National–Global Upheavals are Destabilizing Higher Education

Amid growing nativism and migration resistance in Western politics, coupled with geopolitical conflict between the United States and China, the local and national identities of Anglophone and European higher education institutions are increasingly in tension with their global activity and commitment to cross-border cooperation based on academic freedom.

Higher education is active on more than one geographical scale. Institutions are rooted in cities, regions, and nation-states. They are also international and global in character. Mostly the national and global agendas of higher education institutions synergize with each other.

However, at particular times and places, and in global geopolitics, the national and global in higher education can find themselves in tension. We are now in one of those times.

The double geography of higher education is crucial to its identity and autonomy. Institutions draw meaning, resources, and people from local and national society, while at the same time their global mission entrenches an identity that is never wholly suborned by territory-bound authorities. The forms and imaginings of knowledge are universal, especially in the natural sciences, and when unimpeded ideas and people move readily across borders. It has long been the case, from the Buddhist monasteries in Northern India between 500 BCE and 1200 CE, to the medieval European universities, and the scholarly Islamic madrassas.

Higher education was never more internationalized than in the 20 years after 1995, quickened by the Internet, the cheapening of travel, and the widespread growth in educational participation, university infrastructure, and research science, and facilitated by the broad support of most national governments for open cross-border connections. It was not a just or egalitarian internationalization—it was often neocolonial in form, dominated by the English-speaking countries and fostering brain drain and capital transfers from the Global South to the Global North, but openness and collaboration delivered all-round benefits.

However, while participation and research continue to grow, in most of the Euro-American West, the favorable policy conditions for cross-border activity have vanished. The consensus on global integration has gone. Multipolarity in political economy, science, and higher education, especially the rise of China, has detonated comfortable Western assumptions about natural supremacy. In a world slipping from control, American strategists now judge that free trade helps China and the Global South more than their own country. Western working class communities that gained nothing from globalization oppose all cross-border openness. Frictionless trade has given way to trade wars, and multilateral cooperation on climate change is breaking down. Universities, seen as bastions of liberal cosmopolitanism, are taking intense flak in some nations including the United States.

Since Brexit and the first Trump election in 2016, the populist-conservative singular blood-and-soil version of national identity and resistance to migration have reshaped Western politics. As far-right parties strengthen in the polls and elections, mainstream political parties and governments give more and more ground to nativism. While antimigration ire is mostly directed at refugees, not international students, governments under pressure to cut back incomers and told by business to maintain economic migration are capping and cutting international student numbers. Students are the soft policy target. This dynamic has sharply reduced incoming numbers in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, and threatens to do so in the Netherlands (the Trump government may follow, too). Soft power and revenue goals are receding. Hard power and securitization are now more important.

The most sinister change has been triggered by US/China geopolitics. The government of the United States wants to slow China’s rise by radically reducing cooperation in universities, science, and technology. The strategy is unlikely to succeed—it fosters self-sufficiency in China rather than weakening its science—but has done immense damage, reducing open scientific cooperation to techno-nationalism and national security politics. The discriminatory 2018 China Initiative in the United States led to no prosecutions for “spying” but victimized dozens of American faculty, mostly of Chinese descent. The number of student and faculty visas for Chinese citizens entering the United States has dropped by two-thirds since 2015, there have been incidents of severe border harassment, Confucius Institutes across the West are closing, and American university presidents no longer visit China. China–US joint authorship has been the most productive in world science, but joint projects and papers are now falling sharply.

Coercive interventions by national governments pose an existential challenge for higher education, especially for the leading research universities. To what extent are they willing to operate independently of government in the international context so as to sustain their global mission and the foundational principles of institutional autonomy and academic freedom?

Simon Marginson is professor of higher education at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and honorary professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. E-mail: [email protected].