced form of social living, economic afffluence and intellectual vitality) does not arise out of nowhere. It is not just the hall- mark of economic productivity occasioned by a new global order of division of labour ushered by Western capitalism by design or default, but has deep-seated roots in Asia’s own centuries-old civilizations and traditions. As Smith reminded us, until the early 19th century, the two largest economies of the world were China and India, and the world is now seeing the resurgence of these two giants in the 21st century.23 By the early 1990s, the World Bank acknowledged the economic rise of Japan and the Asian Little Dragons (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) as an ‘East Asian miracle’.24 Since then, economic and social liberalizations have unleashed much force for progress in both China and India. The soft power of both newly afffluent nations is becoming

20 Bill Powell, “Can China Save the World?,” Time, August 10, 2009.

21 Kishore Muhbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Afffairs, 2008), 1.

22 Kishore Muhbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (New York: Public Afffairs, 2008), 9.

23 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (London:

Profĳile Books, 2007).

24 World Bank, The East Asian Economic Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1.

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increasingly felt—in much the same way as Japan and South Korea had fĳixed their cultural muscle previously.

Despite the 1997-98 Asian fĳinancial crisis, which led to the ascendancy of an arrogant neo-liberal Washington Consensus, the centre of activities has once again switched back to Asia after the 2008 global fĳinancial tsunami. In the 21st century, the economic and then cultural rise of Asia will ensure that internationalization is not limited to (Western) Europeanization and Americaniza- tion, and provide the opportunity for internationalization to be put back on a proper track in recognition of the globalized world—i.e. bringing together cross-national and cross-cultural experiences, knowledge and scholarship, and appreciating diversity, plurality and multi-ethnicity. A world where Asia can sit with Europe and North America on a par in shaping the evolution of human civilization can become truly more ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. There are, no doubt, some “universal fundamental values” that have grown out of human civilization across nations and societies, to mark the advent of modernity which most people embrace and cherish. It is also true that this era of internationalization is much grounded in the market economy. However, there is no singular path to modernity as contemporary history has shown; and the market, like any human institution, is politically and culturally embedded in society as well.

There are many aspects of economic and social development processes in Asia which can be compared and contrasted with the Western modernization paradigm—so similar and yet so diffferent due to cultural and historical rea- sons. To illustrate, the East Asian development model (branded as interven- tionist, developmental, or state-led), with the possible exception of Hong Kong, has taken exception to the commonly accepted Western capitalist model. This is not surprising. The 20th^-century presumptions about vigorous policy inter- dependence have failed to be borne out even by the policy outcomes of West- ern nations sharing similar level of socio-economic development. As Francis Castles’ comparative study of OECD post-War transformation found out, cross- national patterns of social and economic policy outcomes were in a constant state of flux as they were shaped by a wide range of economic, social, cultural, political and policy factors, which all altered over time. He concluded that “the [modernization] story . . . . was of a modernity fractured by major political, demographic and cultural fault lines, cross-cutting each other in diffferent ways in diffferent nations and, potentially, making for considerable policy diversity.”25

25 Francis Geofffrey Castles, Comparative Public Policy: Patterns of Post-war Transformation (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1998), 301.

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The fact is modernity can be characterized by quite diffferent age and occu- pational structures across nations, so much so that the story becomes that “of a modernity with many mansions.”26 Economic and social development acts more as a constraining factor rather than a determining factor in public policy choices and outcomes. Once the thresholds of modernization are reached, nations and societies may diverge in their own diffferent routes and practices.

In the aftermath of the global fĳinancial crisis, even corporate leaders are advocating the need for integrative thinking:

. . . we need to think about the world in terms of systemic complexity and how indi- viduals, fĳirms and even nations adapt to this complexity. We need to understand that there are multiple solutions to complex problems, rather than the elegant ‘optimal equilibrium’ from neoclassical analysis.27

Shengargues that true modernization involves the adaption of advanced ideas and innovations to the local context and realities. The same holds true when it comes to the internationalization of higher education once Asia has become mature, confĳident and can play a prominent role on the world arena. But how would Asia’s contribution to global higher education add color and vitality to the substance of the pursuit of knowledge and meaning of life, which educa- tion ultimately is about? Will Asia be just producing more of the same of the Western-originated contemporary higher education model, or will it be able to unleash a more critical understanding and practice of higher education, a cul- tural and epistemological reflection of the role of universities as venues of higher learning?

