This research analyzes and describes the transformations of the contemporary
university institution. Considering the centrality that knowledge and
education have gained at a global level this challenge is of some account. In
fact, analyzing university institutions today means, first of all, observing them
from a global and post-national perspective, through the central lens of
globalization, internationalization and transnationalization.
The globalization of the university system needs to be rethought in respect to
the broad change in labour mobility, through the geography of production
within financial capital, as well as in the light of the pattern of control
emerging with the proliferation and transformations of borders.
Therefore this work aims to analyze the original shape that the university is
assuming inside and beyond its limits: if borders impose a line of division, a
frontier is a space that is possible to cross. The university, thought as a
frontier, is that space of transformation that lets us rethink the concept of the
institution itself.
London, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai are the five research
fields chosen to look through the transformations, challenges and new trends
of higher education, the frontier between the campus and metropolis in the
middle of global assemblages, between education and the labour market.
The starting point of this research on higher education and the university
institution is a perspective based on globalization and the post-national
dimension to the modern world. In fact, narrowing my studies to remain
inside national borders would mean not only being unable to grasp the deep
changes and shifts of this institution, but further underestimating the
protagonist role of the university in determining the shape of contemporary
globalization.
In a schematic way my research questions the transformation of the
university institution and its transnational status; the process of
internationalization and globalization through the overlapping of education
and the global labour market.
Beginning with the Asia, my attempt is to overturn the commonplace ratio
that describes the ‘Asian miracle’ as a result of cheap and unskilled labour.
Rather, I analyze the Asian factory as a global edu-factory, showing how Asia
is today the engine of the transformation of the university on a global stage.
Central to this is how the transnationalization of higher education is changing
the traditional role of universities and the implications of it in the global
labour market. Nowadays the university is the place where mobility,
citizenship, exception, a global workforce and financialization are becoming
interwoven. This research would disclose the multiple layers of this
institution between the potentia of the ‘intellectual forces of production’ and
new forms of control of the cognitive workforce at a global level. The
challenge is to discover the internal lines of conflict that define capital as a
social relation within the changes in the university.
I would like to outline the transnational process of the university not as a
linear and homogeneous process, but as different zones constituted by social
compositions, frictions, lack and degree of command, differential inclusion
and the new hierarchies of the workforces.
The globalization of HE is not a smooth process, and I’ll try to show which
kind of social struggles are emerging in these transformations and the
conflicts which highlight contemporary transitions in the recent expansion of
higher education, identifying the implications of new forms of capitalist
valorisation, exploitation and control that are occurring in ‘the great
transformation’ of the university today.
