The Emergence of the Global University

Attempts to define and differentiate what is distinctly ‘modern’ about the modern world
focus most trenchantly on its capacity for ever-growing technical and social control.
Historians have used many familiar formulations in order to capture this singular capacity
of modern societies: the idea that ‘science’ in the modern world came for the first time to
be conceived in such a way as to make it subject to progressive, disciplined development;
the emergence, accordingly, of ‘method’ and mechanisms of ‘knowledge production’;
and, the organizational ‘professionalization’ of research and scholarship. But, if the rise
of the professionalized, disciplinary and evolutionary conception of knowledge is in a
fundamental sense constitutive of the modern era, then the modern research university
must be considered the most characteristic institution of modern societies.

It is not simply that the massive development of the modern research university, over the
course of the last two centuries, has come to provide the institutional locus wherein these
processes of professionalized, disciplined ‘knowledge production’ and accumulation are
organized and realized. Rather, the very shifts within the underlying structure and
understanding of the functions of the university over time provide us with fundamental
clues not only about the advent of modern societies, but also the ongoing trenchant
changes within these societies, continuing very much into our own time. Hence, what we
see in surveying the increasingly global reality of the present time is not only the
exportation the modern research university (as with other originally European
institutions, like the nation-state) across all existing political and cultural borders. We
note that the increasing attempt of societies of the ‘periphery’ (whether in the European
and Western or non-European and non-Western sphere) to place themselves on the global
stage involves a comparable drive towards epistemic self-assertion, not least the building
of vast new university structures and institutions in which exported and local norms vie
with one another. And, ironically, in this tense field of exportation and self-assertion, we
note the establishment increasingly of globally conscious university institutions making
for the coming of a culturally differentiated global managerial elite. No single
phenomenon today captures this triple dynamic in the global university environment of
‘exportation’, ‘self-assertion’ and the bid at manning a ‘global class’ more trenchantly
than the explosion in recent decades of English curriculum programs in all corners of the
non-English speaking world. Hence, to probe the repercussions of this triple dynamic
both for the role and future of the university as an institution and broadly for modern
social and cultural development at large, it is this phenomenon, which we propose to
investigate in its full historical trajectory.

As William Clark argues in Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Modern Research
University (2006), the medieval European university was a radically different kind of
institution than its modern research-oriented counterpart. Above all, it was an institution
committed to reproducing, which is to say replicating, the society it found by looking
back to an already achieved corpus of authoritative knowledge. Hence, the guild
structure of medieval universities was in no sense accidental. The professors understood
themselves as master craftsmen who knew the right, achieved model based on the
extensive experience of study with their own mentors. Their task was to pass on this

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knowledge from the past, to recreate it in the present. Their task was literally to recreate
the corpus (body) of the past in the present. And, their embodied notion of knowledge
was taken quite literally. Competing with the aristocracy, they insisted on physical
requirement for joining the academic guild…one could not be handicapped, etc.
Literally, the realized, right achieved body of the past was to be transmitted across
generations.

As Clark notes, this highly embodied, backward looking orientation towards knowledge
of the medieval university was, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, displaced by a
radically different understanding of knowledge accumulation and its organization in the
advent, in the German context, of the first modern research university (University of
Berlin, 1810). The modern research university differed fundamentally from its medieval
counterpart in that it replaced the backward looking idea of an already achieved
knowledge with the forward looking orientation of ‘original research’. As opposed to
professors who sought to pass on the body of the past to the present, in the modern
research university, the faculty and students engaged in uncovering new knowledge.
They conceived themselves ideally as a community of knowledge open to the future.
They studied not simply the classics as models passed on from the past and to be
transmitted to the future. They studied the Greek and Roman societies that had created
those classics as historical exemplars of self-formation (Bildung), which might equally
make such autonomous self-formation possible for their own society in the present. They
thus, in romantic fashion, took the idea of a ‘university’ deadly seriously. They thought
of the academic community as providing the ideal antipode to the society at large: the
university was in their eyes a community in which knowledge was holistically united, just
as the pursuit of it socially in the academy. Its goal was not functional advantage of one
kind or another, the kind that made for the competition and conflict in society at
large…the pursuit of knowledge was disinterested and, as such, it held out an ideal
potential for society at large. The future orientation of modern research thus became a
disembodied one in a very specific sense. It was not the body of the past that was to be
replicated in the present. Rather, the pursuit of disinterested knowledge in the university
provided the model and possibility of a society that had never as yet been, one forming
itself holistically as in the unity of knowledge and its academic pursuit.

