Higher Education in a Polarized World with Simon Marginson

Welcome back to our third season of this podcast on global higher education affairs. If like many of our fans you consume this podcast as text, you probably won’t notice much change. But if you’re actually watching me right now, you’ll know that we have made the jump from audio to video. It’s an absolutely naked attempt to tap into youtube and its larger audiences. We hope you like the format change.
At the start of a new season it’s always a good idea to bring out a big guest and this week we have one of the biggest voices in contemporary higher education, Simon Marginson. He’s Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at Oxford University, until recently the Director of the Centre for Global Higher Education in the United Kingdom, Editor in Chief of the journal Higher Education and a very regular commentator on higher education for outlets such as University World News. If there is anyone in the world who can hold a mirror to the entire span of higher education across the globe, it’s Simon, which is why we invited him on to talk with us specifically about the state of higher education globally.
We spent a lot of time talking about which countries are up and which are down in the world of higher education, though to a large extent that’s a matter of demographics and geopolitics. In this area, the global bright spot is still China, whose higher education sector continues to improve in quality year after year after year. We also discussed issues of academic freedom and academic autonomy and the extent to which these issues are resonating on similar frequencies in both East and West.
Maybe the most interesting part of the discussion, though, had to do with the notions of the purpose. We sparred a bit on the idea of universities and employability, but what I found interesting was Simon’s view that the role of big American universities in acting as a role model for a certain type of academic freedom may have been grossly underestimated – something that is making him very worried about the potential outcome of the election in the United States this November.
But enough from me – let’s listen to Simon.
Alex Usher (AU): Simon, let's get down to business. It's mid 2024. What's the state of global higher education right now? What parts of the global system are doing well, and which ones aren't doing so well?
Simon Marginson (SM): Good question, as Shrek would say. There are problems at the border in many countries. Universities are facing more muscular governments in relation to people mobility. But I'd say, on the whole, the pattern is varied across the world otherwise. East and Southeast Asia is traveling well in terms of finance and the sort of general state of the play with the public reception of higher education. Europe is worried about the far right, but otherwise I think higher education is traveling okay. Probably some uplift overall in the Arab world and India. I'm not sure about Iran, I don't know enough about it. It's a big system. The United States has serious problems with the political reception of higher education on the Republican side of politics. The possibilities of a Trump government are really alarming given what's being said in relation to what Trump might do and the Supreme Court's involvement in the sector.
AU: You've written a lot about the growing effects of geopolitics on higher education. There's been a gradual undoing of cooperation between East and West. By East, I mean China and increasingly Russia and by the West, the OECD. Do you think this estrangement is likely to get worse before it gets better?
SM: I would say yes to the gets worse, but I would separate the Russia and China problems. I mean, I think they've got different dynamics. Russia is a simple case of, you know, that Putin's basically broken the multilateral consensus worldwide and brought warfare back to Europe which has created tremendous problems and anxieties, not least, of course, separated Russian universities from the world university networks and made it impossible for all of us to deal directly with the institutions, because their rectors have all signed up to the war whereas the China problem is different.
I think China's pretty keen to stay engaged with the West. But, the US in its wisdom decided to decouple from China and to see China as a threat and a problem in higher education along with the economy and everything else. I was just in China in June, I spent most of June and the abiding feeling there is that people hope that things will go back to where they were, that there will be a restoration of good relations with the US. The US engagement was so important in Chinese universities and so transformative in so many ways in a positive sense. I had to tell people I thought it wasn't going to reverse and the U.S. saw science and technology, and universities as part of the general geopolitical problem of primacy on the world, and that China's strength in universities no longer welcomed by the U. S.. Don't expect any more help from there was my message. The realists in China realize that that's the game they're in now, just like the realists in the U.S. realized it. They're in a long conflictual game as well. I don't see any solution to this problem short of, you know, things getting so bad on the environmental front that we all start to work together again.
AU: How long do you think it would take to reverse these tendencies? Let's say the war ends in Russia or China is seen as less of a threat. How quickly do you think these old networks of cooperation could be revived?
SM: Well, I think right now you could revive both quite quickly because there's a lot of people who establish cooperative relationships on both sides, like the West End Russia and the West End China. They’re still in the game and would welcome a return to cooperation. I think that the sector has generally been collaborative at world level and hasn't reflected a sort of conflictual geopolitics historically since perhaps the eighties when globalization really took off, there's been a to a very open approach to cooperation across the world in the sector and it's been one of the reasons why we all like working in universities and on international stuff is that. It's so much win-win and so on. But I mean, in the end, we are creatures of our nations. If the government's pull hard enough, they pull the universities back to the nation and some forms of collaboration perhaps survive under any circumstances, especially intellectual sort of cooperation and exchange. But, there's sort of the big items, like the big cooperative programs in science, the big mobility cooperations, including the exchange of undergraduate students. For example, the exchanges of students between the U. S. and China are quite important at one point and withering now. I mean, those things do depend on states, and they do depend on cooperation between states. And so it's hard to get back to things unless there's a change at the geopolitical level, but I do think that the sector itself could cooperate quite quickly if there was a political shift.