26 Ibid., 305.

27 Andrew Sheng, “This year, a test of the Asian model,” South China Morning Post, January 8, 2011, A11. Andrew Sheng was Chairman of the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong from 1998 to 2005. A Chartered Accountant by training, he is currently the Chief Adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission and a Board Member of the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority and Sime Darby Berhad, Malaysia. In addition, he is a member of the Advisory Council of the Iskandar Regional Development Authority, Malaysia, the International Advisory Panel of the Labuan Offfshore Financial Services Authority, Malaysia (LOFSA), the Governing Council of the International Centre for Education in Islamic Finance, Malaysia (INCEIF) and the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Securities Market, India (NISM).

He currently chairs the annual OECD/ADBI Roundtable on Capital Market Reform in Asia. His recent book, From Asian to Global Financial Crisis, is published by Cambridge University Press.

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The Loss of Purpose in Universities

Despite the rapid expansion and internationalization of higher education world-wide, there are growing concerns about the loss of identity and values of universities as institutions of higher learning. Steven Schwartz, Vice- Chancellor of Macquarie University, Australia, laments that universities these days have become so focused on imparting knowledge that they have forgotten to impart what he calls ‘wisdom’.28 He is not alone in sounding the alarm.

Nussblaum,29 also observes that modern tertiary education has lost its way and that if society wants to produce graduates who have the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a ‘citizen of the world’, with the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person, then it should reverse the current idea of university driven more by economic pro- ductivity and less by liberal and critical values. In his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings30 argued that with the ascendancy of higher education marketization, culture is no longer seen as an important legitimating reference. The (original) European tradition of the modern university had been grounded in the ideas of reason and culture. However, today’s universities are

“in ruin”, he said, because excellence is measured only by technological and utilitarian criteria. Instead of grooming wisdom and ideas, many universities are being pushed towards a very functionalist path of qualifĳications-generation and vocational training.

Mackler sums up the crisis of modern-day universities by suggesting that they have over the years shifted to a positivist model which emphasizes knowl- edge production and job training, from a hermeneutic one that values under- standing and meaning. The positivist model is rooted in the scientifĳic revolution which sees the world within a framework of knowledge that is verifĳiable and reproducible in a way akin to the empiricism of the natural sciences.31 Ostovich also observed that education is spoken of as an industry and

29 Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profĳit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 2010).

30 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge (MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

31 Stephanie Mackler, “From the Positivist to the Hermeneutic University: restoring the place of meaning and liberal learning in higher education,” Policy Futures in Education 8, no. 2 (2010):

181, www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE.

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knowledge as a commodity.32 As a result, the university has become a creden- tialer rather than an educator.33 Within such a ‘commodifĳication’ trend, there is little room for the university to be the venue for genuine thinking and interpreting.34 The loss of purpose of university in the contemporary Western world also has to do with the crisis of meaning in Western culture, as Mackler sees it:

The hero of the modern world and its universities is the knower—the researcher, the collector of data and information, and the creator of new knowledge. The twenty-fĳirst century is already saturated with knowledge. Unfortunately, all our knowledge has been won at the cost of its meaning. The presence of so much knowledge and information makes salient the absence of wisdom about what it means for us.35

Indeed, with today’s obsession on world university rankings, and quantitative performance indicators which, more often than not, are methodologically- biased, there is a risk of our universities becoming one-dimensional.36 It is becoming increasingly difffĳicult to talk about educational ideals and values.

