Globalization and Higher Education

12. Corporate, Technological, Epistemic, and Democratic Challenges: Mapping the Political Economy of University Futures

c h a p t e r 12 Corporate, Technological, Epistemic, and Democratic Challenges: Mapping the Political Economy of University Futures Sohail Inayatullah Changing student expectations (access to global systems of knowledge, including transparency and international accreditation), the Internet (virtual education; moving from campus-centered to personcentered , and far more customized, individually tailored education), global corporatization (reduced state funding for universities and the development of a market culture on campuses), and transformed content (multicultural education) are current trends that will dramatically influence all the world’s universities. Indeed, the potential for dramatic transformation is so great that in the next fifteen to twenty years, it is far from certain that universities as currently constituted—campusbased , state-funded, and local student-oriented—will exist. Certainly, the current model for the university will cease to be the hegemonic one. Of course, rich universities like Harvard will be able to continue without too much challenge, but the state-supported university will be challenged. Asian nations, where education is defined by the dictates of the Ministry of Education, will also face the efficiency-oriented, privatization forces of globalization. Their command and control structure will be challenged by globalization—market pressures, technological innovations, and the brain gain (that is, from graduates returning home from the United States and England). • 202 • Corporatization Corporatization, the entrance of huge multinational players into the educational market, will create far more competition than traditional universities are prepared for. The Economist estimates that total spending on education in the United States in 2001 was $800 billion. By 2003, the private capital invested will total $10 billion, just for the virtual higher education market and $11 billion in the private sector serving the corporate market. Indeed, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, calls online education “the killer application of the internet.” Jeanne Meister, president of Corporate University Xchange (CUX), expects that by 2010 there will be more corporate universities in the United States than traditional ones. They are and will continue to challenge the academy’s monopolization of accreditation. Globalization thus provides the structure and the Net the vehicle. Pearson, a large British media group that owns 50 percent of The Economist, is betting its future on it, hoping that it can provide the online material for the two million people seeking a degree online annually. Motorola, Accenture, Cisco, and McDonald’s as well as News Corporation all seek to become respectable universities. Cisco Networking Academies have trained 135,000 students in ninety-four countries. Motorola has a new division called Motorola Learning and Certification that resells educational programs . Accenture has purchased a former college campus and spends 6.5 percent of its revenues on educating employees. Of course, much of this is not new. Corporate education has always been big. What is new is that corporate universities seek to enter markets traditionally monopolized by academics. And, given pressures on corporations to be more inclusive of minorities, to be more multicultural and more triple-bottom-line-oriented (prosperity, planet, people), it may be that corporate universities are embracing diversity at a quicker pace than traditional universities. Clearly, when billion-dollar corporations want to enter the market —a rapidly growing market, especially with the aging of the population and with national barriers to education slowly breaking down—the challenge to the traditional university becomes dramatic—indeed, mission -, if not life-threatening. With an expanding market of hundreds of millions of learners, money will follow future money. Money will transCorporate , Technological, Epistemic, and Democratic Challenges • 203 form education, or, at the very least, dominate the discourse concerning which values are most important—the student, the academic, the administrator, the community, or corporate interests. For community education and for communities traditionally tied to a local regional university and seeking economic vitality, the future will become far more daunting. As universities globalize, corporatize, and virtualize—moving services to low-cost areas—their place-bound identity will increasingly disappear. This is a far cry from the classical European, Islamic, or Indic university, concerned mostly with moral education. In Bologna in the twelfth century, the university was student-run. If the professor was late, he was fined by students. Some teachers were even forced to leave the city. Paradoxically, corporatization with its customer -first ideology may return us to a student-run university. The Academy beware! University Dimensions At one time the university was student-run. We know that it is no...