AU: One thing that strikes me that's really changed in the last decade or so has been the way that different nations conceive of the mission of universities. You and I met in Shanghai at one of the meetings of the academic rankings of world universities. Those were born of a particular moment where it seemed like the entire world kind of believed that research production of new knowledge was really the purpose of universities. I think we've seen over the last decade or so, and you see it in the kinds of rankings that are popping up in the West, you see a lot more interest in contributions to communities, social mission, sustainability, inclusion, those kinds of things, whereas in China and some other parts of Asia, the University's mission seems still really tied to research production. You see this more in the most recent Leiden rankings, I think seven of the top institutions for research production are now in China. Do you think that changes the way that people think about cooperation?
SM: Yeah, two things there. I agree with you. One thing to mention is that the science budget is booming in Singapore and China, and to a lesser extent Korea. Japan is now back as a science producer and it’s re-spending again. Taiwan's still under spending perhaps, and Japan's not spending as much as the others, but You know, generally, this is, it's a boom time for government funded science in in, in the, in East Asia. The large universities in China have got extraordinary public support. They have had, over a period of three decades, funding that’s just built and built and built, and goes up 10 percent a year. This has not stopped despite the slowdown of the Chinese economy. So, yeah, I think you will see a continuation of this whole trajectory of building science, global science in East Asia.
The other thing is that I think that ideologically, or policy wise might be a nicer way to put it. The East Asian countries perhaps have bought into the knowledge economy idea more than almost anywhere else or the idea that if you build science and technology capability, that will flow through modernization and economic performance and. defense and military capacity as well. You know, all of those things will flourish if you're spending money on science and technology. Perhaps there's an exaggeration of the potential of the knowledge economy idea in East Asia. Certainly there's been something of a shift away from economic objectives in many Western countries with a focus on security and national military preparation and competitiveness. Populism is driving this sort of emphasis on the political rather than the economic and particularly on national identity and nativism. I don't think East Asia has given up the economy just yet. I mean, East Asia, in a sense, is still in the previous period where the knowledge economy idea is really sustaining higher education policy worldwide.
AU: We’ll come back to populism in a second here, but I want to talk about institutional autonomy because even though we do have a little bit of a divide between say China and the west, it seems like institutional autonomy is on the decline in both halves of the world, right?
SM: I agree with you. It's got different trajectories, but yes, absolutely. I think we're seeing a reassertion of the nation state in all kinds of ways. One of the ways is that the nation state has problematized science, technology, and higher education in a way that it wasn't problematizing them a few years ago. Most countries seem to be moving towards greater regulation and control rather than less. Of course, the State has never been very far away in East Asia, but you are seeing a more obvious shift probably in the West. I was really surprised when Trump moved towards on the China initiative in 2018, how the American presidents all fell into line. Which made me think about the question of autonomy, because until that happened, I did hear various American university leaders saying that they saw this as a university matter rather than a state matter and they were going to continue to pursue good links and relationships. But when push came to shove, and when it become a big national security issue, everyone fell into line. The more worrying thing, of course, is what's happening with the Republican intervention at state level and the potential for that to happen through the court and through federal legislation after the election if Trump is in power.
AU: Let's focus just on the west now. In many, maybe even most countries, we've seen populist attacks on the higher education sector. Are there some countries where the sector is dealing better with those attacks than others?
SM: It's playing out differently in different places, isn’t it? It's, I mean, Orban and Hungary, of course, is a prime example of a government which has seen hobbling the universities as a social, political and cultural force as part of securing political control through the state. That’s the example which the Republicans sometimes cite in the U.S. as the way to go. But the national rally in France and the riot scene far right in Holland and Germany haven't been talking about higher education to the same extent. Although they may well do so, especially if they're in power. Another interesting example is Meloni in Italy. I think this is a very clever far right government which has really got under everyone's radar now and, and it's been putting its own people into every major institution and securing long term control over the society. They have already announced a cultural agenda and a more nativist approach and possibly, we'll revive the idea of leaving the EU as well. You know, when the time comes, when that's going to work for them. Now they have not tackled the universities directly at all. The Italian sector is quite interesting because it's probably not very well organized at national level, but there's quite a lot of a substantial role for higher education for universities in a lot of cities in Italy, they're important places. So if you think of Meloni’s agenda, it eventually will bring itself into collision with academic autonomy in Italy, but it hasn't really happened yet.