The positivist model has been the predominant culture in higher education, and the humanities and social sciences are being forced to mimic the empirical and quantitative methodology and epistemology of the hard sciences. Research assessment is driven more by citation indices than by a holistic evaluation of impact both on scientifĳic discovery and knowledge creation, as well as

32 Steven T. Ostovich, “Dewey, Habermas, and the University in Society,” Educational Theory 45, no. 4 (1995): 469, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1995.00465.x.

33 Ronald Barnett, The Limits of Competence: Knowledge, Higher Education and Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994).

34 Stephanie Mackler, “From the Positivist to the Hermeneutic University: restoring the place of meaning and liberal learning in higher education,” Policy Futures in Education 8, no. 2 (2010):

182, www.wwwords.co.uk/PFIE.

35 Ibid., 188.

36 For instance, the QS’s World University Rankings attach heavy weight on peer evaluations and reputation of universities—40% of the weight is based on ‘Academic Peer Review’ and 10%

on ‘Employer/ Recruiter Review’, while ‘Student Faculty Ratio’, ‘Citations per Faculty’ and

‘International Factors’ account for 20%, 20% and 5% respectively (http://www.topuniversities .com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/methodology/weightings-aggregation)—

hence in efffect favoring best-known universities. The Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings is comparably a more balanced measure but its weighting is also skewed towards research elements—‘Research’ and ‘Citations’ share 30% each, and ‘Teaching’, ‘Industry Income’

and ‘International mix’ share 30%, 2.5% and 5% respectively (http://www.timeshighereducation .co.uk/world-university-rankings/) What is often common about international university ranking systems is the emphasis being put on research over teaching and on the hard sciences over other disciplines.

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contribution to social progress and the enlightenment of humanity. Some eye-catching ranking exercises have the tendency to measure mostly tangible and quantifĳiable performance, but ignore equally important dimensions of a university’s role and mission, such as the students’ learning and enlightenment experience, the nurturing of students’ social and global awareness, and the university’s contribution towards community and human development.

Despite globalization which should lead to embracing more cross-national and cross-cultural diversities, and the rhetoric about the internationalization of education, the reverse seems becoming more the reality—with homogene- ous standards and so-called best practices being imposed on universities worldwide. This is contrary to the true spirit of internationalization about cul- tivating a sense of globalness and cosmopolitanism, where universities should champion a multidimensional process and emphasize ‘multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism’.37

As Usher observed: “Despite the spread of rankings around the world, they remain deeply controversial . . . Although universities and academics publicly deplore rankings, the real problem is not that these rankings misrepresent the truth about which universities are best, but that they reveal too much about what the academic community really value.”38 The sad thing is although most would agree that such ranking games are defĳicient to say the least, they persist and are increasingly resorted to by many universities in their ‘marketing’ activities because they sell in the current logic of internationalization. In a sense, internationalization has triggered the trend to compare on an international scale and thus the need to establish world league tables of rankings. Operating within such world games, Asian universities have unavoidably to play by the rules inherently more favourable to Western systems and criteria. Will Asia’s rise in international higher education help alter that trend of commodifĳication and marketization, and contribute towards a renaissance of a humanistic tradi- tion of university, or will it perpetuate it instead? The sign does not bode well if the Shanghai Jiao Tung University’s world university rankings system is of any indication.39 Some feel that Asia has yet to rise up to the big test:

37 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda,” Deve- lopment and Change 37, no. 6 (2006): 1255.

And Rodrigo Britez and Michael A Peters, “Internationalization and the Cosmopolitan University,” Policy Futures in Education 8, no. 2 (2010).

38 Alex Usher, “Rankings,” Educational Policy Institute Commentary, November2, 2007, http://

www.educationalpolicy.org/pub/pubpdf/Commentary_07.pdf.

