Session Information
WERA SES 02 D, Global Ethics in Higher Education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper critically reflects on recent transformations of higher education, which have been heightened by global crises of political economy and processes of neoliberal social and educational restructuring. The advance of a highly competitive and unequal global agenda for education (Dale 2000) has re-framed higher education as a set of transactional economic activities, redefining higher education in terms of markets and commodified educational goods and services, and research in terms of the production of commodified knowledge. ‘Internationalization’ can reflect the sharpest and most competitive and exploitative edges of this globally structured agenda for education, especially for public higher education institutions which are scrambling to command fee and research income in a global context of competitive funding, narrowing state support and managerial pressures to deliver reforms and ‘results’. The effect of these combined pressures has been an assault on care (Lynch 2010), the narrowing of creativity (Maclaren 2012; Bastalich 2010) and the instrumentalization and ‘de-educationalization’ of higher education (Biesta 2009; 2014), aligning with ‘dangerously empty’, yet hegemonic, discourses of neoliberal entrepreneurialism (Kenny and Scriver 2012) and managerialism (Lynch et al 2012). This paper takes the current crisis of higher education, and the response of ‘internationalization’ as valuable opportunities to respond to this ‘dangerous emptiness’, by putting back into the frame alternative economies that represent possible alternative normative and ethical foundations for public higher education. The aim is to pluralize the possibilities for higher education to play a democratic and transformative role in society, at national and global levels. Three alternative possibilities are examined for rethinking the ‘economies’ of higher education beyond that of the commodity transaction. These three alternatives connect the spheres of ethics and economics in different ways – as gift economies (Vaughan 2002), as care economies (Lynch 2009) and as public goods (Khoo 2014). These alternative possibilities are brought to bear on the debates about global ethics and global citizenship. The paper considers the potential for higher education to contribute to the formation of global citizens as professionals whose reflexivity and creativity are democratically invested in order that they, in turn, have the capabilities to care, to practise developmental leadership, and foster the public good.The paper argues that these alternative economies must be taken into consideration for higher education to answer to actually existing injustices and to vindicate and cultivate greater social equality and global justice in substantive ways.
References
Bastalich, W (2010) Knowledge Economy and Research Innovation, Studies in Higher Education, 35, 845-57 Biesta, G (2014) The beautiful risk of education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Biesta, G. 2010. Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Dale, Roger (2000) Globalization And Education: Demonstrating a “Common World Educational Culture” Or Locating a “Globally Structured Educational Agenda” Educational Theory, 50 (4), 427-448 Khoo, S. (2014) 'Public goods: from market efficiency to democratic effectiveness ' In: Robertson, (Ed). Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2013/14. London : Commonwealth Secretariat:97-100 Kenny, K. and Scriver, S. (2012) Dangerously Empty? Hegemony and the construction of the Irish Entrepreneur. Organization 19(5), 615-633 Lynch, Kathleen; (2010) ''Carelessness: a hidden doxa of higher education''. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 9 (1):54-67. Lynch, Kathleen (2009) Affective Equality: Love Care and Injustice. Houndmills:Palgrave. Lynch, K; Grummell, B and Devine, D.; (2012) New Managerialism in Education: Gender, Commercialisation and Carelessness. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacLaren, I (2012) The Contradictions of Policy and Practice: Creativity in Higher Education, London Review Of Education 10, 2: 2012-7 Vaughan, Genevieve (2002) For-Giving: A feminist criticism of exchange: Anomaly /Plain View Press.
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