AU: Are there any places where higher education systems are able to resist a little bit? Where are they doing best at pushing back at that increasing state control?
SM: I don't think we've seen an example of a successful political actors in the sector who've been able to secure public support to protect themselves. My sense is that the sectors are sort of a bit like a house of cards politically and can be pushed over fairly easily. Perhaps we shouldn't say such things in public, we might be inviting trouble. But even though our people are so well entrenched in the elites, in all countries and play major roles in industry sectors and in all the leading professions and we have a following in the arts communities and all the places where you'd think in the public culture or the civic culture. Despite all of that, we don't seem to be very good at mobilizing support.
AU: Simon, we've mostly been talking about the West and China, but that leaves out an awful lot of the world's Higher education systems, right? Obviously, there's the world's second largest system in India, there's the rest of south Asia, and central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Are all countries where research is less central to the role universities? These are countries where massification is still happening and that's still job one: to fill more people into these systems. What do you think are the most important challenges these institutions are facing over the next 2-5 years?
SM: Alex, I'd say yes and no to that. Obviously building mass higher education is still the driving project in say most of Latin America, for example. But then when you look at the research data and in global science data that's published in English, that goes into the bibliometric collections, and goes in the Web of Science and Scopus. What you see there is in the last 20 years, is an explosive growth of science in a whole range of non-Western countries. Now obviously China, but also in East Asia, South Korea and India. As you say, India is a very big system. Now it's third biggest science producer as well as being the second or largest number of students. It's the third biggest science producer and it's well ahead of all the European countries now like Germany and the UK is headed well ahead of Japan. You've got Brazil which is a big player. Iran's a big player. Indonesia is a big player. Who would have thought that because if you go back 20 years practically no science papers at all in Indonesia and now almost 40, 000. So, there’s something happening there. In Thailand and Malaysia, you're seeing an uplift in science.
So, we have seen a spread of the research university and scientific research to a much larger number of countries. I think fits in with the general argument that we're seeing the emergence of multipolarity. Even though it may not be that we're going to get more than two very big players on the world stage. Or three, if you include the EU as a player. But, certainly at the next level, the kind of what you might call the “middle countries,” a really large number of them now, not only the European big players like Germany and France, but also, the Iran's and Indonesia's and South Korea's and South Africa and Brazil are having quite a lot of autonomy on the world stage, and having the capacity to pick and choose which side of a side of the cold war they'll align themselves with and so on. So, freely exercising that kind of political clout makes the whole period rather different to what we've seen up to now.
AU: Do you see any of those countries being particularly close to the Chinese model? China was able to both expand massively and increase its science production at the same time at some rather phenomenal rates. So any, any of those strike you as being particularly China-like?
SM: No, not directly. I don't think the Chinese model is easy to replicate to be honest, although you do have a general phenomenon in the East Asia of this tremendous commitment to knowledge and education and the Confucian family syndrome driving that in many ways, and that's common to the whole region. But no, I don't think you're going to see many more miracles like the Chinese miracle. But partly, of course, that has been funded by this extraordinary growth of the Chinese manufacturing sector and that too is not going to be easily replicated elsewhere. I’d say Indonesia and India are both on a really rapid growth path and they're both going to end up pretty big in terms of universities and science.
AU: I want to turn to another topic that you've written about quite a bit in the last little while. That's about employability and the role that employability is playing in policy making. The governments are instructing institutions to be much more instrumental about the way that they train people for jobs. You've pointed this out that this is not a good outcome that the institutions aren't meant to have that kind of instrumentality. But I wonder, isn't this kind of a natural outgrowth of massification? The way that universities grew and got more funding in most countries, was that they argued “we need more universities to graduates in order to fund the economy.” It was all about employment. It's about growth. Isn't this turnabout is fair play, as if this is university's own arguments coming back to bite them?
SM: I suppose I persist the idea that if it's based on arguments, then it's a natural occurrence. But, I agree with you that it's followed from the arguments. I think what happened was the human capital idea or this sort of idea that if you educate people and their productivity increases and they become more productive workers and they, and they create greater value in the economy, and they also create more value for themselves as workers through their salaries. That sort of simple linear narrative of the relationship between education and work, or how education improves, expands, and that drives economic development and growth. That simple narrative was a godsend to the universities and perhaps even to the school sector as well. Everyone seized on it and ran with it for five or six decades. So, yes, it's been really entrenched as a dominant narrative, and it's the sector that's as much responsible for that as anyone else is. But the problem is that what we do in terms of knowledge intensive policy. Like teaching and learning, forming people culturally through a cultural process of immersion in knowledge, and then hoping that when they go out to the workplace, that they're going to be productive and effective.