39 Shanghai Jiao Tung University (SJTU)’s Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) tends to emphasize the scientifĳic research performance of the universities, considering every

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. . . while Asian economies have been shielded from the current crisis better than those in the West, Asian universities and think tanks have not evolved new systems of thinking that can radically challenge those of the West. This is partly because our mindsets are dominated by the technological superiority of the West, including in intellectual pursuits and theoretical work.40

Rediscovering Asian Traditions and Scholarship

Asia does not need to follow passively the trajectory of positivist higher education. Schwartz calls for the imparting of wisdom to our university students.41 So what is wisdom? In the East, Confucius expounded it as follows: “໻ᄺП䘧,

೼ᯢᯢᖋ, ೼҆⇥, ೼ℶѢ㟇୘”. Translated into modern language, it means the way towards great learning involves the formation of high moral character, enlightening the people (community), and ultimately achieving the ideal realm. University education, in its early elitist tradition, in the East as well as the West, was about grooming scholar-leaders who excel in knowledge and culture, and who would lead society and the world with their virtuous character and high moral values.

Modern universities across the world like to draw reference to the British Oxbridge or American Harvard/Yale/California models. However, one should note that in China, there had in fact been over a thousand years of ‘college’

(к䰶 shu yuan) history, until the fĳinal days of Ching (Manchu) dynastic rule, predating Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge and Sorbonne. Such tradition is lost nowadays, although recently there have been some attempts to revive it in China. In 1929, the President of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei (㫵ܗ෍),42 articulated his ideal of university as to embrace several elements: “Ё೑Ӵ 㒳ⱘᄨ๼㊒⼲, ࡴϞ㣅ПҎḐᬭ㚆ǃᖋ⊩Пϧ⏅ⷨおǃ㕢П᳡ࡵ⼒Ӯ”

(the Chinese traditional Confucian and Mozi (๼ᄤ) spirit, English character

university that has “any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science”(http://www.arwu.org/ARWUMethodology2010.jsp), favoring research universities particularly those are strong in the hard sciences and those from English- speaking world (especially in North America).

40 Andrew Sheng, “This year, a test of the Asian model,” South China Morning Post, January 8, 2011, A11.

42 Cai Yuanpei 㫵ܗ෍, “zai bojili zhongguo xueshenghui yanshuoci ೼रᡔ߽Ё೑ᄺ⫳Ӯ

ⓨ䇈䆡 [Lecture to Berkeley Chinese student union],” in Cai Yuanpei quanji disijuan 㫵ܗ෍ܼ

䲚㄀ಯो [Complete Works of Cai Yuanpei Vol. 4] (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1984), 64-66.

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education [liberal education], German and French professional research, and American emphasis on contribution to society). When the late Chinese histo- rian Ch’ien Mu (䪅〚) founded New Asia College in Hong Kong in the 1950s (subsequently a constituent college of The Chinese University of Hong Kong), he also had the aspirations to connect to the college spirit of the Sung and Ming dynasties, while adopting Western European university tutor system, so as to bridge Chinese and Western cultures under the education aim of humanism (Ҏ᭛ЏН), for the benefĳit of human peace and social fortune (䪅〚, 1986).43 Such scholarly legacies are, however, often neglected or forgotten in the bid for world-class status according to the international ranking games and in the process of commodifĳication of higher education. Reconnecting to Asia’s Cul- tural Past is a Major Challenge to Asian Universities.

Despite the rising importance of Asia and all it represents, there is still insuf- fĳicient emphasis given to, and work done on, the rediscovery of Asian traditions, institutions, systems and thoughts. There is also a lack of systematic consolidation of Asian scholarship rooted in the region’s historical struggles, modernization experiences, institution building, and social and economic development. Until recently, the studies of Asia had been relegated to ‘Asian Studies’, and the study of Chinese culture, history, and social and political systems has been treated as Sinology or ‘China Studies’, rather than as a general or comparative body of experience and knowledge with wider empirical and theoretical implications for facilitating a better understanding of the diversity and richness of humanity. Many branches of knowledge developed in the process of Western civilization have been treated as ‘universal’ academic disciplines whereas Asian knowledge and thoughts have only been regarded as Asia-spe- cifĳic. Even some Asian academics hold a similar attitude towards their own culture and traditional scholarship, and some prefer to study and understand Asia through Western eyes, perspectives and conceptual frameworks.

Two issues stand out.

How to Make Asian Scholarship and Knowledge Discovery/Discourse Recognized Globally?