Clark Kerr, the President of the University of California system in the turmoil of the
1960’s and the most important thinker on the transformation of the university over the
course of the twentieth century, noted in his 1963 lectures, eventually published as The
Uses of the University (1972), that there was something highly ironic about the in fact
romantic emergence of the modern research university in the German context. For, as
against the highly idealized understanding of the future orientation of the first modern
research university, one in which original research was a free, communal and
disinterested activity, the real use of the modern research university, Kerr argued, first
made itself manifest in another German institution of the nineteenth century, namely, the
research institutes in the physical and chemical sciences, tied directly to research and
development in German industry. For Kerr, writing at a time of massive US government
investment in higher education, in the aftermath of WWII and in the midst of the
competition of the Cold War, what was on the horizon for the modern research institute

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was neither the disparate functionalized research institutes tied to different industries, nor
the university as an ideal holistic community, showing the path to society at large by
standing outside of it and its interest-driven conflicts through the pure pursuit of research.
Rather, Clark argued that instead of the ‘university’, what was now required and
inexorable, was the ‘multiversity’. The university was not to stand outside of society as
its ideal antipode. Nor could the functional and interest driven potential of knowledge
accumulation lay disorganized through the body of society (as with research institutes).
Rather, the university would have to become the organizer of knowledge accumulation
and production, in its full functional meaning, for society as a whole. It had to be a
multiversity, because, in it, different disciplines would vie with one another for showing
their functional relevance for the interests of society and so for putting their students in
functional positions in society at large. The modern research university was thus a
multiversity in that it literally was to produce the future of its society through ‘knowledge
production’; it was a vehicle of its society, its path to the future, and so it had to represent
all the competing interests of this society as they competed with one another to create the
future. From the entertainment it provided its immediate local community through its
sports programs to the research it did for the military and defense establishment, the
multiversity answered to the total, multiple interests of its society as it competed for
production and power in the future.

Kerr was, acting as President of the University of California system through the heady
days of campus protests and conflicts in the 1960’s, initially highly dismissive of the anti-
establishment student-driven political and cultural movements of the decade. He saw in
them one more evocation of the first romantic emergence of the modern ‘university’ in
Germany, according to which the academic community imagined that it represented some
potentially ideal and ideally united world against society at large. He was convinced that
the multiversity was rather the great vehicle of the community, that provided it a bridge
to the world at large and to the future. The multiversity was a servant of society and
could be no more. But, in this guise, he underestimated the students he was dealing with;
for, they were not simply representing a self-righteous utopianism. Rather, they had
come to understand that they had become the material for ‘knowledge production’ and its
instruments in society; but, they felt that such ‘knowledge production’ had come to take
on essentially an automatic, machine and factory like aspect, in which they were being
treated like so much raw material that had no say in the process. It was in confronting
this sense of what was being done to them, that students began insisting on having greater
voice in their own education and in the educational establishment.

Hence, the notion we have of university students and universities themselves as generally
left-of-center institutions (especially in the United States) is a highly contextualized one.
It emerges from a context in which the ‘multiversity’ as the functional bridge between
society and its future became a contested arena. Students, industry and faculty contested
what this functional bridge to the future should encompass. By contrast, outside of this
context, students as not-yet elites in the midst of social crisis (as in Weimar Germany or
post-independence Indonesia) could be some of the most reactionary groups in society at
large. But, are we still today in this same context of the university as the future agents of
their respective societies, with this future contested by the participants in the endeavor?

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There are many indications, which suggest that the emerging global university is moving
in different directions. Most important of all, the global university increasingly does not
act simply as a vehicle of its society, its bridge to the future and the rest of the world.
Rather, in many contexts in the world today, the global university rather is disembodying
its student body from whatever local context they may come from, including the one in
which it itself may be located; this is most clearly in the case of English language
programs in non-English speaking contexts. Its goal is less the welfare of its society but
rather the creation of a global presence and a globalized elite. At the same time,
ironically, traditional academic norms (like freedom of speech) taken for granted in
bridging present and future become problematized as global institutions and globalized
students must be contextualized in local settings of self-assertion. It is the repercussions
of this emergence of the globalizing university within the triple dynamic of epistemic
exportation, local self-assertion and the creation of a globalized class that we seek to
investigate.