The problem is what we do is not very economic. I mean, if you're going to design the system around productivity and maximize maximum economic value, I don't think you would have caps and gowns or academic disciplines or professors or universities in their present form. The actual forms of higher education, especially the knowledge intensive way of teaching and the economic model don't fit together very well. We've got the situation where we don't look very efficient or effective in terms of that model, which we have done so much, as you rightly said, to entrench in the public mind. And I don't know how we're going to work our way out of that problem, but it's perhaps possible that we will find ways to put a broader understanding of higher education on the agenda. But at the moment, anyway, I think the understanding is becoming narrower rather than broader. So we're in some trouble with that.
AU: I hear that at a rhetorical level from governments, it's a nice stick that they can beat universities with. It's about employability, about jobs, young people, et cetera, et cetera. Interestingly, it's not happening in China, right? Now you've got graduate unemployment up around 20 percent and yet I don't see the government getting upset with universities about that. But, are there some places that we really need to watch out for where governments are taking really strong policy steps to force universities in the line? I know in Australia, there was the Job Ready Graduates program, which sort of tried to use, price signals to browbeat students into particular fields of study. But where else are we seeing those kinds of things?
SM: In China, it does take a form. The kind of reductionist employability argument is playing out there. But as you know, the role of universities and higher education is very well entrenched historically in China as a sort of way of sorting the population. And The top echelon, the 985 universities or the double world class ones, they're seen as appropriate places for a broader formation. That’s where the small number of liberal arts experiments and so on have played out. But in the middle and lower levels, it's seen as a vocational sector primarily. So higher education is in no real danger in China because it's such a valuable sorting mechanism for the state. The state uses higher education quite brutally to pass the responsibility for social outcomes back to the individual. That's a more complete process in China than it is in the West. So, in a way, China's sort of very vocational and very instrumental about it despite the veneer of intellectualism in the top layer.
Whereas in the West, the narrower employability agendas had to be imposed specifically or created specifically. There was that a case in Australia prior to the election that brought in the present Labor government where they were talking about job ready graduates and microcredentials in place of higher education degrees rather than as a supplement. Of course, the sector manoeuvred brilliantly, as it usually does when faced with less than totally powerful reform ideas. It absorbed the microcredentials idea successfully and made that marginal to its normal operation, but pursued it. In the UK, I think a rather tougher proposal there coming from the conservative government, which has just lost power, was the emphasis on graduate salaries as a measuring stick to check the economic performance of individual institutions and disciplines and that has been run relentlessly through the public debate. That has become quite powerful in terms of shaping public expectations about universities.
AU: So, I'm curious about the balance you have between pessimism and optimism. You've made a good point about growth and expansion, very hopeful stuff in large parts of the world. But we've also got some, some storm clouds on the horizon. What do you think things will look like 10 years from now? If I had to say what makes you most optimistic for higher education globally for the year 2034, what would it be?
SM: You probably realize I'm more of an optimist than a pessimist and tend to hope for the best in human nature and hope for the best from our societies. I think that I'm increasingly worried though about climate and about the climate and nature emergency as many are calling it and our inability to get to grips with that and what you might call a failure of our collective conscience and our collective organization in relation to these really big challenges, which we tend to put off or ignore rather than deal with. I'm a bit worried about that one.
I think I'm worried about the universities more than I have been at any stage in my career. I think that we perhaps underestimate the importance of the American sector in sustaining the idea of academic freedom. That sort of Humboldtian notion of freedom to teach and freedom to research, freedom to learn has been sustained very much by the bottom up faculty cultures in the U.S., which have been so resilient. That in a lot of ways has shaped the global science system. And so it's become a kind of collaborative, bottom up, academically free zone which has not been subject to direct monkeying by governments all that much. And I suspect that now that research collaboration is in the gun sites of some of those are concerned about geopolitics now that that faculty and student mobility is seen as a potential threat to national security. We're in a different era where academic values have been weakened in the eyes of the state and the eyes of the public. That's quite serious medium term for us. It may not show itself immediately across the world, but it's certainly showing itself in particular instances now. And the general trends are all retrograde in that area. So I think there's probably reasons to be pretty worried about universities and those big global and international university bodies that meet from time to time, like the International Association of Universities. I think I've really got a lot of work to do to try and to get to grips with these broader trends.
AU: Simon, thanks so much for joining us today.
SM: Great pleasure.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, the listener, for tuning in. If you have any comments or questions join please don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcasts@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Nick Hillman of the Higher Education Policy Institute in London. He'll be joining us to talk about the higher education strategy of the new Labour government in the United Kingdom. Bye for now.