Current practice among Asian academics and institutions, being groomed in the Western system (in particular under Anglo-American influence), have often resorted to or even exclusively relied on ‘international’ citation indices

43 Ch’ien Mu 䪅〚, “xinya shuyuan ‘zhaosheng jianzhang’ ᮄѮк䰶᢯⫳ㅔゴ [The admission brochure of New Asia College],” in Xinya yiduo ᮄѮ䘫䪢 (Taipei: The Grand East Book, 1986).

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and other indicators to defĳine scholarship and performance, but these indices and indicators are all based on Western defĳinitions of worthiness. When they write, they often prefer to cite Western rather than their own Asian references as the former are thought to be more authoritative and better known to editors of Western ‘international’ journals and publishers. To clearly establish an Asian system of scholarship recognition and to facilitate the promotion of such scholarship, it is pertinent to groom Asian intellectual venues and platforms. Some Asian countries have sought to formulate their own national systems of meas- urements and indicators of impact and relevance although this has not been a less contentious process. They have to avoid positivist prejudices and to free themselves from the intellectual trap and hegemony of culturally-based international measurement.

The Language of Scholarship and Research in an Internationalized Setting Internationalization should not be a reason to de-emphasize writings in the local language or downgrade the value of local or regional studies and publica- tions. In practice, there has been longstanding concern from some universities and academics that, with the reliance on international benchmarks developed by the US and Western Europe, research in the humanities and social sciences of local signifĳicance in other parts of the world might have been subject to mar- ginalization. At times, what is defĳined as ‘international’ is at best arbitrary—

thus US journals are easily considered as more international than British or Australian ones (because of their higher impact factors), and British and Aus- tralian journals are in turn deemed more international than Asian ones. Over- coming the linguistic hurdle in making Asian paradigms and practices more widely available presents an important challenge. In the absence of the wide- spread use of Asian languages, using the English medium as an academic lin- gua franca to write about and spread Asian scholarship is unavoidable and also efffĳicient. However, this will perpetuate the continuing domination by English venues, to the detriment of developing prominent Asian ones.

The vast Asian scholarship and cultural and social experiences cannot be fully tapped without the understanding of local scholarship and thoughts expressed in the local language. We must transcend the limitations of understanding Asia through non-Asian academic literature, or only through Western analysis and perspectives. There is presently a lack of bridge between Western and Asian scholarship, and between Western modernity and Asian traditions.

Furthermore, international academic literature should not be just informed by the scholarship of the West, but should also embrace Asian scholarship and

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experience as the region imparts greater impact on the world trends. There might well be a clash of civilizations and paradigms, but such clash or tension reflects the reality and should be welcome as a healthy one in order to stimulate new insights and perspectives in capturing the full essence of human progress.

As Asia rises in the provision of global higher education, Asian universities should also learn how to contribute to international and cosmopolitan under- standing from Asia’s own legacy and civilization by rediscovering their scholarly traditions. There is a need for Asians to understand their own Asian-ness so as to extend the global discourse.

Concluding Remarks

By emphasizing Asia versus an America and Europe-driven internationalization, we are advocating a new approach to the globalization of higher learning, where there is an intellectually pluralist and academically vigorous environment needed to spur creative and critical minds, divergent ideas and non- mainstream approaches; and where ‘internationalization’ will not, by default if not by design, turn out to be the very process to reproduce uniformity and conformity (in the name of benchmarking and convergence to one singular set of best practice or international standards), to suppress creativity and the pursuit of meaning and purpose.

But Asia must not get into an Asian arrogance or hegemony of knowledge, scholarship and thoughts. The way towards genuine and inclusive globalization ultimately hinges on the balancing between and integrating the global trends and the regional and local experiences. This is a major challenge to all universities, in Asia and elsewhere. The integration of local/national experience and methods with those of other societies and cultures will more force- fully construct the kind of intellectual and educational ‘multiversity’ that a university’s mission is about, and this is where Asia’s rise can truly enrich and contribute to the new global higher education.

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